Building Out A Brand on Amazon with Mina Elias

Building and maintaining relationships is the key to winning wholesale. Take it from Mina Elias, a private label pro who built his supplement brand to seven figures.

While we spend most of our time talking wholesale on this podcast, there are many things wholesalers can learn from giants in private label. From optimizing listings and creating ad campaigns to adding value, and, of course, building relationships, brand masters can help you master the brands of your suppliers.

On this episode of Entrepreneur Adventure, Elias walks us through his strategy for success and how wholesalers can borrow tricks from the private label trade. Stay tuned.

Listen

Watch

Meet Mina

Several years ago, Mina hit a career crossroads. After starting the 9 to 5 grind, working at the whim of employers was no longer enough for him. With a degree in chemical engineering and a user of supplements himself, Elias’ father encouraged him to develop his own brand. So Mina dove in headfirst and the rest is history.

Influencer Marketing

A large part of Mina’s marketing strategy was Instagram. He targeted groups of people such as influential friend groups or top influencers from a Gym’s Instagram page, sent them the product, and shared their posts on his own story. His logic? People become interested in a product when more than a few friends are using it. While you may think this has nothing to do with your wholesale world, tip off your suppliers to Mina’s web-building technique. As Mina reminds us, relationship-building is all about depositing free value before ever asking to withdraw.

Titles…

You’ve probably heard about the mine & refine method if you’re an active listener. As a reminder, it means taking slow-selling products, sprucing up their listings, and hopefully snagging exclusivity agreements with brands impressed by your ability to boost sales. Mina has a few tips for creating a winning listing.

Let’s start with titles. First, figure out your main keywords (and other top hits) by investigating the competition and using software like Helium 10. Your title should have your brand name followed by the main keyword followed by other top keywords. Just remember to keep it readable.

…& Images

When it comes to images, make sure yours are 3D render or at least high-quality images with low light focus. They should be bright and not shiny and cropped as close as possible to the edges so the product looks big in a search result. Also remember to compress the image so it loads faster. Rule of thumb: if you’re going to spend money, spend money on high-quality images. Images will sell your product more than anything else.

…& Bullets & More

Features. Benefits. Why it matters to the consumer. Always include these three elements in your listing. When you’re writing bullets, pack as many keywords in as you can and work to answer every question the consumer may have.

Next, let’s talk about reviews. The fastest way to bump great reviews is to share the reviews with friends, family, and co-workers who can quickly mark them as “helpful.” The most helpful reviews will surge to the top.

Finally, Mina suggests trademarking your brand (if applicable) and converting your descriptions into HTML.

PPC

Your goal with PPC is to launch campaigns that discover new keywords for you. Aim to find every keyword associated with your product, regardless of whether it’s profitable or not. Once the targeting begins, you can optimize bids. Mina recommends breaking your auto campaign into four targeting groups so you have the flexibility to scale and substitute wherever it’s needed. Make sure you have at least $100 in your budget and start bids low. Also limit your keywords to ten per campaign. Amazon only allocates money to the top five or ten. And keywords are useless if they’re not driving impressions.

Building Relationships

Mina saves information about his manufacturers so he can customize gifts and holiday cards throughout the year. Aside from this personal touch, becoming an Amazon guru for your wholesale partner is the fastest track to success. Sharing knowledge will only help your relationships and when it comes to wholesale, relationships are synonymous with discounts and exclusivity.

Overall

So whether this episode helped you improve your listings or whether it gave you some insights to share, applying these value-adds can transform your business.

For more tips from Mina, check out PPC University.

Happy selling everybody!

Resources From This Episode

Outline Of This Episode

[00:00:40] Todd’s introduction to this episode

[00:03:03] Meet Mina

[00:14:05] Using Instagram to your advantage

[00:18:11] Optimizing listings

[00:50:14] Building relationships

[00:55:53] How to do PPC

[01:13:42] Todd’s closing thoughts on this episode

Transcript

Mina (00:00:00):
You can go and say, Hey, like, can you do this favor for me? And that will more than willingly do it. Just because you have that relationships. But I think relationship building is incredibly important in this business.

Todd (00:00:10):
Like private label, retail, Arbritrage There’s a lot of logistics, things that you need to work on, but in wholesale world, it’s really all about the relationships.

Announcer (00:00:23):
Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the entrepreneur adventure podcast, where we talk about Amazon wholesale and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle or anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch.

Todd (00:00:40):
What’s up everybody. Welcome to episode 51. And today we sit down with Mina Elias. He is a private label seller who has built out a supplement brand and grew them to over seven figures. Now you might be wondering, well, why are we sitting down with a private label person when this is supposed to be a podcast about Amazon wholesale? And the reason is because we are doing the Amazon wholesale mine and refine method that we’ve talked about before, where we’re taking these products, fixing up the listings and selling them and potentially working those into exclusive agreements and things like that. If you haven’t already checked that out, you can check it out entrepreneuradventure.com/ M I N E Amazon private label sellers like Mina are experts at building out these listings, getting these listings, selling lots on Amazon. And so who better to talk to than a successful seller who is doing really well on Amazon is built out.

Todd (00:01:55):
Multiple brands has even sold one of those brands as well. And so we are going to dive into the brands that he’s built, how he’s built them and how he’s built out his product pages PPC advertising on Amazon, and even some off of Amazon advertising like influencer marketing and things like that. And while you may not do all of this stuff yourself as a wholesale seller, knowing about this kind of stuff, and being able to give tips and tricks to the brands that we’re trying to work with, then we can become the expert, the Amazon guru for them and help further build that relationship. So I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode, this interview with Mina Elias. So sit back, relax, and let’s go ahead and dive into this. If you want the show notes there over at entrepreneuradventure.com/52 and can pick those up. So let’s go ahead and dive into this episode.

Todd (00:03:03):
All right. So we’ve got Mina Elias with us today. Mina, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background?

Mina (00:03:12):
Thank you so much for having me. So a little bit about my background. I came to America in 2011. I was born in Egypt, raised on Dubai came here to study chemical engineering and chemistry graduated in 2014 with my bachelor’s and 2018 with my master’s in industrial engineering. So was very, you know, traditional set on like having a typical career, you know but very quickly on, I think around 2017, 2018 is when I started feeling like, Hey, you know, something’s off, like I’m working harder and harder. I’m not making as much money as I thought I would. I’m not moving as much as I had as I want to in life. I don’t think this is right. Like, I don’t like listening to instruct. Not that I don’t like listening to instructions. I just feel like whenever someone employs me, I felt like I was being kind of enslaved.

Mina (00:04:03):
And it was like, because we pay you money, we get to do whatever we want to. And it was kind of like not a good feeling. So I said there must be more. And it was, I was on vacation in September, 2018 back in Egypt with my parents. And I was sitting and my dad said, Hey, you know, what are you doing? And I was looking up some protein powders. I wanted to buy protein powder before I went back to America. And he was like, why don’t you just make your own supplement? And I said, you know, I, I already like buy, like I used to buy like egg, egg, proteins, like raw. And I would buy like the cow powder and I would buy like, get some casein or whatever and mix things up. And I’m like, yeah, I already like buy it and mix it at home.

Mina (00:04:45):
And he’s like, no, no. He’s like, why don’t you start your own brand? And I said, start my own brand. Like, I, it was not fathomable to me for me to even start my own company. So he said, yeah, look into it. You’re super smart. I said, okay, let me look into it. And so I looked into it I did like a quick feasibility analysis. Like if I bought the raw ingredients, I said, okay, first of all, what am I going to make? Correct. And I was, I’m a fighter. I still am. And I said, okay, I’m going to do something. That’s going to work for me. I was on keto at the time was on the keto diet. And if you guys know about the keto diet, you know, like use a lot of like salt you know, from your body just because of like the blood sugar is a very stable and low.

Mina (00:05:23):
And so I was like, I need something to replenish my electrolytes cause it’s going to help me perform. So I said, okay, let me pull out how much the raw materials cost, how much the bag is going to cost the label. I was like, Oh, it’s going to cost five bucks. And it sells for 25 bucks on Amazon. I have a home run. I called my friend. I said how do you start a company and said, Oh, just go to legalzoom.com and start an LLC. I said, no way. And within two days I had an LLC. And so yeah, within two days had an LLC contacted a friend from college, said, Hey, can you make a design for me? And she said, yeah, for sure. And went back. I had a girlfriend at the time and we talked about it and I’m like, what’s like a really good electrolyte name.

Mina (00:06:01):
And we came up with hydrolyte.so hydrolyte was the electrolyte name came up with that. And I already had the formula and everything. And, you know, I’m, I’m a chemical engineer and chemistry. I was able to like do a ton of like research on the clinical data and get the doses and everything. And so I, I got some bunch of raw materials and mixed it up at home, but got some bags from Amazon, from some scoopers from Amazon. Put them in there had the, the graphic designer from school helped me. She made a design for me. I went printed it, put the label on. And that was, I was like, okay, I have a company now I sell supplements. And I posted it on Facebook and this guy said, Hey, you know, we have an MMA event coming up November 2nd, 2018.

Mina (00:06:43):
And so, you know, I officially incorporated the company on October 10th, came back from vacation, like September 23rd or something, October 10th and incorporated the company in November 2nd, I was at this event. And I said, yeah, sure. I’ll show up. And he said, yeah, I’ll get you like a free booth and everything. Cause I know you’re just starting. I said, okay, awesome. And so I showed up there with 40 like bags and I was like, yeah, this is a soft launch, blah, blah, blah, and 25 sold. And I was like, wow, like I had no idea. Like people actually wanted my product and they kept asking me, where can I find your product? And I said I don’t know what to say because you know, I didn’t have it on my website and then have it anywhere. Well, I was going to tell them it’s available only at one gym.

Mina (00:07:22):
I was in Rhode Island the event and my gym was in Connecticut and people were coming from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. And so I was like, it’s going to be on Amazon soon. And obviously I didn’t know that it was going to be on Amazon or anything. And I just said, you know, I’m just going to say it. And then 20 days later, I figured out how to get on Amazon. I was ungated I was approved to sell on Amazon on gated. And honestly, all it took was me researching a ton, like a deep dove that night, like watched a thousand YouTube videos. I called seller support the next day. I said, Hey you know, I’m, I’m calling you guys because I want to sell supplements on Amazon. How do I do it? And they’re like, Oh, we’ll walk you through it. You know, you need to send us this, you need to send us that we need an invoice.

Mina (00:08:02):
We need a, you know, a certificate of analysis. And so I went to a manufacturer said, Hey, can you send me an invoice and certificate of analysis for this blend? And they said, yeah, sure, here you go. I, they sent it to me. I forwarded to Amazon. And next thing you know, November 22nd, I sold, I was selling on Amazon. And you know, I watched a bunch of the videos like, Oh, make sure, you know, your friends buying to get the velocity and everything. So and I also went hard on PPC. So was spending like a hundred bucks a day on PPC. And I think the first few days I sold five units. And then within like the third or fourth day I remember I was at the gym in the morning. I’d done, just done with my swim. And it was 10 sales a day and it was looking at the orders and it was all random people.

Mina (00:08:44):
And so, yeah, within four days or so, I was like doing 10 sales a day, but I was spending a hundred bucks a day on PPC. So it was kind of like, I wasn’t making any money. And I had only ordered a hundred. So my first batch was $500, a hundred units. And I was like, you know how, like, let me just test the waters. Now I have a very different approach. And I tell people like, don’t make the same mistake. I did, don’t get a hundred units and then run out of stock. And my lead time was a week. So if my lead time is a week and, these people are sourcing from China and their lead time is 60 days. I’m like, you know maybe just like validate a different way and go all in and then kind of have faith that you’re going to move these products no matter what, but yeah, it’s kind of a summary and, you know, fast forward I started another, a women’s brand and I sold it. And then I started another women’s brand another athletic brand. And now I told you about the new brand that we’re starting, the it’s a, it’s going to be called nuro haven’t told anyone about it yet. So, I mean, obviously I’m assuming by the time this is out, we already announced that, Hey, we’re working on this project, but

Todd (00:09:47):
Yeah, for sure. And we can dive into that a little bit later, but what I really like about your story or one thing I think people can really take from that is that you came up with an idea and just kind of dove into it and just went all in and started working. And you made it work because this was what, what year was this?

Mina (00:10:09):
This is 2018. So it’s just September, 2018. Yeah.

Todd (00:10:12):
But not too long ago. And you went into an area of supplements that most people, if you ask, they would probably say, yeah, don’t go into supplements is too competitive. You’ll never be successful there.

Mina (00:10:24):
Yes, I’m sure. Yeah. Yeah. So

Todd (00:10:27):
Sometimes it can actually be a negative to research too much. Right. That’s why a lot of times you know, just learn whatever your next step is and just keep going, keep going and keep going. And while you were successful, not everybody is all always successful, but everybody in businesses have everybody in business, I should say has successes and failures. And it’s really all about just breaking down those barriers and keep moving forward. So that’s kind of what I really liked about your story. You just, you had an idea, you ran with it and you just really made it work.

Mina (00:11:05):
And my mindset was a little bit different and I see a lot of people kind of like they say, Oh, like I, you know, I launched a product and it failed that. And for me, that’s not a failure because if this is my mindset, right, everything that I do, I’m learning from. And if you think about it, I spent so far on formal education, a hundred thousand dollars. Now, if I’m, you know, invest 5,000, $6,000 into a supplement or whatever, and it fails, I a hundred percent did not lose my money. I just took that money and invested it into education. It’s just a different type of education. And so would that being my mindset, it’s a lot easier for me to be okay, like going into things and knowing, Hey, it might not work, but this is education.

Todd (00:11:49):
Yeah. For sure. It’s so many people will, you know, they’ll be like, Oh yeah, I’ll buy that TV for 500 bucks or a thousand dollars, but they’ll look at like some kind of training or something like that. And I’ll be like, Oh, I don’t know if I want to spend that much for training where the training is so much more valuable than anything. And I’ve gone through a lot of training, anybody who is successful. A lot of times they’ve gone through a lot of training. They’ve got mentors and people that they’ve learned from and things like that. So it’s definitely important to you. That’s huge. Yeah. A hundred percent for sure. So you’ve built this this supplement company. What is your, what kind of sales are you looking at on that company if you don’t mind share?

Mina (00:12:35):
Yeah, no problem. So right now conform has been like very horrible for me because it’s an electrolyte brand. So I’m down in like the 50,000 range. Usually, you know, Q1, Q2, Q3, I’m doing in the, in the 70, 80,000 range. The other brands are approximately 30,000 a month each. And so, you know, and was able to sell the women’s brand for 500,000. So that was a good project. I got into that, grew it and sold it. So, you know, it doesn’t sound like a lot, you know, people are selling for a million, 2 million, but, you know, again, all of this is just me kind of like learning as I go. And so you know, in no way am I like amazing at anything, but it’s just I’m getting better every single day. And that’s kinda, my goal is just to be better than I was yesterday.

Mina (00:13:24):
So, you know, with the supplement brands combined, I think last I checked on average is 140,000, so a month. So that’s doing pretty well in terms of the supplements. And I think there’s I think I really want to grow the brands a lot bigger and then sell them for a lot more. The first one that I sold was kind of like, Hey this is, this is proof that you can your business is a valuable asset and can sell for a lot of money. And now it’s okay, let me significantly grow and make sure my P and L’s and everything are a profit and loss statements are very clean and everything looks good and add as much value to get as big of a multiplier as possible.

Todd (00:14:05):
Yeah. So those two brands, you said you sold two different brands, just one, just one. So how, what kind of level were we looking at at that brand new sold?

Mina (00:14:15):
So it had two skews, that’s it? And it was I believe how much was it doing in profit a month? It was doing like like $16,000 a month in profit just two products nothing crazy. We were able to launch the product using social media use a lot of influencers. And then that kind of gave us some traction on Amazon. We were able to get a lot of reviews. And then from there kind of the Amazon, I like switched my full focus to the Amazon algorithm and kind of like systemize the Instagram where it’s like, let’s just keep contacting. And basically we would go into one girls cause it was a women’s brand one girl’s Instagram page. Look at all her friends, find the ones that have the good amount of followers to contact them, to send them the product.

Mina (00:15:04):
And then you know, go to the next door, go to that one that we contacted then after she accepts that we go into her page. And so we kind of built like this web and try to keep always like people connected, because if I see like five of my friends using a product, I’m kind of going to be like, yeah, you know, I want to use it too. Or if I see them all like, you know, maybe drinking the same drink or something, I’m like, yeah, I want to try that too. Versus, you know, if, if I see one person here and then another person sees another person there and it’s kind of, I don’t want, I don’t want to do this disconnect. So actually one of the things that I do with hydrolite is I go into gyms Instagram pages, and I find everyone like all the members of that gym.

Mina (00:15:47):
And I hit up like the 10 best most important, like, you know, high, like highest amount of influencers. So all of them get the product, all of them posted. And obviously they, I don’t ask them to post it all. I do say, you know, just send me content. And I posted on my story and tag them. So naturally they just reshare the story. And now, like all of their friends from that gym are seeing like five different people using the same product. And I’m like, yo, what’s this thing. Like I saw John use it and I saw Matt use it. And like, you know, what’s, what’s up with this thing that everyone is using. And they’re like, yeah, it’s super cool. You know, they reached out to me and, you know, number one, it’s a very good brand awareness, but I definitely will drive some sales. Right.

Todd (00:16:27):
Yeah, for sure. That’s a really good idea. I like the, the way they’re sending you content, you’re posting and tagging them.

Mina (00:16:36):
I don’t want to put anything on my feed. Like for me, if you look at my Instagram, it’s like, it’s pretty nice. And so I don’t want to just be here with like a product holding it or something. It just kind of does not, it’s not what I want my feed to look like, but if it’s a story I’m more than happy to share. And then, you know, you’re, you’re already tagged in there because you know, when, when you post a story and tag someone and then you repost that story, anyone can just click and see who’s the owner of that story. So it makes life super easy.

Todd (00:17:04):
For sure. Yeah. So the big reason I wanted to bring you on here was to talk about your process of building your products and stuff on Amazon, because some people might be thinking, well, you know, this podcast is supposed to be about Amazon` wholesale, not private label. So why don’t we get this guy on private label grant? And I, I’ve been talking a lot about a method. I call Amazon wholesale mine and refine where we’re finding garbage listings cleaning them up, making them look really good, get a lot more sales and try to roll that into exclusive agreements with the brand and reaching out to the brand and trying to help them grow products on Amazon. And of course we get to sell those products for them. So let’s really kind of dive into what kind of tips and tricks and things like that you actually did on Amazon to take your listing from nothing to doing 50,000, $60,000 a month.

Mina (00:18:11):
Awesome. So, yeah, I’m more than happy to share that. So let’s break down the, the Amazon detail page. So first thing is you know, you start, I think I’ve seen a lot of consumer reports saying that there’s two most important things. And I just want you guys to keep that in mind as we go through this whole thing, but the two most important factors on Amazon, just due to the type of audience that’s on there is the price and the number of reviews. And so, you know, and star rating, obviously it can be like 2000 to start. So if you have a low price and you have a really good reviews, you’re going to be successful on Amazon. And so would that being said, that’s going to kind of dictate a lot of what’s going on on the page. But if we start breaking the page one by one first thing is you have your title.

Mina (00:18:57):
Now this is how I create my title. So that is very it’s a good title. It converts. Well, it’s good SEO. So what I’ll do is I’ll figure out what the main keyword is. If you don’t know what the main keyword is, I want you to type in what you think the main keyword is in a search, and then go and look at the top competitors. Generally, you want the main keyword to be immediately after your branded name. So for example, for hydrolite it’s hydrolite electrolyte powder, my main keyword, which is the highest search volume and to explain the main keyword, it’s the highest search volume keyword with direct relevance to your product. So if you’re selling like a lamp, like a color changing lamp, you don’t want it to be lamp because yes, the lamp is going to have 300,000 search volume a month, but it’s just not relevant to your product.

Mina (00:19:45):
It’s ESC you know, your product is a lamp, but it’s a colorchanging glam. So the color changing lamp would be you know, the most relevant and high search volume keyword. And so go and look at your competitors and see what they have right after the branded keyword. So now that you’ve figured that out, you want to go in and you want to search for that main keyword. So for example, I was such electrolyte powder, and then I’ll scroll down. I have the helium 10 Chrome extension and the human thing, Chrome extension will tell me exactly the BSRs of every single product. So there’ll be a star it’s basically telling me who’s selling the most, the lower the BSR, the more they’re selling and BSR stands for bestseller ranking. So I’ll pick 10 of those and I’ll put them in reverse ACIN and look up in helium 10 Cerebro, and I’ll pull out the keywords from them.

Mina (00:20:30):
So what that will do is they’ll give me every single keyword that every single one of those products is in listing for. So I’ll have something like 40,000 keywords.Then I’ll go into advanced filters and I’ll hit nine minimum record competitors for the 10 products that I searched. And what that will do is it’ll give me the intersection of every single of one of those products, keywords. So any keyword in that list is ranked for every single one of those products. So I’ll get a very nice high quality list of keywords. And then I’ll sort by search volume. Now, in my main, in my title, I want the main keyword to be right after the branded keyword. And then everything after that, I want to stuff with those highest search volume keywords that are relevant to my product while making it readable.

Mina (00:21:13):
So that’s where it becomes almost a little bit of an art. You do have the keywords, you have a list of keywords. You know, that those keywords are super important. Now make it sound like a readable title. So you don’t want to have something like, Hydrolite electrolyte powder, electrolyte supplement for athletes, men, and women, a workout supplement energy, you know, just, no one wants that. So if you can make it sound nice, like how’d you like electrolyte powder you know, ultimate hydration formula for athletes with the sodium decimate, something like that. That sounds nice. That’s the goal. So that takes care of the title and the title is very important for SEO. And that’s why I touched on it first, the second most important thing, in my opinion is the images, the main image is the most important because it’s even a step before you even sell your product is if people are going to click on your product.

Mina (00:21:57):
So make sure your main image is a 3d render or like a very, very high quality you know, image with like the second they call it like low light focus or something like that. It’s basically like, you don’t want shine in the image. You want the light to be very like low for it to be bright, but like not shine to make sure that you crop the image as close as possible to the edges of the product so that it can look a big on the search because you don’t want your product to look small, make sure you remove the background and make sure you don’t have any shadows. And if you do have shadows, make sure the shadows are super tight. So it doesn’t look like the shadows are cropped in the image. And then after that you have Oh one more thing a tip for you guys is please compress.

Mina (00:22:45):
So make sure that your, the minimum pixels that you use for the dimensions of the main image is 2000 by 2000. Anything less is just not as good as quality and you want the product to be zoomable. So if certain products you don’t have those correct dimensions and you hover the mouse over it, it won’t zoom. So you want to make sure you have at least 2000 by 2000 pixels always go for square. Cause everything on Amazon is a square and then compress the image because it’ll load way faster. So make sure, you know, you compress the images and it’ll load way faster on Amazon and that’s with all the images, but the main one is important because the last thing you want is to click on an image and it kind of looks a little bit clunky for a few seconds. And then, you know, it looks high quality.

Mina (00:23:26):
Now with the rest of the images, understand that most people, including myself, when we’re buying things on Amazon, I do not read most of the words. I just look at the images and the images sell the product to me. So it’s very important to focus on the images. A lot of people go to fiver and try and like cheap out images or they’ll use their manufacturer images or just stock images or pictures with their phone. Please avoid that. If there’s anything you want to invest your money in, I would invest the money in the images because high quality images will sell your listing better than anything else. And the theme that I have in every single one of my listing images is features benefits, why it matters to me as a customer. So features is okay, let’s say you have like 60 watt light bulb.

Mina (00:24:10):
Okay. That’s a feature benefits you know, a very high brightness. Okay. What does, what does that matter to me as the customer? So it says something like, you know, lights up your room as if it’s broad daylight, even on a you know, a gloomy day. Okay. That now that took me to a whole different place. Like it took me, like if I buy the lamp, even when it was gloomy out, you know, like, let’s see your Northeast or something I’m going to feel good and just keep that same. Every single image should like, even if it’s a lifestyle image, I highly recommend that you have words in there that keep promoting, why is this, why does this matter to me? This is going to make your life better in this way. This is going to make your life better in that way.

Mina (00:24:49):
And I’ve seen so many people talk about just features and benefits, but never touch on why it matters. Like you have to spell it out for the customer. Don’t make them think like a regional conclusion for, and make sure, you know, all of the listing images are sales. And, and if you do have brand registry and you have a video, make a nice 32nd video have a lot of pattern interrupt. So don’t make it a long winded video where it’s like, you know, three or four scenes, a lot of pattern interrupts and a lot of, you know words that are popping up on the screen, benefits, benefits, benefits, benefits, why it matters, why it matters and things like that. So in terms of listing images,

Todd (00:25:27):
With the images you’re taking like for the secondary images, not the main image is that product all white background, but the secondary ones you’re taking photos of the product in putting like texting graphic overlays, you know, maybe makes your room look like a bright sunshine day and you’re drawing a line, the light bulb or whatever the case. Yeah.

Mina (00:25:53):
And maybe you can do a split screen image and then say, you know, traditional lamps and then our lamp and then show like how it’s a gloomy day in that room. And it’s a very nice sunny day in that room. And you know, kind of have like a few little bullet points on why that’s better now. Photography can be expensive. So here’s one way that I do it. That’s very cheap. Whether you manufacture in China or in the U S this has kind of like a ha I know everyone’s always looking for hacks. So instead of having to take pictures of your product, because pictures are or many pictures of your product, because that can be expensive. What I do is I take my product and I send it to a photographer. I don’t source in China, some things I do like for example, the new one that I’m working on, the labeling, everything is in China.

Mina (00:26:38):
So I can do that, but generally I do it in the U S but it’s not going to cost you more than two or $300 to send your part to a photographer and have them put it in a white box and take images of the product in all these different angles. So straight ahead to the left, to the right, this angle, that angle all like laid down top-down lifts, right? Everything take all of that, remove the background, and now you have brand assets. Now I go to a company, a, I use a company called nolimitcreatives.com. They’re like $400 a month unlimited graphics. And, and so they will Photoshop as many pictures as I want for that flat fee, which is, I love because it’s pretty economic for me as someone who started out a small and I send them those assets. And I say, here are the images that I want.

Mina (00:27:23):
And instead of them looking like, you know an ugly, 3d render, a, you know, like a computer image just shoved into a picture. And like, you’re like, this looks fake. It’s like, it is a real image with a real angle that they can insert into the Photoshop so well that it looks like you did actual, real product photography. So that’s one way you can kind of, instead of actually having to hire a whole you know, photography company and send you a products and they, they take the photographs in all these different situations. You just do it once in a white box and then send those assets to no limits. You know, obviously you can use any graphic designer and don’t have to use them, but pretty much the graphic designer can Photoshop those real images of your product into, you know stock background images, and it’ll look very realistic.

Mina (00:28:11):
And so that’s the one way, you know, I go about doing that next time. We’ll move right under the title. You’ll see you have the price, the number of reviews, the star rating, and then a question. And so for the price, you know, highly recommended, you do look at your range. And I understand I can’t dictate to anyone how to go about it, but generally I like to start at the lower end of the price range and then move my way up. Now, for example, my friend, Rob, from the genius brand, we also sell supplements way more successful than I am, but all of his stuff is like price incredibly premium from day one. There’s no right or wrong way. It’s just, it’s all pricing psychology. So she makes sure you pick the one that aligns the most with what you’re doing. Number of reviews and star ratings.

Mina (00:28:53):
We’ll get to that. Well, you know, when we get to the, kind of the reviews, but questions, so that one is a very important one. Most people’s psychology when they go on the listing is they want to find the first thing that will tell them why this product is not the right fit for them. I don’t know if you know about the psychology, but they’re always, like, we always do everything by pluses of elimination. You know, Hey, Todd what do you want to eat today? Okay. you know, there’s pizza burgers, sushi ramen. Okay. Ramen is too heavy. So that’s eliminated you know, sushi is like, I’m not really feeling if pizza or burgers. Okay. Let’s do pizza. Cause we could share burgers is like a little bit, okay. So basically we got to our conclusion by eliminating the other options, right?

Mina (00:29:33):
Not by saying, which is the best one for us. And on Amazon’s exact same thing. People are looking at your products and they’re trying to them because they’re trying to reach the, the product that they want by process of elimination. So we want to remove any doubts that they might have. The questions is a very good way to do it. So questions is generally when a customer goes into your listing and they ask a question you know, you get a notification in your email. Hey, you know, John asked this question can you please answer it? And then you answer, so why do we wait for customers to ask the questions? Why don’t we just do all the work for them and ask any questions possible? So what I do is I have a buyer account and my buyer account is called the Amazon customer.

Mina (00:30:16):
It’s just very simple. It’s my buyer account. I buy my stuff from it, but the name when say, okay, what’s your name, Mina Elias. My name is Amazon customer. And then I use that account. I’ll go into all of like my top 10 competitors listings. I’ll go into all of the questions that they’ve asked and make a list or that people have asked on their listing. And I’ll make a list of all of that. And I’ll add any questions that I think are relevant to me. So now I have a list of like 200 questions and I’ll go into my listing with that buyer called Amazon customer. And I’ll keep asking those questions and then people will get notifications or Amazon customer asks the question. And so doesn’t bring up any like red flags, like why is one person asking the same question? It just sounds like an Amazon customer is asking a question and then I’ll go in from my seller email where I get those question notifications and answer everything one by one. And pretty much at that point, I have a frequently asked questions database right there. So if you have any questions on anything, you know, by using the questions that people have previously asked or questions that I think people are going to ask, it’s already answered there. So kind of trying to eliminate as much doubt in people’s minds as well.

Todd (00:31:25):
Never thought of that before, but that’s really smart. And as far as you know, there’s nothing in Amazon’s service that could get you in trouble for that.

Mina (00:31:35):
No you’re pretty much just asking questions. There’s nothing wrong with asking questions. And if you think about it, you were making the customer journey even better because you’re giving them frequently asked questions. I don’t know why there is no FAQ section in the Amazon listing page. There should be but this is one way to go about it, you know, to create a FAQ page without even, you know, with the option being available. So after that,

Todd (00:32:00):
I’ve never heard that before. I really liked that then. And I’m going to have to look into doing that for sure. Yeah.

Mina (00:32:07):
Very easy. It doesn’t take long and you don’t even have to think of all the questions yourself. You can just get ideas from everyone else’s listing. Perfect. So after that is the bullet points. And so the bullet points show up next. Remember how we talked about that list of keywords that we got initially to create the title. So bullet points, you want to use that same list and you want to pack in as much of those keywords as you can in the bullet points, the bullet points is the best format I’ve seen work is a short all caps and then colon. And then you know like maybe a one sentence or two sentence description, and generally people are only gonna read the all caps parts. So make sure that the short, all caps parts highlight that it is you know feature benefit, why it matters to the customer.

Mina (00:32:54):
So again, you know, whatever, like is unique about your product and turn a highlighted there, make sure that it’s in nice and big caps because then people are only reading that no one, no one really wants to spend time reading personally. I know I don’t want to spend time reading like a paragraph on Amazon. So on the big and the big ones in the, in the all caps bullet points, make sure that that’s where you talk about your benefits. And then for the keywords, you can kind of pack them into the sentences that come after that. Then you, you know, you move on after that, you’re going to see, you know, a bunch of like the sponsored products. If you have multiple products have a few people go in and buy your product and your other products than your other products.

Mina (00:33:36):
And then with enough times, it’ll start showing as frequently bought together. So that’s another way you can kind of trigger the frequently bought together. They’re going to see, okay. You know, I bought me in as Hydra, like bluegrass, but also people frequently bought the hydro like duress and the mango pineapple and like the energy one kind of altogether. And you might get a, an upsell from there. You know, I don’t really have any data saying that, but it can’t hurt. It’s better than having someone else’s product being in your frequently about together. So I’ll do that and, you know, make sure that’s there. Under that I’ll see sponsored products related to this item now, sponsor products or into this item, if you have other products that apply to that product. So if I’m selling, I sell some like a hydrolite electrolite powder. If I have any other supplement in there, if I was selling shoes, for example, cause I know some wholesale people will sell like many different things.

Mina (00:34:24):
So if I’m selling shoes, I’m not going to advertise on my electrolyte page, but if I’m selling anything else that relates to the supplement or even a food related or anything related to the target audience of that I’ll advertise it on my own listing. So basically create a manual campaign, product targeting. And then when it says, enter, what ACIN do you want to target? I’ll I’ll target my own ASIN`. And so this way, you know, I’m targeting my own product and I’m preventing other people from showing up under my own product. So a good person to look at for that is Bulletproof coffee. If you go and look at both of coffee they pretty much have all of their products advertised in every single one of their listings and they kind of push out all of the competitors. You need to kind of go to page two of the sponsored products to see their competitors. So that’s what I would do. There we go down and now you’re an enhanced brand content.

Todd (00:35:18):
One thing I wanted to mention on the bullets, cause I did the same thing with the caps beginning, and then you had to fill out the rest of the sentence. You don’t want to go too long and all that good stuff that you mentioned. I did just recently hear about that. Amazon was suspending products. I believe it was in the cosmetics niche only for having those caps at the beginning. So while I still recommend doing it we probably want to keep an eye on them. You never know when they might expand that out and start blocking it

Mina (00:35:55):
Well, but that’s crazy. Cause I think like almost everyone does that.

Todd (00:35:59):
I know.

Mina (00:36:00):
They would suspend everyone.

Todd (00:36:02):
I read some reports that products would be suspended and there was because of the all caps at the beginning of the bullet.

Mina (00:36:09):
Okay. Very interesting. So I’ll definitely look into that. Maybe I’ll call Amazon and ask them and say, Hey, is it against the terms of service to all caps? The beginning of the bullet points, but yeah, thanks for that tip. Yeah. So anyways, so after that we have enhanced brand content or product description. So if you have a, if you don’t have a brand registry, I highly recommend that you do get brand registry. IP accelerator is incredibly cheap. It’s $825 and you apply for a trademark and within two weeks you’re in brand registry and anyways, you’re going to need a trademark if you’re a legitimate business. So might as well just do it. Now with that being said, if you do have a product description, you’re going to need to do a convert from regular word to HTML. So go to work to HTML, convert.com. And that will basically what you can do is you can write bullet points, caps, bold italics, or whatever you want in your product description.

Mina (00:37:01):
And then when you go and click on the HTA, it’ll convert the words into HTML and then you copy the HTML put into your backend and it’ll show up the same. If you do not put it in HTML, it’ll just show up as one long paragraph. So make sure, you know, you do that and you know, with creating the product description, unfortunately it’s very boring. Most people are not going to read it, but just try and have again more of the keywords in there. You know, to keep, you know, giving you more and more SEO boosting for Amazon and make it nice and easy and simple and keep in mind, it’s always features benefits. why it matters to a customer. And now if you do have enhanced brand content, I highly recommend that you do utilize that as much as you can do not try and put in a lot of words personally, I’ve not seen that work.

Mina (00:37:47):
And as a consumer, I just don’t read it. You know, when I see a comparison and it’s like words, words, words, I’m like, I don’t want to spend time like peeping my eyes, reading those words. And so all of my enhancement I try and stick to just the modules that are large. And it’s an image with, again, short, you know, four or five words on the image, something to talk about again, benefits and why it matters to the customer and make it super short, quick and simple. And I, I like it to be very heavily image-based first of all, you know, like the brain processes, images like a thousand times faster than the processes words. So that’s one pro of having images. And the second thing is most people are so fatigued when they shop on Amazon of reading words, that they just want the images to kind of tell them the entire story. So try and sell entire story and your product just by the images. I think that will do pretty well. And then, you know, right past the enhanced brand content is where you get to the questions, which you already covered. And then after that, you’re getting into the reviews. And so would the reviews, there’s a few strategies, but I’m in thought if you want to add anything before I get into some review strategies.

Todd (00:38:55):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I was gonna mention on the ehanced brand content, it’s really good if you are a brand registered or the company that you’re working with. One thing that I like to do is you want to kind of think of it like a website, you know, make it like the front page of a website. Yeah. Not too much information graphical. What I like to almost do is kind of look at like your biggest competitors in the niche that you’re in go to their actual website. And if it’s a professionally really nice done website, the front of that website is almost going to look like what the enhanced brand content would look really good at.

Mina (00:39:35):
Oh, that’s a very good idea. I actually never thought of that, but you’re right. Enhanced brand content should be almost at a landing page. So maybe I’ll look into that, go going into competitors, websites, and trying to mimic that in enhanced brand content. That’s pretty good idea.

Todd (00:39:48):
Enhanced brand content, which a lot of the products that I work with are not you do use HTML in your descriptions. You haven’t run into an issue with that.

Mina (00:40:00):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always use HTML and then, or I use, I write it in an HTML converter. I make it look nice, you know, bullet points, description, all that stuff. And then it converts into HTML. I copied that, put it in the back end, then it comes out. Perfect. Okay. There’s certain things that you can’t do an HTML, like like there’s certain things that Amazon won’t let you do. I think certain like characters and stuff like that, to be aware of that. And honestly I don’t have a list handy. It’s just, if Amazon kicks back as a error, I’ll just keep trying to find what’s causing that error. And it’s something crazy. Like generally, if you just do all caps, bold bullet points, stuff like that. You’re you’re fine.

Todd (00:40:41):
Yeah. Yeah. I usually try to stick to like line breaks. So like new lines lists. So like bullet point lists and things like that in bold. Anything more than that, I think you’re, you’re trying to walk in a line that Amazon could get upset about.

Mina (00:40:57):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, and again, don’t overthink it because like, people are not really going to read the description that much. So maybe focusing more of your energy on getting enhanced brand content. So would the reviews now reviews is I think one of the biggest things and I constantly want to get more and more reviews with first of all, with the existing reviews. If you have anything that shows up as less than five stars on the first page, so the top reviews, you want to avoid all of the other reviews so that they can kind of, you know, show up for. So the, how the reviews up is depending on the number of helpful votes. So if if you have a one-star review that has seven helpful votes, and then you have a five star review that has eight helpful votes, it’s going to show the first five-star review and then a one star review.

Mina (00:41:44):
And you don’t want to, you don’t want people to see that as soon as they go to the page. So it’s as simple as copying the URLs to their reviews and then sending them to friends, family employees, and just say, Hey, can you just cook helpful on this review? It takes two seconds. But with enough people, then you have like 20 helpful votesfor like the first 10 reviews for first five stars and reviews. And you know, pushes down that one star review. And I don’t know if anyone’s strike fighting with Amazon to remove review. I’ve tried many, many times they just give up theirs. They’re never going to remove, I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone ever have a one-star unless like they did something black hat, which I don’t know about. But instead of trying to fight it just bump up all of your five star reviews so that those one stars don’t show on the first, or even if you want to be more aggressive, don’t even show up on the second page and kind of everything on the first thing.

Mina (00:42:38):
The second page of the reviews should be five stars now with getting reviews. And unfortunately it is against the terms of service to incentivize for a review, but there are certain like, you know, gray area things that I like to do. So for example, I have a, an insert in some of my products I’ve been split testing and basically on the answer, it says, tag us on Instagram to get a, you know, a free product or tag as on. Instagram to get $10 cashless, stuff like that, things like that. And so all I’m doing is I’m waiting for them to tag me on Instagram. And the second that they do, I have an employee they’re waiting to engage with them. And the second day they say, Hey I used pixelfy.me. pixelfy.me creates deep links. What a deep link is, is when you click on a deep link if you’re on Instagram, on your phone, or if you’re on Facebook, on your phone or whatever, when you click on that link, it opens in the native Amazon app.

Mina (00:43:31):
So it opens straight into the Amazon app instead of opening in in the browser and Instagram browser. And you have to input your username and password. I will never trust me. I will never input my username and password. It’s already saved on my app on, on my, and I probably don’t even remember, I have to go back and find it. So if you ever asked me to do anything and I have to put it in my username password, I’m probably not going to do it. So I use pixelfy.me to create that deep link. And I took on that deep link and it opens up into the Amazon native app. And it’s basically, I send them, I say, here’s a link to leave me a review, send them that link. It opens up into Amazon. And I’ll pretty much say for everyone, that’s already left us a review, we’re offering this.

Mina (00:44:11):
And so technically I’m not incentivizing. I’m saying, you know, for people in the past who have left us a review we’re as a thank you, we’re giving you a free product. Or so if anyone has not left a review, they probably will leave it before screenshotting and send it to us. So it’s kind of a way. It is gray area. I know it’s against Amazon terms of service to incentivize anyone to a view, but I have not yet found a way where someone out of the kindness of their heart is going to leave you on five star review. It’s usually a one-star review of people complaining. And then the dealer, the way that I deal with one star reviews is I’ll really go and try and do my best in terms of customer service. But sometimes people are just bitter. They’ll leave the one star review and they don’t want anything to do with you.

Mina (00:44:50):
And, you know, you just got to take the loss and, and keep moving. And it’s no big deal. I remember when I first got my first one star review, it was worse than it was a worse feeling than a breakup. Like my first, it was worse than my first breakup. And I was sat at the office of, you know, it was like this, I couldn’t focus. I was like, man, like, that’s it. Like, my business is over, but like, trust me, it’s okay. Like nothing’s going to happen. You just have to keep getting more five star reviews. And, you know, I really want people to engage with me on Instagram because once I get them into Instagram, I have an open line of communication with them. And I’m always like hitting them up and texting them and, and messaging them and say, Hey, like, how about you send us a picture?

Mina (00:45:31):
And like, you know, when you send us that picture, like we’ll post it on our story and we’ll tag you and things like that. And just kind of get them going and make them feel special and make them feel part of the brand. I think that is one thing that will separate our brand from other brands that who are on Amazon that are, you know, obviously if there’s very big supplement brands, they’re doing a way better job than I am. So I definitely look up to them, but compared to the Amazon brands that are just trying to pump, pump, pump, and like do all like the little things and hacks and stuff like that, I’m trying more to build a relationship with my customer because as soon as I build a good relationship and I leave a good taste in their mouth I know that they’re always going to come back and you know the lifetime value for supplements, it can be very long.

Mina (00:46:15):
And I know one of my customers her name’s Jenna, she has bought 12 times from us so far. So, you know, having a good loyal customer following can be amazing. And that also feeds into subscribe and save and, and having a lot of subscribing saves. I think having a lot of subscribing saves is also very significantly increases the value of your business. So, you know, if you were naturally going to sell for 500,000, maybe you could sell for 600,000 just because you have such a, a large amount of subscribing saves that, you know, it kind of adds the value of your business just because you have that recurring revenue. But that’s pretty much it in terms of the listing detail page.

Todd (00:46:55):
Yeah. So just for anybody not aware of the subscribe and save is for like, in the grocery category, especially so that people can subscribe and get things monthly bi-monthly or something like that and get a percentage off. So that’s really helpful if they’re selling in any kind of category that has that.

Mina (00:47:14):
It’s definitely consumable product. Yeah.

Todd (00:47:17):
Yeah, for sure. Now, just to kind of bring it back around to Amazon wholesale, because some of the stuff that we touched on may not necessarily apply to us working on the listing, but knowing and understanding some of these things, like what you’re talking about on Instagram, which is a really great way to fill a following and build out your brains and stuff like that. Well, we might not be doing that personally, if we can be the person who is giving these tips and tricks to the brand, and we’re also selling their products, we can become the Amazon guru for them. And that’s just going to be better a solidification of that relation care that we’re building with that brand.

Mina (00:48:04):
Absolutely. And I’ve been there too. So like I said before I did partner with my manufacturer and you know, I went in and I looked at his brands and, you know, as soon as I said, you know, I’m looking at your brands, I can definitely help you give me just one product. Let me start with one. And I started with one and I made it better. And I went, moved to the second and the third and the fourth. And and I was just doing it out of the kindness of my heart. I did not want anything. I just, I was like, thank you for being a good manufacturer to me and not being a bad person. And so in exchange, I just want to help you out. And as I saw that happening you know, the relationship significantly improved and I, you know, got better terms.

Mina (00:48:44):
I got a lot of leeway. I mean, he now even utilizes his R and D team. And for me, I like, I am, I’m a very small brand. Like I’m probably his smallest brand that he manages. Like the minimum that he does for anyone is like around seven to 10,000 units a month. And I’m not anywhere near that. I mean, not even for like you know, for one brand you know, maybe all my brands combined. Yes. But, you know, so in terms of that, like helping, I really believe, like if you go in there and you add as much value as possible to someone that you’re trying to sell or pitch or whatever and I always believe in like, give, give, give, and if you give enough value, not waiting for anything in exchange, you will get way more than that you even want it to ask for in return.

Mina (00:49:29):
So I think it’s a very good idea. If you can become that Amazon Guru for that, you know, you’re a wholesale partner and then offer them all this advice and say, you know, here’s a strategy that someone uses here’s this here’s that I can help you with this. I can help you with that and just offer it just because you want to help. And then in exchange, like they’re like, it’s an intangible value when you have a relationship. Like, you know, you can, for example, the relationship between two best friends is, you know, if they did go into business, like it’s not a monetary, like, value being that it’s your best friend. You can go and say, Hey, like, can you do this favor for me? And they will more than willingly do it. Just because you have that relationships. But I think relationship building is incredibly important in this business.

Todd (00:50:14):
Oh yeah. A hundred percent in the wholesale world. It’s the most important thing. A lot of like private label, regional arbitrage, there’s a lot of logistics and things that you need to work on, but in wholesale world, it’s really all about the relationships.

Mina (00:50:33):
Yeah. And one thing that I do with my manufacturer that I think everyone can also implement with their wholesale partners is I have a file for every single one of them. And I have like the name, his name, his wife’s name, his kid’s name what he likes, what his wife likes and his birthday, his wife’s birthday, things like that. And I just slowly kind of like you know, pull that information over time and then every single kind of event or on like a national holiday and take, it’s giving us, sending them a gift basket for the kids on Christmas. I’ll send them a gift basket for the kids. During their birthdays, I’ll send them specific. Like he like really likes coffee. So every time I fly somewhere that has nice coffee. Like I was in Seattle the other a week.

Mina (00:51:19):
I bought a bunch of coffee and I gave it to him and kind of like, just to having those gifts, I wouldn’t call it bribery, but I really just maintain a good relationship with someone that I really care about. I think that without him, I would have not gotten to where I am today and he’s significantly impacted. Like my life has made me a lot better. He’s also passed on a lot of advice. You know, he’s been in the supplement game for 30 years now, so all of that advice that’s been passed onto me. It really helped. And so you know, I am grateful to that. And so just maintaining that relationship by having those a file and then you know, just having my assistant and say, Hey you know, schedule emails on, you know, November 7th or whatever, December eight and all these like different dates where it’s like either a birthday or, you know, something, or maybe it’s the kids’ schools is going to go out. So maybe on the last day of school, I’ll send them a bunch of chocolate and things like that. You know, just those little things they go a long way.

Todd (00:52:17):
Yeah, it’s super smart. And most people do not do that. So you’re just immediately setting yourself apart from everyone else and building that relationship like we said, and that’s really what it’s all about having that personal connection. And it can go a long way for getting discounts and maybe getting exclusives on new products, whatever the case may be for sure.

Mina (00:52:42):
And I think the two most significant things. So for me you know, a lot of people try and negotiate price and stuff like that. I don’t worry too much about price my lead time and my terms, those are the most important things because the lead time and the you know, payment terms will affect my cashflow cycle and the shorter, and I’ve run the simulation. The shorter, my customer cycle is the much more money I can make. So maybe having the same cost of goods. If I save a dollar, then maybe I’m saving three grand a month. But if I, you know, reduce my lead time by two weeks, I can then have, you know, maybe 50 to a hundred thousand dollars additional by the end of the year. And so it is a significant impact.

Mina (00:53:24):
And so that’s kind of why I really care about building the relationship of staying away from it, being a business money-driven relationship and more of like a, you know, we’re friends that are doing business together type thing, because just by shortening and you know, most of us know, like the lead time is not really the lead time. They give you a lead time kind of just, Hey, like, this is an average, like we’re going to be safe. And at least for private label for manufacturing, they’re like, Oh, it’s four weeks lead time. I’m like, no, I know that it’s one day in the factory, you’re just putting me in a line. But if you have someone who really cares about you, it’s like, Hey, can you really help me? And they’re like, okay. Yeah. Just like, tell me what you need and we’ll sneak it in, you know, between like this order and that order, and kind of can, can help you out. So that, that will go a long way.

Todd (00:54:08):
Absolutely. A hundred percent. All right. So anything else on the product page or did we cover everything there?

Mina (00:54:16):
No, I think we’ve covered everything. You know, that you can do to kind of optimize the listing there. I’m trying to think, but I can’t think of anything else.

Todd (00:54:25):
Do you use the Amazon early reviewer program or the new is it the buying program? I think it’s called.

Mina (00:54:33):
Yeah. I have had good success with the vine. I have not had good success with early reviewer program. A lot of them kind of like leave four and three star reviews, which I don’t like. I don’t know. I think that people that Amazon chooses all might be like you know, people like who take reviewing a little bit too seriously. So personally I already have a hundred people in line for any product that I launch. I have more than a hundred and every single product that I do launch, it’s something that I can use and, you know, most of the time I can use and other people can benefit from. So it’s not a difficult thing to kind of say, Hey, you know, I’ll get you the product for free in exchange for reviews since you’re my friend and kind of go that route. So I have no issues getting the initial reviews.

Todd (00:55:19):
Okay, good, good. Yeah. And for anybody not familiar with the early reviewer program allows you to get up to your first five reviews for like 60 bucks. And then the buying program is basically a way for Amazon to allow you to give away free product in exchange for reviews, which is, yeah,

Mina (00:55:38):
It’s cool when they do it. Right.

Todd (00:55:40):
Yeah. Kind of nice to laugh a little, I didn’t shake your head, but that’s what happens when you’re playing somebody else’s playground. They want it done.

Mina (00:55:48):
Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, that’s a, that’s all the advice I can give on the detail page.

Todd (00:55:53):
Okay. Awesome. And so last but not least let’s touch on PPC. So advertising on Amazon, what kind of tips can you give people in that area?

Mina (00:56:04):
Okay. That’s a long one. That’s a very long one. Okay. So in terms of PPC, that’s kind of like where I Excel because starting off as, you know, a small supplement brand and a big, you know, there’s a lot of big supplement sharks out there. I needed to really have a good handle on my PPC. Now the general strategy is this. You want to launch campaigns that will discover new keywords for you. Discovery campaigns are basically the auto, broad and frisk campaigns. Those are the ones where you can input keywords and ACINs, and they will discover new keywords for you. And so you’re technically discovering. So you want to launch those discovery campaigns. The overall goal is to find every single keyword and ASIN possible that is related to your product that you should be advertising on, even if it’s not profitable and then targeted.

Mina (00:56:52):
And then once you’re targeting it, you can then optimize the bids. So if it is profitable, keep it there. If it’s not profitable to lower the bids until it either becomes profitable or it stops getting any impressions at all. So you know, the first step is break up your auto campaign into four groups, the close match, loose match compliments and substitutes. The reason I do this is because you can have very high performance in the close match and then horrible performance in the complex. And so you don’t want to have them all intertwined because then what if you want to scale the substitutes or one, if you want to still the close match, but the loose vacs is not doing so well. So break them up you know, into the four targeting groups and then have your main keyword in one keyword, only one in broad one in phrase one exact campaign.

Mina (00:57:38):
So that’s three separate campaigns each with one keyword for your main keyword, and that will help you get a lot of traction on that main keyword and then get your top 10 keywords again, the top 10 keywords you can get from that list we talked about initially, and then you can have that in a broad phrase and exact campaign. And so that will be a good setup for you to start discovering keywords. And then from there you know, there’s other campaigns that you can launch to personally, I will launch a broad phrase and exact branded campaign. So anything that has hydraulic or MMA nutrition in it, and then I’ll launch a campaign targeting my own products that’s to defend my products. Like I talked about the Bulletproof and then I’ll also do a category targeting campaigns. So for all the categories that my competitors are in, I’ll target that category and then I’ll click refine and I’ll refine it by more expensive than me.

Mina (00:58:30):
So the minimum price is $1 more than I am. And then the maximum number of star reviews is three stars or less. This kind of makes me target low hanging fruit. So now that you know, it’s three stars or less and it’s more expensive, so it’s a no brainer that I’m better and I’ll have those campaigns set up. Now, the discovery campaigns are already discovering keywords for me. And so I wait about a week. It depends I’m pretty aggressive. Another tip is please make sure that you have at least a hundred dollar budget and then start with a lower bit, do not do a $10 $20 budget. Amazon’s going to look at that and say, this person is not having enough money to spend and automatically just not show you in placements. So if you say that you have a hundred dollars budget, and then you control your spending by having a lower bid, that’s where you’re going to see a lot more success.

Mina (00:59:16):
And so I started there, I wait about a week or two weeks. I go into the search thermal personnel search term reports will show everything that the auto and broadened phrase campaigns have discovered. I’ll pull everything out and I’ll do duplicate. So what that means is I’ll make sure that anything that I pull out, like, let’s say, I’m going to start targeting in broad match. So I’ll pull all the keywords and I’ll say, okay, I’m going to start launching them in broad match, just to make sure that I don’t already have those keywords already in broad match. And so once I remove any duplicates, I’ll then launch all of them in broad match. Generally keep it 10 keywords or less per campaign. The reason I do that is because anything more than 10 keywords, I’ve just noticed that Amazon will just send all of the budget to that, to the top five or 10 keywords.

Mina (00:59:59):
And then all the other keywords won’t get any impressions. And if you’re not getting impressions for your keywords, it’s pretty much like you’re not targeting them. So kind of keep them 10 per campaign. Even if you have 50 campaigns, a hundred campaigns, it doesn’t matter. You want to actually be driving traffic instead of pretending that you’re driving traffic, by having them all in one campaign, also campaign structure needs to be like a one-to-one. So campaign ad group, and then the 10 keywords. The reason I do that is if I do have multiple ad groups, I cannot control how much money Amazon sends to one ad group versus the other. So I could have a hundred dollar campaign budget, and then it goes $90 in ad Group one and then $10 ad group two. So to avoid that, I will just keep it pretty linear. So again, I’ll pull out all the broad, all the keywords I’ll launch them in broad phrase, exact, make sure I don’t have any duplicates in there.

Mina (01:00:46):
And then I’ll pull out all the ACINs and launch them there, and then I’ll keep repeating that process. And then I’ll go into the search term reports and just start, you know, trying to look for anything that is bleeding me, which basically spending money and not giving me a good return on investment. And because, you know, it sucks because if it’s a broader a phrase one keyword could be bringing down the whole keyword. So you know, let’s say abroad, electrolyte powder, it’ll be triggering for a sugar-free electrolyte powder. But maybe, you know Ultima, electrolyte powder is bleeding. It’s spending a lot of money. It’s not making sales, but all of these it’ll trigger it for 50 or 60 keywords. So all of those could be profitable. That just one is not doing well. And so I’ll go into the search term report and I’ll find those ones and I’ll make sure, so anything for me that is over in the last 30 days, over a hundred percent Aprils in a broader phrase or auto or anything that spends more than $15 or more in the last 30 days with no sales on negative and I’ll negative it for now.

Mina (01:01:46):
And then as my reviews get better and better, I’ll, you know, remove the negatives and kind of start fresh again.

Todd (01:01:52):
Are you using any software to do all of this, or are you doing this all through the Amazon interface?

Mina (01:01:57):
No. So I’m doing everything through bulk sheets, so I’m not using software because I don’t trust software. I’m very paranoid guy. I’ve used a software in the past and it’s ruined my campaigns. So I will download the bulk sheet. So if you just go to a campaign manager on the left click, the three dashes, go to a bulk operations, and then it’ll download the bulk sheets for like the last 30 days. And that was the last thing I was going touch on. So it, for the last 30 days for the bulk sheets, I’ll go in and I’ll sort everything by, so I’ll, I’ll go into I’ll highlight everything, clicked filter, go to column B and then only show keywords and product targets. And that shows me every single keyword or ASIN that I’m targeting I’ll then go and sort everything by ACOS largest to smallest anything over my desired ACOS.

Mina (01:02:42):
And usually my decided ACOS is my break even ACOS, which is equal to my profit margin before advertising anything above that I’ll lower the bid by 5 cents. Anything that’s below that up to like 1% ACOS I’ll keep it the same, or maybe, you know, anything that’s below, like 15%, ACOS increase it by 5 cents. And then anything that’s getting more than five clicks and no sales are lower. The the max bid by 5 cents. And then I’ll go down and anything that it has less than 300 impressions, I’ll increase by 10 cents to make sure that, Hey, I’m increasing the bid until it gets impressions. And the reason I go for a break even ACOS I’m okay spending up to break even or up to my entire profit to make a sale just to, because I know that that’s going to get me more and more traction.

Mina (01:03:29):
And the more traction that I get, it’s going to spill over into organic sales and that’s where I’m going to make my money. So I make sure to always track my PPC, spend divided by my overall revenue and not just by my campaign manager PVC revenue, because I get a better picture of how everything is going, because I started in the past, turning off BPC thinking that I was going to get the organic sales that I’m getting now, but I lost all of my sales. And it’s just not a secret that Amazon is pay to play. And then if you turn off your ads, you’re not going to get a lot of organic sales.

Todd (01:04:02):
Yup, yup. For sure. So a lot of good information there. Some of that probably went over a lot of people’s heads, which is the thing you can replay the video. Yeah. You can replay the video, grow into this stuff that you don’t have to know all this stuff immediately, but learning and knowing that this stuff is out there and growing and building on top of the knowledge you have is super important. So you definitely know your stuff when it comes to building out lists things and stuff like that. I can see why your brains are doing so well, which is pretty awesome. Now I’m sure we could spend another probably hour talking about PPC really easy. But what I wanted to point people over to, if they’re interested in learning more, you do have a PPC university, correct?

Mina (01:04:54):
Yeah. So I have a one hour free training there. So PVC university is a PPC course. It covers everything PPC related very technically. But if you just want it to kind of get a really good one hour, it’s not just an intro, but I, you know, pretty much cover what I talked about, but in like a lot more depth if you go to the PPC university.com that will have a one hour free training.

Todd (01:05:18):
Yep. And the PPCUniversity.Com and then what we just click on the free training that it says right at the top.

Mina (01:05:24):
Yeah. Click on free training. It says, show preview, you click on that. And then there’s a one hour video right there. There’s no fluff, there’s no pitch. There’s nothing it’s just straight up like, you know, starting from auto campaign or see a general strategy all the way to bulk sheet optimization and bleeding and refreshing keywords and everything, and just covers everything. And it’s just kind of like my way to I know it’s hard. I know it’s hard. And when I first started, it was very rough for me. And I just, I, you know, to me, like, I’m gonna make my money selling my brands. I’m going to make my money selling supplements. I’m not going to become a millionaire off of like selling the course. But you know, I, I really wanted to help people. I struggled a lot at the beginning and I struggled just understanding PPC and how it works. So the hour free training is kind of just like, Hey, you know, I don’t want people to feel like they’re, they’re all alone in this, like there’s people out there. And like I said, I mean, I’m not worried about making money. I know where I’m gonna make my money. The only reason I charged for courses because obviously I can’t give my time away.

Todd (01:06:25):
Sure. So we’ll throw that link in the show notes. If anybody’s watching on YouTube, that’ll be down below as well, so they can check that out. Now why don’t we wrap up, you want, you mentioned in the beginning about a new brand, right? If you want to tell anybody about that, now’s your chance.

Mina (01:06:45):
Awesome. Okay. Yeah. So it’s a very, very exciting brand stung to Todd Todd shares. You know, my, my love for coffee. However, I stay away from coffee because I’m very afraid to get overly dependent on it. And I know that I will. And so I only allow myself to have coffee once a week on Saturday, and it is so beautiful. I wake up in the morning, I go surfing in Santa Monica and then I come back shower and go get Starbucks and sit outside in the sun. And it’s amazing. And I love that ritual. And so I kind of want it to come up with something that is a replacement. That’s also you know, not bad for you. It doesn’t hurt your adrenals or anything like that, the same way coffee does. So we came up with nuro and that’s a new brand.

Mina (01:07:28):
It’s going to be out on Kickstarter. You know, we’re launching it on Kickstarter and the reason I’m launching it on Kickstarter is to show everyone that you can start a brand was zero. Even though I can invest my own money. You know, and if we don’t raise enough money, I’m probably going to have to invest my own money, but it’s no big deal. I just want to show everyone that you can start a brand from scratch and launch it successfully without any investment other than people backing your idea. And, you know the source of energy is going to be Cola nut, and Gorana and it’s going to have ashwagandha and lion’s mane and chaga, and a bunch of other adaptives there to kind of help you with your mood and, and, and you, you know, not fatigue, your adrenals kind of replenish them instead of fatiguing on my coffee does, and then there’s going to be other elements like turmeric ginger you know, black pepper, cayenne pepper Celtic sea salt, and things like that, that also add to the benefits of the product.

Mina (01:08:22):
And it’s going to be in the form of a latte. So my goal, if anyone lives in California and has been the Erewhon, they have like mushroom cappuccino and Erewhon, and that is like this so delicious and is naturally flavored with Monkfruit. So I will try and as close to, as possible get to that flavor. It’s like a very nice cappuccino flavor. So we’ll see if we can achieve that, but that’s the goal. And so the base is going to be kind of like a cacao and, and you know raw almond milk powder and things like that. So we’ll see how that goes. But yeah, I mean, that’s my new project. I’m working on that. We’re working with an Amazon FBA YouTuber and so we’re documenting the entire thing and it’s more of a passion project, more than anything I mean, I know, I think we can be very successful with it.

Mina (01:09:11):
It’s something that I see, I need, I think everyone can use a break from coffee, even if they love coffee and everyone loves having that morning ritual. So why not give everyone that morning ritual that they want, but with something that’s good that will still give you that energy. It’s not going to be as good as coffee. Coffee will definitely get you wired. Coffee is very powerful. So I don’t think it’s going to be as good, but it’s going to be very close and it’s going to be good for you. And it’s something that you can kind of, you know, enjoy and like, you know, put that hot water froth it and enjoy it, you know, in your balcony or on your deck in the sun. And so that’s kind of the new project that I’m working on.

Todd (01:09:49):
Yeah, for sure. you can mix it up with coffee, maybe if you’re addicted to it.

Mina (01:09:53):
Yeah. If you, I mean, I don’t see why not, if you want to throw some coffee in there, you totally can. Yeah,

Todd (01:09:59):
It definitely sounds really good. My, my wife is kinda getting, gotten into some of that stuff. Like the lion’s mane and stuff. I love Monkfruit that’s what I use to sweeten, my coffee just a little bit, just put a little bit, so you need to buy it out. And so I’ll definitely keep an eye out for it. He said it’s Niro with an N

Mina (01:10:20):
Yeah, it’s a nuro, so N U R O. And, and we are hoping to have like the Instagram and everything up and running by next week. We already have a ton of content, and then we’re hoping within the next few weeks to kind of have it up on Kickstarter and start raising the money is going to, we’re going to raise money for 30 days. You know, try and get as many backers as possible. I know a lot of people can really use this and production is not long. So by the time the Kickstarter’s over, I would say probably two weeks before you get it. So it’s not like one of those Kickstarter campaigns where, you know, you pledge and then you get the product like two, three months later. You know, our production time is pretty short, so we can definitely get it out pretty quick.

Todd (01:11:06):
Yeah. The idea of launching on Kickstarter is a pretty cool one. You see that fairly often, like on shark tank and stuff were launched on Kickstarter, and now they’re trying to build off of that platform. So it can definitely be powerful if you can build the traction and you almost kind of gained like a cult following exactly from that. And that’s kind of our goal

Mina (01:11:31):
We’re going to try and right now as, so we just wrapped up a branding call yesterday. So we’re going to finalize our branding, messaging everything tomorrow, and then set up our group like a Facebook group and get that as a launch group and have everyone, everyone, everyone share, share, share you know, and get everyone in that group. And then as soon as we launched on Kickstarter, kind of push everyone to Kickstarter, run ads to the Kickstarter and kind of like, you know, get a lot of momentum going. And we’re also going to see if we can talk to jello or, you know, one of those Kickstarter, you know, partners I think, I believe they take like 15% of everything you raise. But they don’t, you know, if you don’t raise anything, they don’t take anything. And I think it would be cool.

Mina (01:12:17):
I think we can negotiate them down because we’re, you know, doing the sun YouTube and they’re going to get a lot of like a lot of visibility and a lot of the audience is very applicable to using them. So I think we can negotiate them down, but you know, we’re going to try and leave no stone unturned and see how that works. And at the end of the day, you know, I’m very, I’m going to have a lot of fun with it. So I’m happy. It’s not something that, you know, I’m running after money for. It’s more of like just, I want it to prove to everyone that you can create something that you really like, and you don’t need to have a lot of money to make money or be profitable or anything like that,

Todd (01:12:54):
For sure. And you gotta have fun with it. That’s what this is all about. Trying to build a life that you enjoy living, you know, get out of the nine to five grind and, and build your own life. So it definitely, when you have that Kickstarter up, send me the link over, I’ll throw it in the show notes and maybe we can throw some traffic your way and help you out with that. So other than that, I think that about wraps up everything we wanted to touch on. We had a lot of really great information. This is probably one people are going to want to listen to maybe a couple of times to really dive into the details we talked about, but I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing all the great knowledge.

Mina (01:13:33):
Awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Todd (01:13:35):
Absolutely. You have an awesome Thanksgiving coming up here tomorrow after, regarding

Mina (01:13:41):
Gonna eat a lot of food, have a good day

Todd (01:13:42):
All right. So there you go. Fantastic interview with me now. I learned a lot of really good tidbits in there. Some goals nuggets, as we like to say, and I hope you did as well. This might be one that you want to listen to a second time because we really went in depth on some of these things and they might’ve gone over your head. So maybe it’s something that you want to come back to at a later date, even as you further Amazon journey, but at least, you know, all these little things that you can do, tips and tricks to build out listings and increase sales on Amazon. So you can share that knowledge with other people build those relationships like we talked about in the beginning and during the interview there and make sure if you’re interested in checking out his free training, go to thePPCuniversity.com click on free training. You can really dive into the PPC advertising on there. So it’s really nice to him to share that with us. I’ll put that link in the show notes or the comments down below if you’re on YouTube as well. If you want the transcripts or the show notes, head on over to entrepreneuradventure.com /52, since this is episode 52. So with that, that wraps up this episode. I’m your host, Todd Welch signing off happy selling everybody.

announcer (01:15:15):
This has been another episode of the entrepreneur adventure podcast. Thanks for listening fellow entrepreneur and always remember success is yours. If you take it.

Entrepreneur Adventure is now Amazon Seller School