Your Amazon listings are probably NOT as optimized as you think. Your products likely aren’t merchandised as well as they could be either. In this episode, Brandon shows you how to find obscure keywords to dramatically grow your sales and rankings. He also shows you how to merchandise your product to fly off the shelf. 

‍

We also talk about AI, competitor research, new product development, and what it will take to get ahead and stay ahead on Amazon. 

‍

Brandon is in an elite club of 8 figure sellers on Amazon. His brands will sell over $30 million this year on Amazon, and he’s targeting over $50 million in sales next year. 

‍

Here’s a look at what we discuss:

• The two main factors that impact ranking on Amazon: 1. Performance and 2. Relevance and how to improve BOTH.
• How to find obscure keywords that you can rank for quickly to boost sales.
• The 2 biggest mistakes sellers make when it comes to merchandising and how to fix them easily.
• How to get feedback faster and easier on product designs so that you don’t waste time or money on products or merchandising that’s likely to fail.
• How to use AI to quickly synthesize what your competitors are doing well, what they’re doing poorly, and what you should do about it.
• Using AI to get a clear picture of your ideal buyer.
• How stacking small changes can allow you to double or triple sales year over year.

Transcript:

Brandon:

I got off the stage. I walk into the hallway, a guy chases me into the hallway from the audience and says, that's my listing. I said, do me a favor and please change your title tonight. Like literally, here's the suggested title that I gave in the talk. He comes back to me the next night, we're out of social after a whole day of audience, he had his team change it. He comes back to me and he shows me a screenshot of 20 different keywords that have gone from either not indexed to top 10 immediately and says, credit

Brett:

In the bank, let's utilize that.

Brandon:

Yeah, he said, we did the math on this. We're going to make over a hundred thousand dollars more profit this year just from that one change.

Brett:

It's time for another spicy curry hot. Take the part of the show when I get just a little bit spicy. So here's the hot take for this show. You're likely focusing on the wrong keywords. Either you're shooting too big or you're not shooting for what's relevant or you're not looking at what are the untapped opportunities. Example, let's say you sell toiletries bags. Should you just go after the keyword, toiletries bags, or should you think about something more specific? Maybe you sell toiletry bags for men. Maybe they're leather. Maybe there's a waterproof component on the inside. So I think you want to look at what problem does your product solve? What are the opportunity keywords out there? What could you be relevant for and what's going to move the needle? And then are you thinking about untapped things like, I didn't even know this, but DOP kit is another word for a toiletries bag.

So focus on the right keywords and look for untapped opportunities. That's where you're going to create a compounding effect. Little wins with little untapped keywords will snowball, and then you go after the big stuff after that. So focus on the right keywords. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today my guest is Brandon Young from DataDive and Seller Systems. This cat is an eight figure seller on Amazon, and so we're going to talk about how can you double your traffic and conversions on Amazon by digging into the data and understanding things that most people don't understand and finding obscure keywords and obscure opportunities and leveraging AI and understanding the algorithm and all kinds of fun stuff. I first met Brandon in Fort Lauderdale. We were both speaking at Seller Summit.

Shout out to Steve and Tony. Awesome event. You saw on Amazon, you got a 10 seller summit in the future. We both spoke there. I heard his presentation and I was blown away, and so I had to get him on the podcast. And then I also found out my team loves the tool that he designed. So data dive. It's an amazing keyword research tool. My team uses it on the Daily, and so I was just thrilled to meet Brandon and now pumped to have 'em on the show. So with that, Brandon, how you doing, man? Thanks for coming on and welcome to the show,

Brandon:

Brett. I really appreciate you having me on. It was really great to meet you at Steve's event. Can't say enough about how awesome Steve is, and it's such a little known secret, his event because he caps it on only a couple hundred sellers. He wants it to be intimate, and I tell him he could have 2000 people on an event with his following and with the following he has, but he doesn't like it. He wants it to just be one-on-one.

Brett:

Yeah, which I love that about scb and Tony as well. They've designed the event to be what they want and like an event that they enjoy attending. So a couple hundred people, those are my favorite events too. I like the big ones as well. I like speaking on big stages. That's fun. But connections community that you make in a smaller event is super cool. Really good stuff. So I'm going to send Steve and Tony an invoice for our promoting of the Seller Summit here. So you're welcome guys. But man, really excited to dive into this topic. We're going to talk ai, we're going to talk algorithm. We're going to talk.

