Podcasts about like amazon

15/16: Gene Marks observes steady business for construction and safety industries across the US. He notes that raw material costs have surged significantly. Despite inflation, consumer spending remains vigorous, with major retailers like Amazon reporting their strongest retail growth since the pandemic.1900

PREVIEW for Later Today: Corporate Leaders Report Robust Consumer Spending. Guest: Gene Marks. CEOs from major companies like Amazon report a 15% retail increase, signaling strong consumer confidence. Marks notes that while surveys vary, actual spending data from big-box retailers remains the primary economic indicator.1910 FIFTH AVENUE

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dr. Justin M. Lee. Purpose of the Interview To showcase Dr. Lee’s journey from a young real estate agent to a multi-industry entrepreneur. To inspire listeners with strategies for wealth-building through real estate, construction, and logistics. To encourage financial literacy, ownership, and collaboration within underserved communities. To issue a call to action for minorities to explore opportunities like Amazon DSP and real estate investment. Key Takeaways Early Career & Education Started young in real estate, embraced discomfort in rooms dominated by older professionals. Leveraged millennial tech skills (social media marketing) to help veteran brokers grow. Earned a doctorate degree and became a licensed real estate broker. Social Media as a Business Tool Built a strong presence on TikTok (90K followers) and other platforms. Helped older real estate firms thrive by creating digital visibility. Emphasized that “business must look as good online as in person.” Financial Literacy & Homeownership African-American communities often lack foundational financial knowledge. Key barriers: misunderstanding credit, fear of debt, and lack of exposure to ownership benefits. Advocates teaching the difference between good debt (real estate) and bad debt (consumer credit). Real Estate Process Initial onboarding: credit score, income, tax filing. Connect clients with lenders, secure pre-approval, then negotiate and close within 30–45 days. Uses property tours as motivation even for those not yet approved. Pooling Resources for Wealth Industry dominated by white men and foreign investors who use syndication. Dr. Lee created a private family fund with fraternity brothers and friends. Acquired 150+ apartment units and commercial properties by pooling resources and forming LLCs. Amazon DSP Opportunity Owns an Amazon Delivery Service Partner business (42 trucks, 200 employees). Offers minorities a chance to apply for DSP with $10K grant. Taught him true CEO skills: HR, payroll, compliance, and scaling operations. Construction Business Entered construction after experiencing exploitation in fix-and-flip projects. Learned the business side (permits, change orders) and got licensed. Built major projects like a 10,000 sq. ft. restaurant in Atlanta. Advocates for Black representation in construction, an industry dominated by whites and Hispanics. Personal Background Raised in New Orleans during Katrina by a single mother and grandparents. Mother invested FEMA checks into real estate, teaching him property management and renovation skills early. Believes knowledge is power and emphasizes planning and consistency. Notable Quotes On embracing discomfort:“I learned to embrace the uncomfort and make it one of my biggest strengths.” On social media:“You have to make your business look the same way online as in person.” On financial literacy:“Real estate is always going to be good debt. Bad debt is the Macy’s card.” On collaboration:“Pooling resources shows how far we can go and how fast we can go—but together.” On planning:“If you don’t plan, you plan to fail. All you have to do is stick to the plan.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSupport the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dr. Justin M. Lee. Purpose of the Interview To showcase Dr. Lee’s journey from a young real estate agent to a multi-industry entrepreneur. To inspire listeners with strategies for wealth-building through real estate, construction, and logistics. To encourage financial literacy, ownership, and collaboration within underserved communities. To issue a call to action for minorities to explore opportunities like Amazon DSP and real estate investment. Key Takeaways Early Career & Education Started young in real estate, embraced discomfort in rooms dominated by older professionals. Leveraged millennial tech skills (social media marketing) to help veteran brokers grow. Earned a doctorate degree and became a licensed real estate broker. Social Media as a Business Tool Built a strong presence on TikTok (90K followers) and other platforms. Helped older real estate firms thrive by creating digital visibility. Emphasized that “business must look as good online as in person.” Financial Literacy & Homeownership African-American communities often lack foundational financial knowledge. Key barriers: misunderstanding credit, fear of debt, and lack of exposure to ownership benefits. Advocates teaching the difference between good debt (real estate) and bad debt (consumer credit). Real Estate Process Initial onboarding: credit score, income, tax filing. Connect clients with lenders, secure pre-approval, then negotiate and close within 30–45 days. Uses property tours as motivation even for those not yet approved. Pooling Resources for Wealth Industry dominated by white men and foreign investors who use syndication. Dr. Lee created a private family fund with fraternity brothers and friends. Acquired 150+ apartment units and commercial properties by pooling resources and forming LLCs. Amazon DSP Opportunity Owns an Amazon Delivery Service Partner business (42 trucks, 200 employees). Offers minorities a chance to apply for DSP with $10K grant. Taught him true CEO skills: HR, payroll, compliance, and scaling operations. Construction Business Entered construction after experiencing exploitation in fix-and-flip projects. Learned the business side (permits, change orders) and got licensed. Built major projects like a 10,000 sq. ft. restaurant in Atlanta. Advocates for Black representation in construction, an industry dominated by whites and Hispanics. Personal Background Raised in New Orleans during Katrina by a single mother and grandparents. Mother invested FEMA checks into real estate, teaching him property management and renovation skills early. Believes knowledge is power and emphasizes planning and consistency. Notable Quotes On embracing discomfort:“I learned to embrace the uncomfort and make it one of my biggest strengths.” On social media:“You have to make your business look the same way online as in person.” On financial literacy:“Real estate is always going to be good debt. Bad debt is the Macy’s card.” On collaboration:“Pooling resources shows how far we can go and how fast we can go—but together.” On planning:“If you don’t plan, you plan to fail. All you have to do is stick to the plan.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Dr. Justin M. Lee. Purpose of the Interview To showcase Dr. Lee’s journey from a young real estate agent to a multi-industry entrepreneur. To inspire listeners with strategies for wealth-building through real estate, construction, and logistics. To encourage financial literacy, ownership, and collaboration within underserved communities. To issue a call to action for minorities to explore opportunities like Amazon DSP and real estate investment. Key Takeaways Early Career & Education Started young in real estate, embraced discomfort in rooms dominated by older professionals. Leveraged millennial tech skills (social media marketing) to help veteran brokers grow. Earned a doctorate degree and became a licensed real estate broker. Social Media as a Business Tool Built a strong presence on TikTok (90K followers) and other platforms. Helped older real estate firms thrive by creating digital visibility. Emphasized that “business must look as good online as in person.” Financial Literacy & Homeownership African-American communities often lack foundational financial knowledge. Key barriers: misunderstanding credit, fear of debt, and lack of exposure to ownership benefits. Advocates teaching the difference between good debt (real estate) and bad debt (consumer credit). Real Estate Process Initial onboarding: credit score, income, tax filing. Connect clients with lenders, secure pre-approval, then negotiate and close within 30–45 days. Uses property tours as motivation even for those not yet approved. Pooling Resources for Wealth Industry dominated by white men and foreign investors who use syndication. Dr. Lee created a private family fund with fraternity brothers and friends. Acquired 150+ apartment units and commercial properties by pooling resources and forming LLCs. Amazon DSP Opportunity Owns an Amazon Delivery Service Partner business (42 trucks, 200 employees). Offers minorities a chance to apply for DSP with $10K grant. Taught him true CEO skills: HR, payroll, compliance, and scaling operations. Construction Business Entered construction after experiencing exploitation in fix-and-flip projects. Learned the business side (permits, change orders) and got licensed. Built major projects like a 10,000 sq. ft. restaurant in Atlanta. Advocates for Black representation in construction, an industry dominated by whites and Hispanics. Personal Background Raised in New Orleans during Katrina by a single mother and grandparents. Mother invested FEMA checks into real estate, teaching him property management and renovation skills early. Believes knowledge is power and emphasizes planning and consistency. Notable Quotes On embracing discomfort:“I learned to embrace the uncomfort and make it one of my biggest strengths.” On social media:“You have to make your business look the same way online as in person.” On financial literacy:“Real estate is always going to be good debt. Bad debt is the Macy’s card.” On collaboration:“Pooling resources shows how far we can go and how fast we can go—but together.” On planning:“If you don’t plan, you plan to fail. All you have to do is stick to the plan.” #SHMS #STRAW #BESTSteve Harvey Morning Show Online: http://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Like Amazon, now Walmart and Target are holding similar “fall” savings events promising to offer big savings. All three of them know the consumer economy is in deep trouble, thus the overemphasis on savings. But it's not just what these retailers are doing for customers, it's what they aren't doing for workers. According to a range of sources, including the retailers themselves, they are not hiring. Eurodollar University's Money & Macro AnalysisFor more information on 21shares and to sign up for their newsletter, visit https://bit.ly/3JTI4GQSubscribe @21Shares on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@21sharesFollow @21Shares on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/21shares_/Follow @21Shares on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/21shares-us/Follow @21Shares on X: https://x.com/21Shares_US----------------------------------------------------------------Sign up for our webinar on the Hidden Truth Behind Interest Rates:https://webinar.eurodollar-university.com/home----------------------------------------------------------------Challenger Gray & Christmas https://www.challengergray.com/blog/september-job-cuts-fall-37-from-august-ytd-total-highest-since-2020-lowest-ytd-hiring-since-2009/Retail Dive How retailers are hiring for the 2025 holiday seasonhttps://www.retaildive.com/news/retail-holiday-season-hiring-job-cuts/760900/ISM Services September 2025https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/reports/ism-pmi-reports/services/september/FRBNY Business Leaders Surveyhttps://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/Survey/business_leaders/2025/2025_09blsreport.pdf?sc_lang=en&hash=872CB84D638D0F3D1A3F833365E25EF4Dallas Fed Texas Services Outlook Surveyhttps://www.dallasfed.org/research/surveys/tssos/2025/2509

Data leak gives Guardian US investigations team an unprecedented look into Trump's deportation regime – and how people are seemingly being ‘disappeared'. Oliver Laughland and Maanvi Singh report. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus

What if you could design your week the same way top companies design their best products? That's the question I dive into with my guest, Howard Steinman. Howard is an executive coach with over 25 years of leadership experience, including time as a technology executive at Amazon, and he brings a treasure trove of wisdom about how the “working backwards” approach can change not just business, but also the way we plan our time and live our lives. In this episode, Howard and I talk about starting with a clear vision for how you want your week to feel—whether that's light, accomplished, connected, or something else—and then reverse engineering the steps to get there. We get into how this process can bring clarity in both work and home life, why not all decisions deserve the same amount of weight, and how to find purpose even when life feels messy or uncertain. I loved this conversation so much because it's not just about productivity, it's about living more intentionally, giving yourself grace when plans shift, and creating space for what really matters. If you've ever wanted your days to feel more aligned and joyful, I think you'll find Howard's insights both practical and inspiring.  Links & resources: Plan Goal Plan Planners! https://www.navigatingnextcoaching.com/ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/howardsteinman/ Connect with Danielle: Email: support@plangoalplan.com Facebook Group: Join Here Website: PlanGoalPlan.com LinkedIn: (I post most here!) www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-mcgeough-phd-

Today, Paul talks about some of the first choices you have as an investor. Do you invest pre-tax or post-tax, and what funds do you choose? Listen along as Paul talks about how most funds you can choose are over-weighted with large tech companies, but don't include enough of smaller markets. This combination leaves you in the same boat as most investors: seeing less returns than the market and wondering what you could be doing differently.    Want to cut through the myths about retirement income and learn evidence-based strategies backed by over a century of data? Download our free Retirement Income Guide now at paulwinkler.com/relax and take the stress out of planning your retirement.

In this episode, Shobhit Chugh, former Google PM and founder of Intentional Product Manager, shares practical strategies for moving beyond execution and becoming a standout product leader—even when you don't have formal authority or a supportive manager.

Send us a textCulture isn't just a buzzword – it's the foundation that determines whether businesses thrive or merely survive. This conversation dives deep into why prioritizing people before products and profits creates sustainable success. The research is clear: money only impacts happiness up to about $75,000 per year. Beyond that threshold, purpose and meaning take precedence – especially among younger generations seeking work-life balance and connection to something greater than themselves. We explore how sharing your long-term vision with team members creates buy-in and alignment that ripples throughout your organization.Core values deserve special attention. Generic principles like "honesty" and "integrity" fall flat compared to actionable values that guide decision-making. One example shared: "Do what's right, not what's easy" – a principle that team members can apply both professionally and personally. We discuss how businesses impact far more lives than most realize, with a single company potentially influencing thousands of households through its network of clients and their employees.As your business grows, consider establishing a dedicated "culture steward" to maintain your organizational DNA through hiring and onboarding. Like Amazon's famous door desks (still used today as a symbol of frugality), culture-defining elements become powerful when intentionally cultivated. Whether you run a marketing agency, contracting business, or any other enterprise, the message remains clear: happy teams naturally create happy customers. Your culture isn't just nice to have – it's your competitive advantage.If you enjoyed this chat From the Yellow Chair, consider joining our newsletter, "Let's Sip Some Lemonade," where you can receive exclusive interviews, our bank of helpful downloadables, and updates on upcoming content. Please consider following and drop a review below if you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to check out our social media pages on Facebook and Instagram. From the Yellow Chair is powered by Lemon Seed, a marketing strategy and branding company for the trades. Lemon Seed specializes in rebrands, creating unique, comprehensive, organized marketing plans, social media, and graphic design. Learn more at www.LemonSeedMarketing.com Interested in being a guest on our show? Fill out this form! We'll see you next time, Lemon Heads!

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 800-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Brad and Dan discuss the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump's recent tariffs and draconian deportation policies. They tie these events to broader themes of Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, and Trump's governing style. The episode covers Trump's unpredictable tariff policies, the economic repercussions, and the administration's harsh immigration practices, including erasing the social security numbers of migrants and canceling student visas. Dan & Brad touch on the theological implications, the reaction from right-wing pundits, and the disturbing vision of a dystopian governance model inspired by business efficiencies, culminating in a critique of the Trump administration's approach to ruling without governing. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jorge is officially taking over as the new host of Think Like Amazon. But before diving into fresh conversations, he went back and studied the top episodes. What he found is timeless leadership lessons from insiders who built and scaled Amazon. In this kickoff episode, he breaks down 7 powerful insights (from earning trust to building real customer obsession) that every ambitious leader should hear.Whether you lead a team or just want to level up your thinking, these takeaways will change how you operate.1. (02:50) Long-Term Results Mean Bringing People with You (Ronak Patel, ex-Director of Logistics)2. (06:26) Customer Obsession Goes Beyond Data (Jennifer Arthur, 16-year Amazon veteran)3. (11:58) "Working Backwards" Means Embracing Hard Truths (Colin Bryar, former Technical Assistant to Jeff Bezos)4. (14:06) Earning Trust Can Be Systematic (Justin Maner, ex-Director Amazon Devices)5. (20:56) Simple Solutions Often Win (Dave Anderson, former GM)6. (24:21) Ownership Has Levels (Ethan Evans, former Amazon VP)7.  (28:21) Say YES to Get "Lucky" (Ronak Patel, most listened episode so far) Mentioned in the episode:·       Ronak Patel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronak-patel-nashville/·       Jennifer Arthur: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-arthur-460768/·       Colin Bryar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinbryar/·       Justin Maner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmaner/·       Dave Anderson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scarletink/·       Ethan Evans: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/·       Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/think-like-amazon-podcast

The gap between spending money with your restaurant and amazon should not be as big as it is.  - Do you need some help driving sales to your restaurant?   I'm the CEO of America's Best Restaurants. We help restaurant owners get the attention they deserve and find more frequent customers!

