POPULARITY
Amazon title changes could cost sellers thousands. Plus, Prime Big Deal Days are announced, and ChatGPT advertising may be coming soon. Get this week's top e-commerce news. We're back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10's VP of Education and Strategy, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10's newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level. Huge Potential Amazon Title Issue! Amazon may hide brand names from product titles in search results, which can hurt conversions when the brand name contains a product's main keyword. Bradley discovered that removing “Hemp” from one listing coincided with its conversion rate and daily sales dropping by nearly half. Sellers should check their listings and, if affected, add the missing keyword separately within the title as a workaround. Amazon Ads announces new integration to support advertising in ChatGPT https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/library/news/amazon-ads-chat-gpt-advertising-integration/ Amazon Seller Central News: Prepare for Prime Big Deal Days: October 6-7 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHM1o0NjM0UkZTRVdCRjY2 Amazon Seller Central News: New requirements for product bundles starting January 11 https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHUk1IN1M4NDJIWkwzUktZ Get inventory to the East Coast faster with Standard Ocean Express https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-news/articles/QVRWUERLSUtYMERFUiNHWEpVOUNYRjg0QTRQRThX Interested in Amazon Global Logistics? Visit http://h10.me/agl to explore Helium 10's special introductory offers and learn more. Bradley will be at Amazon Accelerate in Seattle, where attendees can find him at the Helium 10 booth or contact him on Instagram @serioussellerspodcast for a potential podcast interview. He'll host three sessions on preparing Brand Stores for the holiday season with AI-powered tools, along with a presentation on turning eight hours of work into eight minutes using AI. He'll also discuss smarter product selection using Product Opportunity Explorer and other data points. Subscribe to the AM/PM Podcast on YouTube and turn on notifications for an upcoming masterclass on keyword research and building listings in 2026 and 2027. In episode 555 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Bradley covers: 00:00 - Introduction 00:46 - Huge Potential Amazon Title Issue 09:06 - Amazon Ads in ChatGPT 10:26 - Prime Big Deal Days Dates Revealed 12:10 - New AI MCP Features 14:13 - Amazon Product Bundle Policy Change 17:03 - Look at Keyword Sales, Not Just Search Volume 20:21 - Get Inventory to East Coast Faster 21:32 - See You At Amazon Accelerate!
Send us Fan Mail Amazon Ads has rolled out a new beta feature inside Sponsored Products campaign creation called “Increase Conversions.” When enabled, Amazon can create an additional Sponsored Brands collection campaign alongside the Sponsored Products campaign.In this video, Noah Wickham from My Amazon Guy explains how the new setting works, how it fits into Amazon's push toward collection ads and full-funnel marketing, and what sellers should check, including bids, target keywords, products, and campaign naming.Book a call with My Amazon Guy to get help with your Amazon Ads strategy: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxu#AmazonAds #AmazonPPC #SponsoredProducts #SponsoredBrands #AmazonSellersWant free resources? Dowload our Free Amazon guides here:Your $1M Roadmap is here!: https://bit.ly/3SBO7VkDownload the 2026 Amazon AI Operating Manual: https://bit.ly/3SLmusPAmazon Receiving Delay Guide: https://hubs.ly/Q04cdD4c0Amazon Catalog Spring Cleaning: https://hubs.ly/Q046BVfp0Amazon Proft Margin Defense 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q042trRH0Amazon SEO Toolkit 2026: https://bit.ly/4oC2ClTAmazon Seller Strategy Report 2026: https://bit.ly/3YN1RME2026 Ecommerce Website & SEO Readiness Checklist: https://hubs.ly/Q04btghf0Amazon 2026 PPC guide: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXTimestamps00:00 - New Amazon Ads Beta Feature Overview00:23 - What Does the "Increase Conversions" Setting Do?01:00 - Sponsored Brands Collections & Search Placement Changes02:06 - Customizing Targets, Bids, and Campaign Names02:45 - Amazon's Push for Full-Funnel Marketing03:48 - Strategic Takeaways & PPC Budget Allocation-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVw Support the show
Amazon is testing its ad engine inside ChatGPT. If you spend the next thirty minutes listening, you will understand why this shift matters more than any algorithm update in the last five years. Amazon neared seventy billion dollars in advertising revenue last year. This is not a minor feature update. It is a fundamental change in how buyers discover products. Your current Amazon Ads strategy might be obsolete before you finish this episode. I break down what this means for your seller strategy and how to protect your margins. You will learn how to change your discovery approach before competitors lock in. You will see how David, a Voltage operator, scaled from thirty thousand dollars a month to over one million dollars by June 2026. His brand ran on a specific framework that adapts to these shifts. You will get the exact steps to audit your current listings against this new reality. This is not theory. It is operator experience. I show you how to use Caiman Data AI to track these changes in real time. You will know which SKUs to prioritize and which to pause. You will understand the connection between chat-based discovery and your business reports. This episode gives you the tools to stay ahead of the curve. You will see how to integrate this into your daily workflow. You will learn how to protect your cash flow while the market shifts. This is the fastest path from seller to operator. Listen now to secure your position in the new discovery landscape. The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast is your daily source for operator-level insights. Do not wait for the algorithm to change. Change your strategy first. Get involved in the Voltage framework. It is the fastest path from seller to operator. You get Almost Automated Income with FBA, the core Voltage methodology, and the tools to build a resilient brand. This is not about chasing trends. It is about building a business that survives any shift. Listen today and start building your advantage. The market is moving. You need to move with it. This is your moment to act. Do not get left behind. The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast is where operators come to learn. Join us and take your brand to the next level. This is your chance to lead. Not follow. The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Operator-led. Seller-focused. Real results. Get involved in the Amazon CEO Playbook for $24.95 at voltagedm.com/blueprint: https://voltagedm.com/blueprint?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep389
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon: https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ En este vídeo, Roberto Augusto responde preguntas sobre autopublicación, Amazon KDP, informes de lectura, lectores beta, email marketing, Amazon Ads, traducciones, uso de IA, derechos de autor, portadas, maquetación y distribución. También ofrece consejos para mejorar libros, promocionarlos, gestionar reseñas y crear una comunidad de lectores, además de comentar el éxito de los concursos literarios de Editorial Letra Minúscula. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:02 Índices en novelas y no ficción ▶️03:01 Importancia del informe de lectura ▶️05:10 Email marketing para escritores ▶️07:41 ¿Importa la extensión de una novela? ▶️09:49 Cuándo traducir un libro ▶️12:06 Análisis de un libro para escritores ▶️15:00 Problemas con Amazon KDP ▶️18:15 Tiempos verbales en una novela ▶️20:56 Estilo y comprensión lectora ▶️23:02 Cómo empezar con Amazon Ads ▶️27:16 Crear un libro autobiográfico con IA ▶️29:42 Traducir novelas usando IA ▶️33:53 Derechos de autor e imágenes con IA ▶️37:23 Corrección profesional y uso de IA ▶️41:48 Riesgos del intercambio de reseñas ▶️44:15 IngramSpark y venta en librerías ▶️47:09 El futuro de la autopublicación ▶️50:39 IA, derechos de imagen y marketing ▶️56:20 Éxito de los concursos literarios ▶️01:08:43 Despedida y próximos proyectos
Learn how to optimize your Amazon Ads with a simple weekly routine for checking ad spend, attributed sales, ACoS, and campaign performance. I'll show beginners how to identify strong and weak performers, make one measured change, and track the results. • *Learn More* https://advertising.amazon.com/lp/build-your-business-with-amazon-advertising#Ad #AmazonAds #Sponsored
Eine Marke will auf Amazon einen Gang höher schalten. Wo geht sie hin? Inhouse aufbauen, Agentur beauftragen, Software kaufen, Freelancer holen oder selbst etwas mit KI bauen. Früher war das im Kern eine Budgetfrage. 2026 ist die Antwort auf diese Frage eine andere. Doch woher kommt die Verschiebung? Warum verändert sich die Landkarte?Yarin spricht mit Timo Daedrich, der etablierte Markenhersteller beim Einstieg in D2C und E-Commerce begleitet. Es geht um die Stimmung im Markt und darüber, woran die Entscheidung zwischen Inhouse, Agentur und Tool aktuell wirklich hängt.Alle Themen der Episode im Überblick: Yarin & Timo stellen sich vor (00:00)Was D2C für einen Markenhersteller wirklich bedeutet (02:50)Stimmung im Markt: Unsicherheit hemmt die Investitionsfreude (05:15)Marktplätze als Vehikel für den schnellen Start (09:58)Die größte Hürde ist politisch: B2B gegen D2C (13:15)Shop, Amazon oder weitere Marktplätze: was zuerst? (15:51)Die Landkarte: inhouse, Agentur, Tool oder Broker (18:30)Was KI an den Erwartungen an Agenturen verändert (21:46)Wo KI heute wirklich funktioniert und wo nicht (23:46)Ziele, Kompetenz, Budget: woran die Entscheidung hängt (28:40)Kundenströme zwischen Tool und Agentur (31:46)Was am Ende beim Menschen bleibt (35:24)Links & Ressourcen:Timo Daedrich auf LinkedInTimo Daedrichs WebsiteYarin auf LinkedInCORTUA – KI-gestütztes Amazon Ads System für den gesamten Produktkatalog. Jetzt Erstgespräch vereinbarenFragen & Anregungen:Für Fragen und Feedback hinterlasse einen Kommentar bei Spotify oder auf YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ADFERENCEMail: vitamin-a@adference.com
The FTC says Amazon put a bidder that does not exist into its ad auction — for seven years — so the CPCs you paid on Amazon Ads were never the price the auction produced.Mike Ryan and Chris Scharmüller break down the FTC's case against Amazon Ads: what Amazon is accused of doing to its own auction, what it cost advertisers, and why Amazon's defense is not a denial. Then the story Amazon would rather talk about — its demand-side platform plugging into ChatGPT ads, and what that does to targeting on a brand-new surface.For in-house PPC and ecommerce teams buying on Amazon, Google and now AI surfaces.Key takeaways:A second-price auction only delivers its benefit if the auctioneer is trusted. The design makes honest bidding safe; a dishonest auctioneer turns that honesty into exposure.The alleged mechanism is blunt: a bidder that does not exist, placed between the real second bid and the winner. The FTC says it ran from 2019 and extracted tens of billions.The damage per click was small by design — calibrated to stay under advertisers' minimum acceptable return, which is why it went unnoticed for seven years.Amazon's defense is not "we didn't." It is "no one was harmed, because targeting gains were pushing CPCs down anyway."Precedent says spend does not move: nobody left Google after the DOJ hearings.Meanwhile, Amazon's DSP brings real first-party targeting to ChatGPT ads — plugging that inventory's biggest gap and giving OpenAI a way to monetise intent it currently leaks to Google.Resources & links: ▶ Subscribe for new episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@smarter-ecommerce ▶ All episodes and show notes: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com/en/podcast/ ▶ Follow smec on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbh/▶ Mike Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeryanretail/▶ Chris Scharmueller on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-scharm%C3%BCller/ ▶ How smec manages Google Ads for retailers: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.com/en/About Smarter Ecommerce (smec):Smarter Ecommerce (smec) empowers e-commerce brands with AI-driven PPC automation that optimizes for profit and business outcomes while maintaining strategic control.The platform activates first-party data - profit margins, customer lifetime value, and key business metrics - to automate campaign optimization toward goals like profitability and efficient growth, while detailed campaign insights provide full transparency and enable PPC teams to focus on strategic oversight rather than manual execution.As a Google Premier Partner and three-time Microsoft Retail Partner of the Year, smec manages over €500 million in ad spend and drives €5B+ in annual e-commerce revenue for 350+ global retail clients including THG, Snipes, REWE, and Intersport.Make sure to follow smec - Smarter Ecommerce for more performance marketing insights:smec - Smarter Ecommerce: https://www.smarter-ecommerce.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/smarter-ecommerce-gmbhNewsletter: https://smarter-ecommerce.com/en/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smarterecommerce/
Pellerin Books founders Laura Palmer and Jessie Sullivan on how readers discover books now, where to put your marketing money, and why the quality of the book still decides everything.You'll learnThe rule that quietly decides which authors get a publisher's time, budget and attention.Why the first question about marketing a book is never “how?”How to research your readers and your market without paying for a single tool.The metric that makes an ad campaign look like it is working when nothing is.What a cover and a developmental edit should cost, and the one place never to skimp.Why raising your ad budget too fast makes it perform worse, not better.How subscription reading changed what a sagging middle chapter costs a writer.Whether a publisher actually cares how many followers you have.Three books on writing that between them cover almost everything, and the two-word rule that keeps readers turning pages.Why you cannot keyword your way into a reader's life in the age of AI search.Resources & Links
Send us Fan MailAmazon Ads ChatGPT integration brings ChatGPT Ads into Amazon DSP for AI advertising and programmatic campaigns. Amazon DSP advertisers can reach ChatGPT users with conversational ads during product research, comparisons, and buying decisions. Amazon sellers and ecommerce brands can see how AI shopping, Amazon advertising, and ChatGPT commerce may change paid media.Ready to test Amazon DSP and AI ads for your brand? Book a call to build a smarter paid media plan around ChatGPT advertising: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxu#AmazonAds #AmazonDSP #ChatGPTAdsWant free resources? Dowload our Free Amazon guides here:Your $1M Roadmap is here!: https://bit.ly/3SBO7VkDownload the 2026 Amazon AI Operating Manual: https://bit.ly/3SLmusPAmazon Receiving Delay Guide: https://hubs.ly/Q04cdD4c0Amazon Catalog Spring Cleaning: https://hubs.ly/Q046BVfp0Amazon Proft Margin Defense 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q042trRH0Amazon SEO Toolkit 2026: https://bit.ly/4oC2ClTAmazon Seller Strategy Report 2026: https://bit.ly/3YN1RME2026 Ecommerce Website & SEO Readiness Checklist: https://hubs.ly/Q04btghf0Amazon 2026 PPC guide: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXTimestamps0:00 – Amazon Ads ChatGPT Integration Explained0:42 – How ChatGPT Conversational Ads Work1:17 – Who Can Use ChatGPT Ads Through Amazon?2:16 – Why Amazon DSP Matters for ChatGPT Ads3:12 – What ChatGPT Ads Mean for Amazon Sellers3:48 – Future of Amazon Shopping Inside ChatGPT-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVwSupport the show
In this episode we set up AI on Amazon Ads in under five minutes, no code. Then we run through the five prompts that are actually working right now, including the one a seller used to uncover $4,300 in wasted spend.It's a three-step connect: sign up, add the custom connector, click connect. After that you can find wasted keywords, bulk-optimise campaigns, pull live reporting, expand into new marketplaces, and spot competitor ASINs you're showing up for but not targeting.WORK WITH CLEAR ADSWant our team to manage and scale your Amazon advertising?https://clearadsagency.com
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon ➡️ https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ SI deseas PUBLICAR escríbenos : contacto@letraminuscula.com Llama☎ o WhatsApp: +34640667855 Descubre 7 claves de marketing que aplican los autores que consiguen vender más libros: pensar en el lector, cuidar portada y título, construir una audiencia, usar YouTube y email marketing, invertir en Amazon Ads, aprender a vender y publicar de forma constante. Una guía práctica para escritores independientes que quieren mejorar su visibilidad, crear una comunidad y aumentar las ventas de sus libros. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:00 7 claves de autores que venden ▶️00:21 Piensa en el lector antes de escribir ▶️00:41 Adapta el libro a tu lector ▶️01:12 Resuelve una necesidad real del lector ▶️01:52 Cuida portada, título y descripción ▶️02:11 Elige un título atractivo y memorable ▶️02:30 Optimiza subtítulo y presentación ▶️03:21 No publiques un libro y desaparezcas ▶️04:09 Trabaja tu marca personal con constancia ▶️04:42 Construye una audiencia propia ▶️05:05 Crea contenido de valor para tus lectores ▶️05:23 YouTube y email para crear comunidad ▶️06:24 Una comunidad propia impulsa tus ventas ▶️07:01 Invierte en publicidad con Amazon Ads ▶️07:48 Aprende marketing para vender libros ▶️08:38 Publica más libros y amplía tu catálogo ▶️09:06 Crea un catálogo, no dependas de un libro ▶️09:31 Marketing, catálogo y tiempo dan resultados ▶️09:58 El éxito exige publicidad y constancia ▶️10:38 Cierre y sueño de ser escritor
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon: https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ En este directo de preguntas y respuestas hablamos sobre autopublicación, Amazon KDP, marketing para escritores, concursos literarios, portadas, Amazon Ads y estrategias para vender más libros. También resolvemos dudas sobre corrección, edición, nombres de personajes, reseñas de Amazon, contenido A+, precios, distribución, escritura, editoriales y cómo crear una audiencia y una marca personal como autor. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:00 Inicio y nombres británicos históricos ▶️03:58 Realismo en ficción basada en hechos ▶️06:09 Revisión de libro y contenido A+ ▶️08:12 Cuentos infantiles sin ilustraciones ▶️10:49 Autopublicar frente a editoriales ▶️13:08 Revisión de guía para viajes escolares ▶️16:15 Concurso, contacto y Amazon Reading ▶️19:05 Amazon Ads, Reading y portadas ▶️22:35 Requisitos del concurso de novelas ▶️23:59 Riesgos de vivir solo de escribir ▶️25:09 Ventas, batallas y libros en Amazon ▶️27:10 Concursos, Ads y libros actualizados ▶️29:12 Géneros y futuros concursos ▶️32:01 Bases, métricas Ads y cambios en KDP ▶️35:02 Riesgos legales y marketing editorial ▶️38:34 Nichos, KDP y cobro de regalías ▶️40:15 Menciones, plagio y revisión de libros ▶️44:20 Editoriales y desaparición de reseñas ▶️49:32 Tiempo para escribir y canal literario ▶️52:13 Distribución, audiencia y despedida
In this episode, Dave talks about what finally changed in his Facebook Ad Performance after years of frustration and dull performance. He explains what specifically flipped the switch in his thinking, why winning Amazon products don't necessarily translate to Facebook Ads, and what kind of products do work. Dave also lists out a few tips that he's picked up over the years, including what to optimize for, how long to test, and more. Timestamps 00:00 - Why Dave struggled to make Facebook Ads work 02:46 - Why Google and Amazon Ads don't translate on Facebook 05:40 - The #1 Revelation 06:40 - What products work better on Facebook and TikTok 09:31 - Why Facebook Targeting is More Algorithm-Driven 13:13 - Ad Fatigue 14:50 - AI Image Ads vs AI Video Ads 17:15 - Iterating on Winning Ads vs. Starting Over 21:07 - Optimize for Conversions, Not Clicks 22:34 - How long to test ads and what daily budget to use 23:03 - Why you should not send Facebook traffic directly to Amazon 24:28 - Why busier landing pages often convert better 26:22 - The Exchange Life example and the power of visual overload 27:17 - Final takeaway - build for the channel, not the catalog Resources Quiet Light Brokerage The Exitpreneur Jungle Scout As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, leave a comment down below if you're interested. Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. Thanks for listening! Until next time, happy selling!
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon: https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ RESUMEN: Roberto Augusto responde en directo a preguntas de escritores sobre Amazon KDP, publicación, ISBN, reseñas, derechos de autor, registro de obras, Amazon Ads, marketing, inteligencia artificial, portadas y promoción de libros. También analiza casos concretos de autores, comenta errores frecuentes al autopublicar y ofrece consejos sobre redes sociales, fiscalidad, concursos literarios y estrategias para vender más libros. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:02 Bienvenida y cifras del canal ▶️01:24 Preventa e ISBN en Amazon ▶️03:36 Datos fiscales para facturar cursos ▶️06:54 Web, mailing y reseñas en Amazon ▶️10:40 Papel, soporte y revisión en KDP ▶️13:08 Promoción y Amazon Ads ▶️16:47 Derechos sobre guías no oficiales ▶️18:39 Pagos y anuncios para vender libros ▶️21:33 Registro y propiedad intelectual ▶️22:46 Revisión de libro y contenido A+ ▶️26:05 Editor, autor y discrepancias ▶️27:24 Mascotas reales y derechos de imagen ▶️33:48 Autenticidad y éxito en YouTube ▶️37:37 Logos y marcas en portadas ▶️42:04 Revisión de portada y maquetación ▶️44:57 Extensión literaria y pujas en Ads ▶️48:04 Riesgos legales y segundas ediciones ▶️53:40 Plagio, concursos y registro de obras ▶️01:01:37 BookTok, Instagram y promoción ▶️01:07:49 IA, concurso y fiscalidad de autores
If your book sales are slow, it's easy to assume the answer is more visibility and start wondering whether Amazon Ads, Facebook ads, or paid book promotion will finally get things moving. But before you spend a dollar on ads, there's one question you need to answer first: what are the readers who already find your book doing next?In this episode, Jenn explains how to tell whether you truly have a visibility problem or whether something else in your book marketing is stopping readers before they buy. If you've been trying to sell more books, grow your audience, improve your book sales, or figure out whether paid advertising is worth it, this episode will help you make a much smarter decision before putting money behind your marketing.Links90-Day Book Sales SystemFREE Book Marketing Blueprint
The great Meta migration is in full swing. Ex-Meta employees are, filling the ranks at Open AI, TikTok, Amazon Ads and Roku and bringing their expertise with them.
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon ➡️https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ SI deseas PUBLICAR escríbenos : contacto@letraminuscula.com Llama☎ o WhatsApp: +34640667855 Publicar tu libro en Amazon es solo el primer paso. En este vídeo descubrirás qué hacer después para conseguir ventas: optimizar la ficha del libro, utilizar Amazon Ads, crear contenido en redes sociales, construir una comunidad, desarrollar una lista de correo y aprovechar tu página web, presentaciones y eventos. Aprende por qué el marketing es fundamental para que tu libro llegue a más lectores y crezca tu carrera como escritor. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:00 Qué hacer tras publicar en Amazon ▶️00:12 Pasos tras autopublicar tu libro ▶️00:23 Amazon no vende tu libro solo ▶️01:02 Los productos no se venden solos ▶️01:47 Debes conseguir visibilidad y lectores ▶️02:19 Publicar y vender son procesos distintos ▶️02:48 Revisa y optimiza la ficha del libro ▶️03:21 Gana visibilidad con Amazon Ads ▶️03:36 La visibilidad en Amazon se paga ▶️04:02 Promociona tu libro en redes sociales ▶️04:25 Define dónde está tu público objetivo ▶️04:43 Elige las redes donde está tu audiencia ▶️05:32 Crea contenido útil para tus lectores ▶️06:19 Construye comunidad con email marketing ▶️07:00 Crea y nutre tu lista de correo ▶️07:41 Construye comunidad y una web de autor ▶️08:30 Promociona con eventos y conferencias ▶️09:25 Empieza el proceso de vender tu libro ▶️10:14 Despedida y web de Letra Minúscula
How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy. In the intro, Expanding Your Book's IP through Merchandising [Wish I'd Known Then]; Guide to writers conferences [Kindlepreneur]; Rick Rubin and Stephen Pressfield on resistance and the muse [Tetragrammaton]; Pulitzer Prize winners disclose AI usage [Nieman Lab]; My new rebuilt fiction site JFPenn.com. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How AI search actually finds and ranks the books it recommends Why keywords and search volume are disappearing as marketing metrics Building an internet footprint so your book is worth recommending Why Claude leans on Goodreads while ChatGPT and Gemini lean on Reddit Product is more important than marketing, and how to find your comp titles Passion, business sense and resilience in the authors who last You can find Ricardo at Reedsy.com. Transcript of the interview with Ricardo Fayet Jo: Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. It's been a while. Jo: It has been a while. As we were saying, it's been a decade, which is crazy, because you and I see each other at events and things. For anyone who doesn't know you— Tell us a bit more about you, where you're from, and also, what is Reedsy these days and how have things changed? Ricardo: Yes, sure. I think I'm hard to dissociate from Reedsy because my only background really is Reedsy. We started Reedsy right after business school for most of the founders. There are four founders, and I'm one of them. We've been going since 2014, so it's been 12 years. We started around the same time, and you started even earlier than we did, but we've had the chance to meet at quite a few conferences since. I think the main thing we're still known for is our marketplace. Since the very beginning, Reedsy is a curated marketplace where authors can come in and look for editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters, literary translators, author website designers, pretty much any freelancer you would ever need to hire throughout your writing career. That's how we started. That's our main source of revenue and our main business. Since then, as you mentioned, we've also added courses, live events, so we've got a membership under Reedsy Learning. The main thing we're proud of right now is our writing tool, Reedsy Studio, because we've been pouring a lot of engineering talent into it over the past five, six years, and I think it's a really cool writing tool that is 90% free. It also does the formatting, so it's a good alternative to Vellum or Atticus for those who haven't purchased those tools. So there's a lot of things that Reedsy does at this point, which always makes it hard for me to describe what we do. Jo: But you generally serve writers. That's probably the crux of it. Ricardo: Exactly, yes. We're mostly at the production stage. The thing we say is we help authors make beautiful books, right? That's a little bit the tagline that applies to 90% of what we do, though we also help a little bit with the marketing side of things. Jo: And then just tell people where your accent is from. Ricardo: So I'm half French, half Italian from my parents, and I was born in Spain. So depending on my mood and the moment, it might be anywhere from French, Italian, Spanish. It's anyone's guess, really, at this point. Jo: Yes, exactly. You've been part of the indie author ecosystem, as you said, since 2014. You're often at the author conferences, and you stay abreast of everything that's going on. So what are the biggest changes you've seen in the industry since you started out? Like you said, you guys came from business school. You chose to come into the industry at a particular point, and yet things have changed. So what do you think are the biggest changes, and how have you seen authors adapt? Ricardo: It's crazy, the amount of things that happened in the past 10 years. Obviously we came into the industry as a result of Amazon launching Kindle Direct Publishing, and then the Kindle Store becoming one of the number one places where people buy books. That's what enabled self-publishing in the first place as an industry, and obviously we wouldn't exist without self-publishing being a thing. But then I think probably one of the biggest changes that happened was the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and various other subscription models. Perhaps as a response to that, afterwards, I would say direct sales is the other massive change that happened in the industry. The ability for authors to sell direct to their readers via their websites, or running Kickstarters, or basically the ability to reach your customers directly. Now, obviously, artificial intelligence is probably the biggest change of them all, not just in publishing, across every industry, but of course it's going to affect publishing very strongly, or it has already started making big waves. So I would say those are the three main changes that we've seen happening in the industry. Jo: Just interestingly, given that you're French, Italian, Spanish, European— Has the pace of change been the same in mainland Europe? Because you and I have also met up at European conferences, but I just get the sense that each individual European country, the UK included, as I include the UK in Europe, goes at a different speed. Ricardo: No, they definitely do. Our market at Reedsy is all in English. We only have an English website, and I would say 70% of our market is US, then 15% UK, and then Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. We do have clients in continental Europe, but they're mostly going to be American or British expats. A lot of retired people who write books and use Reedsy services. I think the main reason for that is that self-publishing as an industry hasn't really grown in Spain, France, Italy the way that it's grown in the US and the UK, probably because these are countries where book buying habits are a lot more traditional. So all my friends from high school and university in France, they all buy books, they all buy paper books. They all buy from bookstores. They don't really buy from Amazon that much. They love the smell of paper, all these sorts of things. So obviously that makes it harder for indie authors in those countries because they cannot place their books in the places where people buy them, which is traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, or at least it's much harder. So there is an indie movement in those countries, but it's much smaller. I would say Germany is maybe the exception in Europe, where I've seen more and more full-time indie authors, but I don't think it's a market that's comparable even to the UK. Jo: Interesting. Okay, so let's go to marketing, because you love marketing, you have a newsletter about it, and you have a book, How to Market a Book, same title as mine, and we've found each other in our Also Boughts over the years. You have, however, updated yours several times. 2025 was your last update. Mine was 2016, so yours is definitely the most up-to-date one. So what are your thoughts on how authors can reach readers now? And let's split this into two. Let's start with some tips for new authors who just have maybe one book and are really just starting out. Ricardo: Yes, first of all, sorry for stealing your title. Jo: Oh, you know, it's never been a problem. Ricardo: We were trying to come up with something… I know, I know, I know. But still, we wanted something more original, and then we realised that for SEO purposes, that's the title we should really go for. The good thing is, if you search “how to market a book” on pretty much any retailer, you're going to find your book or mine in any order really, but those are going to be the top two books to this day, thankfully, so I'm good with that. I think in terms of marketing tips for new authors who have just the one book, I'd say, despite all the changes in the industry, the basics of marketing still stay the same. One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. Having a great product. By that, I generally don't talk about literary value or prose or anything like that, just because I'm not a book critic. I'm not an editor. My opinion on whether a book is good or not is worth zero. From a marketing standpoint, for me, a good book is one that resonates with its intended audience. So the first step for newer authors is to basically figure out who they wrote this book for, right? Have an idea of who their target market is. A great way to do that, without entering into marketing jargon like proto-personas and stuff like that, is to think in terms of comp titles, comparable titles. I think that's probably the base of any marketing, whether traditional publishing houses or indie authors, to think, “Okay, which other books out there are similar to mine?” If your book is completely unique, you have, I would say, 99.9% chance of not selling, because your market doesn't exist, and 0.01% chance of creating your own market and completely dominating it, right? So being unique is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would say 99% of the time, it is. Obviously being unique within an existing niche, within an existing market, that's completely different, but you need to work on some comparable titles. So I would say that's where I would start, and that's one of the things that AI is great at. If you even just plug in your book into an AI chat that has enough context, if you're comfortable doing that of course, or if you plug in a synopsis, like a long synopsis, you can basically ask the AI chats, “Okay, what would be some comp titles?” Either you'll have heard of those books, and you'll think, “Okay, they're good comps,” or you may not have heard of them, in which case I would really recommend buying them and reading them and seeing whether they're comps or not. I think that's where marketing starts. Jo: Yes, and we might come back to that for book discoverability. Well, let's just talk about it now, because I now pretty much use Claude for discovering books as well. I just find that the Amazon search, for nonfiction it works really well, right? As you said, if you want to learn how to market a book, you just search “how to market a book”, and our books are very well titled for that. But for fiction, it's so difficult to find new books and comp titles, especially if you don't write in a clear genre, which I don't. I know lots of people do. So we're writing cross-genre. So in terms of book discoverability, I know you've been looking into SEO for books and all of that. What are your thoughts on how authors can more effectively have their books surfaced if people are using the AIs for finding books? Ricardo: That's a very big topic. That's one of my favourite topics right now. That's what I talk about in my marketing newsletter, and I want to start a Substack on the topic as well, because I think it is the future of book discoverability. As you say, search on Amazon isn't great, and if it's not great on Amazon, you don't even want to imagine on Google Play, Kobo, all these sorts of places, right? If you search on Kobo or Apple Books or Google Play for witch cozy mysteries, the top 10 books are going to have exactly “witch cozy mystery” in the title or the subtitle or the series title, right? Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Search is very simple on those sites, so it's very easy to game, but it's terrible as an experience for readers. So I do think that a big part of search is going to move to AI, and now you have Rufus within Amazon itself that appears as a chatbot and encourages you to talk with it, to ask for recommendations. In the beginning Rufus was really terrible, but now I recommend authors play with it. In general, I recommend when it comes to AI discoverability that authors play with all the AI search tools. So it's going to be Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Rufus within Amazon. Just like we talked about comp titles, right, ask for something like, “What would you recommend for fans of this book? Which other books would you recommend?” Or if you're looking for something specific that describes your book, what books would you recommend on… I think one of your examples was fiction around masonry or something like that, right? Jo: I always say, for example, if you ask for action adventure thrillers on pretty much anywhere, you're going to get 20 books by male authors. For those of us who are female authors, but also who have female main characters, you can then be far more granular. That's just not something that necessarily works on Amazon. So, action adventure thrillers with female protagonists written by female indie authors, which is very specific. That will work in AI, whereas that definitely won't work on Amazon. Ricardo: Exactly. So one of the great things about AI search, and terrible things at the same time, is that the concept of keyword is lost, right? So we title our books How to Market a Book because the keyword that people would search for is “how to market a book”, or “book marketing for authors”. Those were the two keywords that had the biggest search volume if we looked at Google Keyword Planner, or any search tools that give you keyword volume. When it comes to AI search, since it's conversational, and it's very personalised, and it can go as niche as you want, keywords are going to disappear, and search volume as a metric is going to disappear. The search you just told me about, maybe there are 10 people who are going to run it exactly. Most people are going to run variations of that. Since you can go as granular as you want, it's going to be very long phrases, very long sentences. So the whole concept of keywords, search volume, SEO, is going to disappear in favour of what some people call GEO, generative engine optimisation, AIO, AI optimisation, AI search optimisation. There's a bunch of names for it, but it is a different discipline. It still works on the basis of Google SEO because what most of these search engines will do is they're going to search the internet, right? They've been trained on a lot of information, but not all of that information is current. Most of these models have been trained on documents and web pages before 2021. That's why when you used the very early versions of ChatGPT, and you asked it about current events or current books, it didn't find it. It didn't have that information. Now all these models have the ability to search the web, and they do that really effectively. So the first thing they're going to do if you run a search like that is they're going to run dozens of different searches on Google or a similar search engine. Action thriller books with female protagonists. Action thriller books with female protagonists by indie authors. Action thriller books by indie authors. They're going to create what I call a corpus, so a massive document of information with candidates, books that probably meet those criteria that they have found through regular web searches. Then they're going to go through all those books and determine which are the most relevant to recommend, and they'll return with that. Then they'll usually have a verification layer as well, which is, okay, I have these five books that I want to recommend to this user, but I just want to make sure first that they are written by indie authors, that they do have a female protagonist, et cetera. And if I'm not able to verify that, I'll flag it in my answer to them. So there are these three layers. Web search, then ranking of the book candidates, and finally a verification layer, and then they serve you the answer. Obviously, that's really powerful. If that's the way that search is headed, which I firmly believe, then we as authors need to learn how to get our books in there. Jo: Yes. It's so interesting, and I do this all the time. Really niche stuff, like a thriller about anatomical Venuses, which are these models from anatomy museums and stuff like that, with an edge of the supernatural. What is brilliant is that you can find the books that come up. I actually got one that I read and reviewed, and it was fantastic. So I love the more granular thing, but we're really in the very long tail now, right? It feels like you can write a very nuanced book, and it will be surfaced, but only by a few people. So do we have to write our books and then try to not even retrofit them in the way that we used to? We used to try and figure out the seven keywords and all of that kind of thing, and now I almost feel like we just get to be grownups, where you just get to write the book and put it out there, and these things are more intelligent than the search terms. Ricardo: Yes, absolutely. I think in terms of the variety of books that are going to be read and discovered, that's amazing. A little bit like the whole indie publishing movement was amazing, because if you remove the traditional publishing gatekeepers, then suddenly zombie books aren't dead anymore. Zombies are alive again. They've… Jo: Come to life. Ricardo: They've come alive, and so you get a bunch of zombie books again. It's not a small niche audience. It's actually a pretty big niche audience that loves zombie books, and suddenly they have those to consume. This is a little bit similar on a much, much bigger and more granular scale, because anyone can find exactly the kind of book that they're looking for, with the tropes they want, with the type of characters they want, with the type of author they want, and you can basically use any kind of filter. So for discoverability on the side of the reader, that's great. For the authors, it doesn't mean that you can just write whatever you want and then rest, and readers will find them. Because your books still need to have generated a certain internet footprint and a certain review footprint in order to become interesting or recommendable to AI search engines, right? Unless you're the only book that an AI search engine can recommend for that specific search, and yours was very specific, so it might have been the only one. If there are other candidates, the AI search engines are pretty smart. They're going to recommend the candidates that have more reviews, better reviews, or are more famous, that have more, when I talk about internet footprint, more pages talking about them on the internet. That's for me the big finding I've seen. The more pages you have on the internet talking about your book, so that could be book review sites, that could be Goodreads lists, Listopia lists, anywhere on the internet where your book is mentioned, that creates a footprint for it. The more footprints, the more famous your book looks to AI search engines, and so the more worthy of recommendations it is to them. Jo: Yes, and this is one reason why I now ask people, especially when you sell direct, or say you have a Kickstarter and you want reviews, I ask people if they can review on Goodreads. Obviously Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but it is far more searchable by the bots than Amazon is. I sometimes find that Amazon gets blocked. Or Amazon blocks some of the bots, let's put it that way. They might change over time. They own 15% of Anthropic or something. But Goodreads I feel like does get indexed, and I'm not willing to engage on Reddit. I know Reddit is another popular one. Just be very clear on social media, because some people think, oh, I just need loads of influencers to talk about my book, and that will impact the AIs. But I find that social media just almost isn't even there. Ricardo: It depends on which social media. For me, Reddit is a social medium, right? It's a very weird one, but it's obviously the number one social medium used by AI search engines, and it's pretty dodgy stuff with lots of conflicts of interest, because Google has a paid partnership with Reddit. I think Sam Altman has shares in Reddit. So both OpenAI and Google Gemini heavily rely on Reddit for their AI answers, right? If you ask anything from ChatGPT or Gemini, I'd say there are very high chances that in the sources and the citations of the answer, you're going to find Reddit, right? That goes for books as well. Every time you ask for book recommendations, Reddit is going to be big for those two AI search engines. Claude, it's a little bit different. They do have a little bit of a relationship with Reddit, but I don't think it's as big. I found that Claude relies heavily on Goodreads, not Reddit. To me, Goodreads is another social medium at the end of the day, right? It's not the kind of social medium we think of, like… Jo: It's not TikTok. Ricardo: It's not TikTok. TikTok is surfaced a little bit, but not that much. It might become more surfaced in the future, but right now what I've found is, it's really Reddit and Goodreads. Facebook, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is big for nonfiction topics more than fiction, because there are just not a lot of fiction readers, sorry, talking about their favourite books on LinkedIn. They usually go to other places for that. Jo: Yes, it's really interesting. So obviously TikTok has its own BookTok thing, so some people are finding books on BookTok, and some people like me are finding books through asking Claude, and that's just my overwhelming feeling about the industry. We talked earlier about what's changed. When I started, so 2006, there wasn't even KDP, and then KDP arrives, then you came in 2014, and probably until maybe a few years after that, there was one way to self-publish. Then what's happened since is this kind of splintering. There are so many ways to self-publish. There are so many ways to reach readers. There are so many ways to market. So someone, for example, could sell direct on TikTok Shop, only market through TikTok, and you wouldn't even know that they existed over in another ecosystem, right? So do you feel like that's happened too, this total splintering? Ricardo: Absolutely. I think there are so many different ways in which you can reach your audience now and monetise it as well, that it's absolutely possible. We both know examples of authors who are only visible to their TikTok niche, right? I think the big difference is also monetisation, because earlier you also had different ways of becoming well-known. Like you had Facebook, you had potentially Twitter, back when it was Twitter. Various social media, word of mouth. But where people bought books was Amazon. So that was your monetisation. It was either selling your book on Amazon, or potentially getting KU reads after that when KU launched. Now you can sell on TikTok, you can sell direct, you can run Kickstarters, you can start a Patreon or Substack and make your money through there. There are pretty much infinite ways through which you can monetise your content as a creator. Most of those places will also have a discoverability engine built in, so you can not only sell through there and make money through there, but also grow an audience there. That's probably the biggest competition that Amazon has ever had to face, is this sort of splintering. For us authors and content creators in general, it's amazing, because it's a bunch of different opportunities. Jo: Yes, and I think probably that's circling back to marketing. As we've said, some things have changed, some things stay the same. Is the email list still the number one way to market, do you think, for authors who want a long-term career? Ricardo: I think so. It's just the one thing you really own that allows you to communicate with readers, right? Because even if you build a following on TikTok, TikTok can change. The things we said about Facebook 10 years ago, if you build your Facebook group, Facebook can change, and Facebook changed. Facebook destroyed the reach of pages, and now groups also aren't amazing, et cetera. So the same thing that happened to Facebook can happen to TikTok, can happen to any other social media. Substack is a bit of a hybrid because it is a newsletter, it is a mailing list, but it also has a discoverability engine built in. So I still wouldn't really go all in on Substack. The great advantage there is that you do own the emails, right? So you can move away from it at some point. For me, the email list is the one thing that you are completely in control of. Personally, the main thing I check is my emails every day. I spend more time in my inbox than anywhere else, and I think that's probably the case for most people. So I do think, despite the influx of mails that readers are getting in their inbox, I still think it's one of the most important marketing tools for authors. Jo: Yes, and I still remember when I started my list in December 2008, and I still have people on the list who've been with me that whole time, and have moved email list services several times as well. So I think that's important too. The care of that list too is so important. One of the things that I am annoyed about with Substack, I don't have a Substack, but when I follow some people's, it's always constantly trying to get you to sign up to other people's lists, trying to subscribe you to this or that or the other. I'm like, “That's so annoying.” Now I've found on all these email services they're trying to pair you with other creators and cross-promote and all of this. So it feels like even the email list is becoming a difficult place unless you really protect it. So just protecting your list, I think, and remembering that those are people. Those are people who've bought your books, or people who read your emails. Like people listening to this, these are humans. Sure, some bot might be looking at the transcript, but humans listening to this are individual humans with individual email lists. We tend to forget that, don't we, as you get a bigger list. You think about it as a big number, whereas it's still individual people. Ricardo: Yes, it becomes a number, it becomes metrics, the open rate, the click rate, and all that. But the great thing about email is that you get replies in your inbox. There you remember that they're actual human beings who write you back. I think for readers, the ability to write back to an author and get a response is just amazing, right? If you write to your favourite author and they write back to you, that's the best feeling ever as a reader. So I think email is still one of the best ways to turn your readers into fans and into super fans of your brand, by just interacting with them and answering them. Because yes, you can answer comments on TikTok, Facebook, and all those places, but it doesn't feel the same as an author answering you in your inbox, I feel. So you do get that ability to create a real connection with readers directly through email. Jo: Yes, and I think that trust and the reputation is so important. Just in terms of seeing the authors that you've seen over the years, like I said, you've been going to a lot of the author conferences. You know a lot of the authors in the industry. A lot of people will know you from events. But you've also seen authors come and go, and you've seen vendors come and go. Both of us have seen people arrive, and we'd be like, “Oh, yes, I wonder how long they're going to last.” Then some people do and some people don't. So what are some of the elements that you've noticed about the businesses that last more than a decade? Ricardo: I think they need to solve a genuine problem, or offer a genuinely better solution than one that already exists. I see a lot of businesses come in and they do what another vendor already does, without doing it necessarily better. Those businesses tend to disappear, or linger there, but you don't really hear about them again. When they solve a real need… I still remember when BookFunnel came out, and they've since become massive with one very, very basic thing, which is, “We will take care of delivering your ebook files to readers.” That's how they started, and that's how they became massive. To me at the time, I was like, “That seems like a very small problem,” because I can just email an ebook file. I didn't realise that it was so complicated for a lot of readers to upload files to their Kindle or other devices, and that having a service that takes care of that for you is just massively helpful. I realised that when I published my books, actually. So businesses that solve even micro or apparently very small problems, but they really solve them effectively, they stay. Others that surf on trends, they tend to disappear when the trend disappears. When there's a new marketing trend, and that trend stops working, then those businesses tend to go. Jo: Yes, and what about the authors who last? Because let's face it, most of us don't solve a problem in a different way. Maybe you could say we solve your entertainment problem in a different version to your last book. What about the authors who last long term? What have you noticed about them? Ricardo: Two things. So the first one… Maybe three things. First one is passion. I always say to people who are looking to start self-publishing, I always say that publishing in general is probably one of the worst ways to make money. It's awful. You can pick up any other occupation and it's probably going to be easier to make money. So writers who make a career do it because they need to write, because they have a passion for writing. So a lot of people who come into the industry thinking, “I've heard about all these self-publishing success stories. Surely I can write a book and I can market it. It's not that hard. So that's going to be a great way to make quick bucks,” those generally don't last, because they don't have that genuine passion. The first hurdle they're going to face—and there's going to be a bunch of them along the way—they're going to quit. The second thing is business sense, or business education, the basics of business, right? Thinking in terms of marketing, thinking in terms of who's my reader, unit economics. If I'm selling my books at $3.99, I shouldn't be spending a ton of money. If I just have one book at $3.99, I cannot afford to pay $5 on ads to generate a sale. So those kinds of basic economics or business knowledge, I think, if not a requirement, it's a massive plus. The third thing is resilience. The industry has changed a lot, as you mentioned. There are a bunch of ways now to reach an audience. There are a bunch of ways to make money. It can also be distracting, because you go to one of these conferences and you go back thinking, “Oh, I've got to create my own website, sell direct. I've got to launch my Substack. I have to use Claude Code for my ads,” and three more things, “and I have to set up my TikTok Shop and do TikTok Lives to sell books,” right? Jo: All of those by next week. That's why we go to the conference. Ricardo: Exactly. All those by next week, right? And during that one week after the conference, you have the energy to start implementing all those things, but afterwards you lose that energy and you go back to, “I just want to quit.” So you need to have some sort of resilience, and the business sense of, “Okay, I'm going to try this for the next six months, and I'm going to stick to it, and I'm going to see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm not just going to despair. I'm going to try something else.” That goes for marketing tactics, but also goes for books. Most authors I know who make a living writing, they didn't get there with their first book or even their first series. A lot of times I see authors who write a couple of series, and those series do okay. They sell a little bit, but not much, and it doesn't afford them to quit their day job. Then suddenly, based on what they've learned with those first two series and what they've learned potentially going to conferences or listening to podcasts like this, et cetera, they write a third series that's a hit. That's a hit, and that's instantly much easier to market, and that's when they can afford to go full time and write full time, because they've found that sort of product market fit. And product market fit for me is the main thing for marketing in general and for authors in particular. Until you find that, everything is really difficult from a marketing perspective. But finding it usually requires writing more than one book and more than one series, because you're rarely going to get the big lottery ticket on the first try. Jo: Or ever. I think it's really important. I've never had a breakout book, but I've made good money every year. I think, and Hugh Howey said this, that the real story of self-publishing is not the people who make seven figures a year, it's the people who can go on a holiday once a year, or the people who can just put a bit towards their mortgage or whatever. So you may never have a breakout series. I think that's really important, too. Ricardo: That's true. Jo: That's true. You can just keep writing and make all right money and be what we call in the mid-list. Ricardo: Yes, but you've got to keep going. You've got to have that resilience to keep going, probably because it's your passion. Exactly. You're not chasing that seven figure series. You're writing because you need to write. Jo: Yes, and you can't stop, and you get the bug. I think when you're writing that first book, I'm not sure if people understand that you either get the bug or you don't, I think. You've written a couple of books now. Do you think you have the bug, or is it more about the business? Ricardo: I don't have the bug. I definitely don't have the bug. I would've kept writing otherwise. Jo: You're a technologist, right? Ricardo: Yes. I'm more of a technologist, more of a marketer. To write my first book, How to Market a Book, I actually had to write newsletters, because that I can manage, right? One newsletter a week. Now I don't even manage that. I send it once every two weeks when I can even manage that pace. But back then I did one newsletter a week, and that's how I wrote my first book. I then put all these newsletters together, and that was before the age of AI, so I couldn't just dump all that into ChatGPT and tell it, “Create me a book based on that.” I had to do it myself. Jo: Oh, terrible. Ricardo: Terrible, I know. The days when we had to work. No, but that was a really good experiment. The second book, Amazon Ads for Authors, I actually wrote it from scratch, and I didn't love the experience. I loved the finished product, I'm very proud of it, but I didn't enjoy the experience of writing it. Amazon Ads is not the most exciting topic in the world. Even for people like me, who actually enjoy Amazon Ads, it's not super exciting to write about. The fact of having to write that whole book from scratch, I didn't love the experience. So now I do want to write a third book at some point, but I think it'll probably be in the format of the first one. Like, when I finish my series of newsletters on AI search and AI discoverability, I might do a booklet or something around it, but we'll have to see. It's not my favourite thing. It's a good thing I don't need to. Good thing I'm not an author, basically. Jo: No, but I think that's really great to recognise. You actually have written books that support your business, and that is very common for nonfiction writers. That's completely normal for nonfiction authors. So I think that's another important thing for people to recognise, is that the reasons we write are different, the reasons we market are different, and we all have different approaches. As we wind up, and obviously you talked a bit there about how easy it is to generate books with AI, and that is probably one of the biggest things that people are worried about. Now, those of us like you and I have been talking about AI at conferences and things for years now. Neither of us are afraid of it, I think basically because both of us use it, and we're technologists, so we just get on with it. There is so much fear in the community. There's so much negativity. You mentioned Substack, and now they've integrated Pangram, which is renowned for false positives around what is written with AI, and so people are very worried. If we look forward and we look at the next decade, this is not going away. This is going to change a lot of things. So how should authors be thinking about AI, do you think, if they want to prepare for the next decade? Ricardo: I think they need to play around with it, because you and I know that until you actually use it, you don't realise what it's capable of. We've both had these moments of “Oh my God, I'm going to be out of a job,” or “Oh my God, this is incredible,” the kind of things it's able to do. You also realise by using it the things it's not great at, or the things it can be good at but needing a lot of human input. There are courses out there, there are books, there are a lot of things, but for me, the most important thing is to start playing around with it. So you can pick one specific topic to play around with. Either something that you've been meaning to get into for years and haven't done, or something that really annoys you. Looking at the results of your Facebook ads, for example. If you run Facebook ads in the first place, and when you log into your Meta dashboard you cannot make sense of it, take screenshots or download the data, feed it to an AI chat, and talk with it. One of my biggest tips when talking to AI chats is asking them questions rather than asking them for things to do. Because if you just feed it your advertising data and you tell it, “Tell me what I should do,” the chat has no context about what your ads are about, what your goal is, et cetera, et cetera. If you feed it just a screenshot and you say, “Here are my ads. I would like you to help me make sense of them. What do you need to know from me in order to help me with this?” Then it's going to start asking you questions. “Okay, what are you advertising?” They're books. “Okay, what kind of books? Where are you selling? Are your ads going straight to Amazon or retailers, or are they going to your website? If you sell direct, okay, are these conversion ads?” Et cetera, et cetera. So you build that context, and they can help you with it. So that's just one example, but I would pick one thing that you want to test AI with, with zero expectations. Don't expect that by the end of the week you'll have a full system for understanding your Meta ads thanks to AI. You might get to that or you might not, but at least you'll play with it and you'll understand its capabilities, and have a sort of understanding of how it works and how you can potentially use it for other things. I think that's the best way to adapt, because once you play with it, you start thinking. You're walking the dog and you're just thinking, “Ha, I could maybe use it for this thing or that other thing,” and that's how you progressively become more familiar with it. I think there are a lot of worries around AI, but as you say, it's there to stay. So far, I think I was looking at data this morning, and the unemployment rate in the US has stayed stable ever since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago. So there are a lot of narratives out there around how it's going to replace humans, it's going to replace jobs, et cetera, which it might do. I'm not great at predictions usually, but so far it hasn't. What it will definitely do, however, is completely change the way we work. Obviously AI was one of our big reckonings at Reedsy, because we run a marketplace. Our main business model is the marketplace, where authors come in and look for editors, for marketers, for cover designers, for translators, and some of these domains and services are being transformed by AI, right? AI translations are massive right now. We haven't really seen a decline at all on the Reedsy marketplace, but we're prepared for it. It might very well happen, but what we think is happening, or is going to happen, is professionals using AI tools to provide a better output or a faster output or a cheaper output, or all three of these things. So for example, we now have literary translators who say they're open to editing AI translations, right? So you can come in, you can have your book translated with AI, whichever tool or method you choose for that. Then if you want a set of human eyes on it, you can hire a literary translator who's open to working on an AI-translated manuscript, and that's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than paying 10 cents per word from scratch for a literary translator. I'm not necessarily recommending you completely bypass literary translators, or that you go this way, but you have options, right? You have options for different sets of budgets. I think all these human editors, narrators, translators, designers, et cetera, they're not going to disappear, but they might have to reinvent the way they work in the future. Jo: As we all are doing. As you say, for me mostly it's the business side, getting Claude to help me with business stuff. Like even bookkeeping. There are bills that we've all been paying for years that we can now maybe reduce, and reducing costs as well as increasing profit is obviously good business sense. So, interesting times. But just as we wrap up, what are you excited about in what's coming? How do you see Reedsy shaping up in the next decade? What is coming for you and Reedsy? Ricardo: We're really excited about the decade to come, because obviously 10 years for a startup is a long time. I think most startups after 10 years, the founders are gone. Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Or they've exited or they've sold or whatever. We've stayed, we're the same founders, and we're still as excited because I think we have new products, right? We're working on new things. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Reedsy Studio, our writing tool, is probably one of the things we're most excited about, because first, it's getting adopted very fast. It has startup-like growth that we hadn't seen for other products in a long time, and it has very cool technology built in. We probably have a team of 10, 15 engineers now working full time on it and adding a lot of things. So we've added templates for plotting your book, with relationships within different characters and places and magic systems and things like that. We've added writing goals and writing statistics. We still have the free exports. One very cool thing we've added is real time collaboration. So just like Google Docs, you can write in real time with a co-author, or you can get an editor to work in there live with track changes. So you could have an editor working on chapter one while you're writing chapter three, for example. That kind of thing. It's really powerful technology, and that's one of the things we're really excited about for the future. A business, just like authors, we've got to reinvent ourselves. We've got to find ways to keep things exciting and keep motivated, and that is definitely one of them. When adoption goes along with it, then that's obviously super satisfying. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and Reedsy online? Ricardo: So Reedsy you can find at reedsy.com, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com. And there you'll find the whole suite of tools and services. For me, you can find me mostly by email, as I mentioned. That's the one place I check consistently every day, and my email address is ricardo@reedsy.com. So again, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com and ricardo@reedsy.com. You can email me any questions you have about this episode, about AI book discoverability, about marketing, about Reedsy. I always try to answer every email I get, because I think when we started Reedsy, I really appreciated people like you, and some other agents and editors and authors we contacted who were influential in the industry, who actually answered us and took the time to do that. So now I try to answer every email I get, because I feel like we've been very lucky in the beginning to have those people answering our emails, so we should do the same. Jo: Oh, well, thanks so much for your time, Ricardo. That was great. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. Thanks for having me again.The post Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet first appeared on The Creative Penn.
Why are the biggest retailers overhauling their operations with AI while many FBA sellers are still stuck manually refreshing their Amazon Ads dashboards? Neil Twa dives into this pressing question on The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. After reading a Retail Dive article, Neil was struck by the idea that AI is not just a tool, but a connective layer across the entire retail business. He shares a real-world example from his portfolio, where a home goods brand's SKU was performing well but needed an AI-driven audit to maintain its edge. Neil outlines three actionable moves for sellers at every level: first, audit your listing fundamentals as if AI is grading them, because it is. Conversion rates, return rates, review velocity, and listing completeness all matter more than ever. If you're realizing AI's impact on Amazon's evaluation of your brand, it's time to adapt. Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep357 Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com: https://voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep357
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon Ç ➡️ https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ SI deseas PUBLICAR escríbenos : contacto@letraminuscula.com Llama☎ o WhatsApp: +34640667855 RESUMEN: Descubre por qué Amazon KDP puede ser una de las mejores opciones para autopublicar tu libro. En este vídeo conocerás sus principales ventajas: alcance internacional, publicación en papel y ebook, control total de los derechos, mayores regalías y acceso transparente a tus ventas. Además, explicamos cómo Editorial Letra Minúscula puede ayudarte a publicar tu obra con calidad profesional y gestionar todo el proceso técnico. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:00 Por qué publicar en Amazon KDP ▶️00:18 Qué es Amazon KDP y cómo funciona ▶️00:44 KDP como imprenta global para autores ▶️01:18 Publicar gratis y con apoyo profesional ▶️01:43 Opciones al terminar tu manuscrito ▶️02:17 Autopublicar en KDP como mejor opción ▶️02:47 Experiencia con distintos modelos ▶️03:10 Alcance global en tiendas Amazon ▶️03:42 Venta mundial sin intermediarios ▶️04:15 Formatos, ebook y ventajas de KDP Select ▶️05:00 Lectores, derechos y control de la obra ▶️05:32 Regalías frente a editorial tradicional ▶️06:05 Más ingresos con KDP ▶️06:29 Control y transparencia de las regalías ▶️07:08 Servicio profesional para publicar en KDP ▶️07:44 Qué incluye el servicio de publicación ▶️08:36 Control total y promoción con Amazon Ads ▶️09:12 Cursos, ayuda y publicación profesional ▶️10:00 Despedida y sueño de ser escritor
Servicio publicar un libro en Amazon: https://www.letraminuscula.com/publicar-en-amazon/ RESUMEN: Directo de preguntas y respuestas sobre escritura, autopublicación y marketing para escritores. Hablamos de sagas, Amazon KDP, Amazon Ads, creación de comunidad, precios, concursos literarios, portadas, inteligencia artificial aplicada a la escritura y adaptación de novelas al cine. También resolvemos dudas sobre distribución internacional, ISBN, depósito legal y estrategias para conseguir más lectores. ⏲MARCAS DE TIEMPO: ▶️00:00 Inicio y preguntas del directo ▶️01:21 Concurso de ciencia ficción ▶️02:40 Publicar más y apostar por sagas ▶️07:52 Imprimir y distribuir en Panamá ▶️11:12 Tipos de sagas y continuidad ▶️15:05 Narradores y marketing inicial ▶️16:55 Actualización de libros y cursos ▶️19:33 Cómo llegar a tu público ideal ▶️23:28 Cuándo activar Amazon Ads ▶️26:49 Regalar libros para ganar audiencia ▶️30:20 Cómo encargar una buena portada ▶️35:14 Cómo crear comunidad de lectores ▶️37:20 IA y escritura híbrida ▶️42:55 Interpretación abierta de una obra ▶️49:10 ISBN y depósito legal ▶️51:31 Cómo fijar el precio de un libro ▶️56:15 Concursos, sagas y valor de una obra ▶️58:24 Llevar una novela al cine ▶️01:04:19 Derechos de adaptación y regalías ▶️01:06:39 Despedida y próximos directos
Most beauty operators think cheap sourcing means bigger margins, but Neil Twa is here to flip that script. On this episode of The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, Neil breaks down why low-cost sourcing decisions are actually burying your beauty brand's potential on Amazon. He shares a story about a member who was doing $30,000 to $40,000 a month in the beauty category but found her margins squeezed by poor sourcing choices. Neil offers three actionable moves for beauty operators at every level, whether you're making $5,000 a month or $500,000. From building a sourcing scorecard to juggling compliance checklists and Amazon Ads dashboards, Neil's insights are a wake-up call for anyone relying on cheap sourcing. Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep344 See your Amazon numbers in one place and protect your margins with Caiman Data at voltagedm.com: https://voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep344&learn_mcp=1
In today's Digest, we cover digital publisher revenues falling 4.55% in Q1 2026 as AI disruption bites, Shein swinging to a US$99m quarterly loss ahead of its Hong Kong IPO, and Amazon Ads and Octave striking a deal to bring News UK's audio brands to Amazon DSP.
Amazon is selling its AI shopping tech to your competitors, and most operators are ignoring this shift at their own peril. Neil Twa dives into a Retail Dive article that reveals Amazon's strategy of offering its AI shopping assistant to other retailers, not just keeping it in-house. This move could impact your conversion rates if you don't adapt. Neil shares a real-world example of a mid-sized home goods brand that faced similar challenges. With a solid SKU count and decent margins, they had to rethink their customer engagement strategies. Neil outlines three critical moves for sellers: audit your customer data beyond Amazon Ads, use every touchpoint outside of Amazon, and prepare for the influx of decisions every new AI tool brings. This episode is a wake-up call for sellers at every level. The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast is here to guide you through these changes. Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep334 See your Amazon numbers in one place and protect your margins with Caiman Data at voltagedm.com: https://voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep334&learn_mcp=1
Who actually controls your Amazon Ads right now? Is it you, or a checkbox you scrolled past last week? Neil Twa dives into Amazon's new targeting strategy beta inside manual Sponsored Products campaigns. This episode of The High Voltage Business Builders Podcast unpacks the difference between AI that's a tool and AI that's a takeover. Neil shares a real-world story from an operator running a home goods brand with $40,000 to $60,000 in monthly revenue. The margins were solid, but the ad spend was spiraling. Discover three actionable moves whether you're managing one SKU or a hundred. This isn't about being anti-AI, it's about knowing when AI is taking the wheel. Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep343 See your Amazon numbers in one place and protect your margins with Caiman Data at voltagedm.com: https://voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep343&learn_mcp=1
Sixty-four percent of what Alexa recommends to shoppers is sitting outside the organic top ten. Not page two, not rank eleven. Nearly 41% of those picks are outside the visible results entirely. Neil Twa dives into a Marketplace Pulse article that reveals a startling shift in Amazon's landscape. In a study of nearly two thousand non-branded queries, Alexa's AI is bypassing traditional FBA ranks. Neil shares a real pattern from his portfolio, highlighting a home goods brand with solid products and good reviews that still gets overlooked. He breaks down three actionable moves to audit your top five SKUs for intent language, not just keyword density. If you're spending big on Amazon Ads and still getting bypassed by Alexa's recommendations, this episode is a must-listen. Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep332 See your Amazon numbers in one place and protect your margins with Caiman Data at voltagedm.com: https://voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep332&learn_mcp=1
Programmatic advertisers frequently face low engagement and conversion bottlenecks caused by static, generic display ad formats.Fabrice Rousseau, Director of Advertising Experiences at Amazon, breaks down the major update to Amazon's Responsive E-commerce (REC) ad product and how generative AI is transforming display advertising across the open web.Key topics covered include:Automating creative asset generation—including full-bleed images, motion, and video—directly from product detail pages.Integrating Amazon's "Prompt" agentic shopping assistant into open web banner formats.Utilizing runtime Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) to personalize creative per publisher context and user intent.Driving downstream brand impact and a 27% conversion lift over traditional display units.How to set up component-based REC campaigns inside the Amazon DSP.Fabrice Rousseau is the Director of Advertising Experiences at Amazon Ads, leading product innovation, automated creative engineering, and agentic e-commerce applications.Connect with our guest:Follow Fabrice Rousseau on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabricerousseau/Explore Amazon Ads: https://advertising.amazon.com/Simplify Paid Social with Strike Social: https://strikesocial.com/guaranteed-paid-social-media-ads-outcomes/Connect with Host Dylan Conroy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanconroy/
Most sellers waste ad spend without realizing why. Discover the Amazon PPC strategies, budget shifts, and Amazon Ads features that could make your campaigns more profitable. Amazon PPC can quickly become overwhelming. Sellers are constantly choosing between more keywords, more products, higher bids, new ad formats, and increasingly complex targeting options. But according to Paige Plevyak, Senior Retail Media Manager at Pacvue, better advertising does not begin with more tactics. It begins with a stronger foundation. In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, host Carrie Miller and Paige break down some of the biggest advertising mistakes sellers make, including spreading budgets across too many keywords and ASINs, adjusting bids too frequently, and launching campaigns without a clearly defined goal. Paige explains why sellers with limited budgets should often concentrate on five to ten priority keywords, focus spending on hero products, and use long-tail search terms to build momentum in competitive categories. The conversation also explores when sellers should use Sponsored Products versus Sponsored Brands video, how Amazon Marketing Cloud audiences can improve targeting, and which newer Amazon advertising features may be worth testing. Paige also shares practical advice for recovering after a long stockout, increasing keyword impression share, managing product variations, and deciding when to prioritize immediate profitability over broader visibility. The biggest takeaway is that strong PPC performance rarely comes from constantly chasing the newest feature. It comes from understanding your goals, focusing your resources, and giving your campaigns enough time and data to work. Build the right foundation first, and every optimization you make afterward becomes more intentional, measurable, and scalable. (Time Stamps) - In episode 538 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Paige discuss: 00:00 - Introduction 01:26 - Paige Plevyak's Retail Media Background 03:02 - The Biggest Amazon PPC Mistakes 04:10 - Choosing Keywords Without Overspending 07:53 - Where Sellers With Limited Budgets Should Focus 09:10 - Prioritizing Hero Products and Variations 12:01 - Sponsored Products vs. Sponsored Brands Video 15:39 - Amazon Advertising Features Worth Testing 18:10 - Using AMC Audiences and Bid Boosts 19:38 - Preparing Your PPC Strategy for Q4 27:15 - How Often Sellers Should Adjust Bids 34:13 - Rebuilding Sales After a Long Stockout
Send us Fan MailAn ecommerce marketing funnel shows how traffic moves through awareness, conversion, retention, and repeat sales. This video covers DTC marketing strategy, Meta ads, Google ads, UGC, affiliate marketing, email, and SMS. It shows how brands can reduce website drop-off, improve store conversion, and turn more visitors into customers.Stop paying for traffic that leaves without buying, get a full ecommerce growth plan built around the funnel and conversion gaps costing the brand sales: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxu#EcommerceMarketing #EcommerceSales #DTCMarketingWant free resources? Dowload our Free Amazon guides here:Download the 2026 Amazon AI Operating Manual: https://bit.ly/3SLmusPAmazon Receiving Delay Guide: https://hubs.ly/Q04cdD4c0Amazon Catalog Spring Cleaning: https://hubs.ly/Q046BVfp0Amazon Proft Margin Defense 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q042trRH0Amazon SEO Toolkit 2026: https://bit.ly/4oC2ClTAmazon Seller Strategy Report 2026: https://bit.ly/3YN1RME2026 Ecommerce Website & SEO Readiness Checklist: https://hubs.ly/Q04btghf0Amazon 2026 PPC guide: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXTimestamps00:00 - Why Ecommerce Customers Leave Before Checkout00:49 - Amazon Ads vs. Ecommerce Marketing Channels01:43 - How the Ecommerce Marketing Funnel Works02:10 - Building Awareness With Paid and Organic Traffic02:41 - Moving Shoppers From Awareness to Consideration03:10 - Using UGC and Affiliate Marketing for Sales03:44 - Turning Website Visitors Into Paying Customers04:29 - How Email and SMS Create Repeat Buyers05:44 - How Customer Advocacy Drives Referral Sales07:20 - Where New Ecommerce Brands Should Start08:11 - Building Ads for Consideration and Conversion09:36 - Finding Competitor Ads in Meta Ad Library11:13 - Why Landing Pages Convert Better Than Homepages12:57 - Testing Short and Long Ecommerce Ad Formats14:28 - Landing Page Clicks and Ecommerce Conversion15:56 - Choosing Text, Image, and Video Ads16:56 - Finding Competitor Keywords for Google Ads17:50 - Amazon ICAP Funnel vs. Ecommerce Funnel19:03 - How Customer Advocacy Restarts the Funnel-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVwSupport the show
Most operators using Amazon Ads are inadvertently boosting Amazon's bottom line instead of their own. Neil Twa dives into the common pitfalls that make Amazon Ads unnecessarily expensive for sellers. He explains how many operators bid on unaffordable keywords, launch ads with unprepared listings, and fail to monitor their margins. Neil shares a real-life example from the Voltage community: a seller generating $18,000 a month but struggling with underwater margins. Neil outlines three actionable moves that operators at every level can implement this week to optimize their Advertising Cost of Sales by SKU. If your Amazon Ads dashboard feels like a slot machine you can't decipher, this episode is for you. Ready to implement with us? Join the Voltage Business Builders cohort at voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep325 See your Amazon numbers in one place and protect your margins with Caiman Data at voltagedm.com: https://voltagedm.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ep325&learn_mcp=1
Welcome to Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, sponsored by Duvo and Mirakl.In today's Retail Daily Minute, Omni Talk's Chris Walton discusses:DoorDash launches as a native sales channel inside Shopify's App Store, giving independent brick-and-mortar merchants a seamless, no-onboarding path to on-demand delivery.Amazon Ads rolls out retailer-level breakouts in Omnichannel Metrics, letting DSP advertisers see exactly which offline retailers captured sales influenced by their campaigns.Instacart partners with Tractor Supply to bring same-day delivery of pet, farm, and ranch essentials from 2,400+ stores to communities nationwide.The Retail Daily Minute has been rocketing up the Feedspot charts, so stay informed with Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, your source for the latest and most important retail insights.
That Amazon Ads Podcast Episode 125.The 5 ways to use Claude for Amazon PPC in 2026 are here, and one workflow alone saves 80 hours every single week.Stephen and Andrew are back on That Amazon Ads Podcast with a live Claude + AdLabs MCP demo that builds a full Amazon PPC performance report while they talk.Think Amazon PPC automation is just hype?Watch Claude handle keyword harvesting, product tagging, ACOS troubleshooting, AMC queries, and multi-model AI audits using ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok — all inside one workflow.This is how serious Amazon Ads managers are working smarter in 2026, not harder.Drop your questions in the comments.
After five days, dozens of interviews, countless presentations, and conversations with some of marketing's brightest minds, one thing became clear:The future of marketing isn't about more technology. It's about better thinking.Throughout Cannes Lions 2026, we spoke with leaders from System1, WARC, Ehrenberg-Bass, Amazon Ads, Pinterest, and many of the industry's leading creative and effectiveness thinkers.In this final Cannes Cut, we reflect on the biggest themes that emerged throughout the week, including:Why simplicity continues to outperform complexityHow AI is settling into its rightful role as a tool—not a strategyThe growing danger of the efficiency trapWhy creativity remains one of the strongest commercial advantages a brand can buildThe return of long-term thinking, brand building, and strategic disciplineWe also sit down with David Tiltman (WARC) to discuss the Multiplier Effect Playbook, organisational barriers to effectiveness, why strategy is becoming more important than ever, and how marketers can bridge the gap between knowing what works and actually doing it.To close out the series, we head back onto the Croisette for one final edition of The Buzz Cut, featuring conversations with:Aaron Starkman (Rethink)Brendan Christie (Strategy Magazine)Ruxandra Papuc (AIN'T)Presented by System1.If you've enjoyed following our Cannes journey, thank you for joining us throughout the week.Chapters:00:00 - Introduction02:15 - Reflecting on an Incredible Week06:30 - Simplicity Wins11:05 - AI Finds Its Place16:10 - The Efficiency Trap21:45 - Why Brand Experience Matters26:10 - Is This the Best Time to Be a Marketer?30:30 - Interview: David Tiltman52:30 - Final Buzz Cut58:15 - Wrapping Up Cannes
Today in the business of podcasting:Registration for The Podcast Atlas debut webinar on July 1 at 2pm Eastern is available here.New Sounds Profitable research from The Podcast Atlas finds 73% of podcast listeners would follow a creator from audio to video and 71% from long-form episodes to short-form clips, showing audience loyalty is tied to creators rather than formats.iHeartMedia expands its advertising partnership with Amazon Ads, becoming a reseller across Amazon Music, Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, and Alexa, giving its sellers access to Amazon's first-party shopping and streaming data.Owl & Co. founder Hernan Lopez shares findings from the second annual Global Podcast Economy Report, revealing that ten companies capture roughly 60% of U.S. podcast advertising revenue alongside a vibrant long tail of smaller players.DoubleVerify launches DV Neura, an AI engine that unifies media verification, content classification, and campaign optimization, and can recommend campaign changes across its DV Media AdVantage Platform.Oxford Road's ORBIT tool releases its June 2026 ranking of the top 15 Entertainment and Media podcasts, with The Popcast with Knox and Jamie taking the top spot and the data favoring show-level buying over genre-level approaches.To find links to these, and every article covered in today's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.
Today in the business of podcasting:Registration for The Podcast Atlas debut webinar on July 1 at 2pm Eastern is available here.New Sounds Profitable research from The Podcast Atlas finds 73% of podcast listeners would follow a creator from audio to video and 71% from long-form episodes to short-form clips, showing audience loyalty is tied to creators rather than formats.iHeartMedia expands its advertising partnership with Amazon Ads, becoming a reseller across Amazon Music, Prime Video, Twitch, Fire TV, and Alexa, giving its sellers access to Amazon's first-party shopping and streaming data.Owl & Co. founder Hernan Lopez shares findings from the second annual Global Podcast Economy Report, revealing that ten companies capture roughly 60% of U.S. podcast advertising revenue alongside a vibrant long tail of smaller players.DoubleVerify launches DV Neura, an AI engine that unifies media verification, content classification, and campaign optimization, and can recommend campaign changes across its DV Media AdVantage Platform.Oxford Road's ORBIT tool releases its June 2026 ranking of the top 15 Entertainment and Media podcasts, with The Popcast with Knox and Jamie taking the top spot and the data favoring show-level buying over genre-level approaches.To find links to these, and every article covered in today's episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download's newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.
In the latest of our exclusive interviews from this year's Cannes Festival, NDA's editor-in-chief Justin Pearse meets Lori Goode, Chief Marketing Officer at Index Exchange. With more than 20 years in digital advertising, Goode has held senior leadership roles at Amazon Ads, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Microsoft. Beyond Index, Lori is an active industry leader, serving on the Leadership Group for Ad Net Zero, the board of BRIDGE, and the Executive Achievements Committee for She Runs It.
AI is changing retail media fast, but that does not mean strategy is going away.In this episode, Destaney is joined by Adam Mellott, Head of Service Delivery, Training, and Education at Better Media, to talk through how AI is reshaping internal training, Amazon Ads, and the way teams learn. They cover Adam's experience at the Prosper Show AI Hackathon, the development of BTR University, and why AI should be used as an enhancer rather than a replacement.From master prompts to brand strategy, this conversation breaks down why the best AI outputs still depend on context, human intuition, and strategic thinking.Connect with Adam on Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/adammellottConnect with Destaney on Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/destaney-wishon
https://youtu.be/b_G8krkwKv8 Ganesh Krishnan, CEO of AiHello, is helping Amazon sellers automate advertising, improve profitability, and scale their businesses using AI. Driven by a mission to give entrepreneurs more freedom and enable them to build businesses around products they love, Ganesh shares how AI can eliminate repetitive work while allowing business owners to focus on strategy, innovation, and growth. In this conversation, Ganesh introduces The AiHello Ads Framework: Tap into the Wisdom of Crowds, Find the Right Keywords, Bid at the Right Level, Dynamically Adjust Bids, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains how AI can leverage historical marketplace data to identify profitable keywords, optimize bids automatically, and continuously improve campaign performance. Ganesh also discusses the dangers of AI hallucinations, why Amazon's incentives differ from sellers' incentives, how AI has transformed his own company's operations, and his vision for building zero-hallucination AI systems capable of advancing toward artificial superintelligence. — Build AI Superintelligence with Ganesh Krishnan Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, and welcome Ganesh Krishnan, the CEO of AiHello, an Amazon Ads automation company helping you grow your revenues, reduce work hours spent on ads management, and decrease your ad costs. Welcome to the show, Ganesh. Thank you, Steve. Nice to meet you Well, it’s great to have you here, and let’s jump right in. And my first question is, what is your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting it in AiHello? So it started off with my thesis that we all need to do good towards the planet. A long time ago, I started having my own natural things, selling chemical-free, ecological, sustainable, good-for-the-planet, good-for-your-wallet, good-for-your-health items, and I would sell organic items. And eventually, what I realized was that it was taking a lot of my time marketing, managing it, changing the bids, doing everything. I started working more and more on AI because I’ve worked in AI commercially. I worked in AI in my industry. That was my job. So I said, “Why not use, apply that to my own startup, to my own industry for selling organic things?” And once I started selling it, some of my friends reached out and said, “Can we use your AI for our own businesses?” And I said, “Sure, why not?” And then I started opening it up. And then one person came through and said, “Okay, let’s release it to the general public, see how it goes.” And then as we started earning money, I realized that I don’t need to do a job. I can have this startup, and I can help different people have their own lifestyle. You could have your own lifestyle. You could sell your own stuff that you like, e-commerce, usually on Amazon, and then we help you have your lifestyle. So this is my personal ‘Why’, is we need more equality. We need more people doing stuff they love rather than doing stuff they hate to do, and they hate to wake up and go to work. So do what you love. We are here to empower you. Wow, that’s amazing. So you are empowering people to start their own e-commerce businesses on Amazon, and you help them with AI tools to get up to speed and compete with the big boys. That is correct. Yeah. I love it. So on your LinkedIn profile, you mentioned that you are, I don’t know what the word was that you used, but something to do with superintelligence, AI superintelligence. So what is it that you are doing, and what is your vision of how AI superintelligence can be tapped into? It’s a very long topic. But to start off with, we used the old form of AI, which is a lot of regression, a lot of statistics, a lot of big data learning, and a lot of neural networks, if you felt fancy. And then LLMs became a huge thing. And we launched AiHello probably six or seven years ago. LLMs became a big thing two or three years ago. And it was pretty fancy. It was very good. It made life easy for us. But we cannot use it within AiHello to give it to clients, primarily because LLMs start hallucinating once you go past a certain context. The problem with hallucination is that it exponentially becomes larger and larger. Because if the previous thesis is wrong, if your previous hypothesis is wrong, then it builds on top of it, and it builds the wrong things. Hallucination exponentially becomes worse. And when it comes to finance, when it comes to ads, and when you’re working with sensitive data, this can be catastrophic. So you cannot use these large language models for finance, for situations where you need precise data, and especially when you have lots of context. It’s going to lose the context of the first part. Just because you mentioned something at the start of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not important. It is critical. As humans, we understand what is the most critical part of a conversation, and then we keep that in mind. But LLMs, because of context limitations, just keep on going and start hallucinating. So a few months ago, we came up with the idea that we could use something like a large language model, but not based on the transformer model. And we could base it on data so that there is almost zero hallucination. So instead of building weights, we build it based on data. And we launched this. We don’t use it on AiHello, but we decided to use it on an email service because we have a lot of emails. We process a lot of emails for clients. We process a lot of emails for specialists. So we could use the zero-hallucination approach within emails, and if it is successful, then we can put it into AiHello. And we can, of course, release it as an API as well. So this is going to set the basis of artificial superintelligence because what is stopping us right now from reaching or breaching that wall of artificial superintelligence is this hallucination. And of course, there is also logic. LLMs are pretty stup*d. They don’t understand. You can teach them, they learn, but they do not question what you teach them. They always take it on blind faith. Yeah. Wow. That is genius. I love it. You are going to un-hallucinate AI. And if it stops hallucinating, essentially it becomes a lot more powerful and scalable. AI becomes scalable, or this whole process becomes scalable. That’s fascinating. So your ‘Why’, your mission, is to empower all these people to run their businesses. Do you have a framework for this that you could describe in three to five steps? How do you get someone up and running with their own business on an e-commerce platform? Or do you have any other framework that you could share with the audience? Something simple that they may be able to benefit from? One of the caveats of using AI is that it needs a lot of data. So if you’re just starting out with your e-commerce business, you need to put more of your human intelligence, more of your gut instinct, more of your thoughts, and more of your emotions into building it out. And once you have built up enough data, then you can put it into AiHello and start automating it. So what I would say, if you’re starting an e-commerce business, is hire a specialist who can help you launch off the ground. Do a bit of the hypothesis work, do a bit of the analysis, and then come to AiHello and start automating it. You can only start automating once you have a good idea of how things work for you. And finding how things work for you is something you need to do on your own. It’s like you can’t start running, or you can’t start driving a car, until you learn how to crawl and until you learn how to walk. Okay. So basically, it’s the age-old innovation thing that you have to innovate something on your own, and then you can scale it with AI. That is correct. Yeah. So let’s say I came up with some kind of formula, concept, or product that is currently not being promoted, and I believe it would work. Or maybe I’ve already tested it and I want to scale it. I want to get on Amazon and sell it there. What can you do for me? What are the steps for me to be successful with AiHello’s help? So the first thing when you select a product, is: what are the keywords for it? What keywords do you use for that product? The second would be: what are the bids for that product? For each keyword, what is the right bid to put up? And then you have other things like budgeting. Do you change the bid depending on the time of day? Do you change the bid in total? Those are the things that you need to keep adjusting continuously. With AiHello, we automatically harvest the right keywords for your product. We change the bid. We optimize the bid. We also do dayparting, where you can change the bid depending on the time of day. So there are different things that you can use AI for. You could certainly do all of it manually, but it’ll probably take you days or weeks to do what AI can do in a couple of minutes. So a couple of minutes. But doesn’t the AI also need traffic data to be able to define things? Yeah. So one of the other things about AiHello is that, because we have the wisdom of crowds, if you come up with a keyword, we know exactly how that keyword is going to perform. As you say, you have the wisdom of crowds. Can you extrapolate what you’ve experienced with other products and other customers onto a new product that doesn’t yet have a lot of traffic? Is this what you mean by the wisdom of crowds? Or what do you mean by the wisdom of crowds? Let me give you an example. Let’s assume you want to sell coffee, and you go to our platform and say, “This is my product. It’s coffee. Help me sell it.” So what we do is, we know this is coffee. What are the keywords around it that are going to help sell it? Because we’ve sold other coffee products, we know that organic coffee sells well. We know coffee in the morning sells well. Black coffee sells well. Caffeine sells well. And we also know, based on the previous performance of other keywords, what a good bid is for each keyword. If you don’t know the keywords, then of course you have to spend time researching them. And if you don’t know the bids, then you have to spend time researching what bid to put in. But we do all the research for you, and you put it in. And the second part, the bigger part, is that if the bid doesn’t work out, if you’re not selling, then we increase the bid automatically. If you are losing money, then we decrease the bid automatically. So that bid optimization is a critical part of AiHello. Yeah. We use Amazon ads to promote my books. And yes, it takes a lot of skill to find the keywords, eliminate the negative keywords, adjust the bids, have the right bids, and avoid overspending or underspending. But Amazon also does much of the machine learning. So what is it that Amazon does, and what is it that you have to do? And why doesn’t Amazon do what you have to do? The most critical piece of information to keep in mind is that your aims and objectives are the opposite of Amazon’s aims and objectives. Amazon’s aim is to make money, and your job is to make money. You don’t care if Amazon makes money or not, and Amazon doesn’t care if you make money or not. So when you put up a bid, when you run ads, Amazon will maximize that ad spend, whatever it is. In some ways, it’s like a casino. You go to a casino, and the job of the casino is to win money from you, and your job is to win money from the casino. Ads have become a lot like gambling nowadays. You throw money into it. You expect to make money. Ninety percent of people lose money, and they give up. And Amazon always finds fresh sellers to move on. You cannot depend on Amazon because Amazon is not on your side. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, I always thought that on some platforms it was really difficult to make money with ads. Facebook, I think, is so competitive that it’s probably very difficult to make money. I know a lot of people who have spent a lot of money on Facebook, but I don’t know very many who have figured out a formula that continues to work. Okay. So you’ve helped someone find their keywords, the right bids, and how to adjust those bids. But what we’ve found is that at some point, ads die, and then we have to switch things up. It actually happens quite frequently that you have to create new campaigns and new ads. So what’s the dynamic there? How do you optimize so that you’re not still supporting ads that don’t work anymore, and you switch at the right point? So when we say ads, it’s not technically the campaigns. A campaign is just a container for all of your ads. You have products inside it, and you have keywords inside it. So a campaign is made up of products and keywords. And the question is, when you say ads die, did the keywords die? Then you need to add new keywords, right? You always have to keep adding new keywords and testing new keywords. It’s a continuous job of trying to find the right keywords for your book or your product, and then optimizing the bids constantly to make sure that you’re profitable. You have to make sure that your ads don’t die because of a lack of fresh keywords. And of course, there’s always a limit to the number of keywords you can add because each product has a limited number of keywords that people are searching for. Maybe there’s a long-tail keyword that’s going to make money, but there’s not enough search volume. Or maybe there’s a high-volume search keyword, but it’s not profitable for you. So you have to figure out what the right strategy is for you. Eventually, if your product is good, you’ll make money. If your product is not good, you won’t make money. That’s the bottom line. With ads, you quickly find out if your product… So essentially, it’s a cyclical thing. So you find the keywords, you figure out the right bids, you adjust the bids, and then you have to find new keywords and keep doing this. Yeah. So why do keywords go stale? Do people not search for certain things anymore? There could be multiple reasons for it. One reason is that a competitor has come in and taken your search volume. And you have to know: are you losing search volume? Are you gaining search volume? Has your search volume dropped off? The second reason is that people are not searching for that keyword anymore. Is it out of fashion? The third is: are you underbidding? Is the bid too low? Again, you would know by the number of impressions. Have the impressions dropped off? If the impressions have dropped off, is it because of a competitor? If it’s not because of a competitor, are people searching less? Are your bids too low? If the search volume is the same, are people clicking less? Why are they clicking less? Is it your images? Is it your product? Is your product no longer in fashion? I mean, I don’t know. Maybe a few months ago, fidget spinners were really in fashion, and nowadays no one uses them. So those things go out of fashion. Yeah. The spinners, I remember. They’ve been out of fashion for a while. Yeah. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So it’s a never-ending cycle of innovation and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. So let me ask you this: What drives growth in your business? Most of the growth is… There are different ways to put it. Four years ago, we used to create a lot of blogs. We used to create lots of content. We used to create lots of YouTube videos. And then ChatGPT came along. If you ask kids now, “Do you Google that?” They don’t know what Google is. They really don’t know what Google is. And that’s not a cliché. It’s surprising. They’ll be like, “What Google?” Everything goes through ChatGPT. So for us, growth went from Google to ChatGPT. And we didn’t spend enough time optimizing for LLMs on our site. So what drove growth before was blogs and YouTube. And what drives growth now is large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. People just ask ChatGPT, “What do I do about this on Amazon?” It recommends solutions, and then we go through them. So how do you leverage large language models or AI applications? This was one of the biggest boosts to our company. We managed to set the processes right. We managed to create the templates. We managed to bring structure to our company. Development work has become ten times faster. The turnaround is ten times faster. We’re able to release features quickly. We’re able to find bugs in our existing code quickly. There are a lot of things going on. If I were to say that our company is no longer the same company it was even a year ago, that would not be an exaggeration. It would be the truth. What we were a year ago is not at all what we are right now. So in what way did you change? Is it coding that accelerated and changed everything? I mean, in what other ways did you change as a company? So the code is all done with AI first. Our developers use AI. They put in the prompt, they check the results. There is a second developer who checks whether everything is okay and whether everything is done. And then finally there’s QA, and then we push it to staging. We used to do roughly one-month or forty-five-day sprints. Now we do weekly sprints. So it has gone four times faster. The biggest hurdle for us was managing clients and how we manage them. We never had any structure. So we talked a lot with ChatGPT. We talked a lot about what the right way was to bring structure and accountability into the system. We managed to set up all the software required for accountability. It helped us fix those issues. It created structure. It created accountability for all the people, and then we implemented that. Finally, the last one, which was the most debatable, is that we require a lot of content. We require a lot of graphics. We require a lot of videos for clients on Amazon. I actually went to buy something on Amazon a few days back, and what was puzzling was that when I zoomed in on the images, you could see they were AI-generated because they all had these silly AI mistakes—spelling mistakes, random words. So almost everything on Amazon right now, all the images, are kind of AI-generated. It’s hard to blame them. We ourselves use AI for a lot of the images. We make sure we don’t have the silly mistakes, but we do use AI as well. So the turnaround time for graphics is faster because of AI as well. Though some clients do complain that they don’t like AI-generated assets. And if a person looks a bit too AI-generated, they just reject it outright. So that is the most debatable part of it. But overall, our company is called AiHello. It’s AiHello. And if we don’t say hello to AI, then we’re not AiHello. Yeah. Love it. I love the head and the one arm. Yes. The hello, and that’s it. Yeah. So what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? We are a remote-first company, and I’m struggling to bring about accountability among all the team members. We do have a good number of employees. Ninety percent of our employees are good. Ten percent still have accountability issues. And for me, that is a bit of a hurdle. It is a bit of a challenge to push those people who are dragging their feet about AI. Yeah. Because they are not comfortable with AI. They want to do what they are good at and don’t want to do something new. There is also a bit of hesitation that they might lose their jobs because of AI, although we’re not planning to let go of anyone. Rather, we are hiring more people because we’re able to grow faster. There is an old saying that companies won’t go extinct because of AI, but companies that don’t use AI will go extinct because of AI. Because we are using AI a lot, there is a chance for us to scale, for us to expand significantly. And I want to tap into this advantage and grow. I want to hire more people, and I want to grow. I don’t want to let people go. So this is a very good opportunity. You hear about Coinbase letting people go. You hear about Facebook letting people go because of AI. And I think those are all nonsensical excuses. Those companies are not growing very well, and they are blaming AI for letting people go, which I think is absolutely nonsensical. There is a very good opportunity for people to grow and for companies to grow using AI and increase their hiring. If you’re letting people go because of AI, it’s just a nonsensical excuse. So what do you think is the mental hang-up for people? What prevents better AI adoption or faster AI adoption? A long time ago, when computers were being introduced into many industries, I remember there were huge protests because people thought computers would take away jobs. And it did happen. People did lose jobs because of computers. There were many people pushing papers who lost their jobs. And a lot of people refused to learn about computers because they said, “This is nonsensical. I can do it better by hand.” Can you imagine telling people right now that it’s better to do things by hand than to use a computer? I mean, if you want to do calculations, please don’t use Excel or Google Sheets. Use a pen and paper and tell me you can do it better. It would be absurd to think that way. But at that time, people really did have the mentality that it was better to do things by hand than with Excel. Now, the AI revolution is probably a thousand or a million times bigger than that. And you can drag your feet. There will always be people who drag their feet and say, “I can do it better. AI is just nonsensical.” And sure, some of that is true. But the overwhelming majority of tasks are going to be done extremely well with AI. And it’s not just large language models. It’s everything. Regression analysis, data analytics, big data analytics, forecasting, calculations. I’m not even talking about transformer models. I’m talking about everything related to AI. So much can be automated and done by AI that if you’re not involved with it, you’ll get left behind, just like the people who didn’t use computers. Do you feel like people have to be highly educated to be able to use AI? Or can people with less formal education benefit from it as well? I don’t think it has anything to do with education. I think the learning curve for AI is smaller than the learning curve for computers. If you’re already using computers, you can just install a command-line interface and have things running. Actually, you can go to ChatGPT and ask some questions, and you can build something. But if you want to build serious applications, you can use a command-line interface and build them out. I think the learning curve is probably just a couple of hours to become proficient with these tools. I’m thinking more about this: As AI tools develop and take many of the routine, repeatable tasks off our shoulders, doesn’t that mean we will spend more of our time on high-level thinking and orchestration? And won’t that require some kind of mental ability to do that? It requires you to understand context, understand the implications of things, and be able to connect the dots. So that’s what I mean. The people who can really use AI tools have this higher level of awareness and thinking. They can combine ideas and create new things. But are there AI tools that people with less advanced analytical skills can also use? Absolutely. And you’re 100% right. You’re 101% right. This is what I’ve been advocating for a very long time. Don’t spend your time doing mundane, repetitive daily activities that can be automated. Let AI handle them. You should focus on the things AI cannot do right now, which is human-level intelligence: Strategizing. Planning. Working on the bigger-picture tasks. So you’re 100% right, and that’s the direction we should be moving in. And this brings me back to the point I made earlier: You should do what you love. The things you don’t love, the repetitive tasks, should be done by AI. Yeah. Love it. So what is your vision, ultimately, for AiHello? So my vision for AiHello goes beyond AiHello. We have something called HalZero, which is the engine we want to put behind AiHello. It’s a zero-hallucination LLM. And we are working toward making it happen. We plan to release an API for it soon. If it does happen, then we would probably have a model that can take in data and answer general-knowledge questions with zero hallucination. And we’re building it based on how the human brain works. The human brain is not one-dimensional. ChatGPT is one-dimensional. Transformer models are one-dimensional. You give them data, they run it through the transformer model—the encoder and decoder—and then they give you an answer. But the human brain is built in layers. What we call the lizard brain sits at the base, and as you go higher, things become more and more complex. So the brain is information and action, and everything is filtered through it. Then we act on the filtered result. Machine learning models right now do not have these kinds of filters. They have something similar, which is called chain of thought, but that’s really thinking out loud. This kind of reasoning should exist within the latent space of the machine learning model. It should be built into the model itself. I’ll give you an example. If you had been taught all your life that the sun is green, and tomorrow you woke up in Virginia, went outside, and saw that the sun was yellow, you’d say: “Oh my God, I’ve been lied to all my life. The sun isn’t green.” You would question what you had been taught based on a single observation. But if a machine had been trained for years that the sun is green, and then it saw that the sun was yellow, it might conclude: “The sun is wrong today because I’ve been taught that the sun is green.” The real test of intelligence is this: Can it question its training data? And the answer is no. It won’t, because it has been trained on that data. It has been trained on those tokens. Yeah. So that’s AI superintelligence? The ability to question the training data? That is correct. Yeah. So we build it based on connections. How strong is this connection? How many people have stated this fact? What is my own observation? Which observation is stronger? There is always conflict. In the human brain, there is always a conflict between what people say and what we think. Then our logical brain chooses what is usually the best answer. That is how we have a collective consciousness. We also have a personal consciousness. We always have to decide which one is best. Love it. Well, that’s great. So if you’re running a business and you need to sell a product, and you want to figure out how to be successful on Amazon, how to leverage your ads, and how not to overspend, where should you go? How can people get in touch with you, Ganesh, and your team? And what’s the first step for listeners? You can send me an email at ganesh@aihello.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m always available, and I’m happy to have a chat with you. All right. So if you’re listening out there and you’re in e-commerce, or you want to get into e-commerce, and you don’t know how to leverage all the tools that are out there, don’t forget: Amazon is in the business of making money, not necessarily making your business profitable. So you can use AiHello to help you. Reach out to Ganesh on LinkedIn and get your team involved. And if you enjoyed listening to this episode, make sure you check back every week because I have successful entrepreneurs sharing their ideas—or at least some of the good ones—with you. So thanks, Ganesh, for coming. Thank you, Steve. And thank you for listening. Important Links: Ganesh's LinkedIn Ganesh's website Ganesh's email: ganesh@aihello.com
Send us Fan MailAmazon Ads billing cycle limits can cause frequent $500 charges, cash flow stress, and payment issues for sellers. This video explains how Amazon Ads credit limits work, how to request a higher payment frequency limit, and when sellers should ask for $1,000 or $1,500. Learn how Amazon PPC billing threshold changes can help reduce charge frequency, support ad spend, and give sellers more time between payments.Stop letting Amazon Ads billing issues squeeze cash flow. Get a clear ad payment plan before the next charge hits: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxu#AmazonAds #AmazonPPC #AmazonAdvertising #AmazonSellers #AmazonFBAWant free resources? Dowload our Free Amazon guides here:Amazon Receiving Delay Guide: https://hubs.ly/Q04cdD4c0Amazon Catalog Spring Cleaning: https://hubs.ly/Q046BVfp0Amazon Proft Margin Defense 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q042trRH0Amazon SEO Toolkit 2026: https://bit.ly/4oC2ClTAmazon Seller Strategy Report 2026: https://bit.ly/3YN1RME2026 Ecommerce Website & SEO Readiness Checklist: https://hubs.ly/Q04btghf0Amazon 2026 PPC guide: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXTimestamps00:00 - How Amazon Ads Billing Cycle Works00:36 - Why Sellers Hit the $500 Billing Limit00:59 - Where to Request a Billing Limit Review01:24 - Increase Payment Frequency Limit in Amazon Ads01:41 - Best Credit Limit Request for Sellers02:12 - Credit Card Limit and Approval Timing02:36 - Why Higher Amazon Ads Billing Helps Cash Flow03:10 - When Sellers Should Request a Higher Limit-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVwSupport the show
In this episode, Josh interviews Destaney, CEO of Better AMS, about advanced Amazon advertising strategies. Destaney shares insights on setting ad budgets based on brand goals, structuring campaigns for profitability and growth, and the importance of campaign-level organization. They discuss the challenges of managing large SKU counts and the need for software tools like Pacvue, highlighting that expertise is crucial to leverage such platforms. Destaney emphasizes using data-driven, white-hat strategies and staying proactive with Amazon ads. The episode wraps up with actionable tips and an invitation to connect with Better AMS for further learning and free brand audits.Chapters:Introduction & Guest Background (00:00:00)Josh introduces Destaney, CEO of Better AMS, and discusses her background in Amazon advertising.Destaney's Experience in Amazon Ads (00:00:49)Destaney shares her journey, starting young in Amazon ads, and her experience managing large ad spends.Budgeting for Amazon Ads (00:01:23)Discussion on how brand owners should approach setting budgets for Amazon ads based on goals and growth.Structuring Campaigns for Different Objectives (00:02:05)Destaney explains campaign-level structuring for profitability, keyword research, brand defense, and market share.Fluid Budget Allocation & Campaign Adjustments (00:03:05)How to fluidly adjust budgets between campaigns based on product launches and changing objectives.Challenges Managing Many SKUs & Need for Software (00:04:05)Josh describes the difficulty of managing 1200 SKUs and the need for software to optimize Amazon PPC.Evaluating Amazon PPC Software & Automation (00:05:14)Destaney discusses the importance of having knowledgeable staff and choosing the right software for automation.Advanced vs. Automated Software Solutions (00:07:08)Recommendations for advanced users (rules-based tools like Pacvue) vs. automated solutions for less experienced teams.Limitations of AI in Amazon Ad Tools (00:08:10)Destaney explains the current limitations of AI in Amazon ad software due to restricted data access.Pacvue & Importance of Expertise (00:09:04)Josh and Destaney discuss why Pacvue is powerful but requires deep Amazon ad knowledge to use effectively.Actionable Takeaways for Brand Owners (00:10:33)Josh summarizes three key action items: focus on brand metrics, shift mindset on ranking strategies, and invest in expertise.Closing & Where to Find Destaney (00:13:38)Destaney shares where listeners can follow her and learn more about Better AMS, including free brand audits.Links and Mentions:Tools and Software"Perpetua": "00:07:08""Pacvue": "00:08:40"Websites and Social Media"Better AMS" now BTRMedia: "00:13:52""LinkedIn": "00:13:52"Transcript:Josh 00:00:00 Today I'm super excited to introduce you all to Destaney with Sean. Destaney is the CEO of better AMS and better. AMS is a retail media agency managing over $50 million of spend across Walmart and Amazon. So with that, welcome to the show, Destaney.Destaney 00:00:16 Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Really excited to be here.Josh 00:00:19 I'm super excited to have you on the show. My team is also excited to have you on the show, because they watch your YouTube videos and all the content that you're putting out, and oftentimes in our own strategy meetings, it will be, hey, I remember Destaney said this, Destaney said that. And so to have you on the podcast, I'm super excited to have you here. And I think I want to encourage our listeners to pay attention, because Destaney knows what she's talking about as it relates to Amazon advertising.Destaney 00:00:49 I hope so. I have been in this space for like six years, and I have done nothing but Amazon ads. So, you know, a lot of people are forced to go wide, whether it's because you're brand building or how quickly the industry industry changes.Destaney 00:01:02 I was super thankful to be thrown into Amazon advertising management at like 22 years old. I think my first large brand was managing around $10 million spend a quarter, so I, I had to learn really fast and this is all I know at this point. So thank you everyone for supporting my content because you are, you know, paying for my meals at night.Josh 00:01:23 I love it. A lot of brand owners come to you probably and say, oh well, my budget is unlimited if it's profitable, right? Like if it's profitable, then spend as much as you want. And I think I've fallen into that camp at some times. So Destaney, based on your wealth of knowledge and experience working with even higher level brands, doing 300 million a year, what, like how would you recommend a brand owner comes up with a budget for their products?Destaney 00:01:53 Yep. Yeah. So a budget's obviously so dependent on goals and growth and all of those things. So I always struggle to give that. I will say I interviewed a ton of the other agency owners.Destaney 00:02:05 I think we're managing in total. I kind of like over $500 million worth of spend. And what everyone said an average tacos for a high growth brand that's trying to be competitive is around 10 to 15%. I don't love giving that as a general gauge, because I know a lot of people have certain SKUs that are going to be a lot higher because they're more competitive category, different goals. And I hate giving like one size fits all solutions. Anyone who's listened to me or follow me knows that. It's like my biggest pet peeve. but I will say something to remember is that Amazon advertising is actually really precise. you know, sometimes like Facebook ads where you're doing audience targeting and behavioral aspects are combined in Amazon. Ads are not like that. You can be so granular. So one thing we recommend is we we set up all of our strategies on the campaign level. So when a brand comes to us we're going to have campaigns for profitability. We're going to have campaigns for keyword research. We're going to have campaigns for brand defense, and we're going to have campaigns for rank or market share.Destaney 00:03:05 And when we have all of those set up, that means we can take that budget and fluidly adjust based on our needs. So if we have a $20,000 a month budget and this month we're launching a new product, we're going to shift more of that budget to be focused on rank. And that's going to take away from our profitability campaigns, which means we're probably going to have a higher ACOs, but we're launching now the moment that becomes steady. We're going to lower our budget on our rank and move to profitability. So that way we can be really fluid with those adjustments that make your Amazon advertising align with your actual top line sales goals.Josh 00:03:40 Now that makes a lot of sense. Now I think we I could dive in even further with you. We could get into some real nitty gritty stuff here. Maybe that would have to be a part two. because what I'd like to shift into is we went through this last year in terms of trying to identify a software solution that could execute a lot of these good strategies.Josh 00:04:05 So for our team, you know, we hired an internal PPC manager. We were formerly with an advertising agency for I think four years. So we'd been with them for a long time. But to your point, you know, it's hard for an agency to really get into the details of every single product and tracking their metrics. And w...
$17.200 millones en un solo trimestre, ese es el tamaño de Amazon Ads y acaba de soltar sus novedades en el Upfront de Madrid.Estuvimos ahí el día del anuncio y nos sentamos con Marta Álvarez (Head of Agencies) a desmenuzar las herramientas nuevas de Amazon Ads: desde leer las emociones del chat en Twitch hasta IA que monta tu campaña. Te contamos qué significan de verdad para las marcas, las agencias y para ti.¿Listo para que la publicidad te conozca todavía mejor?
Learn how to turn your product images into video ads in minutes using Amazon Ads' Video Generator inside Creative Studio. In this step-by-step tutorial, I'll show you how to create, customize, and test Sponsored Brands video ads without any editing experience.• *Learn More* https://advertising.amazon.com/lp/build-your-business-with-amazon-advertising#Ad #AmazonAds
Send us Fan MailAmazon seller fees 2026, Amazon Ads payment changes, FBA fuel surcharge, and cash flow pressure are changing how sellers plan profit. This podcast covers ad spend payments, seller boycott concerns, rising costs, AI agents, ecommerce SOPs, and business growth systems. Learn how Amazon sellers can think about margins, pricing, AI tools, leadership, and process changes during a tougher marketplace year.Stop guessing through Amazon fees, ad changes, and margin pressure. Get a clear growth plan before your profit gets squeezed: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxu#AmazonSellers #AmazonFBA #AmazonAds #EcommerceGrowth #AIToolsWant free resources? Dowload our Free Amazon guides here:Amazon Receiving Delay Guide: https://hubs.ly/Q04cdD4c0Amazon Catalog Spring Cleaning: https://hubs.ly/Q046BVfp0Amazon Proft Margin Defense 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q042trRH0Amazon SEO Toolkit 2026: https://bit.ly/4oC2ClTAmazon Seller Strategy Report 2026: https://bit.ly/3YN1RME2026 Ecommerce Website & SEO Readiness Checklist: https://hubs.ly/Q04btghf0Amazon 2026 PPC guide: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXTimestamps0:00 - Amazon Seller Changes in 20261:09 - Amazon Ads Payment Change and Seller Boycott2:04 - Credit Card Rewards and Ad Spend Cash Flow3:02 - Why the Amazon Ad Boycott Had Low Impact4:40 - Seller Fees, Cash Back, and Margin Pressure5:23 - FBA Fuel Surcharge and Rising Costs6:10 - Tariffs, CPC Increases, and Profit Problems7:02 - Amazon Pricing Ripple Effect Across Ecommerce7:40 - AI Agents and Ecommerce Workflows8:31 - Why AI Is Not Replacing Sellers Yet9:03 - MAG AI and Business Process Automation10:06 - How AI Helps New Brands Start Faster10:36 - Why AI Should Not Run Amazon Ads Alone11:22 - Claude, Perplexity, and AI Tools for Business12:25 - Rufus, AI Shopping, and Consumer Trust13:19 - MAG AI, SOPs, and Human Review14:18 - How MAG Balances AI With Core Services15:12 - Ecommerce Growth, Software, and New Business Units16:02 - Custom AI Agents for Business Problems17:49 - When Software Should Fit the Business18:51 - Small AI Tools and New Business Ideas20:32 - Trust, Client Growth, and Ecommerce Services22:52 - Leadership, Teams, and Managing Growth24:24 - SOPs, Checklists, and Process Control26:11 - Teaching, Multiplying, and Training Teams27:42 - AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement28:25 - Ecommerce Growth Plans and Future Markets-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVwSupport the show
Send us Fan MailFinding effective targets for Amazon advertising can be challenging for even seasoned sellers. This video demonstrates how to effectively find advertising targets on Amazon, moving beyond basic keyword suggestions and competitor analysis to leverage Amazon's own system for better targeting insights. Learn how to optimize your amazon ppc strategy and improve your amazon sponsored products and amazon sponsored brands campaigns.Need help setting up Amazon ads the right way? Book a coaching call: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxu#AmazonAds #AmazonPPC #AmazonSellers #AmazonAdvertising #MyAmazonGuyWant free resources? Dowload our Free Amazon guides here:Amazon Receiving Delay Guide: https://hubs.ly/Q04cdD4c0Amazon Catalog Spring Cleaning: https://hubs.ly/Q046BVfp0Amazon Proft Margin Defense 2026: https://hubs.ly/Q042trRH0Amazon SEO Toolkit 2026: https://bit.ly/4oC2ClTAmazon Seller Strategy Report 2026: https://bit.ly/3YN1RME2026 Ecommerce Website & SEO Readiness Checklist: https://hubs.ly/Q04btghf0Amazon 2026 PPC guide: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXTimestamps00:00 - Finding Better Amazon Ad Targets01:03 - Setting Up a Sponsored Product Campaign01:32 - Why One Product Matters01:58 - Automatic Targeting and Bids03:05 - Automated Rules in Amazon Ads03:56 - Creating the Manual Campaign05:22 - Feeding Terms Into Ad Groups06:35 - CTR and Conversion Rate Filters07:08 - ROAS Filter and 30-Day Performance07:32 - Exact, Phrase, and Broad Campaigns08:16 - How the Keyword Funnel Works08:50 - Automating Amazon Keyword Research-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVwSupport the show
How to get money from Amazon every day. There's now a 30-minute delivery, and a strategy you won't find anywhere else. These and more buzzing news on this week's episode! We're back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10's Senior Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, TikTok Shop, Walmart, and E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10's newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level. Amazon Ads introduces Dynamic TV Creative for Prime Video https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/library/news/dynamic-tv-creative/ Helium 10 New Feature Alert: Our TikTok Ads tool now includes inventory-based automation rules that can remove products from GMV Max campaigns when stock drops below a set threshold. When inventory is replenished, the tool can automatically re-add products, helping sellers avoid wasting ad spend on low-stock items while saving time on manual campaign management. Amazon Rolls Out Amazon Now to Dozens of Cities Across the U.S., Providing 30-Minute Delivery to Millions of Customers https://press.aboutamazon.com/2026/5/amazon-rolls-out-amazon-now-to-dozens-of-cities-across-the-u-s-providing-30-minute-delivery-to-millions-of-customers Amazon Singapore cuts ‘less than 10%' of workforce as it winds down Fresh delivery, local seller operations https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/amazon-singapore-layoffs-fresh-grocery-delivery-service-6106446 Helium 10 is hosting the Elite Listing Optimization and Creative Masterclass on May 18 at its headquarters in Irvine, California, featuring Bradley, Carrie, and other experts sharing exclusive strategies for Amazon, TikTok, and Walmart sellers, including AI-powered listing creative, competitor keyword research, AI image generation, A+ content, split testing, and Amazon storefront optimization. Seats are available at http://h10.me/mayelite, and listeners can use code ELITE100 to get your tickets for free. Helium 10 is also promoting the 2026 Amazon Prime Day Ad Summit in Seoul, Korea, where Bradley will be speaking; sellers in Asia can check details and sign up at http://h10.me/seoul In episode 521 of the AM/PM Podcast and Weekly Buzz, Shivali covers: 00:00 - Introduction 00:39 - How to Get Amazon Disbursements Daily 02:38 - Amazon Introduces Customizable Prime TV Ads 04:43 - TikTok Ads Inventory Rule Setup 06:52 - Amazon Rolls Out Amazon Now for 30-Minute Deliveries 08:22 - A Strategy No Other Tool Has 11:02 - Amazon Singapore Shuts Down 3rd Party Sellers 11:34 - Your Exclusive Invite to Our Listing Optimization & Creative Masterclass 13:50 - See Bradley Speak in Korea
In this episode of Next in Media, Mike Shields sits down with Alan Moss, VP of Global Advertising Sales at Amazon Ads, to talk about Amazon's rapid transformation into a full-funnel advertising powerhouse. Alan walks through how he joined Amazon mid-COVID in 2020 and within a few years helped land an 11-year NFL deal, launch Prime Video ads, and close an NBA partnership that made Prime Video a year-round sports network. He and Mike dig into what's working in the upfront market, why Amazon sees retail media and streaming as one unified full-funnel business, and how Amazon DSP's partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Roku, and others now reach 90% of household audiences. They also get into the growing role of Twitch and creators as a mid-funnel marketing lever, and why Alan believes the future is AI agents — not just for creative optimization, but for full campaign orchestration. Key Highlights