Brandon:

Sorry to interrupt you, Brad. This is really important. We did not address Steve properly. He is now a bestselling author,

Brett:

Bestselling author, Steve Chu, which I know want him amazing props with his mom, who all of us in the e-commerce space, and I get this all the time as an agency owner, our parents, our aunts and uncles grandparents, they have no idea what we do. And Steve always makes jokes about that. His parents are like, why don't you get a job, Steve? Why don't you just get a job? I don't know what you're doing, but he got the bestseller with Family First Entrepreneur and now his mom thinks he's cool. So that's definitely a win. So y man, I'm super excited about this. So let's talk about the fact that you are an eight figure seller. That is pretty elite status. So talk about that. How'd you get started and how did you go from where most people play to the eight figure

Brandon:

Mark? Yeah, I appreciate that. We started, it was my wife and I when we were dating, we decided to start a business and we figured out what F B A was from a buddy. To me, it just clicked that that was such a scalable business model because we could leverage the billions of dollars in infrastructure that Amazon has. I don't need my own warehouse, my own employees, my own packing materials, and I don't need to ship anything myself. So I could focus on some levers that really drive growth, like product development and getting the inventory in. So we started with wholesale and liquidation, and then in 2016 we went to Canton because my wife now my wife, we got married in 2017. She is originally from China, and I looked at her and we looked at each other. I'm like, why are we not doing private label? We have a huge advantage here. So from 2017 on, we just kept scaling, doubling and tripling almost year over year. Last year we did 22 million, and this year we should do about 32 million.

Brett:

It's insane, man. So cool. Kudos to you guys. I love the way you frame that. We're leveraging the billions of dollars and infrastructure and ads and everything that Amazon's doing, and you're focusing on a few key levers, growth levers that you can pull to create really outsized returns. And so love this. Several things we're going to dig in there. We're going to talk about the algorithm. We're going to talk about under leveraged and underoptimized listings. We're going to talk about AI and some other cool tools you guys have developed, but let's talk about the algorithm first. So maybe give us an overview, your overview of the Amazon algorithm, and then let's maybe dig into some things that people are not aware

Brandon:

Of. Well, this part usually puts people to sleep, so we got to warn, pause, get some coffee, do some dumping jacks,

Brett:

Slap yourself. This will make you a lot of money. This may not be exciting, but it'll make you lots of cash. And cash is exciting.

Brandon:

Okay, good. I'm a data guy, so this stuff really, I get geeked out by it and I get excited by it, but a lot of people are just glosses over them. So data

Brett:

Tells a story though, and I know that's part of what data uncovers what's happening and what you need to do. So there's a story there. You just got to figure out what that story

Brandon:

Is. Yeah, exactly. And so Amazon needs to figure out the order that products show up on different search terms. And so a lot of people, the first, the primary is that Amazon is a search engine. It's not just a marketplace. So you really have to understand how that works. Then you have to understand that they're going to

Brett:

Reward. It's still product discovery, and sorry to interrupt you, but I think this will just be a good setup is still the vast majority of product discovery on Amazon. It's still done through search. There's the also bot, there's other places you can discover products, but it's still largely driven by

Brandon:

Search. Yeah, a hundred percent. What I'd say is there's two elements to the way that Amazon's going to decide where to rank you on which keywords you should show up. And the first part is a bucket we'll call performance. And then the other bucket we're going to call relevancy. And so the relevancy piece is really just a multiplier. So if you think about it this way, your bucket of performance is going to be your click-through rate. So how many times does your listing show up on a search result and how often do people search it? And then it's going to be your conversion rate. So once someone clicks on it, how often are they purchasing it? And then it's going to be your overall revenue that you're driving, which is a big part of it because Amazon wants to get that sweet commission from you. Amazon

Brett:

Takes a cut of that, so they want to maximize it. Yeah.

Brandon:

The other part of it is going to be that multiplier of relevancy. And the way that that works is that if you are selling a dog bowl and someone searches for dog food, they don't want your dog ball to show up, what they'll do is on the relevancy piece, they're going to make that number less than one. It might be 0.4 or 0.2 basically meaning that it's going to reduce that overall rank number that you have. If you consider it, I just got a quantifiable number of what my product score is from ranking potential and I multiply it by a number that's less than one, then that number goes down. So for every single keyword, every single keyword on Amazon, you're going to have a rank score, and then that rank score is made up of those two things. It's going to be that performance times that relevancy.

And so once we started to figure out how that works, then we realized that it can't be calculated daily. It has to be calculated over time. So then what happens is Amazon's going to run that calculation and then it's going to run it again for a three day average and then like a seven day average, a 15 day average, a 30 day average, a six month average, and so on. But they can't value all those things the same because they want products to be able a trend in the right direction to improve and things like that. So what they do is they value the newer data more. So your one day average, your three day average, your seven day average is going to be weighted more than your six month average for example. And so it started to really make sense that when you're sitting there with a product that runs out of stock for 30 days, it's really tough sometimes to recover because what happens is now you've got a bunch of zeros averaged into your performance, and so you've got your 1, 3, 7, 15, 30 day average all zeros, and all you've got is those longer term averages that are weighted less.

And so now you need to start accumulating positive history again, and it could take you another 30 days or more to really start to recover, which is expensive. You've got to spend money on marketing. You're not showing up organically. Most of your sales are P P C, and then that could be a vicious cycle because P P C converts less than organic usually, so your overall average is worse than it was before, and it becomes almost impossible sometimes with that spiral to recover. So we understand how the algorithm works, but more importantly we also understand how relevancy works. And so relevancy to make that number one, two things have to happen. You're going to get two different ways that relevancy is calculated. The first is that where the keyword is in your listing matters. So title is worth more than your bullets. So if you're in the title, you might get a multiplier of one, and if you're in the bullets, you might get a multiplier of 0.8 or 0.9.

It's going to be less. So someone that really wants to rank for a product, you'll notice. And then where it is in the title matters too, the beginning of the title is worth more than the middle of the title. So you'll notice that sometimes people will just write a title with a long tail keyword in the beginning and they're ranking in the top three for that keyword, but the really popular, also relevant high search volume keyword, they're number 20, right? And it's like why are they winning this long tail keyword when the better listings that outperform them, they sell more units are winning the other keywords, the higher search volume keywords, and the reality is it's because of the way they wrote the listing. They're getting more value there and more rank potential is what we call it. The last part of that is going to be the match type.

So if you write your keyword that someone searches in exact form, meaning that if I want to sell a diaper bag and I say, okay, I want a diaper bag backpack. If I write diaper bag backpack at the beginning of my title and someone searches for diaper bag backpack, now I'm going to get what we call ranking credit. So this ranking credit is going to be a hundred percent of the credit toward into the bank of that keyword, but if I write backpack diaper bag, I'm not going to get a hundred percent of the credit. What I'm going to get is maybe 30% of the credit because that's what we call a broad match. It's the same keywords but out of order. So understanding that the order you write the words in the match type and where you write it matters, and then understanding how the algorithm works, we've been able to basically build a listing writer that will help you maximize the rank of your product to maximize the rank potential of your product. Whether you perform or not is going to be based on how you design the product and the competition.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that so much. So thinking about both performance and relevancy, and there's some similarities. I've been in the Amazon game for a long time since 2016, but go way back on the Google side, and there are some similarities here. Both Google and Amazon wanted delight users. They want to give people exactly what they're looking for. Where it varies a little though is Amazon's primary goal is to sell customers stuff. They want people to buy stuff. So that's where you as a seller and Amazon are totally aligned. However, Amazon doesn't care if it's your product or somebody else's product. They doesn't want customers to be happy. And so I think understanding it in those two veins is super, super important. Where do reviews, where do they play into that scenario? Where would you put those and how would you weight number and quality of reviews?

Brandon:

So to me, reviews are weighted a little bit in the algorithm, but not a lot. But what they matter is going to be on the performance. So if your reviews are worse than your competition, you're naturally just going to get less clicks. So your click-through rate's going to be lower and you're going to get less conversions. Your conversion rate's going to be lower, so it's going to impact you on that performance side more than it's going to impact you directly on where you rank.

Brett:

Totally makes sense, and this is one of those virtuous cycles. You get more clicks and you get more conversions, then Amazon's happy, they're going to show it more and the higher you rank and usually the higher your click-through rate is and things like that. So really, really cool. What are some of the things that you think people miss in relationship to the algorithm? Any kind of non-obvious things that are hidden in there that most sellers overlook or most sellers don't pay attention to?

Brandon:

So I think overall people try to write their listing and design their listing to maximize rank, right? This is the goal, but the two mistakes I see people make are going to be that they don't do enough product design and testing of content at all. Even if they think they do a lot, they might make one or two main images, maybe three main images that they test, but they don't spend enough time and effort on the content side. The other side is going to be on the product design altogether. What type of testing did you do with audiences to determine that you have the right to rank higher than the current incumbents, the best sellers that are already out there? Do you know for a fact or do you have a high level of confidence that you're going to outperform the best sellers? Once you come in, now you are competing against someone with lots of reviews, usually a good rating.

You're coming in and you're trying to be the new guy on the block. If you only have a similar performance when you test, let's say you pull a hundred people and it's like 50 50, when they see what the other one has done and the history they have, it's going to be very difficult to beat them if not impossible. So you've got to have a significantly better offer. You've got to have a significantly better design to be able to come into a market and beat them if it's just head-to-head. So the last piece that I think people don't spend enough time on is the keyword research. It's really understanding how many hundreds of keywords there are that drive sales for that product, not just the top five keywords. And so most people don't realize that there are many different ways people will search for a product because we are just a product of our upbringing and what we call something based on our local vernacular. So I'll give you an example, a toiletry bag for example. What do you call a toiletry bag? Do you have any other words or ways that you call it?

Brett:

It's not something I talk about a whole lot, but would a toiletries bag also be like a makeup bag?

Brandon:

So a makeup bag could be, but that would be more geared towards women. So have you ever heard the term DOP kit? No,

Brett:

Never heard of that. There

Brandon:

You go. That's the second or third most popular way to search for a toiletry bag.

Brett:

Wait, spell that for me.

Brandon:

D O P P kit.

Brett:

What parts of the country or world is do

Brandon:

Kit? Midwest, I guess

Brett:

Midwest. Interesting. I'm a Midwest guy. We call it toiletries. We must be like upper crust Midwest or something because I've never heard,

Brandon:

But I'm telling you, tens of thousands of searches a month for DOPP kit. And then you've also got bathroom bag, you've got travel bag, you've got men's travel bag, you've got men's bathroom bag, you've got all these different keywords that, and then you've got all the different material types. You've got leather, you've got any type of bag you've got there, canvas. So this is just an example for toiletry bag alone, you might have a hundred relevant keywords with a significant search volume, and you're really only when you write your listing based on what the research you've done and what you think, you're only going to hit 50, 60% of those keywords, 50 to 60% of that potential search volume is a better way to look at it. So what we've gotten really good at is saying, okay, how do we reverse engineer and find all those different ways people are searching?

How do we find all those keywords? And so there's a tool like Helium 10 that allows you to maybe do a reverse asin. So you can put a product in there and then it'll tell you all the keywords it's ranked for or indexed for and where they're ranked. Now that's helpful, but a product might be indexed for thousands of keywords, but index doesn't mean it's relevant. It just means that you could be on page 15 and doesn't matter. So how do you really start to take that data and make it useful? What we've done is we've started to look at the top 20 or 30 sellers, and then once you combine all of the keywords that all of them are ranked well for, and you eliminate the noise and you add a relevancy formula that helps sort all that out, now you've got just the keywords that drive sales for that product and a score on 'em like is it a loosely relevant or is it highly relevant and is it something I should be building into my title or is it something I should be targeting in the backend?

And so we really start to understand the whole picture, and it all stemmed from a mistake we made. We had a product that we launched and it was a toy that lights up, it's like a Lego type toy with lights inside of it, and it was really cool. I looked at it and it was a plane, it was a train. You could make it into any five or 10 or 15 shapes, and there was a competitor on the market. So I said, okay, well, they're doing well and they're in stores and we could sell that. It's cool. Every kid would want to have this. And we didn't sell more than five units. The problem was that we could not find keywords to rank it for because no one is going to search for Lego and then buy my random step. It's going to be almost impossible to maintain a rank on any Lego keyword because all the Legos are going to

Brett:

Be, you can't mention Lego. Lego is a brand term, so you can't really mention that in your listing.

Brandon:

Yeah, it's very difficult to maintain rank or get ranked or even on P P C. No one's going to click on it because if they search for Lego, they want Lego. So that's the question that I had to start answering, which was before I developed and launched and did anything with a product or even researched or validated or whatever, I had to answer the question, how are the current sellers getting their sales? What are the keywords driving sales? And can I duplicate or beat them? And if I answer those questions, then I'm going to have a very high batting average when it comes to finding, launching and developing products.

Brett:

I really like this and I like the way we're framing it here. I like the way you're framing it. It is kind of two parts. It's one part merchandising. How do you make your product jump off the shelf, so to speak, and make people want it, make sure that it looks unique and it answers that question of, okay, this is the product, this is what I'm hoping for and what I'm wanting, it's that zero moment of truth or first moment of truth that they used to be used on physical retail shelves and how do you make that thing jump off? And a lot of that's going to come back to user testing. So we're going to get into that in a minute. The other part is really SS e o, and that's actually the very first thing I did online was ss e os started doing s e O for Google back in 2004. A lot of similarities between SS e o on Google and on Amazon with a few key differences, but a lot of times we're like, Hey, I just want to rank for toiletries bag. Well, okay, good luck if you're just starting, that's going to take a little bit of time. But there's a lot of money in the long tail and the really long, more random, more specific keywords, there's a lot of money to be made there and things

Brandon:

That, well, not only that, right? I think that a lot of people underestimate those long tail keywords for helping to pad your metrics. We had talked about performance being a major part of your ranking, those long tail keywords that if they're super specific and relevant, you're going to convert much higher on those. So those being blended in, even if it is only a sale a day or a sale every other day, but you've got 50 of those keywords, that extra high conversion rate being averaged in is going to help you rank for those bigger

Brett:

Keywords, those click-through rates and conversion. It's a really high on long tail, which has a compounding effect as well. So that's great. Awesome. So let's talk more about that. So the keyword side of things, the relevancy side of things. So how are you uncovering that? So you're taking top sellers of a given product, cross-referencing what they're ranking for, applying a score, determining what of those keywords is actually moving the needle versus what's not, and then anything else you'd want to add to that, and then where do we go from

Brandon:

There? So the whole thing is once we understand how are they getting their sales and what can we duplicate? And what you'll find is a lot of the best sellers have what we call outlier keywords. These are going to be those generic keywords that you realistically can't duplicate. If you launch a brand new toy, you're not going to come in and rank for toys for three-year-old girls, right? It's just not going to happen. You can try, but you'll just fail miserably. You don't have that foundation of all those other relevant keywords. So what we're finding is that once we see and we can paint the accurate picture of the market and we can understand, okay, these best sellers are selling 6,000 units a month. The next guy's selling 4,000, the next guy's selling 2000, and then all these other guys in the middle are selling 1500 units and they're ranked for 60 to 70% of the search volume relevant search volume.

We see that that's kind of more in line of what we can expect to sell because we're not going to duplicate the success of these best sellers necessarily because they're ranked for almost all of the relevant search volume and they're ranked in the top of those search terms versus being in the 10 to 15 range, which is where you'll be in the first week to two weeks. So we really start to understand what can we realistically expect to sell? How many should we order? What are the keywords that these better sellers are ranked for that we can't duplicate and what can we duplicate? And so it's about painting the picture to make sure it makes sense and understanding if the market's too competitive or saturated or if there's not enough keywords. So really we get to answer all of those questions from good keyword research,

Brett:

Any anecdotes, any stories of, Hey, we uncovered these keywords for this product or for this category, we put them in the listing, we start focusing on it, and this is the impact that made.

Brandon:

Oh, hundreds and hundreds of those. So not just from me but from students or from users. I get sent screenshots on a regular basis where once you lay this out, for example in DataDive, you get what's called the master keyword list. And so it's what it sounds like. You got all the competitors laid across the top, you got all the keywords on the side, and then you got all the ranks. And so if you put your product on there and you're like, oh, wow, I just have this giant hole where I'm just ranked 35 or 55 for these keywords that all share the same root word, the same exact word in them, and you're like, well, what am I doing wrong? And then you go look at your listing, you realize you didn't write it in there, you don't have it in your listing. Amazon's not sure it's relevant.

So all you have to do is unlock that relevancy piece by writing it into your listing. So you might have multiple holes. What we recommend with a revamp is to go in and say, okay, pick one root word that you realize you have a weakness on. Put it in your title. Put the best keyword with that root word in your title and see what happens Within 6, 8, 10 hours, you're going to see a movement in your ranks. You're going to see a movement going up because you've established relevancy and now all of a sudden you had credit in the bank and now you unlocked it. That's the way it works now. Or what you took out of the title was more important, and now you see a downside on some, so you have to change the listing back right away, the title back right away. So we never recommend changing the whole title right away.

If you've got an existing listing, just maybe one keyword at a time, one root word at a time. But I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event at Kevin King's billion dollar seller summit in Austin, and I was using a case study. I was randomly looking at card shuffler one time, and the bestselling card Shuffler was selling a lot more card than everybody else, but there were a few keywords that he was ranked maybe 35, 55, just not ranked well at all. And he was top three for every other keyword. And I was like, okay, well that's a clear sign to me that he's got credit in the bank for those keywords, but Amazon thinks it's not relevant. All of those keywords, the route that they shared was two deck, two deck shuffler, right? Or one was two to four deck. So the thing is he was selling a six deck shuffler that could also shuffle two decks.

I gave the example. I said, look, without a doubt, if this guy goes in, he's got credit in the bank, if he changes and just adds two deck into his title, he's immediately going to rank better for those keywords. And I got off the stage, I walk into the hallway, a guy chases me into the hallway from the audience and says, that's my listing. I said, do me a favor and please change your title tonight. Literally, here's the suggested title that I gave in the talk. He comes back to me the next night, we're out of social after a whole day of audience, he had his team change it. He comes back to me and he shows me a screenshot of 20 different keywords that have gone from either not indexed to top 10 immediately and says, credit

Brett:

In the bank, let's utilize that. Yeah,

Brandon:

He said, we did the math on this. We're going to make over a hundred thousand dollars more profit this year just from that one change.

Brett:

But that's something you wouldn't have thought of because it's a six deck. It's not a two shuffler, but when you understand that, yes, but it'll also shuffle just two decks if you want to do that. And that's what people are looking for and that's how you become relevant and that's how you sell more units. And so that is awesome. So that's the SS e o side. I know we could talk all day about that. There's more resources on your site and your podcast where people can dig into that. So we'll talk about that later. But let's talk about the merchandising piece. And I know this is something you're very passionate about, that a lot of sellers are just trying to sell something without clear differentiation or without understanding what does the marketplace actually want. So what do you recommend when it comes to testing your product and testing some of your merchandising elements like pictures and design features and things like

Brandon:

That? So one of the, after I validate a product that I want to do it, I have to figure out how I'm going to win. So one of my favorite things to do is to work on the design side. And for the last eight months or so, since the beginning of the year, I've been playing with Mid Journey. So Mid Journey as an AI text, two image generator. And so you type what you want it to generate an image of and it pops it out. And so I've realized that the skill that you're going to need moving forward is going to be what they call prompt engineering. It's going to be how do you talk to this AI to have it give you back what you want? And so I've taken two trips to China this year because I've spent so much time doing custom products, and we have a travel brand, we have a toy brand, and so we are just designing a ton of characters and the usual unicorns and princesses and mermaids and dinosaurs and stuff.

So just spending a ton of time developing new characters. And so once I look at the incumbents or the best sellers, I take their product. Now, if I just need to design the character, I design the character, my team puts it on the product, but sometimes I can get the AI to give me the full product already done with the image I want. And so straight out of communicating with this ai with Mid Journey, I can take that image and I can take the main image of the top three sellers and I can go into a product like a software like pfu, and we can ask 50 people, which one would you want to buy? And if I'm getting more than 50% of the votes against the top three bestsellers that are already on the market, I know I've got a slam dunk. And then so

Brett:

I love that tool, by the way. It's an underrated tool. And I know we're talking ai, we're talking a lot about a lot of things, but pick Fu John and Pick, I think hes one of the founders or whatever, but such a simple affordable tool, but yeah, allows you to get feedback from real people on which image do you prefer, which product would you buy? Things like that, that really can save you so much time, so much money, and really just set you up

Brandon:

For success. And just on LinkedIn, I posted a slushy cup. I was in a talk showing my inner circle. I've kept my AI product development stuff kind of more tight because I think it's really going to disrupt the market. If you're not using AI for product development, you're in a bad spot in six months, 12 months, you might not have a business. This is truly how fast I think product development will go moving forward. You can develop products a hundred times faster, a hundred times cheaper, and they will be better. You're going to convert, you're going to have better designs. And so the old style of waiting for a designer to give you back five concepts and then choosing the best one that wasn't really that great anyway is over. And so straight out of mid journey, you're about 90% of the way there. You have your designer clean it up and then make a decent main image out of it, and then you compare it.

And so just in the class where I was showing the strategies around how to prompt the prompt engineering class, I asked for a suggestive product and someone said a slushy cup. And now I made a Spider-Man slushy cup because first of all, I'm not going to get the licensing to make a Spider-Man slushie cup from Disney. Maybe with this cup I could if I send it to them, to the right IP legal team or whoever's in charge of it over there. But it was just as an example, this cup is 10 times better than anything currently being sold on the market, any of the current bestsellers that are crushing. And what I can do,

Brett:

We can show up for those that are watching the video, and then we'll post a link and actually, hey, if you only listen to the show, which is totally fine, by the way, check out the YouTube video, check out the YouTube channel or check out. That's a really good point. The podcast site@omgcommerce.com on your podcast. See, I excited to see this slushy cup. Now I will confess I'm not 100% certain. I know what you mean by slushy cup.

Brandon:

So this is a new product that you free some stuff, then you add some juice and you squish it together. It's like silicone. You squish it together, and what ends up happening is you make it into a little slushy at home. It's like an at-home slushy type thing, but the designs are so generic, just absolutely a generic. So

Brett:

Now as a preview, what we're about to see, this was just AI generated. So you worked with AI through prompts and Mid Journey and that's how you designed this?

Brandon:

Yeah, all I did was say make me a Spider-Man slushie cup. But I did it in a certain way with certain features and prompted it in the right way, but it wasn't that difficult to get to this product.

Brett:

Dude, that's pretty sick. So we got it. For those that are just watching, it's like a closeup of the Spider-Man face mask or the mask. So the eyes are real big. It's got a pretty cool, I can't tell what's going on with the lid actually from my vantage point. But yeah,

Brandon:

There's no lid currently on this. The lid is going to be separate to put on to drink out of, but it shows the slushie spilling over the top.

Brett:

Dude, that's pretty sweet, man. If I was like a eight year old boy, I would totally rock that slushy cup. You're going

Brandon:

To buy that or your parents are going to buy it instead of a generic one. I could charge twice as much as the current bestsellers and they're going to be like, man, I got to get my kid the Spider-Man one. I got to do it. But I'm doing so many products, I've got hundreds of products right now. I'm going back through my catalog. And one of the things that you need to understand also is that I need to go disrupt myself. I'm going back to my current bestsellers and I'm saying that's not going to be good enough six months from now and I'm making 60, 80, a hundred sales a day better

Brett:

You disrupt yourself than somebody else. So you've got to be preemptively thinking this top seller won't be the top seller forever. So what's next?

Brandon:

What is next? And how do I beat myself? And so I have a list of new products we're developing. I have a list of existing products I need to add variations or new heroes and really just update designs on and just keep outwork the competition so that we can scale to that 50 million mark next year.

Brett:

Love it. That's awesome, man. Any other tips or insights or resources on how do we make sure we're really leveraging the design? I think you've mentioned to me something about you've got a new tool that mines reviews from competitors' products and gives you a summary of what's there.

Brandon:

So it's a product brief tool that this is all the work that we would do with developing a product anyway. We need to go in and see what are the features that we need to add into the product. So if I'm handing a product brief to a factory and I say, okay, needs to have these types of zippers, this many pockets, it needs to have this functionality. Let's say a diaper bag for example. It needs to have a cooler pocket in the front. It needs to come with a changing pad, it needs to have stroller straps, it needs to have a security pocket in the back. But the way that I would come to that conclusion is that I would have to spend dozens of hours going through the top 2030 sellers looking at all their reviews, looking at the features that they all have, finding out what people want, what they don't want, reading the questions and the answers.

Every single product you develop, you need to be doing that. But now AI can do that in a matter of minutes for you instead of dozens and dozens of insane hours. So the tool we just released in the DataDive is the AI product brief tool. You select the competitors, you hit a button and it comes back and it spits out all this information. It tells you these are all the features they all claim to have. You can check 'em off and say, okay, I want that one, I want that one, I want that one. These are all the things people say they don't like about it. These are all the things people say they like about it. Here's some suggested improvements that the AI thinks you should make into the product. And the AI gets involved in helping you develop the product

Brett:

Better. It's reading all the negatives in all the positives, and it's making inferences there and it's saying, okay, this is what we would do.

Brandon:

And then even based on what they figured out the product is, they come back and tell you the top eight avatars, the top eight buyer personas that would buy this product and why they buy it, which to me is magical because you're a marketer as well. So you know that you need to trigger someone's buying a part of their brain. Why are they buying this? What is the value to them? What is that trigger to get them to pull the

Brett:

Trigger? And it's one of those things where the more you understand about your customer, the more directly you can speak to them, the more directly you can design for them, the better you'll be able to zero in on the right keywords when you understand that avatar. And that's something that I think a lot of business owners, and I would say Amazon sellers are definitely in this category. You don't really know who your buyer is. You don't really understand them at a deep level. Now I'm curious, how is the AI by looking at that? How are they understanding who the avatars

Brandon:

Are? Look, I don't know how they do it, but it's pretty magical. So it's just inferring based on the product type and then it's knowledge based pulling from its G PTT category,

Brett:

Product type keywords. Look at all that.

Brandon:

Yeah, so it's inferring based on the questions, the answers, the reviews, the type of product, and it just kind of digs through the whole world wide web and says, okay, these are the top eight people that would buy this product pretty insane. And then after you've selected everything you want, you got those suggestions, you hit a button and it generates the brief that you can now hand to your factory and say, this is how you make a much better product than what's on the market.

Brett:

Dang. So going from idea to really doing all the research that you want to do, putting that together really. Now, and you mentioned this with Mid Journey as well, where you're getting a starting point now with AI and then you're refining it, you're getting a starting point here with AI and you're letting it do all the legwork, then you're refining it. We're not just letting AI do all the work, right? It's not ready for that yet. It may never be, but it is very much ready to do the initial grunt work. And then you're refining and polishing and getting ready and then taking action from

Brandon:

There. And all of that is after you've already validated the product from a keyword perspective. So you look at the competition, you understand that you can beat them from a S E O perspective. Now it's just a matter of making a better design.

Brett:

Brandon, this has been awesome. We could dig into each of these topics at link, but we are up against time. So let's do a couple of things. Let's talk about data Dive specifically. And as I mentioned Team O M G, we love DataDive. We use it on the daily in our agency, but how can someone learn more about DataDive and who did you design DataDive for?

Brandon:

I appreciate that. We designed it for ourselves really. So the reality is we were developing these same exact processes to validate products and choose products back in 2016. This is maybe even back as far as 20 16, 20 17 before Helium 10 even was out. We were piecing together keyword data from seller labs and from viral launch. And so we were having to do VLOOKUPs and try to match keyword search volumes, try to understand who was ranked for what and what keywords were driving sales. And this is all after we made those mistakes. And really I was like, before I pull the trigger on another product, I want to know how I'm going to sell it. That's it. That was like, and I need to know that. And that's where we started. So then once Helium 10 came out and Cerebro came out, we started pulling. They allowed you to start pulling 10 competitors at once.

We would pull that raw data and start manipulating the data. We did that for every single product that we've developed. And then I started teaching in 2018 with seller systems and we started teaching how to manipulate the data and how to create this master keyword list manually where this changes is. A few years ago, two and a half years ago now, my now C T O joins, he was formerly the c e O of the largest development firm out of Romania. And he's semi-retirement, starting a business in retirement and stumbles across me and says, I'll learn how to sell on Amazon. Now I can do it from anywhere and I don't want to work 90 hours a week anymore. But the first thing he says to me when he watches the first class, he dms me. He's like, why is this not a software? This needs to be a software. There's a lot of work that could just be automated. He's like, with your permission, I want to hack together like a Google sheet that has macros that can just do this automatically. And I am not looking to make money on it all. Let the community use it as well. I said, yeah, for sure. We have an abundance mentality. We're all about it for sure. It leaks out of my inner circle. Within two weeks we had 2000 people using it.

Brett:

We might be onto something. I

Brandon:

Said, okay, well we've got product market fit. I said, maybe we should put some money behind this. And so here I am. I'm nearly $3 million invested into this software now, and it does

Brett:

So many people, I don't think people fully understand because we tried to build just a small tool for our agency. Dude, it's so expensive. So yes, software and SaaS maybe may feel expensive to some people, but dude, it takes immense amount of capital to build it and then to maintain it. And yeah, so hats off to you guys for doing that.

Brandon:

No, I appreciate it. Yeah, luckily we're blessed. We do well with our brands. We do well with the coaching, and so we've just been pouring our extra money into the software to keep building it, bootstrapping it, but I'm also impatient, and so I don't do anything unless I'm going to do it big. So I said, I'm not going to have five programmers and take three years to do this. We ramped up to over 20 programmers and really have just been hammering out tools and staying on top of it. And so the fundamentals are, it gives you that master keyword list. It has a product scorecard to give you a quantifiable number as to what the potential risk of doing a product is. So it helps you look at things like R O I, how good the images are for the competitors, the SS e o of the competitors, just all the different elements you'd want to answer before you pull the trigger on a product.

And it gives you a quantifiable score whether you should move forward with that product. We have a listing writer that takes into account the algorithm and gives you a quantifiable score of your rank potential. So we think it's the best in the market. The new AI tool we just launched there yesterday as well is we tap the AI to write your bullets, but we do it in a way where we're telling the AI and we're telling you which keywords to make sure you still include. So anyone can just throw a listing or ask chat G B T to write their listing. But that's not going to rank for all the reasons we talked about earlier in the show, which is you need to know what keywords to put where and in what order. And so you need to know the data first, and then you need to have the AI write it in a way that also incorporates those keywords.

So we did it in that order. The AI tool now writes your bullets and does it to maximize rank. We also have some P P C tools. We have a really unique way of doing P P C as well. We group our P P C keywords based on root word. So we want to make sure that they share a common word or phrase because what we found is that keywords that share a common word or phrase will perform similarly. So if I'm talking about all the keywords that have gray diaper bag and there's a lot of long tail keywords that have gray diaper bag, I'll put five of those together, those all should still perform pretty similarly. So I'm not getting something performing good and something performing bad in the same ad group. And what that does is it helps boost the quality score of that campaign. It lowers your cost per click faster. It's just a much better way to optimize as well. So the software helps you do that. Then we've got a dashboard. We've got a keyword tracker that's in beta. We've got a dashboard and some P P C tools coming out as well. So a lot of development, a lot of things we're doing

Brett:

Totally worth checking out. So DataDive tools, get it, data dive tools, check that out. Also seller systems.com. If you're interested in coaching or learning, I would

Brandon:

Love to have your audience get a discount code with your code.

Brett:

Let's do it, man. Let's do a discount code. Why not?

Brandon:

So for anyone listening, if you use the code O M G, you will get $50 off per month on DataDive Sweet, and you will get a thousand dollars off if you join my mastermind. The inner circle, we've got over a thousand members in there, over 407 and eight figure sellers all helping each other. Weekly calls, five to 10 live classes a month, lots of live events in person. So

Brett:

That is a deal. $50 off a month for DataDive and then a thousand dollars off seller systems code O M G, write that down, utilize that.

Brandon, been a ton of fun, man, super informative. I'm all jazzed up as a result of this conversation. Thanks Brandon, and thank you for tuning in. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on this show? If you haven't done it already, leave us that review on iTunes. Also connect with me on the socials. I'm getting pretty active on LinkedIn, almost daily posting on LinkedIn. Brandon's a good fall on LinkedIn too, so check out Brandon there as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