In this episode, our expert guest answers your Amazon PPC questions. Learn how a seller scaled from $200K to $4M during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Get actionable tips to optimize holiday sales and achieve remarkable growth!   In this episode, our expert guest answers your Amazon PPC questions. Learn how a seller scaled from $200K to $4M during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Get actionable tips to optimize holiday sales and achieve remarkable growth! ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos What if you could transform your holiday sales from hundreds of thousands to millions? Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, our expert guest, reveals the art of crafting your own demand and skyrocketing sales with strategic off-platform investments, such as TV and video ads. We dissect the tactics that took one brand from $200,000 to a whopping $4 million, focusing on differentiating branded and non-branded sponsored product campaigns, and structuring these campaigns based on search intent to maximize their impact. We also break down Amazon advertising strategies for those looking to boost performance and profitability. Discover how to make the most of tools like the Search Query Performance report and Amazon Marketing Cloud for comprehensive insights into conversion rates. Learn to balance profitability with traffic through dual campaigns, explore the potential of DSP for bigger budgets, and navigate the nuances of keyword targeting. With Destiny's insights, you'll be equipped to optimize your strategies using metrics like TACoS and tools like Helium 10 Adtomic for periodic assessments. As we explore the intricacies of Amazon PPC campaign optimization, we cover everything from keyword volumes to match types. Learn how to effectively manage budgets with keyword volume, and understand the importance of automatic and manual campaigns, especially for new product launches. We also touch on the importance of influencer collaborations and product targeting to improve conversion rates in high window-shopping categories. Join us as we conclude with a special Q&A, where Destiny continues to share her expertise and engage with our community. In episode 625 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Destaney discuss: 00:00 - Strategies for Amazon Holiday Sales Success 00:35 - Welcome to TACoS Tuesday 06:17 - Optimizing for New Product Launch Strategies 10:26 - Optimizing Amazon PPC Campaigns for Higher Sales 16:56 - Amazon PPC Campaign Optimization Strategies 17:57 - Optimizing Keyword Match Types in Campaigns 21:14 - Influencers and Organic Sales on Amazon 27:02 - More Q&A and Follow-Up Questions Transcript   Carrie Miller: In this week's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast, we have expert Destaney Wishon with us and she's answering all of your questions, and we're going to be talking a little bit about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how one of her clients actually went from $200,000 to $4 million this holiday season. This and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast.  Bradley Sutton: How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think, think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. Well, that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and this episode is our monthly live TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart PPC and advertising related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away.  Carrie Miller: Hello everyone, Welcome to TACoS Tuesday. We have our expert guest here, Destaney Wishon. Thanks so much for joining us, Destaney.  Destaney: Happy to be here. Very excited. I mean the chaos of the holidays Black Friday, Cyber Monday, what better time to get all your questions in?  Carrie Miller: Yeah, exactly.  Destaney: On our end, almost across the board, we saw Amazon's extending this holiday period, you know, taking some pressure off of their shipping for two days. So for the first time ever. You know, if we're just comparing Black Friday to Black Friday, year over year, this Black Friday was a little bit lower, but the overall holiday period was up. I don't know if consumer sentiment around shopping is higher, but sales were almost incredible and I would say our ROAS was pretty in line. We had one brand go from $200,000 to $4 million in sales month over month. It's obviously a giftable item, but it was pretty crazy to see that. So it's been really strong now. Carrie Miller: Oh, that's amazing.   Destaney: Didn't run deals whatsoever. You did nothing for lead-in CPCs are up and your sales weren't that much stronger. But for the brands who leaned in, they did fantastic.  Carrie Miller:  That's amazing, was there a specific strategy you think that they changed, because that's a pretty substantial jump.  Destaney:   They did a fantastic job. And this is kind of the new topic I've been coining in my training is when you list on Amazon, you're just capturing the demand. Amazon's doing all the work. They're driving the people that are searching for your product. You're just, you know, you got a little bucket and you're capturing it.  Carrie Miller: Yeah Destaney: What they did incredible was they created their own demand, so they went off platform, they invested in TV and video and they educated their customer based on why they need to buy their product. So when Black Friday, Cyber Monday came along and they typed in their search term, they stood out in the page because the customers were already familiar with their products.  Carrie Miller: Wow, that's, that's pretty incredible. Yeah.  Destaney:   Yeah, it was insane to watch.  Carrie Miller:  I was. I've been curious about the tv ads and how. You know how those are going for people, so that's sounds like they. You can do a really good job with them, depending on- Destaney: 100%. We're seeing a lot of success. It's also just like rewiring your brain. I think a lot of brands are spoiled because sponsor products are so successful. But I'm like, of course they're successful, a customer's already planning on buying you. You didn't do any work, you just fit on a keyword. Like Amazon did the work of bringing people on the platform. Carrie Miller: Very true, so would you like to get on and start answering some of the questions from the audience?  Destaney:    Let's do it. I mean, typically these run over, so we might as well start strong.  Carrie Miller: Well, yeah, okay, this is from Spencer, and he says What is considered best practice for branded sponsored product campaigns. Do you make a separate campaign for each SKU or do you make one campaign and put all the SKUs in it?  Destaney:     It kind of depends. Your branded searches aren't always the same, right, if someone's typing in Coca-Cola Diet Coke versus regular Coca-Cola, you can change your strategy. So we segment based off search intents. We almost always separate branded versus non-branded, like that is table stakes. You have to separate branded versus non-branded campaigns. But when it comes to lining up your SKUs, we depend on search intent. But also from a reporting perspective, it's sometimes nice to break out into single SKU campaigns because then you can look at your TACoS per brand and you can say you know SKU A is doing really well. Maybe I should increase my branded search investment on this SKU and increase my budget on that campaign while pulling back on my branded investment for SKU number two. Breaking out into single SKU campaigns as a whole just makes it really easy to control your budget distribution if you have good naming and good organized campaign structure.   Carrie Miller:   Daniel says afternoon. Is there a I think it's morning for me, but afternoon probably for you guys Is there a golden ratio of CTR to CVR for measuring effectiveness of ad campaigns? Destaney:   I'm not going to give a golden ratio per se because it's really dependent on category. Click-through rate's also really difficult because it depends on things like pricing and reviews. So your advertising is going to be influenced by that. Same for your conversion rate, but your conversion rate. You can figure out what your category is converting on really easy using tools in Adtomic or using the search query performance report and clearly see using brand metrics. Hey, my category is converting at 20%. You should be converting better than category average, like that's kind of the standard. If you're going to increase your ad investment, you need to be converting better than category average. That being said, again, it's also dependent on search intent. Probiotics is going to be a lot more expensive than probiotics for kids back to school, right? So you can't just blanket look at your conversion rate across the board. You have to understand intent.  Carrie Miller:   Awesome. Okay, let's go to Joshua. He says if you came to Helium 10 from an agency and had hundreds of their old campaigns in your account, what is the best practice? Should I delete all of the non-performing campaigns and start over? I am not sure how to proceed. Destaney:   Great question. No matter what software you're transitioning to or an agency you're transitioning to, we don't ever recommend just pausing everything and hard stop. It's really bad for relevancy and it's difficult for the transition. What we do recommend doing is pulling your search term report for the last 60 days. Pull out all of your keywords that are successful and build them out into the new structure that you want to move forward with using the new software and then slowly rolling those out at the same time. As your new campaigns pick up traction, you can slowly pause out your old campaigns that are maybe a bad structure or maybe they're a weird single keyword structure that you don't want to move forward with. You slowly transition them over. First thing pull all your good keywords. Second thing pause all your bad keywords. Third thing slowly launch and transition your budgets over from old to new.  Carrie Miller:     What are the best practices for 2025 for new product launches. What's changed? I mean, I don't know if that's in regards to that's what I would put it, as I think.    Destaney:     I mean I don't know if that's in regards to me, but I would put it as yeah, I think quite a few things have changed. In terms of product launches, I would say driving external traffic is still doing really, really well and something that I think needs to be leaned into. A lot of brands cannot afford the CPCs in the category on a product that has zero reviews, so any way you can use external traffic that's maybe a bit cheaper to get your reviews up before leaning really heavy into Amazon advertising is a little bit more profitable. I would also say we're seeing this transition to creative matters so much more. So, making sure your click rate and conversion rate is good with your main image, but on the Amazon advertising side, really focusing on your sponsor brands, your sponsor brands video, your headline search ads, anything that makes you stand out on the Amazon advertising side. Really focusing on your sponsor brands, your sponsor brands video, your headline search ads, anything that makes you stand out on the page, because when you're launching, you don't stand out on the review perspective, so find unique ways to stand out within the search results.  Carrie Miller:   My product launched in October and I'm struggling to get sales. I've been using auto and manual campaigns, spending between 30 to 50 per day on a $20 product. I've launched the product in another territory where it's selling well. So feel confident with the product and listing. Any suggestions? Destaney:   Yeah, so I would say the first thing is to look at the keywords and really make sure they're the right keywords. Type them into Amazon. Do you see similar products? Once you see similar products, are those products priced at the same as you or are they cheaper than you? Do those products have a lot more reviews than you? Figure out the competitive advantage that they may have over you and improve your listing in that way. On the advertising side, it's really as simple as again looking at the keywords and trying to expand the keywords in which you have that competitive advantage and then optimizing your bids to make sure you can be profitable. The biggest thing, though, I would say, is understanding that competitive advantage. When you type in your main keyword, what do your competitors look like? What's the price? What's the reviews? Is the main image different?  Carrie Miller:   And the next question is from an Elite member of ours. Hi, Andrew. For SB product collection campaigns we find basically all our sales come from top of search. Is that common? Also, is it worth spending time bidding on other placements for those campaigns? Great question.  Destaney:    In general, I would say it is common. If you think about how the search results are set up on desktop and mobile, what is the biggest ad on the page? It's the sponsored brand top of search ad. The headline ads, the sponsored brand ads on the product detail page are typically video. It's not typically product collection, it's sometimes store spotlight and video. The only other sponsored brands that show up on page one are way down in the middle of search, sometimes the bottom of search. So this is very typical, not surprising. You can bid on the other placements. It's not going to drive a huge difference. Just know that the majority of your traffic and visibility comes from top of search because that's where all of the customers are clicking and viewing before they scroll down the page. Carrie Miller:   All right. The next one is from Keith. He says my BSR is improving and my PPC is converting. However, the organic ranking for my main keywords are not improving much. Any advice on how to improve rank?  Destaney:    Yeah, the two biggest factors that you can then break down is sales velocity or conversion rate. So again, figure out your category conversion rate. That's super easy with brand metrics, insights and planning or Helium 10 Adtomic, it's Amazon given data, it's first party data. So look at brand metrics. If you're converting lower than your category, you're going to need to drive a lot more traffic to your category, so you're probably going to need to spend more in order to improve that organic rank. On the flip side, let's say that you are spending more than the category or driving more in the category. Then it comes down to again like improving that conversion rate. It's traffic or conversion. Those are the two levers you really need to consider. So again, traffic the easiest thing to do is spend more it's not always the best answer or improve your listing and convert better, so that way you can easily spend a little bit more.   Bradley Sutton: Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's index checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. More information go to h10.me/indexchecker. Carrie Miller:    Hello, 80 to 90% of my PPC campaigns coming from SBV. I see the CPC and SBV a lot lower than sponsored. I am thinking to double down on I'm assuming that's sponsored brand video and let the SP sponsored on the second plan. Would that be a good way of going?  Destaney: This is. I'm not going to say this is wrong, but this is really really unusual to see because on page one there's one sponsor brand video ad, so it's very limited in terms of advertising inventory. On page one there's 15 to 20 different sponsor product camp placements, so almost actually across the board. As an agency with over $100 million in spend, 70% of sales almost always come from sponsored products because they have more real estate and inventory on the page than anything else. Very unusual. Also, sponsored brands view can get competitive really fast because since there's only one placement on page one, when everyone starts increasing bids for that placement, you can kind of lose control as CPCs go up and you're going to lose a lot of your sales velocity. So I love sponsored brands video. It's a great format, but it's very, very limited in terms of advertising inventory and you should be investing more in sponsored products. That is, across the board, the highest sales driving tactic because there's so many more sponsored product placements than anything else.  Carrie Miller: Keith says or asks what is the best way to check my conversion rate versus competitors on keywords?  Destaney: I would say your search query performance report is probably like one of the easiest ways as a whole to look at search query performance. It's not specifically related to advertising. When you're specifically looking at advertising, you can't compare directly on the keyword level. You can look at it at the subcategory level but you cannot see directly on the keyword level. You have to use SQP and then overlay it with the rest of your data.   Carrie Miller: How can you measure the effects of having a loss leader to help bring in additional traffic into your brand or variation listing?  Destaney:    Great question. I would probably dive into AMC for a lot of that. AMC is going to help you understand if someone clicks on one product, do they then end up buying another product? That's the easiest way. Without that, you could probably use depending on where you're advertising the sponsor product to advertise product report to see if people are clicking on one and then buying another. That's a really easy way to justify. It's just limited to only your advertising data where, if you use the appropriate AMC report, then you're gonna be able to see all of your organic data and that's gonna help you understand much better.    