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[ BDSN ] 🔭 Why sellers dumber than you are rich

[ BDSN ] 🔭 Why sellers dumber than you are rich

September 05, 2024

Listen to Kevin read this newsletter

STUMP BEZOS

Axios recently reported that each Meta employee represents 7-figures in revenue. How much do you think it is?

[ Answer at bottom of email ]

🐕 It’s 3:16am on a Thursday morning.

I’m in the lobby of the 24-hour animal hospital in South Austin, anxiously waiting for news from the operating room.

Finally the vet appears and solemnly says I have two choices.

I can either put my little doggie girl Zoe down, or try a $5,000 emergency surgery with no promise of success.

She may die if there is a complication, and I was told to say my goodbyes.

I had rushed Zoe to the vet because at midnight I had let her out for a bedtime pee. But she couldn’t pee. She was hopping around the yard like a rabbit trying.

She had bladder stones completely blocking her urinary tract. It’s painful and can quickly become lethal to a dog as urine backs up into other organs.

The operation a couple years ago was successful, and she is full of life now, wiggling her tail and wanting to say hello to every stranger she meets.

Oh, and I did get a souvenir bottle of stones as a parting gift. $5K well spent.

As I left, I vowed I would never give Zoe a cheap treat that could cause stones.

I told you this true story to lead us into today’s Billion Dollar Strategy (below), which I am also sharing in more detail on a live webinar tomorrow.

Welcome Travis Zigler to the Billion Dollar Dream 100

Every month I announce a new member of the Billion Dollar Dream 100. These are the people you should follow and get to know. They’re announced in no particular order.

Dr. Travis Zigler is today’s inductee into the Billion Dollar Dream 100.

I first met Travis in 2016 in a private mastermind organized by the #2 affiliate for Amazing Selling Machine (another Dream 100 member, Brian Johnson, got me in - thanks Brian).

While everyone else was looking for the latest hack or black hat tactic to rank better, Dr. Zigler was building audiences and a real brand. He created blogs that solved pain points, drove traffic to them, then directed the readers to his products on Amazon. He was crushing it.

The company was called Eye Love. He met his wife at The Ohio State University where they were both studying to be optometrists (a year apart).

They opened a private eye clinic in the southeast after graduation and started a failed Amazon product line selling polarized sunglasses.

But they kept noticing a constant problem with dry eye for their clients in the eye clinic. The available drugs were expensive. So they developed a cheaper solution.

Their clients loved it. And so did the rest of the world when they launched the drops on Amazon, to the tune of $450,000 per month.

The company was called Eye Love (they also bought and rolled in another company in 2020 called MediViz).

The Eye Love name ruffled the feathers of Shire, who was running TV commercials featuring Jennifer Anniston and using the phrase “Eye Love.” The Ziglers fought back and Shire eventually offered to settle.

The Ziglers sold the business in 2021 to Acumen Health Holdings, and are now focusing on their life’s work and genuinely helping other sellers.

It’s about more than just money for the Zigler family. Every year they do mission trips to places like Jamaica, Peru, and Ecuador to provide eye care for hundreds in impoverished villages.

Dr. Travis is also passionate about helping entrepreneurs achieve freedom using Amazon. He loves helping them develop strategies about PPC, DSP and Attribution.

So he founded Profitable Pineapple Ads to help other sellers solve their PPC pains and grow their business. That business is now booming as well.

Travis has won several awards (and bags of cash) at the in-person events for his hacks and presentations. He is also one of the Dream 100 experts advising other sellers next weekend at BDSS Market Masters in Austin.

Now, just imagine what you’re missing not being in Austin!

You will be challenged to find another human being as good as Travis and his wife Jenna in the Amazon space.

How can you turn a common dog treat into a luxury item that stands out in a sea of mediocre and commoditized products?

When I first started selling Bully Sticks for dogs on Amazon, most sellers sold a pack of 30 treats for around $30.

I manually analyzed the reviews of the top sellers (in the days before AI or software tools did it for you). I discovered people wanted USA raised meat, sticks that were not “hollow” from stretching, and treats that did not stink or leave a stain on the floor or couch after Fido finished it off.

Most don’t know this canine delicacy is a cow penis. “Bully Sticks” is the phrase you use with polite company. They come in 6 inch or 12 inch variations (kinda like what you see every January at the AVN show in Las Vegas).

I found a classically trained French chef who made bully sticks with a 15-step natural process from USA-bred bulls. No stink, no icky drip, no stains - and made in the good old USA.

They weren’t cheap. No way could I sell 30 for 30 dollars.

So what did I do?

I sold a box of three 12” sticks for $54.95, or five 6” sticks for $49.95.

I sold A LOT OF THEM.

One proud pet dad re-ordered 72 times, and subscribe-and-save was 🔥.

Amazon IS NOT always about the lowest price. You can CRUSH IT in some niches by being the most expensive.

Did I generate more revenue and have a better BSR than the top sellers?

No way.

But I took home more money (the kind that counts).

Yes ma’am. You read that right. Less gross sales and a worse BSR = more total in my pocket in this case, other than the guys at the very top who often had to deal with shady tactics and competitors f-ing with them.

Could I rank on page one for the search term “bully sticks” - only for a few days when I did a launch (back then with Viral Launch or Zonblast).

But I was in the top results for terms like “Bully Sticks No Odor,” “Premium Bully Sticks” and “Bully Sticks Made in the USA.”

“Shoppers on Amazon Purchase Pictures - not Products.”

Four key ways I made this product successful:

1) Product differentiation

2) Premium packaging

3) Exceptional listing images and graphics (including cartoons)

4) Knowing my avatar (pet parents who treat their dog like a human child and want to spoil them at any cost).

Here’s an influencer video created before it was cool to do so. Be sure to watch until he smells it!

🕵🏽 HOW to DIFFERENTIATE YOUR PRODUCTS

Are you looking to stand out in a crowded marketplace?

Join me tomorrow, September 6th at 11 AM PST for the latest FT Monthly Webinar. You'll learn how to market and differentiate your products in saturated marketplace.

In this exclusive complimentary one-hour webinar, I’ll share strategies using my own products on the following:

Product Differentiation
Innovation and marketing
Differentiation - How to turn a commodity into a brand

Register here today so you don’t miss it tomorrow

📺 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS

This video was 100% created by AI using prompting. The technology will only getter better – and FAST. What’s coming in AI within the next two years is going radically change what you can do to market your business and serve your customers.

🔭 YOU GOTTA SEE THIS TOO

You don’t have to be smart to make big money!

According to a Swedish study, the top 5% of earners in the world are slightly less intelligent than those just below them on the economic ladder.

In this video, Steve Chou breaks down exactly why people who are likely dumber than you are killing it in business.

Then, at the end, he shares the secret of success that he learned from running my own businesses.

Smart People …

Tend to rationalize
Are afraid of looking stupid
Overestimate risk
Never think they know enough

Send products to Micro-Influencers using the platform Stack Influence which automates influencer collaborations at scale (get thousands of collabs per month).

Brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and Farmacy have been able to get to #1 page positioning on Amazon and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13X in as little as 2 months.

🤑 Pay influencers only with products
🚀 Increase external traffic Amazon sales
📸 Get full rights image/video UGC

Increase your listings search positioning before Oct Prime Day is upon us!

Click here now to get 10% OFF by signing up before Oct Prime Day

🌎 STATS YOU SHOULD KNOW

🔎 ENHANCE GOOGLE TRENDS for BETTER INSIGHTS

Find product niches for Amazon FBA and Shopify using Glimpse. Successful e-commerce sellers know many of the best products succeed or fail because of the underlying wave (think air fryer, massage gun, etc.)

Glimpse’s Google Trends Chrome Extension makes the default Google Trends experience 100x more powerful by adding enriched data and insights.

Glimpse lets you see absolute search volume in Google Trends, get alerts on trending topics, and find trending searches in any category. Additional features include: • Google Trends search volume data (real-time): see exactly how many searches there for any keyword.

The most comprehensive and real-time list of people-also-search longtail keywords (ie: goldmines) - much more important now in capturing consumer intent accurately with COSMO and Rufus integration on the Amazon SERP.
Discover new trending topics in any niche • Export Google Trends to Google Sheets and CSV
Set Google Trends alerts: get alerted when a topic starts trending
Keyword difficulty, CPC, competition statistics
Real-time keyword search volume

📻 BEST of AMAZON SELLER PODCASTS

I trained a battalion of AI robots to listen to 50 Amazon-related podcasts every week and share just the good parts with you.

Here are some awesome nuggets from late August: