Branding Blitz

I've finished my first week of sales and am ready (and excited!) to report the results of that first week.  Toward the end of that first 7 days (on day 6) was a special promotion Amazon ran called Prime Day where a ton of extra traffic poured over Amazon's website.  Even though I wasn't one of the deals being promoted by Amazon, I aimed to harness some of the extra traffic with my PPC campaigns. For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/10/ or see below. --- Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 10 of the Branding Blitz!   That's right, we're in episode 10 of this podcast! This is still new – we're still at the very beginning of this story – but it feels like a pretty significant milestone to get to double digits. It might not seem like much, but sometimes you have to stop and appreciate those little steps that you take along the way to get to the big goals.   Man, has it been an exciting week here! There has been a ton of stuff going on both on a personally and with the business.   I hope this week has been exciting for your business as it has for mine... and perhaps less exciting for your personal life or at least hope you're dealing with a less stressful kind of excitement.   Trying to prepare for a cross country move when you feel this weak is not an fun kind of exciting. I have to say though, my wife has been a superhero with all of this doing the majority of the packing all while taking care of our daughter... and taking care of me too. Unfortunately, she's having to bear the brunt of it; because, in any given day, I generally spend an hour or so at most outside of my room, which we've got closed up to try to keep it as climate controlled as possible. I never thought I would actually miss doing household chores...   Anyway, in the midst of all this, it's been great to have some positive and encouraging things going on with this new business.   When I closed out episode 9, I had sold 2 units of my main product – that was day 1. Since I'm expecting this to be a gradual build-up of sales as I move up rankings, I was excited to start off with a baseline of 2 sales the first day.   That was a Friday. In my past experience, weekends have tended to do poorly for online sales. I don't know if that is true across the board or if it is niche specific. What I experience this first weekend could indicate this assumption is going to hold true, but I really don't have enough data to say for sure yet.   On Saturday I held steady with 2 sales and then Sunday I dropped to 1 sale – again, no big deal. Fluctuations like that are expected especially in this early stage and I didn't expect the weekend to be a big sales time to begin with.   Then Monday came and I sold 6 units. Not bad at all considering I'd sold 5 total the previous 3 days, and it made for a nice start for the week. I had a couple of people ordering multiple units – which was encouraging to see.   Tuesday, again I stayed fairly stable and sold 5 units which brought my total for the first 5 days up to 16 units. Having never launched a product before and knowing this wasn't a super high volume product I was super excited to be able to say I had had at least 1 sale each day so far – let alone to get up to 5-6 per day so fast.   This is when the anticipation really began to build for Wednesday. I've been seeing Amazon promoting Prime Day. I'd seen people mention it in a couple of Facebook groups. I don't have a TV in my room, but I've heard they were hammering it pretty hard with television commercials.But I'd really just been focused on getting my product launched. I hadn't put much thought into how it would effect me. To be honest, I think I really had tried not to get my hopes up and was expecting to maybe be selling 1-2 units per day and not really benefit from the traffic.   But when I saw that I was getting 5-6 sales a day, and realized that the PPC was converting well and would allow me to grab some of the extra traffic, I started to get excited... but I still wasn't really sure what to expect.   When I woke up on Wednesday, I think I had 4 sales already. By noon I had matched my best day so far with 6 sales.   I've noticed that I don't seem to normally get sales between about noon and 6pm. I'm guessing that's just a slow traffic time because it's between lunch time and the end of the work day.Sales did slow down during the afternoon on Wednesday, but they didn't stop completely, they kept on periodically ticking in.   They picked up again in the mid-evening, before slowing down again. They had slowed to what seemed like a complete stop at 15, but I had one late order come in at the end of the day and that's where I ended my first Prime Day with 16 units sold.   That felt like a pretty cool place to land because it was about 3 times what it looked like my average weekday starting out was going to be. AND even cooler was that it exactly doubled the total number of units I had sold up to that point. How cool is that to be able to say I doubled my total lifetime sales for that product in a single day! Honestly, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect this to become more of a normal day for this product over time, but it was pretty exhilarating to be able to sell that many units just 6 days in! I'll need to build up more organic search rankings before I regularly get that many sales in a day.   I had started selling in the middle of the day on Friday so it's possible I missed some morning sales, but if you count that as a full day that means I had one more day until I closed out my first week of selling this product. I was curious to see how extra bump received on Wednesday carried forward.   It's about 2 AM here in Oklahoma right now and I'm doing this because I can't sleep – but that also means it's just ticked over to Friday morning according to Amazon. I finished Thursday selling 5 more units of my main product.   I'm not sure if that means the sales yesterday didn't give me much more momentum, or if Thursdays are going to be a slower day, or if I just haven't seen the affect of the sales yesterday yet since they're still shipping out and my BSR is jumping around. My organic rankings probably haven't caught up yet either.   Anyway, it wasn't a bad day either way. It stayed on par with Monday and Tuesday. But something even more interesting happened today. I sold one of my secondary products. I launched the two other products along with this one. They went live at the same time, but I have done no PPC. In fact I haven't promoted them AT ALL. I wanted to really just focus on my main product at first before starting to promote those. I can't imagine they're ranking very well for anything in the search results, but apparently someone somewhere in North Carolina took the time to dig down to some bottom page of the search results and buy one of them. I know it's just one sale, but that has me pretty excited about the potential these secondary products may hold. Could they be more valuable products than I originally expected? I guess we'll find out in time...   So I closed out my first 7 days by selling 37 units of my main product and 1 unit of what I guess I'll call product 2A. I'll count that as a success for my first week for sure.   I've noticed a couple of interesting things in this first week.   I know the PPC sales reporting lags, but I was under the impression that it normally updated the sales from PPC when an order ships. But, if that is true I am getting some organic sales already. Amazon has shipped 30 units so far and my PPC report only accounts for 13 of them. So that's less than half of my orders accounted for. So either the PPC reports are even more delayed than I realized or I'm showing up in organic results more than I realized. I've peaked at some of the searches that I thought could be delivering some traffic, but I haven't honestly found anything major that I rank highly for. So maybe I just need to wait to see if my PPC report updates.   I've also been curious to see if people would order multiples of my main product, and it's great to see they already are. In fact, it seems fairly common. I am a little surprised how common it is because I already have over twice the quantity of my main competitor. But I already have several orders where people have purchased 2 or even 3 units. This shows that there may be some potential to add a variation with greater quantity that is a higher price but still cheaper than buying two of these. And I'd make more money off of one unit of those than two of these so everyone wins. I'd been considering doing that eventually anyway, but it's pretty cool to already have confirmation that this may be a good idea.. but the first priority is establishing the rankings for this product.   The other interesting and kind of frustrating thing is that over half of my inventory still isn't available for sale. It was delivered to Amazon's warehouse on July 6th. But it still hasn't been checked in. Both UPS and Amazon show it was delivered, so the box has been scanned in at their warehouse they just haven't processed it for some reason...   That box happens to have been the largest of the 3 shipments by quite a bit and accounts for 222 of the 400 units I sent in. Not to mention also over half of the secondary products as well. Obviously this hasn't been an issue yet, but it's a bit concerning so I chatted with Seller Support today and they said they'd put in a ticket to have it investigated.   Either way, I'm already thinking about my first inventory re-order. I don't want to feel like I have to log on and place an order ASAP when I get to Idaho. I'd like to have a bit of cushion and not have to worry too much about it. So I may try to place an order before I leave so it will get there a week or so after I do and I've got some flexibility in how quickly I get it to Amazon. Or of course if sales really pick up then I'll have it there and ready to get out right away!   Anyway, that's my first week. If you're selling on Amazon already, I'd love to hear about how your first week went. Even if you haven't gotten that far yet, what are your expectations? Fear? Excitement? Wherever you're at, leave me a comment under this post at brandingblitz.com/10 or shoot an email to jr@brandingblitz.com!   And if you have a question you'd like to ask, head over to brandingblitz.com/ask and drop me a line there!   If you've listened to previous episodes of this show, you probably already know I'm going to ask – have you subscribe yet? If not, why not head over to iTunes and subscribe to Branding Blitz right now? And while you're there, could you leave me a review? Just like a review on Amazon, iTunes uses the reviews to help guide people to quality content – and I'd love your feedback.     That's it for this show, I'll catch you next time on episode 11 of the Branding Blitz!

One last thing needed to be done before I could start promoting my product on Amazon... I had to decide what my initial sales price would be.  Generally, I would recommend doing that ahead of time...  In any case, once that was done I was ready to launch my PPC campaign(s) and get those first sales rollling in! For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/9/ or see below. --- Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 9 of the Branding Blitz!   Let's go ahead and jump right in here. At the end of episode 8, I mentioned that my products were ready to go live on Amazon. And it's true, the listings were live and the products were available for sale, but there was one last thing I needed to decided before I could start promoting the product.   Believe it or not, I got this far without deciding what price I wanted to start out selling the product for. I had put some consideration into the price I wanted to eventually sell at, but I planned to start at a lower price so that I could build up my sales velocity more quickly and start ranking organically for some keywords so I can get some non-paid traffic.   I mentioned before that the main product is a low priced product which only works because there is such low competition and I can get it so inexpensively. I'll have to do some testing to see what prices the market can handle, but I don't expect it to go above $10. It's a consumable product which I can eventually add variations of with larger quantities and that should be able to sell over $10, but this initial offering probably won't.   I'm okay with that though because my TOTAL product cost including shipping from China, the packaging, the extra business cards I had to get for labels, and shipping to Amazon comes just under 60 cents per unit. So a $10 sale would net about $5.35 cents profit.   All that said, my initial goal is to scoop up as many sales as possible even if I'm only making a marginal profit. Once I'm getting traffic from the regular search results and not just the paid advertising, I'll begin to gradually raise my prices. But I had to figure out where to start at.   I figured a good place to start was by looking at my main competitor. They are merchant fulfilled not FBA – which means it isn't elligible for free shipping. So I took their base price and added their shipping cost to it and tried to just match their price – even though I'm pretty confident my product will be perceived as more valuable.   I ran into a little snag with that plan because at under $6, my product got flagged as an add-on item. Which meant it wouldn't have even been available to purchase at all unless you placed a larger order – I forget if it's $25 or $35... but it doesn't really matter, I didn't want that restriction.   I don't think Amazon has ever clearly defined what qualifies something as an add-on item, but one of the factors is a low price, so I began to play around with the price a bit. Finally I landed at $6.25 per unit. This is less than a dollar more than my main competitor while clearly showing more value because my product is a larger quantity and it was a high enough price that it became prime eligible. So I was confident I would be able to snag some market share at this price.   I set it up so that this was a “sale” price. So it has the “List price” which is marked out and below it is my normal price which is a little lower – that is also marked out. Then finally below that in red it shows the sale price of $6.25 and tells how much money they're saving by getting it at the current price rather than paying full retail.   I net about $2.11 per unit sold at this price, so substantially lower than I'd like eventually, but gives me enough room to do a little bit of lightweight advertising to start generating some sales.   Speaking of generating sales... now that I'd determined what I felt was an optimal starting sale price, I was ready to set up my PPC campaigns. I set up three separate campaigns.   The first campaign I set up was just an automatic campaign. This lets Amazon choose some keywords it thinks are a good fit and start promoting you on those.   The second campaign were the obvious keywords I could think of regarding my product. Think about what you would type in if you were searching for your product. In fact start slowly typing some of those into the search bar on Amazon. They have a predictive text feature which tries to guess what you might be looking for as you type – and sometimes it can give some helpful hints of different things people might type in for your product. Add those to your campaign. Think of different words you could substitute or different ways you could describe the product.   For the third campaign, I went to the Google Keyword Planner. It's a free tool Google provides to help people set up AdWords campaigns. And one of the features allows you to put in a webpage and let Google scan it and decide what it thinks might be relevant keywords. I simply put in the URL for the product listing and downloaded the list of what it came up with and put that straight into the PPC campaign on Amazon.   Some of the suggestions it came up with weren't all that helpful like, “where are the amazon distribution centers,” I doubt anyone is ever going to search that on Amazon and click the link to my product. A bunch of the suggestions were spot on, and some of them were related, but I'm not sure how effective they'll be.   But at this point, you really don't need to do a lot of filtering because the goal of this is to see what keywords are successful and sometimes it's not the main ones you think will be. Sometimes it's the more obscure indirectly related ones that convert especially well.   So I'll run this for a while without filtering out the bad ones. Once I've gotten enough results to see that something is either costing way too much per click or isn't converting then I'll take it out. If something is doing really well I may increase my bid for it – although I think I've got it set where I have a page-one bid for most of the relevant search terms.   It was Friday, July 10th, 2015 when I got this all set up, my first product went live and I began advertising. Within a couple of hours from the time I set up the PPC campaigns, I had received my first sale – I could officially say my new brand had a product selling on Amazon. And I had spent 88 cents on 3 clicks at that point – less than half of my profit margin sounded pretty good when I would have been happy to break even. Later that day I got a second sale and the PPC campaign was still well within ideal limits.   So I ended my first day live having sold 2 units and made a dollar or so on each one. Not quite time to begin planning my retirement, but I have to say it felt like a good start as we headed into my first weekend selling this new product. I was and am anxious to see what the coming days and weeks hold.   I also realized that day that Amazon was promoting July 15th as “Prime Day”. I obviously am not a big enough seller to be included in the sales they're promoting, but it should still garner me some extra traffic since they're promoting this thing so heavily. Should be interesting to see what happens – I'll report back once those numbers are in!In the meantime, there's a full transcript of this episode available on brandingbliz.com/9 I'd love it if you stopped over there and left a comment about the show. I really appreciate your feedback!   Another way you can let me know you're enjoying this show is by letting me know what questions you have about selling on Amazon, sourcing a product, or developing a brand. To do that, head over to brandingblitz.com/ask and leave me a question.     Finally, would you subscribe to the show on iTunes? Each new episode comes with a complete 100% moneyback satisfaction guarantee. And hey, while you're there could you go ahead and leave me a review? I'd really appreciate it!That's it for this show, I'll catch you next time on episode 10 – that's right, we're headed for double digits on episode 10 of the Branding Blitz!

Before I could send the product to Amazon I had to do something a get a little creative with the packaging.  I had planned ahead for this so had everything we needed when we got back from our trip.  I also had to shootsome pictures before the listing could go live. When I was ready to ship the product in to Amazon, I was amazed by how inexpensive Amazon makes it to ship to their warehouses. For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/8/ or see below. --- Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 8 of the Branding Blitz! Life has been pretty crazy trying to take care of my health while juggling this business startup and trying to prepare for a move across the country! I haven't been able to move as quickly as I'd like with this business, but for everything that has been going on, I'm really excited about the progress I've been able to make. I've got some exciting news to share over the next couple of podcasts.   Today, I'd like to talk about what it took to get my inventory live and selling on Amazon after receiving the shipment from China.   First, since all 3 products came loosely packed in the same box, we had to sort them into separate piles. This was easy to do with the main product, but since the two secondary products look very similar it made the process take longer than it should have. Anytime I order these two products at the same time in the future, I will make sure to request that all the units of each style are bagged or bundled somehow to keep them separate and this should save a fair amount of time sorting. That's one of those little things that didn't occur to me before hand, but it is definitely worth keeping in mind if you're considering ordering variations of the same product.   Ultimately, they need to be sorted because Amazon wanted us to ship to multiple warehouses and they specify how many of each product you ship to each one so we had to count them out. But there was an additional reason we needed them sorted. Since I was ordering off of AliExpress rather than Alibaba as I originally intended, the vendor was not prepared to do custom packaging.   They did offer to print labels for me, and I nearly took them up on it, but I insisted on seeing a picture of the labels ahead of time and they were very low quality. I'm most of the barcodes seemed unscannable. If you're working directly with a manufacturer or even a vendor that is used to customizing orders, this shouldn't be a big issue. But if like me you find yourself working with a vendor that isn't experienced with even basic customization, you will need to find some other way of labeling your product.   I do have a label printer, but all I have are really big shipping labels that would be too big for these products. And I figured rather than spend money on the proper size of label and still have to do the work of printing and sticking all of the labels, I might as well look into getting something done for me.   I looked into several companies online that print labels or stickers, but in low quantities the prices didn't really make sense. Still definitely within my margins, but I wanted to keep looking for a better option.   That day, I got a coupon in the mail from Vistaprint. I'm honestly not a huge fan of Vistaprint... I've ordered from them a few times and the quality has always been fine, but I think just the way they push you really hard to buy pointless things like a mousepad with your logo on it bugs me... just let me order what I want to order without having to click through seven pages of advertisements...   All that aside, I realized that a business card was about the right size for my products, and that coupon made them a pretty darn good deal – I think pretty much anytime you Google “Vistaprint coupons” they'll have some kind of sale going on.   So I bit the bullet, designed some quick labels to fit on a business card, uploaded my art, clicked through several pages advertising useless stuff I could buy from them, and got 2,000 business cards headed my way. 1,000 for the main product and 500 for each of the other two.   I did all that a couple of days after placing the order with my vendor, so all of this arrived while we were out of town visiting family and was ready to go once we got back.   So once we had finished sorting the products, it was time to start labeling them. I've got a pretty nice stapler that doesn't jam very often, so it actually went really quickly to staple these business cards to the product packaging and it even turned out looking pretty nice. I definitely want to get something set up where all the packaging is done in China and I can skip this process on my end, but for now I'm really happy with how it turned out and it wasn't as much of a time sink as I feared it might be.   By the way, if you happen to have experience working with a manufacturer in China specifically to get a zippered plastic bag with a custom label printed on it, shoot me an email to jr@brandingblitz.com – I'd love to get a recommendation for a manufacturer you were satisfied with.   Once that was all done, it was time for the pictures. I already created the listings back before I ordered the products so I could get the FNSKU barcodes ready. But since I didn't have the final product in hand I hadn't taken care of the pictures yet. I didn't want to stall the process while I worked on that, so I went ahead and shipped the products to Amazon and held on to a couple of each product figuring I'd have time to work on the images while UPS delivered my packages.   The shipping process was fairly simple, they told me how many of each product to ship where. They had us split it into 3 shipments. So what came from China in one small box left in 3 small boxes, and in total to ship all 3 products, 600 total units, to 3 different warehouses it cost a grand total of $15.51 – I did the math on that dividing it out by the weight of the different products and it cost about 1.5 cents per unit for the main product and about 4.8 cents per unit for the secondary products. That was great news because I'd been allowing for 30 cents per unit shipping cost. I think I snapped a picture of those three boxes sitting on the porch waiting to get picked up – I'll try to post that along with the show notes at brandingblitz.com/8   Quick tip: I don't live anywhere near a UPS store or any other kind of UPS dropoff point. And I'd have to pay a fee to have them come out and pick up a package. But I've found that the drivers are willing to pick up a package if they're already out for a delivery. So it was cheaper for me to order something inexpensive on Amazon like a $4 storybook for my kid and have it delivered via Prime 2-day shipping. That gave me a couple days to do the necessary prep work for the shipment, I saved some money on scheduling a delivery, and got a free book for my 11 month old daughter who seems to think these cardboard books taste like candy. I'm not 100% sure if this is actually a UPS policy for their drivers to pick up packages along their delivery route or if I've just been lucky in the past, so your mileage may vary... but it's worked so far for me.   Anyway after shipping them out, it was time to take some pictures. I happen to have access to decent lighting an a good camera and have moderate knowledge of how to get the effect I want out of it. So I took the pictures myself. To be honest most modern cell phones have a camera that can take really hi-resolution photos. They don't give you as much control over depth of focus, shutterspeed, etc, but if you know what you're doing you can actually get a pretty decent picture out of a cellphone.   That said the pictures are one of the biggest selling tools you have – and if you're not confident with a camera, it is probably worth getting them professionally done – even if you are confident with a camera, this is one more thing you can outsource and not have to touch personally. When someone is browsing the search results your main image is the first tool you have to grab their attention. And once they click on your product images have the opportunity to convert to a sale by showing the quality of the product, and even preemptively answering any common questions the customer might have. If it's common for a customer to ask if your product has a certain feature, don't make them read the description or even the bullet-points for that. Show it clearly in one of the product images. Not everyone will look at the additional images, but for those that do it can be a huge help in conversions.   My main competitor has 3 poorly done pictures which was one of several reasons I felt confident I would be able to compete with him. I made sure to take several shots of each of my products. Size is an important aspect of my main product, so I made sure to show something in the picture that could be used as a reference for scale. Your main product image is basically supposed to just be the product on a white background, but you've got a bit more flexibility with the secondary images.   I got some pretty good images, but I'll probably have some professional ones done down the road. I think these are good enough that there are more efficient ways to focus my resources than trying to get better pictures... but there is improvement that can be made down the road once the business gets into more of a rhythm.   By the time I was done taking and editing all the photos, the inventory had already been delivered to Amazon's warehouse and much of it had already been checked in... some of it still hasn't but enough has that I was ready to do a quick review and edit of the descriptions and bullets then upload my images and let the listings go live!   In the next episode, I'll talk about the next steps I took and the results I've started to see.   In the meantime, if there's a full transcript of this show available at brandingblitz.com/8   And as always if you have a question you'd like to ask me head over to brandingblitz.com/ask and leave me an audio recording or just drop a comment with your question. I'd also love any feedback you have about the show.   And if you're enjoying hearing following along with my journey would you do me a favor and subscribe to the show? Just head over to iTunes and search for Branding Blitz to find the show and click subscribe. While you're there, it's be great if you're willing to leave a review. That would help me get back in the good graces of iTunes after not releasing an episode for a little while, and I'd really appreciate it!     That's it for this show, I'll catch you next time on episode 9 of the Branding Blitz!

I'm back from my trip to Idaho with some good news regarding my health.  AND while I was gone, the first shipment of inventory arrived from China and it's time to get things rolling.  I also discuss how my things shifted from my original plan after running into the Hazmat issue I talked about before. For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/7/ or see below. --- Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 7 of the Branding Blitz! If you're subscribed to the show, you've probably noticed a break since the last episode was released. If you're not subscribed to the show, you should probably pause this episode and go subscribe. Don't worry, I'll wait for you. Anyway that gap was due to a number of things. The biggest is that the day after recording episode 6 I went on a trip to Idaho to visit some of my wife's family. We'd been planning this trip for a while and in some ways it turned into an inconvenient time to travel with my health issues and trying to start up this business. But it actually ended up being a providential blessing. The dry air up in Idaho made a HUGE difference in my health. I was able to breath again, I was able to go outside and enjoy the fresh air. I wasn't completely cured, but it made a big enough difference that I was actually able to do some light exercises which I believe will help build up muscles overtime to gradually pull my spine back into shape. So that was encouraging... in fact it was encouraging enough that we made the decision to move there later this month.While I was in Idaho, I also got a call from the pulmonologist with the date for my appointment. After waiting several weeks to even get something scheduled, we knew we wanted to stay in Oklahoma long enough to have the tests done and see what the pulmonologist has to say about the results. So in a little under two weeks I have my appointment, and then I've got some people coming to help load up a truck the next couple of days after that, and off we go to Idaho. So part of the delay with a new episode has been due to planning and working toward that move. But I also got hit pretty hard with breathing issues after we got back. Luckily, I had a handful of good days where I was able to get some important things done, but then I ended up spending several days in bed. So I'm just now getting caught up enough to record another episode. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, I had a box of inventory from China waiting for me when I got back. And I was able to get that all checked out, processed, and shipped to Amazon in those good days that I had before ended up essentially bedridden. Before I get into that, I have an update on the Hazmat issue I talked about in episode 6. About 2 weeks after I opened that ticket requesting that the product be investigated or they at least tell me why they think it's Hazmat, they finally changed it so it is no longer considered a Hazmat product. Still no indication of why it got flagged in the first place or why it wasn't unflagged with my initial review. So a process that I was assured would take 3 or 4 days ended up taking over a month – nearly 5 weeks - to get resolved.I had put a lot of upfront work into getting ready for my first product. I had ordered samples, ordered my top competitor's product to compare quality, designed packaging, dug into a bunch of relevant government regulations, did a fair amount of back and for with the supplier, and was ready to place an order. If I hadn't decided to create the listing to get the FNSKU before placing the order, I would have been in for a huge disappointment when my inventory got here and Amazon refused to take the shipment. I'm also glad I decided not to simply wait for it when they told me it would be 3-4 days or I would just now be placing my order a month and a half later. I still think this will be a good product to sell down the line, and I'm glad that I've already gotten past the Hazmat issues so there won't be any issues when that time comes. But I ended up drastically changing course. In the days immediately after getting the product flagged as Hazmat, my wife and I had did some serious thinking and discussion about how to proceed. And ultimately, I think that pause we were forced to take caused us to come up with a better plan for our current situation.We decided to look for a product with less competition and with a lower cost per unit so we could get more inventory. We happened to also be able to find one which could be produced and shipped faster too, so that was a big bonus for us. We still like the original product and have some big longterm plans for it, so we wanted one in the same market so that we could sell them under the same brand. Up to this point, I'd been doing all my searching for suppliers on Alibaba, but I decided to give switch it up. I'd tried AliExpress briefly before but hadn't found anything worthwhile. Either the prices were too high or the shipping was too high. But I'd heard other people talking about finding good test products on there, so I decided to give it another shot. I came across a related product which has low enough volume that it isn't really worth pursuing on it's own, but it makes sense as part of this brand, and was able to find a good deal on AliExpress for a couple variations of this product. But more importantly, as I looked into this I found another product which I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. It is a consumable accessory for the product I was considering ordering. It's still not super high volume, and it has a low pricepoint, but the competition is low. And even though it sells for a low price, the profit margins are still really good – even after Amazon takes their cut. Plus, I was able to read through the negative reviews on some of the other Amazon sellers and make some adjustments to help fix some of the complaints. I'm not going to get rich selling this product, but I think it will be a good start for where we are with very limited funds. In the end, I ordered 100 units each of 2 variations of the product I started out looking for on AliExpress. Those are mostly there to add some meat to the brand's product catalog – AND because I can't really give away any of the consumables without having these to give away with it. The consumable product is useless on it's own so it wouldn't be much of a giveaway if that was the only product I had. I haven't decided for sure if or when I'm going to do a giveaway but I wanted the option to be there. In the end I expect each variation to be able to grow to the point where it is at least making back my initial investment in profit on a monthly basis, so I'd call that a good investment even though it won't be a huge part of my overall business. The consumable, I ordered 400 units of as I expect it to sell in a significantly higher volume. In fact after I ordered, I wondered if I should have ordered more. But here's the great thing – I was able to get all three products from the same seller, and because of the size of my order, the seller not only offered me volume discounts but also free DHL shipping. And because there wasn't much in the way of customization, I was able to have the product at my door 12 days – less than 2 weeks – after placing my order. So when the time comes to re-order I can get the product here quickly. I suspect I'll be able to get shipments even faster in Idaho as I'll be in a way less rural area. The interesting thing is I was actually having a really hard time finding this product on Alibaba, so if I hadn't given AliExpress another try I probably wouldn't be moving forward with this product. It's an incredibly basic item, so I know I could have it made cheaper direct from a manufacturer, but there will be some tooling costs and a really high volume order involved when that time comes. For now, I've got really got profit margins with the price I got on AliExpress, and I got great service from the seller, so I'm happy to continue working with them. I'll post a picture on the blog of the single small box that all 600 units came in. Oh yeah! I forgot to mention that other great factor. All three products are very small and lightweight. The “heaviest” weighs about half an ounce or 15 grams for those of you on the metric system – including the packaging.Anyway, if you'd like to see that picture, head over to brandingblitz.com/7 – you'll also find a full transcript of this episode. And it's a great place to leave a comment and give me some feedback. If you've got any questions head over to brandingblitz.com/ask and leave me a message. And if you haven't subscribed yet, head over to iTunes and do that now. If you're quick, I won't even notice that you ignored me earlier when I asked you to do it. We popped onto the “New & Noteworthy” list on iTunes for a little while while I was gone, but we've dropped back off because I haven't been able to get a new episode up. If you subscribe and leave me a review, that will help get me back on there and I'd really appreciate it!   That's it for this show, I'll catch you next time on episode 8 of the Branding Blitz!

I'd never heard of the hazmat flag before, but apparently it isn't all that uncommon happening on such random products as baseballs, toy cars, and... my product. It's been a longer process getting it cleared than it should be, and as such I'm being forced to switch gears.  Let's dive in to find out what happened! To leave a comment head to http://brandingblitz.com/6/    Full Transcript below: ---   ---   ---   ---   Hello again, and welcome back to the Branding Blitz podcast! I'm JR, and this is episode 6.   It's been well a couple weeks since I recorded the last episode because I've had a long string of bad days with my health and life's been kind of crazy as a result. I went to the doctor yesterday, and got another steroid shot and some new meds, so I'm doing a bit better now, but still a bit out of whack.There have been some interesting things happening in the meantime though.   After I recorded episode 5, discussing some common questions I'd seen about barcodes, it occurred to me that this is the kind of thing that would be handy to have in text form as well. Podcasts are a great format for explaining things, but they're not easily searchable if you are looking for a specific piece of information. So I put together a guide that is divided up into different sections with a table of contents that lets you jump to a specific question.The response to that guide has been fantastic. In the time since I posted that guide, it has nearly doubled in size as people have asked more questions and I've been able to add those answers to the guide. Each time I think I've got all the main stuff answered, someone else comes along and asks a great question, so it just keeps growing. My hope is that I can turn it into the most comprehensive guide to FBA barcodes possible. And that is made possible by people like you continuing to give feedback and asking more questions. If you'd like to check it out, you can find a link by going to http://brandingblitz.com/resources/The feedback I've gotten on this guide has truly been AMAZING – I love to teach people and knowing how helpful this has been is really exciting to me. It's inspired me not just to try and make this guide as comprehensive as possible, but also to try to create more guides. So I'd love to hear from you what topics you'd like to see a thorough guide created about.   The past couple of weeks have been eventful for my product sourcing adventure as well – in some ways a little more eventful than I wanted this part of the process to be.I was ready to submit an order for my first product, but had decided I wanted to put the FNSKU on the product packaging straight from the manufacturer. So I set up the listing in Amazon to get the FNSKU. I went in to create a shipment so I could retrieve the label, and got an error message stating that the product was flagged as a potential hazmat issue and was under review.I had never heard of this before, but apparently, it isn't all that uncommon. Hazmat by the way is short for Hazardous Materials. Anything that is flammable, explosive, poisonous, corrosive, aerosol, or contains a lithium ion battery is supposed to automatically get flagged – so if your product matches any of those things be aware that you may have an issue.But my product didn't match any of those things, and I wasn't sure why it got flagged. In searching the internet and talking to people about my issue, I came across people who had really random products flagged. One person had a baseball flagged as hazmat, another person had a tennis ball – not sure what's going on with the sporting goods but those were two different people! Someone said they'd had a toy car that had the words “fire red” in the paint color and it got flagged, but they re-did the listing without the word “fire” and it went through.   Anyway, as long as your product isn't actually hazmat, it should pass review. Depending on your product, you may be able to get what's called a Material Data Safety Sheet or MSDS from your manufacturer. An MSDS is basically a document that shows what materials your product is made of and how they respond to different environments, how flammable they are, how to extinguish if they do catch fire, what gases may be released if they catch fire, things they interact with, etc. So if you can get one of those, it should help with the review process – though I'm not sure if you can get an MSDS for something like a baseball.   For my product, I actually already had an MSDS sheet. So it wasn't a big deal to upload that info. Once I'd done that, I hopped on a chat with seller support to see if there was any way to expedite the process. They assured me there was nothing they could do to speed it up, it would take 3-4 days, but that was great news because it used to take weeks or even months to get it done. That was on May 20th and for about the next 3 weeks I did not get any information and was told there was nothing that could be done to speed it up. Finally, on June 8th, I was told that they had determined the product to be a Hazmat product. Which means until we get this sorted out, I can't sell this product through FBA. They couldn't tell me why it got flagged as Hazmat or why they decided to leave it that way. But they submitted a ticket to the department that handles that. Supposedly they'll be able to tell me what's going on. That's been a couple days ago now, and I've not received any updates yet.While I don't think this item should be a hazmat product, and it seems like we should be able to get it cleared because there are dozens of other sellers selling nearly identical products through FBA, I'm very hesitant to pull the trigger on this order until it gets cleared.   So, that's all given me some time to think. Even before finding out they had decided to leave Hazmat status on the product, I had decided to look into other options.As a result, I've made some changes to my plan. I'm still super excited about doing this product in the future, but it is no longer going to be my first product.The path I'm going to take now is quite a bit different than the one I was originally planning, and I think it is for the better. So this frustrating hiccup with being flagged as Hazmat may have been a blessing in disguise.In the coming episodes, I'll talk more about what I've changed with my plan. And when I know more, I'll keep you updated on the Hazmat issue and hopefully be able to share some tips for what to do if you find yourself in a similar situation.I'm leaving tomorrow morning to go visit family in Idaho. The trip was planned long before my health fell apart, but I'm hopeful that the dry air in Idaho will help give me a bit of a reprieve.By the time I get back, my first product should be here – I actually just checked the tracking info and it is expected to be delivered on Thursday. So I can begin moving forward with that.I'm planning to take my recorder with me, but I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to record another episode while I'm gone or not. If not, I'll have a lot to talk about when I get back!For a transcript of this show, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/6   If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask   If you haven't done so yet, could you do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review. That will help me tell iTunes that I am NOT a hazardous material – and I'd really appreciate it.     That's it for this episode, I'll catch you next time on the Branding Blitz.

If you're stuck or confused by UPCs and FNKSUs, you are NOT alone.  I've noticed a ton of people getting hung up on these.  So this episode is my attempt to clear up some of the confusion. We're going to dive deep into some basics here to get an understanding of what the barcodes are and what you need to do with them. The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, head over to http://brandingblitz.com/5/ Hey everybody, welcome back! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand. This is episode 5 and today I'm going to discuss a topic that seems to be a hang up for a lot of people. I quit using Facebook back in January – when my health started falling apart, I simply didn't have the energy to invest in it. I got back on again this week for two reasons. First, I wanted to look into setting up a page to help promote my new brand. But I also wanted to join up with some of the Facebook groups where people are discussing Amazon FBA and private labeling – primarily I was interested in the one Scott Voelker set up to build a community around The Amazing Seller podcast, but there are a handful of others I joined too. So after months of avoiding Facebook, Scott Voelker got me back on it – I'm still not sure if I should thank him for that or not, but there is an active community there with a lot of valuable information being discussed. But there was something I noticed very quickly. There are certain questions that seem to get asked quite frequently. One of those issues in particular I've noticed being asked at least 2-3 times a day over the past few days. It seems every several hours someone asks some form of the following questions: Do I need a UPC code? Where do I get it? Does the manufacturer provide the UPC code? Does the manufacturer put the UPC code on there or do I? Do I need to put the UPC code and the FNSKU? What's and FNSKU and where do I get it? What's the difference between a UPC and an FNSKU? Do I need to register my UPC code? There's probably a dozen or so different questions you could ask along those lines, but ultimately, this is what is really being ask: Can someone PLEASE help me understand this confusing mess of acronyms and barcodes? I think I've got it sorted out, so I wanted to put together an episode explaining the details as a resource to anyone trying to figure out what they need to do. So that's the topic of this episode titled: “Alphabet Soup: UPC, FNSKU, SMH, IDK, TGIF” I think most of the difficulty stems from not understanding the basics of what barcodes are, what a UPC is and how they're used and how that differs from an FNSKU. So we're going to start with some basic explanations which should help make everything clearer when we get to discussing the practical application. So first off – what is a barcode? Probably the first thing that pops into most people's head is the black and white set of lines and numbers you see on the back of every product on every shelf of any major retail store. But that is a specific type of barcode – it's a UPC barcode. But a barcode can be used for other things too. If you look at your computer case, it likely has a barcode with a serial number on it and maybe a product key as well. Your car may have a barcode on the dash or door for the VIN number. When UPS delivers your package, it has a barcode. And as I've recently discovered, when you check in to a hospital or ER, the little bracelet they give you may have a barcode. All that is to say, when we hear the word “barcode” something very specific tends to come to mind, but the actual term barcode refers to a system of turning information into a code made up of lines or bars so that it can be easily read by an optical scanner. We're trained to read text, so the lines don't mean much to us, but for a computer using very basic optics, it is much easier for it to interpret lines than letters. Barcodes have actually expanded beyond basic black and white lines to other formats which can hold more information within the code – but for the purposes of this discussion just think of a barcode as an alphabet that is easier for a computer to understand. Then what's a UPC code? UPC stands for Universal Product Code, and this is what you see on any product you pick up in Walmart. The numbers at the bottom are the human readable version of the UPC and the black lines are what you get when you translate those numbers into that special alphabet I mentioned. In theory, each of those sets of numbers is unique to an individual product. So when you get to the cash register, instead of the cashier having to look up the product by name in their computer or type in the price manually, they can flash that set of bars in front of their scanner and the computer can quickly figure out that 037000195221 is a tube of toothpaste. We'll talk more about the UPC, where you get it, and how to use it in a minute, but first let's talk about the FNSKU. What is that? Well, barcodes aren't just used at the cash register, they're also very useful in warehouses. Imagine you've got warehouse with hundreds of thousands of products in it. You get a sheet of paper with a bunch of product names on it and you're supposed to go find those product and box them up to ship out. Let's get even more specific – let's say one of the products on that list is that same toothpaste we talked about earlier. I just searched on Amazon for “toothpaste” and it showed 13 pages of results. So that's hundreds of different toothpaste varieties. So imagine I direct you to the “toothpaste” section of Amazon's warehouse, and tell you to find the four pack of 6 ounce tubes of Crest Pro-Health Whitening Fresh Clean Mint toothpaste. Now, be sure not to confuse that with the six pack of 4.2 ounce tubes of Crest Pro-Health Clean Mint toothpaste – a totally different product. This is where barcodes come in – instead of you sitting there trying to verify you've got the right thing saying to yourself, “Wait was it the 4 pack or 6 pack?” “Oops this is 4.2 ounce tubes, I needed the 6 ounce tubes.” “Wait this one isn't the special 'whitening' version, I need that version.” You can just scan the barcode and the computer will interpret that code and verify that it's the right thing. So far all of this could be done with the regular UPC barcodes, but Amazon faces another issue that compounds the complexity of this. Imagine now that you not only have to find that specific type of toothpaste amidst all the others – but there are 7 different companies selling that toothpaste all stored in your warehouse and you want to make sure you send out a product from the correct set of inventory. Well, if everyone selling that toothpaste has is using the same UPC barcode, then you don't have any way of telling them apart, so you've got two options. You could just pile everyone's inventory into the same bin and send them without differentiating between who the inventory actually belongs to – this is an option you can use on Amazon and it probably would be the right option for this toothpaste example, but for a lot of products that isn't ideal, so Amazon needed another option. This is where the FNSKU comes from.The FNSKU is a set of letters and numbers that identifies a unique product just like the UPC does – but the FNSKU also contains information linking it to a specific seller. When Amazon needs to be able to tell something is your product specifically, they will require it to have an FNSKU barcode on it. And to make things easier on them, they actually require that the UPC barcode that would generally be on the packaging either be replaced or covered so that only the FNSKU barcode is scannable. At this point, you might be thinking - “Alright JR, that's great, I now know way more than I ever wanted to about barcodes – but I still have no idea how to apply all this to my product.” Well, let's talk about that a bit. Since we know that it is eventually going to be replaced or covered up, a logical question is, “Do I even need a UPC or can I just use the FNSKU?” Every product you list on Amazon will need to have a UPC before you can create the listing. In fact if you have variations, such as offering the same product in multiple colors, each one will need it's own UPC. That said, depending on how you decide to move forward with what you're learning here, you may not actually need the barcode itself – just the set of numbers. You need to type in the numbers from the UPC when you are registering the product on Amazon and that may be the last time you ever think about that UPC. Knowing that you have to have a UPC code for your product and in the end the only scannable bardcode needs to be the FNSKU, you've got about 3 options on how to proceed. One of the most common options for people starting out is simply to have Amazon put a sticker on your product with the FNSKU on it. This is an easy and hands-off way to get started. I think it is popular because all the different barcodes can be confusing and you don't have to understand ins and outs of all of this to take this route – you just let Amazon handle it. So if you're still feeling confused at the end of this podcast, this may be a good route for you to get started with. However, it does have a cost to it. You pay Amazon $.20 per item to sticker it. That's not much, and hopefully that won't cut into your profits too much, but as you scale up your business, $.20 per item sold can really add up – and there's an easy way to avoid it once you get past the information overload that's often involved in getting a product launched. One thing to remember about this option is that Amazon does require it to have a scannable barcode when they receive your products for FBA. They don't care if it's the UPC barcode or the FNSKU, but they need to have some scannable idenifier. So if you want to have them put the FNSKU sticker on there, your product needs to have the UPC barcode on there to begin with and they will cover it up with their stickers. This is definitely a viable option starting out, but again, I don't believe it is the BEST option as you begin to grow and move forward – and it's not the option I am using. The second option is to put the stickers on yourself. This one seems like a nice choice initially for a lot of people when they think about having to pay Amazon to sticker their products. Putting a sticker on my product is easy, right? Why should I pay Amazon for that? Well, for one thing stickering yourself isn't free. You have to have a printer to do it, which may use up some of your ink or toner. I know some people do it, but Amazon specifically says not to use an inkjet printer because they can smudge, smear, and fade sometimes. So they want you to either use a laser or thermal printer. And you have to buy the labels. In the end, it's still probably less than $.20 per unit, but not free – AND even more importantly is the amount of time you're spending doing all this. Ultimately, it's up to you, but generally I would recommend having Amazon sticker it instead of you. One potential exception is if for some reason you can't get the UPC barcode printed on the product – in that case Amazon wouldn't label it for you anyway, so you might as well put the FNSKU on yourself. The third option, and the one I plan to utilize myself, doesn't even involve stickers. We know that Amazon wants you to have a UPC when you set up the product page, but somewhere along the line they actually want that UPC barcode to disappear and be replaced by the FNSKU barcode. Well, since Amazon never needs to actually see the UPC barcode on your product, there's no reason to even put it there in the first place. Rather than having your manufacturer print the UPC barcode on the product and then paying Amazon to cover it up – let's take that FNSKU barcode that would have been printed on a sticker and have the manufacturer print it directly on the product packaging right from the beginning. They were already going to print the UPC barcode on there, so this is no more work, is not any more complex for them, and should not cause any extra costs. It gives Amazon exactly what they want and allows you to avoid either stickering it yourself or paying Amazon to sticker them for you. It's really that simple – on the package where you would have them put the UPC barcode, have them print the FNSKU barcode instead. Now that I've said it, I'm sure some of you are thinking, “Seriously, the solution fits into a single sentence? Couldn't you have lead with that?” Well yeah, I could've, but I noticed that on all of the posts asking about barcodes, someone would answer with something along those lines, very basic and to the point – and very often it still didn't click with the person asking the question until it was explained in more depth. I THINK that is at least in part because most of us see UPC barcodes everyday but we never think much about the functions they're performing and the FNSKU is a whole new thing and we don't immediately know how they're related. So that's why I started by discussing the function and relationship of the UPC barcodes and FNSKU barcodes. I'm hoping that by starting there, it helps understand the whole picture better, and by the time I get to the point of saying, “Just put the FNSKU barcode on there instead,” it will make more sense why I'm telling you to do that. There's still plenty of other questions to answer like: “Where do I get my UPC code?” “Once I buy it, do I have to register it somewhere before Amazon can recognize it?” and “Why isn't Amazon accepting my UPC?” I think I'll split off a more in depth discussion of those questions into another episode but for now here's the short answers. You can buy UPC codes in a hundred different places around the web – to buy them from the same place where I got 10 of them for $20, go to brandingblitz.com/barcodes No, you do not have to register your UPC code before Amazon will recognize it. There are a number of reasons Amazon may not be recognizing your UPC code as valid, but probably the most common one is that there are actually a couple different standards for UPC codes, some have an extra number in them. Yours may be one of the shorter ones – if this is the case, adding a zero in front of it should allow Amazon to recognize it. Don't worry, that's not just a hack, it's actually a valid way of converting from the shorter UPC to the longer version. For a transcript of this show, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/5 Let me know if this explanation helped you and if I left anything out that you'd like me to explain further. If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask If you haven't done so yet, could you do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review. That'll help iTunes know I'm providing something helpful through this podcast, and I'd really appreciate it! That's it for this episode, I know it's easy to get overwhelmed by some of this especially when a lot of it has to do with confusing and unfamiliar acronyms and things we're normally trained not to have to think about as consumers, but I hope this has helped you understand barcodes, UPCs and FNSKUs. To keep with the theme, here's a couple more acronyms for you: TTFN and TTYL, I'll catch you next time on the Branding Blitz.  

Now it's time to get a bit personal. Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side. This episode continues down the road of discussing the personal side. The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, head over to http://brandingblitz.com/4/ Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand. This is episode 4 – a continuation of episode 3 where I started discussing some of the aspects of my personal life which are going to significantly impact how this brand building story plays out. If you haven't listened to episode 3 yet, that might help some things make more sense in this episode. But just for a quick refresher summary: I started the story about a year and a half ago when we found out we were going to have a baby. The business I'd been working on wasn't growing fast enough, so I needed something else. After a ton of research and some shoestring marketing, I launched a Kickstarter project and blew away my expectations. I had a nice little sand castle staying just barely out of reach of the waves, when a big one came in and flattened the whole thing. My health completely fell apart. My lungs aren't functioning properly which kind of causes a cascade of other issues. I've got severe fatigue, my brain partially shuts down at times causing foggy thinking and memory issues. I get short of breath really easily and often find myself getting dizzy for no reason. I've listened to the recordings of the first couple of episodes of this podcast and thought to myself, “Wow... I don't come across as very high energy – I sound tired and out of breath at times.” Well, part of it is I have a pretty laid back personality – but part of it is because I actually am tired and out of breath. I'm also scripting these episodes out ahead of time – I don't plan to always do that, but with the mental issues I've been having, I don't think I could talk for 15 minutes without just getting completely lost. It's worked out much better to sit down and write for a couple minutes at a time throughout the day. Even that would have been pretty difficult a couple of weeks ago, but some of the meds they've got me on do seem to be helping somewhat. With all that going on, work has come to a screeching halt on my Kickstarted business. Even this new business which is way less demanding than the old one still has to move slower than it normally would because I have to find windows of time where I feel I'm thinking clearly and have the energy required to work. The Kickstarted business is not earning any income since I'm not working on it. There is still some money reserves in that bank account, but I also still have plenty of commitments to fulfill to my backers as well, so I don't really feel at liberty to invest that money in this venture. And the little reserves we had built up personally have been completely depleted... and actually have been for a while now. But I didn't see a way to get any more income coming in other than pressing forward with my Kickstarted business... at least until that wasn't an option anymore. It's gotten severe enough that our car is actually being processed for repossession and it doesn't look like there's much we could do to get it back. They want more money than we got on our tax return to stop the repossession process plus a commitment that I will resume payments – I can't give them either. I think even more than the loss of the car, it hurts my pride. I like to think of a man who stands by his word, but I can't find an option that allows me to fulfill my end of that contract. In the end though, when I signed the contract I had every reason to believe we would be able to make it work – and in fact we did for a couple years. In an odd way, there is a silver lining here – not having a car payment to make anymore does mean that I'll have less money that needs to be pulled out of the profits of the business when that time comes. We've also moved in with my parents, but interestingly enough we didn't do that because of all the things I just told you. We had begun preparation for that before the Kickstarter project actually launched. A big part of our motivation is that my dad had been diagnosed with a type of cancer that was described as inoperable and incurable with the best known treatment option having about as good odds of making it worse as it did making it better. Sure, the fact that they weren't going to charge us rent was a nice bonus, but really we wanted to be there as a support for my parents. It's interesting to look back at that decision now and know that his cancer is actually shrinking and that no rent thing has actually become a pretty big deal. The year since launching our Kickstarter project has easily been one of the roughest years of my life probably in large part because of the emotional extremes. From the ultra-high of the successful project and a new baby girl to the ultra-lows of defaulting on debt and not knowing why my body is shutting down. I'm not sure how much of a support we've actually been for my parents – I like to think we've helped some. If nothing else, I think the fact that we're all kind of going through hard things together has helped draw us closer. This all puts me in an interesting situation for launching a business though. Our monthly expenses are honestly VERY low right now which is going to be a really big help. Ideally, I'd like to launch this business without even considering pulling money out of it for at least 6 months. Honestly, it would be great to be able to go even longer than that, but I'm not sure we'll make it that far. Every little bit you take out is that much more you have to build up. If we get to the point where we're making $1,000 a month in profit and I pull that out to catch up on bills then it's almost like I have to start the building process over. That's not entirely true because we'll already have inventory and sales and reviews at that point, so we'll be starting over with momentum not from ground zero, but it will stunt the growth. At some point, I need to cycle back and fulfill my commitment to my Kickstarter backers as well – preferably as soon as possible. My hope is that I'll get on a treatment plan for my health that will allow me to begin devoting some energy toward that again, but I am not sure how long it will take to get there. If it is going to take a really long time or isn't realistic at all, then I may need to eventually look into taking even more profits out of this business to get that one running without me. It really all depends on what the pulmonologist's tests say I guess... I really don't know what the future looks like. Again, the normal advice is that in an ideal world you don't want to pull profits out of the business early on – but life rarely takes place in an ideal world... mine certainly isn't there right now. So if I have to practically start over growing the profits a couple times to get everything back on track, it may not be ideal, but that's what I'm going to do. All the more reason I need to act now, I need to act fast, and I need to act strategically. And if I can pull it off then it will be just one more way to show that there really is no excuse not to begin taking action towards getting your business up and running. Again, there are a ton more details I could go into with this, and I'm sure some of it will come up in future episodes, but for now I think that gives a nice broad overview of where I'm at personally and some of the effects that is going to have on this brand launch. I know that these last two episode got a bit more personal than a lot of podcasts tend to, but I really want to take you along for the ride as I launch this brand. And I feel like to truly do that you need to know not just the status of my business, but the status of myself and my family – because those things are going to shape every single decision I make as I move forward. I have to say, talking openly about health and financial problems is a lot harder than talking about plans to grow a business. But really that's just because we train ourselves not to talk about those things. We're not supposed to have problems, right? Well, here's a news flash – I do have problems. And I'd be willing to bet you do to. Maybe yours are worse than mine. Maybe they aren't, I don't know. The point is, we've all got them, but we can't let them stop us from pressing on. For a transcript of this episode, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/4 – I'd love to hear from you! And let me know too if you're reading the transcripts. It's easy to do right now since I'm typing it all up ahead of time, but let me know if it's valuable to you so I can decide if I should continue in the future. If you want to contact me but think it'd fit better in an email than a comment, feel free to drop me a line at jr@brandingblitz.com If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask If I haven't scared you off yet I'd really appreciate if you subscribed on iTunes and left a review. That'll help iTunes know that after four episodes of listening to me talk, you're still ready for more, and I'd really appreciate it! That's all for this episode, I'll catch you next time on episode 5 of the Branding Blitz podcast.  

Now it's time to get a bit personal. Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from. There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side. This episode starts down the road of discussing the personal side. The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, go to http://brandingblitz.com/3/ Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand. This is the third episode. Last time, I gave a quick overview of where we're at so far with this business. I am still very early in this process, but things are well underway and moving quickly. That is one of the things that makes me excited to share this story with you. I always love hearing people's stories of building a business – while they are actually doing it rather than after the fact. I guess it just adds an extra level of excitement and suspense not knowing what the outcome is going to be. As this story unfolds, I'm hoping to share that excitement with you – not so much an excitement about my business and where it's going but about the potential for YOUR business and the things that can happen as you take action towards your goals. I mentioned that in this episode I wanted to talk about some details from my personal life. At first, that may sound like something that doesn't really belong here – but I truly think it does. It is an inseparable part of this story. If I don't share at least some of these details you really won't have the full story. Even more than that, I really hope that my situation can become a catalyst for you, as it has for me. I hope that it will inspire you to take action and move forward and remove any barriers or excuses that may be stopping you from starting or growing your business. Wherever you're at in the process, I think there's something here to help motivate and push you forward. So let's get started! About a year and a half ago, my wife and I found out we were going to have our first child. We didn't have a whole lot of resources but we were getting by. My wife had a full-time job at a residential treatment facility for women with drug and alcohol addictions. Overall, she enjoyed working there, but it was low pay and fairly high stress – and we wanted her to be able to stay home with our daughter if possible. We'd been living pretty frugally and were able to get by with the income from her job, which had left me free to begin gradually building up a small online business whatever extra resources we could budget. I had a little business set up that was growing gradually but steadily – but it needed more money to scale than we had to invest so the growth was very slow. When I had started, we didn't have a baby on the way, so I figured scaling very slowly was okay – I had plenty of time. Suddenly, with a baby on the way, I had 9 months until our expenses were going to go up and even if my wife kept her job we wouldn't be able to get by on just her income. That wasn't going to be enough time to get this very slowly scaling business model I'd been working on up to the necessary size to support us. We decided it was time to look for something that could scale faster. We didn't need 7 figures, but even $1-2000 a month in profit would be enough for our little family to scrape by. After digging around for a while, I came up with an idea for a service that I saw a decent amount of demand for that either wasn't being met or wasn't being met well. Again, it was something that was going to need quite a bit of money to get running at scale – actually it needed more than our annual income to get running even at a low level because I would need to buy specialized equipment. But unlike the last business venture, I had an idea of how to get the money necessary. I spent the few months reading every resource I could find on running a successful Kickstarter project. I made a video of myself talking about the project to put on the project page. I designed a bunch of special graphics and carefully crafted text, descriptions, and calls to action for my page on Kickstarter. Set up the business, the bank accounts, went through the approval processes, went to trade shows to see the special equipment in action and try it out myself. I built up a decent following on Twitter in the months leading up to the launch, contacted blogs to write about my project, got discussions going about the idea on major forums in the industry – basically got as much buzz going as I could with less than $100 in my marketing budget. The day finally came and my wife and I got up together in the morning, went into my office together, loaded up my Kickstarter account, stared at the computer screen as the minutes ticked by until the time came that we had scheduled to start the project. And finally with a shaking hand – I clicked the launch button and... it gave me an error! I think I ended up just having to reload the page or something to get it to work but talk about nerve-wracking. At this point, since I already told you I don't have a lot of money, it may sound like I'm leading up to a big flop – but the project didn't flop. Not even close. The project was scheduled to last just over a month. I think a lot of people have a perception that the Kickstarter creator is just sitting around waiting while the project runs. But that's not the case – at least not for the good ones. It was a very fast paced month trying to keep up with updates and emails and back-and-forths vendors as I realized I was going to need larger orders and more varieties. We hit our base funding goal – the minimum amount I had decided that we needed if this business was going to get off the ground – in under a week. Often after the first couple of days, activity on a Kickstarter page drops off completely – but ours only dropped partially and then our momentum actually grew throughout the campaign with a HUGE burst at the end... and when it was all said and done we ended up raising almost 4 times our initial goal. Now all that extra cash definitely came with it's own set of expenses and commitments to deliver the end result to our customers. It made it both possible and necessary to get more expensive equipment, and have a higher amount and variety of our inventory produced. We were ecstatic at this point. This was going to be a monumental time commitment from me, but we were okay with it because it set us up spectacularly for her to be able to quit her job and take care of our child and we were going to have a successful business which would eventually allow me to hire employees to take over some of my time commitments. The months that followed led us through many bumps and bruises with various vendors and manufacturers and service providers not living up to promises or expectations. But we put our heads down and pushed through. Discouraging as those bumps were, we knew we were blessed to have a business that was going to allow us to meet our goals and had a ton of growth potential. Then my health began to fall apart. I'm actually still working towards a full diagnosis, but it sounds like it was a combination of new issues as well as health issues I've been living with since I was in a car wreck at the age of 14 – some of which have gotten better over time, some I've learned to cope with over time because I had to and some of which I didn't even really know I had. Because the newer issues built up gradually, I didn't notice at first. I knew I was beginning to lose productivity, but I just thought it was stress or lack of sleep (we did have a newborn sleeping in the same room with us afterall). But eventually those new issues inflamed the physical problems I had as a result of the wreck – I recognized those symptoms, but I also recognized something else. I now had health problems I'd never had to deal with before. Something about the combination problems various things in my body created a bit of a perfect storm. Suddenly I'm having severe chest pains, I can't get enough air, and even something as simple as blowing my nose leaves me dizzy and gasping for breath. I get searing headaches, severe fatigue, and I can't think clearly and my memory is fuzzy. As I said, I don't have a full diagnosis yet, but they have told me the EKG, x-rays, etc seem to show a healthy and properly functioning heart – so the chest pain doesn't seem to be a heart issue. The current theory is that my lungs had actually been gradually losing efficiency for quite some time, which was causing my body not to get enough oxygen. The lack of oxygen explains the fatigue, headaches, and mental issues – funny what your body does when it doesn't get enough air... I am being referred to a pulmonologist get get some more tests done and try to determine more specifically what's going on and determine the proper course of treatment or maintenance. Sigh Alright – I think if I tell this whole story in one episode, this is going to get a little long. Don't worry though, I'm trying to record a batch of these so I have a few already to go right away when I upload them. So by the time you're hearing this, the next episode should already be live or maybe within the next day depending on if I decide to space it out or not. For a transcript of this episode, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/3 – I'd love to hear from you! If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask I'm hope now that we're a few episodes into the show you can start to see at this is going to be a fun ride to come along on. If that's true, I'd really appreciate if you subscribed on iTunes and left a review. That'll help iTunes know I'm not just wasting the little oxygen I do have, and I'd really appreciate it! That's all for this episode, I'll catch you next time on episode 4 of the Branding Blitz podcast.  

Alright, it's time to get down to business.   Before I can take you along for the ride in this brand launch, I have to lay the baseline for explaining where we're starting from.  There are two main aspects to this: the business side and the personal side.   This episode starts down the road of discussing the business side.   http://brandingblitz.com/2/Transcript:   Hello again and welcome back everyone! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand. I want to spend the next couple of episodes discussing where I'm at in the process of launching the brand as well as where I am at personally – both of which I think you'll find make this a fascinating story to follow. For now, let's focus on the business side. The past few weeks have been pretty intense for a number of reasons, not all positive. But from the aspect of launching this brand, things have been going great and very active. About a week and a half ago, I ordered samples for our first product. Normally, if you don't already have a relationship with a manufacturer - which, let's face it, most of us don't - I would recommend ordering samples from several different manufacturers. Due to financial constraints I put more effort into weeding out manufacturers based on ease of communication, responsiveness, how knowledgeable they seem, and details pictures of the products... as well as price, minimum order quantities, lead time, etcetera. I only ended up ordering samples from one manufacturer when it was all said and done. If you've got a little extra cash, I definitely recommend ordering more samples. It was more unnecessary stress waiting for the package to arrive wondering, “What if it gets here and it's not as high quality as they made it out to be?” The fact that the most important aspects of this particular product can't be judged based on a picture didn't really help. Often you'll have to pay $50 or so for a sample, which sounds like a lot initially – way more than the cost of the product itself. But when you consider it gets to your door in a few days from a factory in China, that's honestly not very much. And definitely worth getting a few of them coming so you can have a better basis for picking which manufacturer you work with. That said, it actually worked out for me. I paid $60 for samples from one manufacturer, and I'm very happy with the quality of what we're going to be getting. While I was waiting for those samples to come, I registered the business and got a Federal Tax ID number. If you're serious about doing this, I definitely recommend setting everything up separately under a business name and tax id rather than doing your own SSN. I'm not a tax expert by any means, but I think that will really save some headaches down the road when this things begins to scale. I also registered a domain and began setting the website up. Whether or not you need a website right away really depends on what you're trying to sell – in a lot of cases I would say it's not a big deal. But for my particular market I really feel like having at least a basic informational site will be very helpful. I don't plan to have a store there yet. Eventually we'll set that up, but for now I want to have a laser focus on Amazon as our only sales channel. So I just logged into my HostGator account and set WordPress blog on the brand domain. I've begun adding some information to it, and will be adding more in the coming days. It will eventually need a better theme, but for now I've just got a pretty basic free one on there. A basic website is so easy to set up that it really is hard to justify not setting SOMETHING up when you're getting started even if it isn't absolutely necessary for your niche, but you also can't let it be too much of a distraction as you're trying to get that initial momentum. I've already got experience working with websites so it wasn't a big deal for me to set it up. If that kind of thing is overwhelming for you or you feel it's going to slow you down – don't worry about it right off the bat. There will be plenty of time later once your business has started to gain traction.   One of the things that I believe is going to help me differentiate myself in the market I've chosen is that I am looking to build a brand. This has to do with the fact that I'm planning to expand to a full line of products rather than just a single product – but it also has to do with the fact that I have been thinking about the brand image from the beginning.   Even before I chose my product, I was thinking about branding. Each time I found a new product or set of products to start tracking in a different niche, I asked myself some basic branding questions. “How hard will it be to build a brand and a full line of products around this product?” “Who will my customer be?” “What kind of brand image and messaging will connect with them?” “What are the other brands out there like and how well branded are they?” “Will I want to enter the market as a low cost alternative or a premium option?” “Can I use the brand imaging itself as a way of differentiating my product EVEN before my brand is established?”   I believe the answer to that last question is yes. This is another thing that will depend to some extent on your market. I think it can be done in just about any market, but with my particular market, trying to use every aspect of my branding to show that I'm trying to put out a quality product is one of the ways I intend to differentiate my product in this market.   I'm coming in to a market where I believe the packaging of the product can make a HUGE difference in both conversions, as well as the customer's perception of quality and satisfaction after the purchase – which hopefully also means repeat it may lead to repeat sales. Yet, I honestly don't think ANY of my main competitors have very good packaging. The top two sellers are decent, but really I'm not impressed. Some of the others look especially unprofessional. I feel like stepping in with packaging that presents more of a premium impression could go a long way.   Again, this is something that I think could help at least marginally in pretty much any market and I think it will especially help in my market. But if designing packaging isn't something you feel up to the task for or you just feel like it's a hurdle that's going to slow you down DO NOT let that stop you from taking action. You can always move forward with a very basic packaging – even just a polybag with a sticker on it or a card insert is acceptable for a LOT of products. Then onces you've started to get traction and you're ready to try to upgrade the packaging and see if it increases your conversions you can either design it or hire a designer. I've heard a lot of good things about 99 Designs – I have NOT used them, but most of what I've heard has been pretty positive. If I was looking to pay for a design, that is probably the first place I'd look.   That said, I'm a self-taught computer geek and my wife has a degree in “Print Communications.” Which means, with our combined powers, we form something of a marginally qualified design team. We spent some time as we waited for samples working on potential packaging ideas. Having the product in hand really helped with that, and we've finalized most of the design with a few tweaks to be made here and there.   What we've come up with isn't perfect, and I'm sure a true professional designer could easily pick out some things to clean it up a bit more – but I'm pretty confident that we look more professional than the competition, while presenting the brand image we're going for. And it didn't cut into our budget at all or really slow us down much. That's the key – not letting these little hurdles slow you down. If it's too big and going to really slow you down to work on a website or design a package – don't do it. Not yet. Keep moving forward taking the actions that you can to start getting traction. Once you've got enough traction you can circle around to build out your website and have new packaging made up without losing your forward momentum. We very well may do that in the future ourselves. I'm quite happy with the packaging we've come up with, but if my theory is right and the packaging is going to be a good source of differentiation, it may still be worth having it redone professionally in the future. For now though, we're going forward with what we were able to put together without losing the momentum we have.   The packaging actually did ALMOST become a hurdle for us – but not because of the custom design. Partway through the design, I realized that there were some specific federal regulations regarding the labeling of my product. I'd been basing the information on my labels in large part based on what I saw included on other similar labels – but it looks like some of my competition, as well as the samples from my manufacturer, don't meet up with the full federal regulation... at least as I understand it. So it took me a bit of deciphering to figure out what we needed to include on our product labels, but I believe we've got it sorted out. I'm actually a bit curious what happens if one of the competitors gets reported to the regulatory agency. It feels a bit dirty to report them just because they're my competition – but now that it is also a legal issue. And to be honest, now that I'm aware of law I feel a bit better knowing the info that is supposed to be on these packages. There's good reason for it, and honestly as a consumer I would like it on my package. So I wouldn't feel too bad about reporting them... BUT again that doesn't seem like the most efficient and productive thing to focus on so I haven't looked into it any farther other than just wondering what would happen if they were reported.   There's one last detail I need before we can finalize the packaging, and I think we'll be ready to place our first order.   I purchased UPC codes last week as well. I got 10 barcodes for $20 from a company called Cheap UPC Barcodes. This is a very good deal compared to some of the other websites which mark up the price of their barcodes pretty significantly. On a lot of sites you'd pay way more than $20 for a single barcode and I got 10. If you need some barcodes, this seems like a good place to get the – if you go to brandingblitz.com/barcodes it will send you to their site and I'll get a small commission if you buy your barcodes there.   But instead of putting the UPC code on the packaging, I'm planning to put the FNSKU code on there. Since I'm not looking to get into any other retailers right now, I don't really need the UPC barcode on the package and it saves me from having to put a sticker on there with the FNSKU or to pay Amazon to label it. I had previously started to set up an Amazon seller account, but realized there had already been an Amazon Seller account operated at this address in the past. I have heard Amazon doesn't like people having multiple seller's accounts – I'm not sure how much of what I've heard is true, and this is a different name, different business, etc... but I still wanted to check before I charged ahead. So I've contacted them, they asked for some more info which I gave them and am now waiting for a reply. So that right now is the main thing holding me back from placing an order with the manufacturer– and I'm hoping they'll get that to me today.   In the meantime, waiting for that has given us a little extra time to make some additional tweaks to our package designs and add some of the initial content to our website.   I'm also looking into setting up a Facebook page and targeting people in my niche which would then set me up to do a giveaway for some initial reviews. There is already one set up, and I think Facebook ads would let me target people that are fans of that page, so that would actually take away some of the legwork on getting that set up. I'm not completely decided, but I may try to use some Facebook ads to get some people following my new page. Post for a giveaway and send people to LeadPages to get them on an email list or something. At this point, the main goal would be to gather emails of people interested getting review copies of the product – but that could also be a useful list to have down the road as well as long as I make it clear that I'll be sending them other stuff too not just freebies.   That's one of the ways I'm looking into to build that initial sales and review momentum. But I haven't actually started that process yet. If I decide to go that route, I'll probably try to do that while I'm waiting for the product to be manufactured. I'll also need to continue to build out   There's plenty more I could keep talking about, but I think that gives a pretty good overview of where things are for this brand launch. We've chosen a market, chosen a product, figured out some key differentiators, chosen a manufacturer, gotten samples, designed the packaging, and are ALMOST ready to order. Plus the legal structure of the business is established an we have a very basic website that is up and running with some minimal content.   For a transcript of this show, as well as links to any of the tools mentioned, and to leave any comments or feedback, head over to brandingblitz.com/2   A full list of the tools I'm using can be found on brandingblitz.com/tools   If you have any questions you'd like to ask and maybe get it answered on the podcast, drop me a line at brandingblitz.com/ask   I look forward to connecting with you!   That's all for this episode, I'll catch you next time on episode 3 of the Branding Blitz podcast.     In the meantime if you're enjoying the show, it'd be great if you subscribed on iTunes and left a review. That'll help iTunes know I'm not just talking to myself here, and I'd really appreciate it!

Welcome to the show!  In this first episode, you'll get to know me, why I'm starting this podcast, and what I have planned so far for Branding Blitz. I'm going to take you behind the scenes as I build a new brand from scratch.  Specifically this brand is going to sell physical products. Our primary sales channel initially is going to be Amazon FBA.  Similar to what you may have heard others like Ryan Danial Moran ( Freedom Fast Lane ) or Scott Voelker ( The Amazing Seller ) talking about.But it's not just about finding a bunch of products to sell on Amazon.  I want to expand beyond Amazon to other sales channels, e-commerce, and maybe even brick & mortar retail.More than that - I want to build a brand. I want to be intentional about my marketing. I want to harness the power of repeat customers and referrals.  I want to take over my niche by out marketing the competition.As you'll learn, I'm operating under some interesting constraints.   I'm calling it the “Branding Blitz” because I need to move lightning fast and strategically. And I want to invite you to follow along for the ride. Let's get this party started! For a full transcript of the show: http://brandingblitz.com/1/To ask me a question and have it answered on the show: http://brandingblitz.com/ask/