Carrie Miller: My sponsor campaigns are doing well when I have a lower bid. Whenever I raise my bid to try and get more juice out of them, my budget gets blown and they become unprofitable. Do you know what I should do in order to make this work for me?  Destaney:    There's really no perfect answer here. I mean is the balance that is Amazon advertising. One of the things that we do to help this is we'll create two campaigns with the same keywords. One of our campaign will be lower bid, focused on profitability, and the other campaign will be higher bid, with focus on sales, and we'll shift our budget back and forth. You know, 70% of our budget is going to go to profitability, 30% of our budget is going to go to the high traffic. That way we're not having to constantly fluctuate our bids. This kind of allows us to move the budget from both to maximize profitability and then, when we're done with that, it's okay, we can shift more and turn on higher sales. It's just easier budget distribution. The other things that you could look at is your bid management strategy. Maybe there's a better middle ground. Are you optimizing for placements? Are you moving broad phrase and exact? Sometimes your long tail keywords are going to be a little bit cheaper from a CPC perspective, so you're going to be able to drive more profitability from your long tail keywords. All of those additional measures are going to be hugely beneficial for the strategy.  Carrie Miller:   The next question is what's your take on DSP and data from AMC?   Destaney: I'm going to start with data from AMC, because it is now available for everyone. Brian Lee asked later on in the chat who can use AMC. Helium 10 has actually rolled it out, so you first need to request your instance being set up, but you do not need to run DSP ads to get access to AMC now. AMC is basically analytics and audience platform that just gives you a ton of insights into your Amazon advertising data. If you're not incredibly familiar with Amazon ads, it's gonna be probably a shiny object syndrome and I don't recommend you dive into it just yet. But if you understand sponsor brands and sponsor display. The second part of this question is what's my take on DSP? DSP has a bad reputation in the space because agencies and or Amazon managed services haven't been running it well, but DSP as a tool is incredible. It's one of the most powerful Amazon advertising tools out there, I would say, if used appropriately. You do need to be spending at least $10,000 on DSP a month for it to make sense, but DSP is incredibly, incredibly powerful for brands that are ready for it.  Carrie Miller: What do you recommend for Ad campaigns when you have separate listing variations. Do you recommend to merge or manage in each campaign??   Destaney: Again, it depends on search intent. In my opinion, if I have a black t-shirt versus a red t-shirt, and that's how they're variated, I like to separate out my campaigns so I can create search terms based off the variations. So I can create search terms based off the variations. If my only variation difference is size. No, not size price $20 variation, $10 variation I may not segment them. I would typically put my lowest price first because that's going to have the highest click-through rate and then lead customers to my other variations. If it's flavor variations, weight variation, something with different search intent, I recommend segmenting campaigns so you can curate your keyword experience.   Carrie Miller: What is a good way to determine keywords that you are ranking for, then comparing them to PPC campaigns to determine which keywords you may not be advertising for? Any quick way to do this.  Destaney:   Quick way is the fun part of this question. So the biggest thing I would say is to 100% 80-28. We kind of look at if we're ranked in the top four. We're going to pull back on sponsored product spend and move budgets to our sponsored brand, so we're winning the top of search and showcasing our brand. That's our overall strategy. You can use TACoS correlation to do this. If you have a TACoS objective, you'll see that when you spend on a sponsored product ad that you're ranked for, your TACoS is going to increase because you're cannibalizing your organic sales. So you can almost use TACoS as a lever to push and pull. It's not a perfect solution but it will help. The second thing to do would be to dive into you know, using Helium 10 and on a monthly, quarterly basis, pulling probably those terms, that on average you're above number four, number eight on, and then we create segmented campaigns for ranking that we can turn on and off as needed. So I don't want to turn off that keyword as a whole, I just want to lower the bids. So I'll shift my budget for my ranking campaigns to my profitability campaign. So I'm still running, but I'm not showing up in the top four sponsored ad placements.   Carrie Miller:    Jason says what is an optimal amount of keywords per exact campaign. I started with 15 or so, but as keyword harvesting creates new targets, the list has grown quite a bit. Break them into new campaigns question.  Destaney: Absolutely I personally don't love harvesting new keywords into an old campaign because it's going  change the performance of your old campaign right. If you have 10 new keywords that aren't proven, then your overall campaign may stop, start performing worse. So 15 is a great number. This is one of those fun like depending on what influencer you follow in the space, you're going to get a different number. It's really dependent on your budget. You know we've had brands that are spending a million dollars a month and they're able to have 100 keywords in a campaign because their campaigns had a thousand dollar budget. So we could afford from a budget perspective to drive traffic to every keyword. If you don't have that budget and you're only at $100 a month or a day, then you're going to need a lot smaller group of keywords to make sure you're collecting data on those keywords. So start with 15, maybe go to 20 to 30, depending on how high you want your budget to be, but then always break them out to new campaigns past that point.  Carrie Miller:   Are exact keywords generally expensive than broad? What, according to you, is the right mix of keywords, match type within a campaign and how many can should be added? Destaney: This is a fun one. There's a ton of misconceptions around this. In my opinion it just depends, because it's an auction model. If someone is bidding more on their exact match term than they are their phrase match, then maybe your exact match keywords are more expensive because your competitor is bidding more. We test all three match types across the board. They all three run in a very similar ACoS or ROAS because we control the bids to what's converting best at that certain point in time. I think for us, phrase match is one of our highest selling match types right now because broad sometimes goes too broad and doesn't convert as well. Exact match typically converts the best but can be the most expensive. If we're in a category where our competitors are bidding a lot more on exact, highly recommend running all three. Later on, someone asks can you put them all in the same campaign? You can. It's not necessarily going to hurt. We break ours up most of the time. There's instances where we won't, just so I can control again where my budget's going. But we continue to test every single keyword and every single match type and then just negate and or pause or lower bids depending on the performance in the CBCs.  Carrie Miller: I recently launched, about two weeks ago. I'm running an automatic and manual campaign. Is there any other campaigns I should be running? Destaney: No, I'd say that's fine unless you have a really high budget and look at maybe video or sponsored brands. Those are going to do really well for you. It's unique advertising inventory but considering it's only been two weeks, I think an auto and a manual is good. An auto is going to be used for keyword research and data collection for you. Use your manual campaign to really control where your traffic's going and then just continue adding those automatic keywords you're finding into your manual campaign.  Carrie Miller: Mike says, I'm in a category where there's a lot of window shopping, so my advertising spend is high as lots of clicks, no and low sales. Long tail keywords have low traffic and the keywords with higher search volume are very general, expensive and saturated by competitors. Any other strategies to consider?  Destaney:   Yeah, I would say, like the home decor, apparel, puzzles those categories can be really difficult because of the window shopping. So you got to think how do you stop someone from window shopping? Video does really really well because then you're educating them on why your product's better and why they're interested. And the good thing with sponsor brands video is if they're just watching the video you don't get charged. You only get charged if they clicked, and if they click they're interested. But again, I'd put this back on you to ask why are people clicking on your listing but not buying? Like even in high window shopping categories, you need to have a competitive advantage. The second thing I would say is product targeting, sponsor product product targeting, sponsor display product targeting can do really well. Target all of the competitors who have lower reviews than you, a higher price point than you, worse reviews than you. These do really well in window shopping categories because, as you mentioned, people are looking at competitors and then clicking on other listings and other listings. So this is a good opportunity to kind of take advantage of that mentality.  Carrie Miller:   Would you also say influencers are probably really the best way for those particular categories.  Destaney:  Yeah, I think influencers do really well because they're again, it's the same as the video concept. You don't want to just capture the demand and be compared to every other product in your category by price or reviews, which is what Amazon's known for. How do you educate a customer on why they need your product before they even click? Influencers, video ads, off-platform traffic does that job.  Carrie Miller:   Do you think Amazon rewards or gives more ranked juice for organic sales more than PPC sales, or do they treat them the same?  Destaney:    I would probably say more to organic sales. This is why your big retail brands your Johnson and Johnson's, your Pepsi or Coke's can get away with having listings that maybe aren't as fantastic because their organic conversion rate is so much higher, right? Even before they were spending a ton like seven years ago when I got started in this space those brands did so well because their conversion rate was higher. Customers were searching for their brand name and buying right, so their organic is already inflated and doing much better. Nowadays, PPC of course plays a role, but Amazon knows that they're going to max out on how much PPC opportunity they can have within the search results, so I think organic is weighted a little bit heavier in terms of conversion rate and click-through rate.  Carrie Miller: Do you ever increase budget on a PPC campaign, even if it isn't maxing out?  Destaney: It doesn't hurt. I don't think it necessarily helps. It can. I've seen a few people kind of make statements like I ran a campaign at $50 a day budget and it did nothing. When I increased it to $500 a day it did something. I've never really seen that, but it doesn't hurt anything. Carrie Miller: Joshua says wait. So I thought it was best practice to segment campaigns, as in keywords and such, to determine the performance. So is it best practice to clump keywords together for campaigns in groups of 10 to 15?  Destaney:   It doesn't really matter. Single keyword campaigns are okay, they don't hurt, but they're a pain to scale. We have brands that have 500 keywords doing well, so I'm not going to create 500 campaigns when it doesn't drive that much added value. We do 10 to 15 because it's controllable, it's easy to scale, it's easy for us to build out. Because it's controllable, it's easy to scale, it's easy for us to build out. In an absolutely perfect world, single keyword campaigns could be the best solution, the most value added, because you can do your placements at the same time, but they're not scalable for most people. Most people don't have the operations to run it appropriately and the software's out there that are recommending single keyword campaigns have a really terrible bid management strategy that doesn't make sense for them. So I would say if you're a small brand, only have one product, go ahead and run single keyword campaigns if you want. Just make sure you have a good system for naming and structuring.  Carrie Miller: This is a good question. If you're new to Helium 10 Adtomic, what's the best place to start? I feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the system.  Destaney:   I would start by saying that that is the nature of Amazon and Amazon probably going to feel overwhelmed. So the biggest thing is to actually go through, like the videos that are directly within Adtomic. Like that's what I would say one of your best bets and start learning each piece individually. That's something that I kind of got overwhelmed with, like in the beginning. Keyword research and bid management that should be our core focus when it comes to advertising. So go through those segmented videos and help yourself understand the system that way. Do you have anything else, Carrie?  Carrie Miller: Yeah, I mean we do have kind of a PPC Academy. If you are a paid subscriber to Helium 10, you can go into that course. But Bradley also has done some. He did some masterclasses on Adtomic and then there's also kind of learn videos, like you were saying, just like watch those little videos for each different thing within the actual tools. There's kind of little training videos. I would suggest doing that. We also have it in our academy. We have videos in our academy that show you how to use Adtomic.  Destaney:   General, it just takes time and, to not get overwhelmed, you have to hop in and you have to test and learn. By the time you learn something Amazon will change some button or some switch. So don't get overwhelmed by like. We have incredible comments and questions that are being asked that I would say are pretty advanced here. So, like, don't get overwhelmed by all of that. Just start simple, start small and you'll figure it out as you go. Carrie Miller:   I think we'll do maybe one more here. I think this is a good one. I use Cerebro to extract keywords from competitors ASINs and then include those as exact and phrase match within the same campaign. As a result, my campaign sometimes ends up with 500 plus keywords. Is this approach okay, or should I create smaller, more segmented campaigns? Destaney:   I'm going to assume what's happening with your 500 plus keywords is only 10 of them are actually getting impressions and clicks. That is the problem with that strategy. Unless you have a thousand dollar a day budget, you cannot afford the data across all those keywords. And what I mean by that is the industry standard is you need anywhere from 10 to 20 clicks per keyword before knowing whether or not it's a keyword that can be optimized right. So let's say 10 clicks at a $1 bid across 500 keywords. I can't do that math. What is 500 times $10? Like 5000?  Carrie Miller: Yeah.  Destaney:  Please, you guys I just got the zeros. This is one of those memes I was like what is the most embarrassing thing you typed into your Amazon or your calculator this year? I was about to say you cannot afford to collect data on all those keywords. You're going way too big and you're going to have campaigns that only have 5 to 10 keywords getting clicks, because that's where all of your budget's going. Your budget's only going to go to those keywords. Amazon's not going to spread it across all of your keywords. So there's no point in doing any of that keyword research when 480 of those keywords you cannot afford to get impressions on. That is why we break them out in a segmented campaign. So I can have a $10 campaign focus on one to two keywords, collecting data. I can turn on and off as my keywords are successful versus your 500. Again, you can't necessarily afford it unless you're going to be spending 5 to $10,000 to collect data on all of those terms.   Carrie Miller:   All right, I think that's the last question. I think you've done an amazing job for pretty much 45 minutes straight answering questions. So thank you. And Andrew says Destaney is the GOAT. And then Cory said “Agreed, this is awesome!”. So thank you so much for joining us for TACoS Tuesday and thank you to everyone in the audience. We had lots of I mean, we still have questions we haven't answered. I'm sorry about that. We just don't have time to do all of them every single time, but if you join next time early, you can get your questions in early, right when we start and get them answered. But thanks again for everyone who joined and also Destaney. If anyone wants to reach you, where can they reach you? Destaney:    Facebook or LinkedIn is probably the easiest. I see a few like good questions that came in last minute. Cory Benson, like all of my content is pretty much on LinkedIn, based around your question, so feel free to follow me on either of those platforms or reach out in the Helium 10 groups. I'm pretty active in those groups, so if you have any questions that we missed, we'd love to hop in and help.   Carrie Miller: Yeah, if you're not following Destaney on LinkedIn, you're missing out, so you got to go go follow her there. So, all right, thank you again, and we'll see you all again next time on TACoS Tuesday.

In this episode of The Burleson Box, Dustin Burleson speaks with Steve Anderson about his book The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon. Listeners will discover key principles and lessons from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's annual shareholder letters, breaking down Amazon's journey to becoming one of the world's most valuable companies. The book identifies Bezos's strategies and provides insights into Amazon's success, organized around fourteen "Growth Principles" within four broad themes:Experiment and Embrace Failure: Amazon uses a culture of experimentation and “successful failures” to foster innovation and pursue big, transformative ideas.Obsess Over Customers and Think Long-Term: Prioritizing customer needs and maintaining a long-term focus drive sustainable growth and loyalty.Simplify Complexity and Leverage Technology: Amazon aims to make processes simpler and more efficient through technology, creating time-saving solutions.Maintain a Startup Mindset and Embrace Bold Risks: Amazon's “Day 1” mentality and willingness to take significant risks keep the company agile and prepared for future opportunities.Links:Learn more about TheBezosLetters.comFollow Steve Anderson on LinkedInGet your copy of The Bezos Letters***The Burleson Box is brought to you by OrthoFi:You know orthodontics, we know how to grow your practice. Start More Smiles with OrthoFi.OrthoFi is the industry-leading solution for patient acquisition, insurance management, and patient collections. Our end-to-end software and services help practices achieve dynamic growth, balanced cash flow, and smoother operations.OrthoFi's practices experience a 2.25 times higher same-day conversion rate compared to the industry average, thanks to our expertise in same-day contracts. We take on the full burden of managing patient onboarding, collections, and insurance processing, allowing your team to focus on delivering best-in-class service.Our comprehensive 180-day collection protocol sets the gold standard for delinquency management, achieving an average net collection rate of 98%.Dr. Tara Gostovich of TG Orthodontics shared:"I feel like the cost is less than a staff member, but yet you have an entire team. So, I don't look at the cost of OrthoFi as it's too expensive. It's too expensive to not have it."Learn more today at StartMoreSmiles.com*** Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, exclusive study guides, special edition books each quarter, powerpoint and keynote presentations and two tickets to Dustin Burleson's Annual Leadership Retreat.http://www.theburlesonbox.com/sign-up Stay Up to Date: Sign up for The Burleson Report, our weekly newsletter that is delivered each Sunday with timeless insight for life and private practice. Sign up here:http://www.theburlesonreport.com Follow Dustin Burleson, DDS, MBA at:http://www.burlesonseminars.com

Like Amazon, Goodreads is cracking down on spam and bot author accounts, many of which are producing subpar AI generated content — but protecting the platform means adding a stricter vetting process before authors get to network with readers. In this urgent episode, we dive deep into these changes with insights from Amy, our resident Goodreads expert, who unpacks what's required and how to navigate the approval process with ease. If you're planning to establish your author presence on Goodreads, this is a must-listen! Get the latest on what's changing, why it matters, and how you can successfully meet the new standards. Don't let these updates slow you down—tune in and stay ahead!Send us your feedback!Help promote the podcast and earn free swag! If you're willing to put our podcast player widget on your website we'd love to send you free book swag, and you can earn a free coaching session! Email us at info@amarketingexpert.com for more information.Buy Penny's new book, The Amazon Author Formula now!FREE BONUSLeave a review and we'll give you our Book Launch Checklist! Just include your reviewer name or a screenshot of your review in the email. Can't leave one on your podcast platform? Just email us your review and we'll put it on our website: info@amarketingexpert.com.Check out our podcast page and learn more about the team: www.amarketingexpert.com/author-podcast

Welcome to an interview with a seasoned business strategist and operator respected for his pivotal role in Amazon's early days, John Rossman. In John's book, Think Like Amazon, he provides 50 ½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive―and shows today's business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody's business.   John Rossman is an author, executive advisor and keynote speaker on digital transformation, leadership, and business reinvention. With a career spanning consulting roles at renowned brands like Novartis, Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Walmart, and T-Mobile, he brings extensive expertise in solving complex business challenges and driving customer-centric solutions. As an early Amazon executive, Rossman played a pivotal role in launching the Amazon Marketplace in 2002, shaping its transformative impact.   Rossman is the author of four influential books on leadership and business innovation, including the bestseller “The Amazon Way” and his recent release “Big Bet Leadership.” He served as senior innovation advisor at T-Mobile and senior technology advisor to the Gates Foundation, where he honed his strategic acumen in driving organizational change and creating enduring enterprise value.   Today, Rossman is a sought-after keynote speaker renowned for his insights into leadership for innovation and transformation. His work emphasizes practical applications of Amazon's Leadership Principles to foster innovation, drive growth, and navigate digital disruption effectively.   Get John's book, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader, here: https://shorturl.at/zyUHR   Here are some free gifts for you: Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach   McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf   Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 488, featuring an interview with a seasoned business strategist and operator respected for his pivotal role in Amazon's early days, John Rossman. In John's book, Think Like Amazon, he provides 50 ½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive―and shows today's business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody's business.   John Rossman is an author, executive advisor and keynote speaker on digital transformation, leadership, and business reinvention. With a career spanning consulting roles at renowned brands like Novartis, Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Walmart, and T-Mobile, he brings extensive expertise in solving complex business challenges and driving customer-centric solutions. As an early Amazon executive, Rossman played a pivotal role in launching the Amazon Marketplace in 2002, shaping its transformative impact.   Rossman is the author of four influential books on leadership and business innovation, including the bestseller “The Amazon Way” and his recent release “Big Bet Leadership.” He served as senior innovation advisor at T-Mobile and senior technology advisor to the Gates Foundation, where he honed his strategic acumen in driving organizational change and creating enduring enterprise value.   Today, Rossman is a sought-after keynote speaker renowned for his insights into leadership for innovation and transformation. His work emphasizes practical applications of Amazon's Leadership Principles to foster innovation, drive growth, and navigate digital disruption effectively.   Get John's book, Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader, here: https://shorturl.at/zyUHR   Here are some free gifts for you: Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/OverallApproach   McKinsey & BCG winning resume free download: www.firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf   Enjoying this episode? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo

The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon   Take away: Maintaining a "Day One" mentality in business encourages constant innovation, customer focus, and willingness to take calculated risks, which are crucial for long-term success and prevent a company from becoming irrelevant.   Money Learnings: From an early age, Steve started doing typical things to earn extra money, like mowing lawns. He learned that if he wanted to do something or buy something, he needed to earn the money for it himself. In high school, he developed an interest in photography and turned it into a money-making venture by taking pictures at school plays and selling them to students. This business allowed him to pay for a summer camp for a couple of years. These experiences made him learned that money is helpful and important and that you can make money through your own efforts.   Bio: Steve is the Co-Founder and CEO of Catalyit®, The Insurance Agency Technology Resource Company. Backed by 24 Big I state associations, Catalyit® helps busy insurance agency owners maximize their existing tech and discover, evaluate, select, and implement new tools they need to continue to thrive. Steve is a trusted authority on risk, technology, productivity, and invention and has over thirty-five years of experience in the insurance industry. He holds a master's degree in insurance law and is a Top Voice on LinkedIn with over 340,000 followers. Steve is the author of the international bestselling book The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon. In this very readable and practical book, he takes a unique perspective on business growth by analyzing and demystifying how Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, has grown Amazon, arguably one of the most successful companies in the world. He appeared in USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Forbes, CEO Magazine, and FOX News Extra. Steve and his wife, Karen, have two married daughters, but more importantly, seven amazing young grandchildren. They live in historic Franklin, Tennessee.   Highlights from this episode: Early entrepreneurial experiences can shape future business mindsets. The biggest risk for businesses is often not taking enough risks, especially with new technologies. Successful companies find ways to pivot and reinvent themselves as markets change. It's always Day 1. Long-term thinking and willingness to experiment are crucial for sustained business growth. Customer obsession and reducing friction in purchasing processes can lead to significant success. Gratitude and persistence are key components of living an abundant life and achieving business success.   Links: thebezosletters.com https://steveanderson.com/ https://catalyit.com/   Richer Soul Life Beyond Money. You got rich, now what? Let's talk about your journey to more a purposeful, intentional, amazing life. Where are you going to go and how are you going to get there? Let's figure that out together. At the core is the financial well being to be able to do what you want, when you want, how you want. It's about personal freedom!   Thanks for listening!   Show Sponsor: http://profitcomesfirst.com/   Schedule your free no obligation call: https://bookme.name/rockyl/lite/intro-appointment-15-minutes   If you like the show please leave a review on iTunes: http://bit.do/richersoul   https://www.facebook.com/richersoul http://richersoul.com/ rocky@richersoul.com   Some music provided by Junan from Junan Podcast   Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.

