313 Amazon Private Label Launch – Classic Mistakes

Today’s episode is brought to you by the 10 k collective. The collective is a collection of men and women who are doing at least $25,000 a month on Amazon. In the UK, US, Europe doesn’t matter. But that is the figure as a minimum. Now, why that figure because it means you get to meet with like-minded people who are serious about Amazon who are doing well, and who are vicious to do better, rather knocking around this newbies, which isn’t going to help you if you want to scale up from six figures a month to seven figures, or whatever you’re ambitious to do four to five figures, we have people who are doing up to around the quarter million a month mark. And as I say, the lowest is 25 K. So it’s still quite a big spread. But we have amazing things that gets shared, you will get 30 minutes each minimum of 2025 even in a really busy month. And there’s only eight to 12 people at any given meeting. So what are we covering the meetings? Well, we cover topics from how to stay in stock, make more money without by not missing out and being not being out of stock dominating a market and the mindset needed handling whole container loads of people addicts stock needed, for example, how to get a product on primetime British TV for free as one of our members did back and Halloween last year. So these are not prescribed by me. And it’s not a set course it is simply what comes up what you need to handle right now to move your business forward. It’s very simple, robust format is doing really well. We’ve got great loyalty from members, I think out of 10 people that have joined it so far about eight are still with us after several months, which is a real testament to the fact that they’re getting value. And there’s a great feel of community and we have a lot of fun. We take business seriously. But we also try not to take ourselves too seriously. We get we have a lot of fun. We’re very open that we have a lot of serious debates that actually was added people doing stuff and taking action like opening up in America, like going to Germany, like, you know, doubling their orders. I mean, serious action takes place as a result of these meetings. And it’s also good fun, you’ll need to be able to get to London, as well as doing 25,000 a month minimum roughly in dollars and its application only. If you want to check that out, go to amazing fba.com forward slash mastermind, make sure you click through to the 10 k collective page. Rather than applying for the zero to hero mastermind is which is just for those who are just starting out. Thanks very much for listening. Now on with the show

labels and jelly spoons, boys and girls. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. And Mrs. Man, Lord Mayor,

Lord, hey,

justice, and everybody else who’s listening. Thank you very much for listening. So I just get bored. I’m

going to vary it up.

You humor me here, guys. So I’m going to cut straight to it. Today I want to talk about launching on Amazon. What I mean by that there’s a few different things you can call launching, I suppose is the whole process of

deciding what you’re going to sell going and get it and then putting it out on Amazon, you could call launching. I’m going to talk specifically though, for those who are in the early days or, you know, early few first few products, possibly the first several products if you’re not

very experienced, or haven’t had any input or good training,

and you’re launching a product on Amazon itself. So that’s one thing addressed today. I’ve had a few calls recently with clients as part of my new a launch planning service, which is you can find that amazing fba.com forward slash ra ra E, where

it stands for review, analyze, recommend, and and something else. I forget experiments, I think. So it’s basically my way of checking over

people’s work on their launch. And there are often some very common areas, I think you can correct yourself. So I was working with a client who launched about a week before she spoke to me it is quite common and be working for a long time about a year to get a product off the ground. It was like quite a quality products in some ways, who’s getting sales, but there’s a lot to improve on. So I would say there are basically three areas to examine when it comes to launching. And this is the philosophy that I take with everything now including the PLP course the private label process course the first is ranking. So that means if you want to show up on the search results

for particular keywords, that’s what ranking means. Have you ranked number one for the keyword

I know, coffee cup, like

I’ve got one here, then that’s what it means that you will be the first search results once somebody puts the word coffee cup in

on Amazon and click Search. Right. So ranking, that’s the first thing. So you got to be visible, if your product is invisible for the right kind of keywords, you’re you’re going to get nowhere, right. The second thing is clicks are people when they see your adverts, and when they see your listing, which are organic listing, which is somewhat different things, but are they clicking on it. And the third thing is conversions are people actually buying. So the one client recently, for example, which is quite typical, came up with the problem that they weren’t getting the clicks. So at

least that’s what she thought. And we went into it more detail. So let’s, let’s review those three areas, ranking clicks, conversions. And you can use this as a kind of test for how well you’re doing the process and what needs work and where the work needs to go.

First thing I’m ranking

I think you need to

have a very, very clear set

of keywords you’re aiming to rank for meaning to show up on page one, probably of Amazon,

preferably someone near the top.

So that’s

the first area that people can go very wrong in.

And that comes back to their product research with a keyword

research really what people often call product research, but it’s not really strictly speaking about a product is the keywords that people are typing in that comes down to in my philosophy on this is person in the pain in other words, who is looking and what problems they want solved. And then the key words that they use. And if you pick an area where the if you pick a fight, you can’t win, then that’s a problem that happened at that stage of the game. When you decided which keyword

market you were going to go into. For example, if I wanted to sell coffee cups, or coffee mugs or something

that’s going to be quite full of a lot of people

selling a pretty cheap it made this one’s actually quite expensive. I can’t remember who created it cascades

down there you go. So bit of free advertising against him. But that’s actually brand actually broke this a mug that looks exactly like this, and then replaced it from my wife. So I know it cost me 50 pounds or something, which for me was an outrageous some. But

so they’re probably doing okay. But the average person is not going to be able to sell a coffee mug for 15 pounds. But there will be a lot of people selling mugs. So that’s the kind of example of a market where you’re making a rod for your own back. Because the selling price is going to be a few pounds, there’s gonna be lots of people advertising on sponsored ads, there’s gonna be lots of people selling a lot of volume and therefore getting a lot of sales and ranking well, it’s going to be a tough markets going to.

So very often

that is such a general problem that it shows up in everything else that follows that decision, right.

So this comes down to the decision and

you don’t really know to be fair to everybody, myself included, but anyone who’s selling on Amazon, you can read the market and try and get it right. But you don’t really really know until you actually try and sell. So

one of the hypotheses that we’re experimenting with when we sell is

the hypothesis I can sell coffee mugs, I can get to position one or somewhere position 4567 on page one actually make some money from this.

So that’s one of the first things so you need to look at what you’re targeting and how competitive

that is. And you know, with with clients will often look at their

top one or two keywords that are targeting

and you know, see how realistic it is to actually sell into the market. And that’s a keyword research thing. Which is one reason again, why it’s better off

to you’re better off employing a

coach or somebody to help you review your keyword research

before you even buy the product rather than at the point of launching when you may simply made some poor

decisions. So

once you’ve got your target keywords and you’ve selected the right ones, I would say there are sort of between one and five that are normally the really main ones and maybe another 15 to 20 the your medium tail sort of target keywords.

So one of the most important things you should do is immediately before you even launch ideally or if you forgotten to do it as soon as you hear about it

is to use a keyword ranking tool for example helium 10 has its part of it suite of products

many many tools do whichever one it is just just use one

make sure you put in not only those 20 keywords you think you’re targeting your listing but also

maybe if you can afford it in their space in your ranking tool particularly only got one product

then you need to look at look at getting maybe 100 or so keywords that you should be tracking the ranking for and the easiest way to do that as reverse eight in search so you put in the ACI Amazon identified number for a product into reverse ation tool like the one that haven’t helium 10 for example, or whatever else you want to use. And then it will spit out the top hundred keywords or 200 or whatever it is that that product is ranking for. So that is a good use of that tool to put that into keyword tracking. And then that gives you a baseline before you pull any leavers because the next thing people want to do is run PPC advertising on their target keywords. And so they should that’s the right way to do it. But there’s no point in doing that. Unless you can see that it’s having an effect on the ranking. You can’t do that until you measure it. So the first first thing to do measure everything before you change anything and then you can see whether it has an effect so that’s the first thing we got this lady’s gonna put into place I’m somebody recently working with had only about four keywords in their ranking tool. I said look tracking tool I mean keyword tracking tool and I said How many can you track. So while I got this free version, so I can only track 20 so well at least track that many. And I think it’s probably worth paying for the paid version to track you know, up to 100 or so bear in mind. Most of those wouldn’t do anything.

But if you get some nice longtail keywords that sharp there that can meet you nice profitable sales. Even if there aren’t many of them. It was profitable, you still want to have those. So don’t want to miss out on that information

is another reason to

track keyword ranking.

Good. So once you’ve done that, by the way, if you haven’t done that, you should manually find it on your by putting in some of your most important keywords and

scrolling through the results until you find out where your product is. So even if you do it manually, just just make sure you know, at least for the for the top few keywords is normally obvious what they are I’m selling this catalyst and coffee mug, it’s in remote coffee mug, Merry Christmas, coffee mug, coffee mug, white something like that. It’s kind of obvious right a lot of the time. So the next thing to do before you start running PPC advertising is to make absolutely sure that you have

not only put all those keywords that you want to rank for into your listing. But you also need to make sure that you have them in the right sort of place. So it’s a very important key word for you you’ve decided so winnable fight, but also worth winning, ie you can beat the competition rank somewhere on page one, and make some nice sales from that, then you need to rank it accordingly. So if it’s very important keywords, you want it in the title, probably at the front in the bullet points, and the description and the cycle back end keywords as well. If it’s a secondary but still important keyword you want to in the bullets description back end. So if you don’t put your keywords in those places, it’s going to be much harder to get Amazon to rank you for them. Amazon will do a bad job of figuring it out. But make it obvious make it easy for the algorithm to figure out. So only where you want you built the listing correctly. And then once you started tracking your keyword ranking, should you then be doing something more active, which is running PPC or pay per click advertising

a few

things about that. And if you find that you’re one of the things you you need to check out is your click through rates. If you find that you’re getting very, very few clicks. And there are a few possibilities. One thing is you’re not bidding enough. And if you’re in a competitive market niche, like one of the ones I looked at the client Recently, there are out of the whatever it was 16 odd, maybe 20 positions on page one, they were about eight sponsored ads as it showed up on a laptop anyway, which is a hell of a lot. So if you’re going to stand out in a situation like that, you need to bid quite aggressively. And okay, that may be a reason for us to rethink your keyword niche choices. Because that sounds like that’s pretty competitive. And if the price point is low as well, that could be a reason to stay out of that arena completely.

But assuming that you want to stay with that keyword, you’re gonna have to bid aggressively enough to stand out. And that’s the thing

thing.

Second thing is budget. If you’re

if you’re going to cost per click of about one pound 50, for example, per click, and your budget is 10 pounds a day or something, you’re going to only have about budget enough for six clicks. And that probably not going to make you very much not gonna do anything much really doesn’t send strong algorithm cell signals, it’s not going to make sales probably are not very fast.

So don’t be Don’t be too

shy about it. And in bed

as high as you need to. And have a strong budget. So you know how long’s a piece of string. But I mean, I think if you want to get clicks at a pound to click, you want to be getting a decent number of clicks, 3050 pounds a day, if you’re launching a product and or something like that, in terms of click through rates of the CTA, you want to be getting a decent minimum, maybe around 1% if you can, which shows that it’s relevant.

And if that’s too low, it may be that your listing looks irrelevant. Now, what does that mean? It means people aren’t clicking on it. But the overall offer is what people are looking at, you’ve got your typical launch, which is you’ve got, if it’s priced too high,

you’ve got a reasonably decent main photo, or even a really good one. But no reviews, guess what, you got no social proof, your price is too high, you’re not going to get anyone clicking on it.

And that I’ve seen that

quite a lot recently, with with suppliers have been working with. So the solution is, I’m afraid very simple, which is number one low price a particularly until you get some reviews number to get some reviews. By whatever way you can mostly grey hat, black hat, but that needs to be in place. And number three bid aggressively on advertising. And then only once you’ve got some reviews. And you’ve got the rankings you want, which is the key thing that drives it all Can you then start to further down the advertising spend and further up the price over time. It’s a very simple, robust strategy. It works. It’s very, very simple. The people who are killing it in the million pound mastermind do this exact strategy. It’s not rocket science. But because it’s simple, it tastes it costs a lot of money, people aren’t so keen on doing it, guess what it’s effective. In fact, the only thing I’ve seen consistently effective over the last few months are a lot of the usual hacks was different URLs. And complicated things have been very iffy, or just simply not effective amongst the power sellers that I know personally. So that’s the main thing I have to say, really, I mean, it’s like anything else.

If you do that,

and then you try and feather the price up and the ad spend down in your ranking falls off a cliff, you’re probably just in an over competitive market, and you shouldn’t be there in the first place. See point one for either one I said at the beginning. So that’s pretty much it really accept the economics, which we need to touch on as well, if you’re trying to sell a product for 12 pounds in a in a place where the averages can, and you have no reviews, you’re onto a loser straightaway in terms of sales, right, so you’re gonna have to drop the price. But of course, if you want to make profit, once you get out of the launch period, then you need to think very carefully about your breakeven, I’ve seen people with a product where the breakeven points about 12 pounds, and that’s the maximum you can even ever sell it for baking being all of their costs added up to the total landed cost plus Amazon. Just bear in mind or ways it’s fine to have a loss making test. But when you’re at scale, when you’re Look what you’ve done, no launch and you’ve done your test and you’re trying to make profit, you really are going to struggle to do that. If you’re landed cost. In other words, all the cost of manufacture plus shipping it over import whatever it is getting it to Amazon, basically. Because really, if you’re by price is too high, you’re absolutely screwed. They do say that your profit is made when you buy not when you sell in general in life. And I think that is true. You’ve got to see what markets what the market will bear in terms of your pricing for your product. But over optimistic sales price projections are very dangerous, because that’s speculative. You don’t know until you try and sell whether or not that will occur. But what you do know that is concrete that you paid for in advance when you an Amazon seller. Mostly, at least when you start off. If you haven’t got great credit terms, what you do know is your cost price. So that is the only definite part of that equation between the selling price uncertain cost price to you. So and therefore you have to really work on negotiating a low cost price at scale. I don’t mean for your first sort of test order but your second or third order of private label product or custom product indeed needs to be such that within realistic prices it’s going to make profit that’s one of the hardest things to get right and that’s not an easy solution but that truth is still clear so I want to put that across loud and clear you cannot get away with ridiculous cost pricing in the hope that you’re going to achieve very high pricing just bear in mind the drivers behind Amazon first of all visually everything is like a price comparison site par excellence right there is nothing that is quite as price comparisons it as an Amazon search results page. And that’s by design Amazon have consistently and Jeff Bezos has consistently articulate the three things that customers want and he’s been going on about that for years and working to deliver it number one, greatest selection number two low prices number three quicker delivery quicker delivery is great for everyone including us because customers love it but guess what lower prices in greater selection work against us so there’s always a downward pressure on price on Amazon that’s a given so never ever do your cost pricing side of things and what you spend money on with an over optimistic sales price This is another thing that I see a hell of a lot Be realistic make things work at that level and guess what if

the economics don’t work or the market is too competitive

just get out if you made a mistake that’s okay learn from itself for your own country move on to a new product you don’t give up on Amazon that does that mean I was in doesn’t work whatever that means no just just complete nonsense I know people making millions of people you’ve got to the point of doing a million or so internet for within two years it’s perfectly possible with pretty modest investment but that said you know not every products a winner so if it isn’t a winner Be honest about it sell through learn the mistakes and then go get your next product thanks for listening hope that was a bit of helpful inside of details input into the launch side of things on Amazon if you wanted to work with me on your launch just go to amazing FBA. com four slash rare ra e that is a paid service currently costs I think under 47 pounds so sort of the sort of towards the $200

mark

so

you know that’s payable attire booking so it’s not going to be for everyone. But if you’re serious about launching and you spent thousands on a product already, I think that’s a very good investment of your money and time. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai