Build the Marketplace Growth Map

Outcome: Connect sales, margin, inventory, listings, reviews, ads, and cash into one operating map so problems do not hide in separate tools.

What to do in this lesson

Watch: start with the lesson video.
Learn: use the summary and key points to capture the operating principle.
Do: complete the action steps against one real product, SKU, campaign, supplier, or workflow.
Submit: write one action card with owner, evidence, next step, risk, status, and review date.

Watch

Hosted on Google Drive.

Lesson summary

This lesson teaches the 5 core pillars of a successful Amazon business: product development, product launching, listing optimization, PPC optimization, and list building/utilization. The key is to focus on mastering these core elements rather than getting distracted by other tactics. The lesson provides a step-by-step process for executing each pillar and emphasizes the importance of systemizing and delegating these processes to a team.

Key points

Plan and calendar new product launches 6-12 months in advance
Develop a streamlined product launch process to rank for keywords, get reviews, and hit sales targets
Continuously optimize listings to maintain and improve profitability
Optimize PPC campaigns to maximize ad spend at a break-even ACOS
Use your customer list to get feedback on new product ideas and launch new products to

Action checklist

Plan the number of products you will launch in the next 6-12 months
Routinely evaluate your business on each of the 5 core pillars
Focus on systemizing one pillar at a time, starting with your weakest area

Full transcript

Open transcript

Hello Titans, and welcome to the five core pillars of Amazon training. I am Justin Dyson, one of your Scaler-OS leaders. In this training, I really want to talk about how to scale your company and why complexity doesn’t scale. We have this tendency to really try to make things more complicated than they need to be. So over the past six years, what I’ve been able to distill down is the five key areas of your Amazon business that if you will just focus on these, don’t give me wrong. There are more things you can focus on. There is an infinite amount. But if you did nothing else and you only focus on these five core pillars or principles, whatever you want to call them, then your business will grow. And I know this to be true because I spent the first three years really messing this up. And in year three, I discovered there was a problem and it took me a year to really distill it down and figure out what to do. And then another additional year and a half to really put this and perfect it with my team, delegate every aspect of this and make our business grow without my input. So let’s get started. What we’re going to cover, right? So what to focus on to achieve steady growth. Again, everyone’s goal is to grow, but we never really figure out, okay, cool. How do we do that? And that’s what I want to deliver here. And that’s going to be done by looking at the five core drivers of any Amazon based of business. I’m going to talk about each of those in detail and we’re going to really dive in. And then how to stay focused on what works, right? We always come into this shiny object syndrome and we run into road box because of it. So if we figure out what to focus on, it makes it a whole lot easier. So one concept I really want to try to instill and I want to make very clear is business is boring and growth is exciting. We should be trying to make the operational aspect of our business as boring as possible, right? And I’ll talk a little bit more about that. And then the growth aspect, that’s what’s exciting. You know, we don’t get super excited about spending, you know, eight hours looking at a spreadsheet, right? That’s the business side. That’s boring. But seeing the numbers go up, getting more customers, selling more units, seeing your profit grow, that’s exciting. And that’s where we want to put our emphasis and our momentum. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. So going back to business is boring, right? Business operations should become routine and then routines can be documented, right? So we have this operational aspect of our company. We want to make sure we do it the same way every time. And if we do it the same way every time within reason, then those routines can be documented and we can put them in videos and, you know, actual Google docs or whatever you want to use. And we can create those documentations because those documented routines should hold very few surprises, which makes them boring. And if you can do that, you can delegate that to a team, which is the ultimate goal. And then again, growth is exciting. We want to expand upon that, right? And the key to growth is to focus. We want to be able to focus and we need to know what to focus on. So the key to focus is knowing what to focus on. And that’s what I’m going to go through today. And then finally, knowing what to focus on comes from experience, right? Everyone, if you’ve been in this game long enough, you know that you, you don’t have a problem focusing, but it’s typically focus, your focus is on the wrong thing. And that leads to failures and mishaps and a year will go by and you’re like, dang, why did I spend so much time, you know, trying to figure this one thing out when if I just really went back to the core of this business, I could have grown. I could have doubled my company or even more. So that’s what we want to try to accomplish. But where do we get the experience, right? So if you’re starting out, you, you have no experience. You’re literally watching videos, learning from other people. So that is where you want to get your experience from. You know, if you took a course to learn how to sell an Amazon, then that’s your first wave of experience that you’ve achieved. Obviously, you as a course portal, you’re getting the experience of, of all of us leaders and we’re bringing it to you and hopefully in a simplified format that you can understand and follow along. So we’re here to deliver the experience and I want you to hear me really well on this presentation because I’m going to go through some live examples of exactly what we did, the mistakes we made and why I don’t want you to make those same mistakes. So again, your business grows by focusing on the five core pillars of Amazon and now let’s dive into what those actually are. So the five core pillars, quite simply, is product development, product launching, listing optimization, PPC optimization and then list building and utilization. So we’re going to go through each and every one of these in more detail and we’re going to talk about what it actually means to do each of these well because that should be the ultimate goal. How do we create a process for product development? What does that look like? How do we create a process for product launching? What does that look like? Now this is not going to be a tactical representation of each and every little thing you do in these, but it’s going to deliver the vision and the strategy, the mindset behind what each of these entails. So moving on into the very first pillar and before I continue, right? Those five core pillars are in order of importance, right? So the first one is product development is the most important one and I’m going to explain why as we move forward. So you have likely heard, if you’ve heard anything that Andrew Erickson, one of your other Scaler-OS leaders has talked about, he always says ABL, ABL, always be launching and that is kind of the ground zero, right? And why are we talking about launching if we’re talking about product development? Well, we don’t develop products for no reason. We do that so we can launch them. So we want to keep in mind, we want to really stay focused on ABL. We need to always be launching products. And in order to do this, we must come out with new products on a consistent basis. We have to have a plan to put these things on the calendar and move forward consistently or we cannot always be launching. So remember guys, this is not automatic and for the 90% of you, maybe even more, you have not even thought about it in this way. And I want to clarify that and I want you to start thinking about product development in this fashion. So we must plan for this. We can’t, it will not happen automatically. Like I said, you were going to have to make an actual intention to create a strategy in your company for product development. And now that’s kind of dive in. So why are we doing this, right? So developing products to launch is the biggest lever in your business. Okay? If there was one thing that you did that would move the needle further and faster, it’s coming out with new products on a regular basis. We know this every Amazon seller who’s in the multi-seven figure range will tell you they didn’t get it by building a pretty list. They didn’t get it by optimizing their PPC. They didn’t get it by just optimizing the products they had. Every time they come out with a new product or a new product line, it moved the needle leagues and bounds or leaps and bounds ahead of where they currently were. So product development has three primary objectives. So I want to, I want to set the stage here, right? I told you earlier that, you know, the business side of operations should be boring. But in this presentation, you’re going to see a very repetitive theme here. Every single one of these pillars is going to have three primary objectives. So for product development, this is what the first three are. So first, plan the next six to 12 months of products you want to launch. Launch being the key. We’re not planning the six to 12 months of products we want to come out with or think about or write down. These are ones were actually actually going to launch and we’re going to write these down. We’re going to calendar them and get them moving forward. And part of that is getting all of these products order ready. And by order ready, I mean, all you have to do is say, Hey, supplier, I want to order a thousand start today. That is order ready. That means you’ve gone through the sample phase. You’ve gone through all of the validation aspects of product selection. You know this product will work. All you have to do is say send me a thousand units, they’ll get to work on it. And you can expect it to arrive in, you know, 36 the 90 days, whatever your lead time is. And this also sets the pace for growth in your business. So like I said, you know, launching products is the biggest lever. Well, why if we can do this faster, it will set the pace for how fast your company grows. So if we make sure that in the next six to 12 months, let’s say we want to come out with 10 new products or 10 new product lines, however you want to word it, right? Well, that sets the pace for product launches. It sets the pace for the number of products you have to optimize. It sets the pace on how much you can spend on PPC and how much you can really push that forward. And finally, it also increases or how fast your list is going to grow and how much you can actually use that list because everyone builds a list, but we forget to use it. Well, when we come out with more products, that’s more things we can offer the list and the more products we have in total, the more things we can offer that same list. So that’s what we want to do. And that is the, these are the three primary objectives for the product development piece. So next part of this, right? So these numbers are what my actual product development phase look like in my company. These aren’t, I didn’t make these up. This is our actual process and like the length of time it takes. And this is why it’s so important to calendar this and do it ahead of time. So going from a concept to a sample takes one to two months or longer, right? In my company, I did not need to find a supplier. I worked with the same two, three or four suppliers all the time. So it could potentially take you three to four months to actually go from initial product idea to contacting suppliers to getting a sample and confirming that sample. So let’s say it takes one to two months and it took one to two months for us in our business. Well production time for us was 55 to 65 days. That’s two months. And then the shipping time was another month and a half because it’s going to go from your factory to the port in China, right? It’s going to take a week to do that. It’s going to be two weeks on the water. And then you’ve got another week when it gets to California and then you’ve got another week and a half to two weeks before Amazon even checks it in. That means your total time to develop one product is four to six months. Guys, if you want to move your business forward, you cannot wait and you cannot develop one product at a time every four to six months just because now you’ve got something you’re launching. It’s time to do it again. No, you have to do it more than one at a time. And that’s the key takeaway here. We need to be developing products in sets of two, three, four, five, six, 10, 20, 30. It doesn’t matter. It only depends on the level of business that you’re at. And we want to make sure we’re doing this more than one product at a time. Now, if you are brand new and you don’t have any products out, then guess what? Your number is one. Your job is to just produce one profitable product in the next 12 months. And that’s totally fine. Again, this is based upon where you’re at in your business. But for those of you that have already started, you have a brand now. You have a, you know, a group of products that all encompass one avatar. Now you need to start thinking further ahead and you need to start looking, you know, six to 12 months out into, okay, what are the products that we’re going to come out with? How many are there? Etc. So, finally, the ultimate product development process looks like this. Now I’m going to have this same slide for every seat, every single one of these pillars. So get ready. First, we have products ready to launch now, right? If we’re going to always be launching, we have to always have products ready to launch now, which means we always have to have things in product development. And then multiple products and or variations are confirmed for production this quarter, right? So we already have things lined up. We know we’re going to start producing them this month, next month, or the following, and it’s all happening in this quarter. And then we have new samples being produced for production for the next quarter. So now we’re six months out, right? So we have stuff we’re launching now. We have stuff that we’re going to produce this quarter. We’re going to receive it at the start of next quarter. Now we also need to look at samples and make sure that we’re getting those in the following quarter. Finally, we have a list of product ideas. We may not have validated them yet, but we have a list of product ideas that we can produce in the next six to 12 months. That list exists. It’s not a, yeah, I think I’ve got a general idea. No, you have these things written down. So when you have done product development, and it is pumping on all pistons in your business, this is what it looks like. You have a now phase, this quarter phase, and next quarter phase. And then you have this next six to 12 months after that, all documented, and it’s all ready to go for you to use and just hit the go button. That is what a good product development phase is in your company, right? So moving on to the second pillar and the second most important part of your business, right? So we don’t develop products for no reason. We develop them so we can launch them. So developing products does no good if you don’t launch them, which means we need to have a very good launch process. And again, a product launch has three primary objectives. The first organically rank for highly relevant high search volume keywords, right? So we, for those of you that have been in time for a while, you know, we talk a lot about Mufasa and keyword research and how we find those types of keywords. So this is step one or the first aspect of a good product launch, right? We need to rank for all these highly relevant high search volume keywords, because that’s how we’re going to get the eyeballs on our listing, which will help generate the sales. Second part of the launch is we need to get enough reviews to sustain organic keyword rank. If you’ve all seen it time and time again, you come out with a product. You have literally five reviews. Everyone else has 500 or more and you’re like, well, my conversion rates crap and I can’t seem to stick rank. Well, that’s because you don’t stand out. You have to get enough reviews to actually sustain the organic keyword rank you have. Now fortunately, because of the tools we’ve created in Scaler-OS, you’re also going to be able to get on more keywords than most of your competitors. So the actual number of reviews you need is less than it used to be. So that’s a good thing, but that’s still a key component of a good launch. And then finally, we need to hit or exceed our sales target. And you know, we’re going to talk about that later on in other videos, but hitting or exceeding your sales target, that is kind of the whole point, right? We don’t launch things arbitrarily. Like, I hope I make some money with this. No, we need to know upfront, what is my target? Am I trying to get 10k a month on this product? Am I trying to get 20k 100k? That will help dictate what products you launch and when and in what order. So this is super important stuff. And these are the three objectives that you want to meet whenever you’re launching a product. So moving on, launching products is investing in the growth of your business. I’m going to read that again, launching products is investing in the growth of your business. You cannot expect to invest $50 and expect to get $50,000 if all you invested was $50 and put in minimal effort. That is no good. That is not going to work. When we are launching products, we are trying to meet those three primary objectives and we’re going to invest whatever we need to to make those things come true and part of ensuring your success in that goes back to our first pillar, which is product development. So the key point here is do not sabotage your product launch and the name of being frugal. I know everyone gets caught up on the cost of launch. You know, it’s going to cost two grand, five grand, whatever it is, every product is going to differ and vary. However, if you sabotage that product launch, what will happen, and I see it time and time again, is you kind of do this little mini launch. You don’t really go after too many keywords and you give away maybe 50 units and then you stop and then you just that PPC run. Well, six months goes by and you still aren’t ranked for keywords. You still don’t have the review count to actually stand out and you’re not hitting your sales target. Your launch failed and you can’t complain at that point that you’re losing money because yeah, at that point, you’ve now lost more money than what it would have cost to actually launch the product initially. And I’m here to tell you guys, if you will do a full product launch, you can recoup your investment in two to four weeks after that. That is the goal. That is what we want to try to accomplish. So don’t sabotage your own success here by not giving it your full effort. So instead, let’s do this. Let’s pick products and develop a strategy for launching products in a one, two, a three month period. Right? Now, for those of you that are more advanced and you can afford to launch something and take four to six months, a whole year, even, you know, depending on the level of a competition that you’re looking at, that’s fine. So for many of you, especially in groups zero, one, two, and even three, we need to really dial this down into how can we launch as many products as possible and do it as fast as possible within that one to three months that it goes live. Right? So this is my strategy that you guys have heard me talk about and we’ll also expand upon within Scaler-OS. It’s, it’s really just two core things, right? We use PPC. We absolutely use PPC. We go into move fast. We pull in all the keyword research. We find out what keywords to target. We can typically find 200 to 400 keywords. We’re putting every single one of those highly relevant keywords into our PPC campaigns. That is a non-negotiable and I turn that on on day one. I’m not one of these guys who wants to wait until I get reviews. Reviews come from one place and that’s called sales. So guess what we need to do? We need to focus on sales. Let’s keep things simple and let’s focus on what we know to be true, which is reviews come from sales. So I’ve got PPC set up and that is on day one. I’m turning that on. Also on day one when that product goes live, I’m running a Facebook ad, sending that traffic into Maniacat. I’m delivering to them a search find by offer. So I’m giving them my keyword and if I’m not ranked for anything, I’m going to include my brand name as well. So you know, my brand name plus the keyword is the hey, go find that on Amazon and go buy it. And in exchange, I’m going to give them a 100% manufacturer’s rebate, right? That is my strategy. I’m using it for over a year now and it has a 100% success rate in our company because we again, we don’t sabotage it or launch, we go at it full force. We start off slow and then we ramp up from there. So that is my strategy and I’ve used it time and time again. And that’s what I want you to have in your company. When you’re developing your product launch strategy, it should be the same one from product one to two to three to four and so on. And that’s what we really want to achieve in your business. So the ultimate product launching process looks like this. We are launching products in rapid succession. So set of cadence, are you going to launch products once a quarter? Are you going to launch one product per quarter? Are you able to do two per quarter? What about two per month? What about four per month? We were able to get up in our business. We were moving towards four product launches per month. That was what our goal was. And you’re not going to hit your goal right out of the gate because like I showed you but earlier, right, it for us production time was actually four to six months or right into the total e time. Well, that means I’m going to be waiting at least four to six months before I can even get this rolling. So be gracious with yourself. This isn’t something that’s going to happen next month unless you just happen to have a super quick supplier and you already have things going. And then remember, launches take one to three months. So we need to really tighten up our strategy for launching and get it to where we can launch things very quickly and turn that profit really quickly. And again, we are profitable within two to four weeks after launch. So that is what we really want to see when we’re launching products. We’re doing things quickly. We’re not only coming out with products quickly, we’re launching them quickly and we’re getting to profitability in two to four weeks, right? So finally, and this is what makes it all possible is we have met our keyword rank, review, and sales targets. So if I’m aiming to make 20 grand a month on this product, I hit that. If I’m trying to rank for, you know, five or six keywords that I know we’re going to drive the volume of searches that I need to get sales, I hit that. If I think I need, you know, if all my competition has five hundred to eight hundred reviews and I say, okay, in one to three months, I want to have two hundred, I hit that, all right? That is what we’re doing with our product launch. So moving on to number three. And again, these are an order of succession. And here’s why. So developing products and launching them does no good if you don’t actually maintain your profitability. I’ve said, I’ve done this so many times. I will launch something, come out with it and sales are great. And then I totally forget about it. I don’t even look at it again. I just put the PPC campaigns on autopilot, just my regular maintenance. I’m not optimizing anything. I’m not doing any split tests or nothing, right? That’s a no go. And don’t be wrong. You can do that for a while until you look up and realize you’ve got, you know, 50 views and only half of them are actually producing a profit or, you know, even if 80% are producing a profit in 20, aren’t that’s still a huge chunk of change you’re throwing out the window because you’re not looking at it. So again, we have three primary objectives for listing optimization. First one is we need to maintain profitability on all skews, right? First, first rule of thumb. If we’re losing money, we need to find out why and we need to plug that whole, right? Secondly, not only do we need to maintain profitability, we need to improve it. So if, you know, I’ve got everything profitable, I’m not losing money on anything, but I’ve got, you know, 10 skews that have less than 10% margin. By the time it’s all said and done, that’s a problem. Let’s plug those holes to. Let’s fill up the bucket with our profit again and move on and we’re going to do some split tests and all sorts of things to make that happen. And then finally, we’re going to use this data to improve our product development, both new and old products. So this is a huge one that when we started implementing this process in our business, I’d never thought of this like this just happened on its own and it’s a beautiful thing because what you’re going to find when you start going through the optimization process and you’re looking at, well, why am I no longer profitable in this product or how can I get the profitability up for this product? And you start looking at the individual metrics of your product, you’re comparing, you know, other data on helium 10 or management stats or whoever and you’re looking at your competitors and you’re like, hey, they do this really well. And then you can take it even a step further and you can start looking at just things off of Amazon, off the actual sales channel. What’s the whole market doing for your types of products? What are they doing on Walmart? What are they doing in the big box stores? And if you will look at that information to see why your stuff is falling behind, maybe you’re no longer on the trend. Maybe this is a product you need to discontinue or maybe in what’s really cool when we found is while you’re doing all of this improvements to an existing listing, you can actually find where the opportunity is for your new products. So if in our case, right, we had a bunch of products with patterns. Well, when we were looking and saying, okay, why is this pattern no longer selling? Is it no longer popular? Well, we ended up finding out was not only did we answer that question, yes or no, but we also found out, holy crap, these customers are literally leaving reviews and posting on social media that they want to see these patterns. So these are things that will come up. And so if you can maintain profitability, you can improve it and then you can use the data that you find to just make general improvements across the board and also produce more product development ideas. That’s gold, right? So those are the three things that we really want to try to accomplish with listing optimization. Now this is something I wish I could claim as my own, but I cannot. So Cameron Harold, I just saw him speak on stage. I don’t even know two, three, four years ago. And he got on stage and he was like, all right, guys, the key to success is R&D. And everyone thought he was talking about research and development, not even close. What he was talking about was rip off and duplicate, which is kind of the same thing, but not really. So remember, guys, everything we do on Amazon is already been done by somebody else. You have competitors. You were not the only person in the world selling your type of product. And if you are, congratulations, I hope you haven’t patent. But for most of you, you are just doing the same thing someone else is doing. Now we need to find out what actually works for them and do it ourselves. Do it a little bit better. So use our competitor’s success to tell you what that you want to improve, right? Especially those that exist off of Amazon, you know, those people and those other companies that have to drive their own traffic, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are putting in the time, energy and research and to find out exactly who the customer is and exactly what they want. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in business. So use your competitor’s success to tell you what to improve. And then, and this is probably one of the most important things, right? If you’ve been in any Amazon based Facebook group or anything whatsoever and you’ve seen people post and you may have done it yourself, I know I have, hey, what should my main image look like or what size should it be for mobile or whatever? And you’re going to see thousands of different comments and answers, remember that thousands, but you know, dozens of different comments and answers on this. None of that matters. You can use that to get ideas, but if you do not split test it for yourself, you are setting your business up on a house of cards. Do not take someone else’s word for it. You have your own business with your own types of products with your own types of customers. You cannot simply rely on what they told you on social media to be 100% true. You need to split test absolutely everything. So and again, no one else’s opinion of what to do will be better than you getting the data for yourself. So pro tip here, if you’ve optimized your listing and sales do not sustainably increase, consider killing the product and invest those dollars into something new. All right, no one wants to hear that they have a losing product. However, everyone, you know, when people look at my business, you know, I’m multi-seven figure, higher seven figure business and we had 82 products, I think, by the time I sold my company. I have discontinued probably 50 plus products over the past five, six years. That is a huge amount of products to have been discontinued for one reason or another. Maybe the pattern was, you know, it phased out. It was no longer popular, but there are definitely products in that mix that were just absolute failures. And you need to be able to look at your catalog of products and say, Hey, you know what? I’ve done everything I can to optimize this product. It’s time to move on. Let’s kill it. Money back out of it and quit wasting it, quit parking it there. And let’s go use it to develop something new because remember, we got this whole engine running in our company now. We’re developing products really quickly. We need to make sure that we have some cash to do that. So if you’ve got these weak players, you’ve tried to do a relaunch and don’t be wrong. And when I say relaunch, I mean, like you actually tried, you ran rebates, you optimized your PPC, you did split tests on your images, titles, bullets, whatever. You’ve done all those things, but despite that sales don’t actually increase or stay that way, kill that product and move on, do not be afraid to do that. Successful sellers discontinue things that aren’t working and they move on. So that is one of the key components of listing optimization. You’re going to have to make that decision at some point. So finally, the ultimate listing optimization process in your company and looks like this. We are evaluating profitability on a monthly basis, right? We need to look at this routinely again. We’re going back to routines. We want to do things over and over and we need to make things boring. So every month, we’re going to run a report, hey, what’s our profitability? Secondly, we’re constantly running split tests to find the optimum results. Now first rule of thumb on split tests, you cannot run multiple split tests on the same skew at the same time, right? That’s a no go unless you’re testing two different things, but even then I wouldn’t recommend it. But you are constantly running split tests to find the optimum results. If you use the daily sales tracker, it’s really easy for you to do this manually. You don’t even have to pay for a service. However, you could use something like Splitly who offers split testing services. And also Amazon now has their own split testing components as well. They’re not super elaborate, but they do exist. And then finally, no products are losing money, right? That’s the goal. We don’t want to be losing money anywhere. So we need to make sure that that doesn’t happen. So when you’re doing this and it’s firing in all pistons, you are evaluating profitability. You are making changes to products based on that evaluation and you are split testing your efforts to make sure that you are making the right decisions. Because again, we’re not going to rely on other people’s opinions. And honestly, you shouldn’t even rely on your own opinion. That’s how you end up with making big mistakes as you think that you’re right when in fact, if you did just split tested, you could have confirmed that one way or the other. And then finally here, all the products meet our profitability standard. So going back to, yes, we don’t want to lose money, but we also need to make sure that we’re meeting a certain minimum on profitability. If you’ve got something that’s dragging along and you can only get about a 5% profit out of this thing. And that’s not even after you’ve paid for employees or your staff, VA’s, software. This is just kind of at the gross level. It’s time to kill it. If you can’t get it up there, it’s time to kill it, right? So make sure that all of your products meet the profitability standard you’ve set. You can make it 10%, 15%, 40%, I’ll be honest, 40% is pretty unrealistic. Remember, you’re going to have a kind of a gross profit margin, right? So as soon as you paid for your inventory, shipping to Amazon, land and cost, Amazon fees, you’ve got an actual gross profit margin there. But you’ve also got to pay for ads and you’ve got to do other things. So don’t make it too high. Look at your products now, find a good standard and set that in your business. All right, moving on to number four, PPC optimization. So part of the reason this is number four is one, you can’t do any PPC on things you don’t have. So you got to develop them while you’re launching. We’re not really optimizing PPC, we’re just making sure it’s giving us some sessions and traffic and we’re getting some sales. And then thirdly, while we’re in the listing optimization piece, you know what you’re most often going to find is that you are blowing money on PPC. So that’s why this one’s number four, it comes next. So the number one killer of profits is poorly optimized PPC and I typically see two different scenarios. The first, you are not spending enough on PPC to actually make good sales and therefore that hurts your organic keyword rank because you aren’t pumping out enough volume for Amazon to love you, right? And then secondly, you’re spending so much money and actually not converting at all and what you’re telling Amazon is, hey, this product is not relevant. Don’t show me to anybody because I’m just going to waste my money, right? So those are the two things I see and we really need to solve that problem. So there’s three primary objectives for PPC and one, we’re using all of Amazon sponsored platforms that they have, right? So you have sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display, you have DSP, you have sponsored videos. An infinite amount, it seems these days, Amazon keeps coming out with new ones all the time. So we want to use all of them, right? Within reason, if you use something that’s in beta and it just, it’s really bad, then obviously we can turn that off. But every avenue that you get to advertise on Amazon, use it. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say, well, I’ve heard, you know, for the baby niche or the kitchen niche or whatever, you know, if we advertise on Pinterest, there’s a really good conversion rate. I hate to tell you this. No one goes to Pinterest to buy things. They go there to get ideas. People go to Amazon for one reason. They go there to buy things. Your conversion rate on Amazon will always be higher and it’s so much easier because you don’t have to learn to write copy. You don’t have to learn how to create these funnels, to drive traffic, to your own website or to even Amazon, you know, which link do you use? I don’t know. So guys, I’m telling you, utilize what Amazon gives you. It’s available to you. They will make it convert better than anything you’re going to do on Facebook or Pinterest or whatever. Do not misunderstand me. I’m not saying those are bad platforms to get on. But before you go there, utilize what you have at your disposal already without having to learn something new. All right. Second point, second primary objective is we want to spend as much as possible. If I can spend a million dollars a day and break even, I absolutely want to do that. Because spending that much money and getting that many sales means I can now get a lower cost of goods from my manufacturer because instead of ordering a thousand units, I can order 10,000 units, right? So the more you spend, the more you sell, the more you sell, the lower your cost of goods and just the economies of scale kick in. So we want to spend as much as possible without losing money. So third point is break even. Now I want to be very clear here, there are many different PPC strategies and when I’m considering this as part of these five core pillars, this is for maintenance campaigns. This does not include launches and this doesn’t include re-ranking campaigns and it does not include trying to be profitable. We’re trying to break even in this particular scenario because we’re just trying to maximize the number of units I can sell which will have an impact on my organic keyword rank because going back to the second pillar of product launching, that’s a key component, right? So those are the three primary objectives in our PPC. Now what does that look like? How do we do this? And I would just, again, we can’t dive into every specific thing but there is some basic routine PPC maintenance rules that you should follow and these should be done at a minimum once a week, right? And there’s a whole lot more you can do than this, but this is like the baseline. If you just want to maintain the ACOS you currently have and maybe get it to go down a little bit, this is the action steps, right? So first thing and it doesn’t matter what tool you use, you could do this yourself, you could do semi-seller, you could use PPC entourage, you could use whatever, right? But you need to do these three things. First, negative match search terms that are not performing, right? So I’ll get to that in a second. Make increase or decrease bids on keywords based on performance and thirdly, add profitable search terms as keywords to your campaigns. Now I need to be very clear here and I want you to hear me and I want you to really get this. Search terms and keywords are not the same things and that’s why it’s written the way it is. A search term is what the customer types into the Amazon search bar. That is a search term. A keyword is what you put into your ad campaigns to bid upon. Now the customer could type in a search term that matches exactly what your keyword is and that’s all fine and dandy, but they are not the same thing. So when we negative match a search term, we are not negative matching a keyword, okay? We are simply negative matching a search term that the customer typed in that did not convert, all right? We’re not turning off a keyword, we’re not lowering the bid at this point. We’re simply getting rid of a search term that isn’t working, all right? And then second piece, when we’re increasing and decreasing our bids on our keywords, this will impact what search terms you actually can get. So this is why we’re doing this. If we have a keyword that has a profitable a cost in our exact match campaign, well, why don’t we try to see if we can spend a little more and maintain that, right? So we’re going to increase those bids. Likewise, if we have a keyword in our exact match campaign and it’s doing poorly, let’s say we want to hit 40% a cost, but it’s doing 75, let’s lower the bid and see if we can get that down to that 40% a cost. So that’s why we’re doing that. And then finally, for these search terms that customers are typing in, that we don’t have as a keyword and we’re not bidding on in our exact match campaign, we need to be able to move those from that search term report or whatever tool you’re using and put those in as keywords, because now we can optimize it. Remember, when you’re optimizing your PPC campaigns, it’s your exact match campaign where we want to optimize the bid. You have the most control there, right? So that’s the goal. That’s what we want to do. And these are the three things we want to do at a minimum each week to maintain our campaigns. So pro tip, going back to our Scaler-OS tools here. So a great keyword research is the key to great PPC results. So we talk a lot about Mufasa using that keyword research strategy. You can find 200, 300, 400. I think I’ve talked to one member who found over 600 highly relevant keywords. If you start your campaigns out with that many highly relevant terms, you no longer have to rely on Amazon to find them for you and waste your money in the process. So doing great keyword research will get you great results. And it starts with that keyword research piece, which you actually do during the product launch phase. So you already have this stuff done. All right. Now, the ultimate PPC optimization process in your business looks like this. Again, this is the macro level. So we’re maximizing ad spend at a break even a cost on an individual level. And we’re utilizing all available Amazon advertising placements, brands, display, etc. What we want to do here, right, is the ultimate PPC optimization process looks like this. We are maximizing our ad spend at a break even a cost on an individual level, right? So one of the things that we often see is you know what your break even is as a business whole, right? You just set it across the board. Let’s say it’s 35%. Well, we need to be maximizing our ad spend at the skew level. We need to be able to see, OK, what for this particular skew is my actual break even 35% or is it 45? If it’s 45%, I can I can spend more, especially if I’m already at that 35% profitability level. So we want to maximize that as much as we can and then obviously we want to utilize all of the available platforms on Amazon. So fifth and final core pillar here, right list building and utilization. So your customer list and audiences should make the first three pillars go faster and be more predictable. This is the flywheel. This is the thing that is really going to ramp things up in your business. And the reason it’s the fifth pillar and the reason it’s not, you know, put it at the front is because everyone can build a list, but it is absolutely no value if you don’t use it or don’t know how to use it. So in the way I’m going to tell you how to use it and I’m going to show you how to use it is important because we put this at the end because again, if we have products coming out on a regular basis, we’re launching products on a regular basis and we need to relaunch products during the listing optimization process, we can use this list for those three things. And I’m going to talk about how. So list building and utilization is three primary objectives and these are going to sound really familiar. So I hope you’re paying attention. They’re going to help you develop new products. So it’s going to help with that first core pillar. It’s going to help you launch new products, which is going to help with that second core pillar. And then thirdly, it’s going to help you sell them or sell the people on your list, your other products, which will help with relaunching things during the listing optimization process. So these are the three primary objectives that we want to hit with our list. If we can keep our list engaged by helping or allowing them to help us develop new products and they can help us by launching to them those same new products. And we can also sell them other things that we sell. We can really use this list and it can become a great asset for your business. So how can we grow our list without actually doing any extra work, right? We don’t want, again, I think I said in the very beginning is complexity doesn’t scale. Well, that means we need to simplify and simplify things we need to do less, right? So how can we do less? How can we build this list without doing any extra work? So you can do this while you launch products, right? While you’re launching and you have that Facebook ad and the mini chat flow going, you’re building a list, right? You now have a mini chat audience. And one thing that you can do is at the tail end of your search find by flow, you can follow up with them, you know, using that one time opt in or you can do it in a few days after they purchased and they’ve received it and they love it. You can ask them to join your private groups, whether that’s on Facebook, maybe you have a special Instagram page or whatever in my business, we like to use a Facebook group. So after every time we launched something, we had a follow up and it said, hey, would you like to be a part of our exclusive VIP Facebook group? And they could click that link. It would take them to the Facebook group. They would click joined and so the questions to make that, you know, made them eligible to join and we got them into our Facebook group. That Facebook group is immensely valuable. I can ask them anything. I can ask them to help me develop products and say, hey, I’ve got this new design. What do you guys think about it? They’re like, eh, or that’s freaking awesome. Likewise, I could show them my competitors products and my products and show them a rendering of something I’m working on. Say which ones would you, which one do you prefer? If the most of these people pick my design over the competitor and I know that competitors are top seller, I have a winning product automatically. I know it with almost 100% certainty. So that’s how we want to use that. And the ultimate list building and utilization process looks like this. So we’re actively growing our list. Well, this is automatic. Remember, because if we’re always launching, that list is always growing. It’s always funneling people into our Facebook group or wherever we’re sending them. And then we’re using our audience to generate product ideas, right? So going back to you, ask them what they want. They will tell you what they want. If you will just ask them, don’t leave this off the table. You will get some of the most valuable input from the people who like you and know you. And then secondly, we’re going to launch products with these people. So if they’ve helped you develop a product and you’ve took them along, you’ve shown them pictures, you’ve let them have their input on the actual product development piece. Well, guess what? When you come out with it, you can go to the same group of people and like, guys, I made what you asked for. Please go buy it. And you can give them an offer or not. It’s totally up to you. For me, I like to give them an offer because my goal is to launch the product. And I’m going to do that within that one in three month window. So I don’t care if I make money. I want to get that product launched because then I’m going to recoup that in two to four weeks after the launch. And then finally, we’re going to resell the people on our list. So what does that really look like? How can we do this? Well, so if we’re looking at the product development pillar, right? And we’re trying to decide, okay, which product do I come out with first? Well, if you know you’re going to have this list and let’s say you have crib sheets and you have a matching blanket and a matching pillow, well, it makes sense to come out with a crib sheet first, come out with the blanket next and then go back to those people who bought the crib sheet and say, hey, got a matching blanket. You want to buy it. And then once you come out with a pillow, say, hey, got a matching pillow. You want to buy it? So you can go resell these same people who originally came in at the first product you came out with. But now you can sell them the new stuff you’re coming out with along the way or you can actually go back in the other direction. So anyone who comes in and bought the pillow, they’re like, hey, we got a matching, you know, a crib sheet for that. Do you want to buy it? So you can use that in both directions and it’s incredibly valuable. But that’s the reason this is the fifth pillar because this really becomes powerful and has a value whenever you already have products and development and you’re launching on a regular basis. So again, your business grows by focusing on the five core pillars of Amazon. You’ll notice we didn’t talk about Walmart. We didn’t talk about other marketplaces. We didn’t talk about, you know, learning how to advertise on Pinterest or do direct to sales, marketing, sending people to your Shopify store. We didn’t talk about any of that. None of that matters yet. Okay. You need to make your business boring. We need to make it predictable and we need to make sure it’s constantly growing. Once you’ve got that growth, once you’ve got that routine in your business, now you can go experiment with other things because guess what? You have excess cash. You have extra profit left over to go run those experiments. Don’t try to experiment when you’re a type for cash. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, right? We all do it. I did it for three freaking years. I know it’s tempting, but don’t. So in summary, right, the five core pillars. We have product development, product launching, listing optimization, PPC optimization, and list building and utilization. And this is the flywheel that makes these first three really freaking move. That makes them easier. You don’t have to develop products on your own. You can go to your list. They can help you there. You can go back to your list and launch products. And then when you need to relaunch something, you go back to your list for listing optimization. So it is a really, really, really big asset for you to build. But remember, these things come first and it goes in this order. We want to work on product development and then launching and then listing up PPC. And then once we’ve got these things dialed in, we can really push this list forward. So those are the five core pillars. Now for those of you that are seven figure sellers, I want you to hear me loud and clear on this. I have heard push back on this and I’m calling it out. Every pillar can be systemized and delegated to a team member. There’s not a single thing that I’ve covered today that you need to be doing yourself. Not a single thing. I was no longer doing any of these things in my business, right? And I had a team of three people and like three VAs, okay? There’s nothing that you cannot pass off to somebody else. But it starts with creating that process, really focusing on what works, which are the five four pillars, systemizing those things, delivering those systems to an employee, coaching that employee and moving things along. So again, I’m really trying to drive this home for you guys is before you complicate your business, make it boring. So before you go out and take a Pinterest course, make it boring, before you go out and try to expand into seven different marketplaces, make it boring. Is adding complexity to your business? Yes, it’s exciting and you’ll feel the growth and you’ll see some of that, but it leads to burnout. I speak from experience on that guys. It leads to burnout. You can only handle so many things both during the day in terms of your time, but also mentally. Make it boring before you complicate your business. So a couple more things on that. Every pillar can be turned to a process using the same routine and this is the process for creating a routine. There are five steps. One, create a plan for accomplishing the primary objectives in that pillar. So I went through each of the three primary objectives. You know what they are. So create a plan for accomplishing those and then execute the plan at least once. Right? It’s an experiment at this point. You don’t have a process. You have an idea. You have a plan and now you need to execute. So execute it at least once. And then thirdly, run it again and then optimize your plan with the learnings from the round one implementation, right? So we obviously are going to make mistakes along the way. That’s a given. By the way, if you think that you’re in Scaler-OS and you’re never going to make a mistake, you are lying to yourself. Everyone who is a successful seller has made mistakes and continues to make mistakes at a much faster pace than you. That’s why they’re successful. So learn from those mistakes and then optimize the plan and the process that you created in the first part of this. And then fourthly, document the optimized process that you created, right? You’ve run it once. You’ve run it twice. Maybe a third time in view, optimize along the way. Now document it. You’ve done it three or four times at this point. You know exactly what needs to be done, put it on some paper, right? Make some videos. Give it to a team member, which is the fifth point, hire and coach a team member to manage that process. And the key word here is coach. We often, and the reason we have a hard time hiring people is we like to do this thing called delegation through abdication, which is where I hire somebody, I tell them what I want done. And then I say sink or swim, buddy, you better not sink or I’m going to fire you. And then we inevitably fire them because they don’t even know what you want. You didn’t coach them at all. You didn’t help them along the way. You didn’t give them the resources they needed. You may have thought you did. But if you never let them air out that the confusion they had and you never gave them that time that they needed to really learn from you, you’re setting them up for failure. So this, what you’re seeing on the screen right now, this is the same process I used for every single pillar to hire it out and give it to another team member. We documented the plan. We created that initial plan. We set it up, said, okay, this is what we think will work. We executed it. We optimized it along the way. Sometimes it only took one round to optimize it wasn’t that difficult. Other things took three or four. And then we documented it. We created a video series on, okay, this is how we do this. This is how we use helium 10 to look at products doing this. And then once it is documented in a video format, we hired somebody, let them watch the videos, made them write the SOP so that we knew that they understood the content. And then we coached them along. We have routine meetings. We have daily meetings when we first hire them and then they move to weekly, right? So that is the process that we’ve used for every single one of these five corpillars. And for those of you that are ready to start hiring people, this is how it should work, right? Give them that coaching and let them do the job for you. So action items, I don’t want to leave you here with nothing to do. I know we covered a lot of content, but hopefully you understand that it really comes down to just five key things. So first action item, plan the number of products you plan on launching in the next six to 12 months. You know, we’re coming up on the new year at the time of this recording. And that means you’re going to do this anyways. So plan the number of products you want to launch in the next six to 12 months. Is that five? Is that 10? Is it 20? Whatever it is, write it down. And then actually go through the product development cycle. Figure out what those products are. Figure out when you want to launch them. Is it going to be one quarter or two quarter, you know, three quarter, whatever. Plan it out. Or you can document that the easier it’s going to be to see if you’re on pace or not. And it’ll allow you to make plans to adjust. So one thing to note here, if you haven’t started yet in your group zero and you have no products out, then your target is a one profitable product this year. Not two, not not two, especially like, well, what if you get one and it goes, well, I don’t care. It’s still one profitable product this year. You get there first and then you reevaluate. You can change directions a whole heck of a lot easier once you’re moving forward than if you’re still sitting at the starting point. So your job is to target one profitable product this year. If you come out with a product and it’s not profitable, well, guess what, going back to the drawing board and your goal is still one profitable product this year. So that for those of you that are just starting out, that is incredibly important. Do not try to plan out five, 10 products right up front. You don’t know what you’re doing yet. And that’s okay. We all started there. And then secondly, routinely grade your business on each of these five pillars. So we do this on a monthly basis and we pretty much ask ourselves this question. Are you getting the maximum output from your team and or processes, right? So if we know the objectives that we’re trying to hit, are we actually hitting all three of them? Could we improve them in any way? All right. Yes or no? If we can, which ones are most detrimental to the company? Are we not able to resell anything because we don’t know how to use our list yet? Okay. How do we solve that? Well, maybe it’s not so much the list. That’s the problem. It’s the fact that we don’t have anything new coming out and we need to really ramp up product development and product launching, right? So reevaluate yourself on a routine basis. And I recommend once a month look at the five core pillars and really evaluate critically. Like you want to be critical here, right? Anything that you do at this stage and you critically evaluate yourself, that means you’re giving yourself room for improvement and your brain will start thinking of ways to solve the problem. So be critical on this. Finally, focus on systemizing one pillar at a time. So don’t get too caught up on trying to do everything at once. That’s not possible. It took us a whole year and a half really to put all of these and run them on kind of maximum efficiency. And to be honest, they will never always be a maximum efficiency. If your product development game, like you step that way up, it’s going to break your product launching game. That’s the relationship there. If you have too many product to launch, that means you’re no longer launching fast enough and that’s broken. You need to fix that, right? So keep in mind, be gracious with yourself. Work on one thing at a time. And then ideally, you start with the weakest pillar, right? So if you don’t have that plan, which is why I included it in the first bullet here, you know, for most of you, it’s going to be, you don’t have any products coming out and your business has stalled and you’re probably stuck trying to optimize what you have instead of going out and just adding more revenue and by adding new products. So that’s typically where you’re going to start. Whatever’s the weakest start there and do it from top to bottom. So the pillars are an order from one through five. If you have two that you’re weak on, but one is, you know, the second pillar and the other one’s a fourth pillar, start with number two, all right? They’re an order of importance for a reason. So work it that way. Now that is it for today. Happy selling. I really hope you enjoyed this and I hope it brings absolute clarity on the only things that you need to focus on. With these five core pillars, you have an infinite amount of things that you could do each day. You don’t have to ask yourself, what are the action items I should take each day? Look at these five core pillars. Actually figure out, okay, where am I weak? What do I need to improve upon and where can I move forward? That’s how we move our business forward. Like I said in the beginning, guys, it took me three years to figure out I had this problem of not focusing on the right things. Once we started focusing on the right things, we went from three to six million and about a year and a half, right? That was a much faster growth than what it was previously in terms of dollars. So I hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you guys soon.

Resources

Source lesson: Part 1: The 5 Core Pillars of Amazon
Resources: none attached yet.

Track: 01 — Seller Operating Baseline
Module: Control Tower Setup