Unlock the secrets of skyrocketing your e-commerce sales with TikTok Shop! Join us as we sit down with Michelle Barnum-Smith, a leading expert on TikTok Shop, who will reveal why this platform is revolutionizing e-commerce and how you can tap into its immense potential. From unparalleled user engagement to an all-inclusive buying experience that supports brand building and data transparency, Michelle dissects the unique advantages TikTok Shop offers over traditional platforms like Amazon. Get ready to learn how full visibility of sales data and direct customer interactions can transform your business. In this episode, we explore the seamless customer journey on TikTok Shop from sparking awareness to completing a purchase all within the app. Discover how the shift from traditional influencer marketing to a collaborative affiliate model is empowering creators to drive sales through direct rewards from TikTok. We also get into TikTok's growing prominence as a search engine for younger generations and the new shopping features that make discoverability effortless. This is a golden opportunity for sellers to leverage TikTok Shop's innovative ecosystem to maximize engagement and boost sales. Prepare to be inspired by real-life success stories and practical tips for setting up your very own TikTok Shop. We cover everything from business registration and linking social accounts to optimizing your listings and content for viral success. Michelle shares invaluable insights on inventory forecasting and the ripple effect of TikTok Shop's success on other platforms like Amazon. Plus, learn the importance of adhering to community guidelines to avoid account suspensions and ensure your business thrives on TikTok Shop. Don't miss out on this comprehensive guide to navigating and conquering TikTok Shop's dynamic marketplace! In episode 578 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Michelle discuss: 00:00 - Exploring TikTok Shop for Sellers 02:56 - TikTok's Influence on Consumer Purchases 06:23 - Enhanced Shopping Experience on TikTok 09:32 - Maximizing Sales Through TikTok Shop 11:04 - Reviving Live Selling With TikTok Shop 16:22 - TikTok Shop Viral Success Stories 16:40 - Success Tips for TikTok Shop Setup 19:55 - Maximizing Marketing Opportunities on TikTok 25:11 - TikTok Shop Guidelines and Best Practices 26:40 - Navigating TikTok Shop Suspension Guidelines 33:48 - Effective Creator Outreach Strategy Guide ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: TikTok shop is one of the hottest marketplaces in 2024 to sell on. Today we're going to do a deep dive into everything you need to know to get started selling on that platform. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our special Freedom Ticket monthly workshop, where we actually film live a training, a deep dive training, into a certain aspect of e-commerce and we put it later into Freedom Ticket so that you guys can benefit from it. But you guys here on the podcast are going to get the benefit of getting this training too. Now today's guest is going to be Michelle Barnum-Smith, who is definitely an expert in the field of TikTok shop and she's going to do a deep dive into like hey, what do you need to do to get started and what are some best practices? You know we've had some people on this podcast who sell on TikTok shop. You guys have heard them doing some crazy, crazy numbers, some of them even doing more than their Amazon business. So if you guys want to know what's involved with getting set up on this platform, this episode is going to be for you.   Kevin King: Now, Michelle I've known for quite some time, and so today she's going to be showing you why you need to be considering TikTok and talking about some of the opportunities that are there and what she's doing to help herself and her clients actually crush it. So please welcome Michelle.   Michelle: Today we've got lots of ground to cover and we're going to be talking about the TikTok shop opportunity. Just like Kevin said and Shivali said, unless you've been living under a rock, it is all the buzz, and rightly so. Some people don't realize this, but TikTok shop was born from a hashtag and the whole idea of TikTok made me buy it. This hashtag has been around for several years and it basically was like hey, I discovered this on TikTok and I went and bought it. And here I'm showing it off again because TikTok made me buy this. And essentially, TikTok shop allows businesses to showcase through engaging short videos, live streams and creator collaborations, and users can discover and purchase products directly within the app, creating a smooth and convenient shopping experience. And we're going to talk about, like, just how powerful this really is for you as brand sellers.   Michelle: So the opportunity of a TikTok shop has never been hotter. I mean, essentially, we're talking about a billion monthly users. They're on the app 17 times a day, with 83% of people saying that TikTok has influenced purchase decisions on what they're doing and what they're buying. So consumers are on TikTok specifically to be entertained. They hang out for hours. One and a half billion monthly user base spending an average of 95 minutes a day on the platform. I want you to think about that. That's like at least three episodes of your favorite show on Netflix. It's, you know, it's like people are just like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling and, um, all, all times of the day, like, like we saw in that previous stat of 17 times. You know, essentially starting the app 17 times a day, kind of crazy. Um, they offer a frictionless buying experience from creator to product page, to checkout to back to scrolling in seconds, which is one of the huge reasons why TikTok and TikTok Shop is such a powerful opportunity for sellers, right this second, so you can literally go from an organic discovery experience to a checkout experience in just seconds, and you can amplify that opportunity with some certain promotional activities that we'll talk about. So, bottom line, TikTok shop really helps build brands, not just sell products, so they have more high quality traffic, more sales and repurchases, have full visibility of data, end to end loop closing data.   Michelle: So one of the things that I love so much about TikTok shop is having previously just used TikTok to drive traffic to Amazon. So I have tried it a whole bunch and it is so frustrating because Amazon's a black hole. They don't share data back with you. So if you've ever tried to run ads, drive influencer content, even do social media like, just focus on the social media side of TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or whatever it might be. There's no data back from Amazon, even with using attribution, because Amazon attribution is 55% inaccurate to actually tell you what converted, what drove sales. It's kind of like a guess most of the time and if sales rise you're kind of like, okay, well, what contributed to that In TikTok shop? You know exactly what contributed to that sale. You know exactly what social posts drove how many sales. Which affiliate is your number one affiliate? If you're running ads, you know exactly how those ads are performing.   Michelle: It allows you to speak directly with your viewers as well, your customers, your prospects, every step along the way. It's you the face of the brand, your brand, interacting directly with customers. So most of the time, most sellers, most consumers, don't realize that there's sellers behind their brands on Amazon. They just think that they're buying a product on Amazon. That's not the case with TikTok. TikTok gives sellers opportunity to interact directly with the customer on every step of the customer journey. So there's no question who is? You know who this relationship is with and there's serious marketing opportunities, and I'm such a marketing geek. I love all of the marketing opportunities that TikTok has. Just this, just today, they released promo codes. Super excited about that. So let's talk about the full shopping journey within TikTok. Essentially, TikTok allows you to discover through shoppable content and through short videos and lives to select, basically go and learn more from about the product on the product detail page and then actually check out and buy, place orders and check out without ever leaving TikTok. So why this is so significant? As a marketer and as a seller myself, if I have, let's say, the counter to that is on Instagram and if you've ever been influenced on Instagram, you know, let me know, raise your hand, you're watching, you're watching that content and then the person is saying, oh, go to the link in my bio and you go to the link in your bio in, and it's some linktree that may or may not have been updated and that link might take them to Amazon. Take you to Amazon, where their Amazon storefront is like laid out, all for you to have to sort through just to find the product that you were interested in that caught your attention for just a second, that interrupted your entertainment experience that you were there on Instagram to experience, and now you can't even find what it was that caught your attention. You just give up in frustration.   Michelle: What I love about TikTok shop is that you can go from being entertained seeing a shoppable video, seeing something that a creator is promoting, to all the way to checkout in just seconds and back into your entertainment. That experience has very little interruption. So TikTok has several ways to checkout. Essentially, you have the opportunity to go from a shoppable video to a TikTok shop where you can see that brand's full lineup of offerings, and go to the product detail page where you can then check out. But this is not typically the shopping experience. Usually, it's you see a video. It takes you directly to the product detail page and then you just check out. These are the things and ways that you can build your brand on TikTok shop directly. So let's talk about the customer journey on TikTok versus Amazon. So previously TikTok, when it was just a social media channel, sat a little bit higher up in the customer journey. So if you guys aren't familiar, the customer journey is this idea of a funnel or this process where somebody goes from awareness to consideration, to purchase, to customer service, to going deeper in their rebuy or loyalty to that specific brand. So previously, TikTok the app, the social media side of TikTok was just in the awareness phase, the awareness and consideration phase. Just like Instagram, it was like a place of discovery, a place of entertainment, a place to maybe get educated, but it wasn't a place to purchase. That was where you would go to Amazon, and Amazon fit squarely in the consideration phase, like I need more information, I'm aware of my need already and then I'm going to purchase. So essentially, Amazon is solution solving. It's a search engine for buying. Customers are already aware of a need. They search, research and buy on Amazon.   Michelle: Buyers don't hang out on Amazon for fun or entertainment, despite Amazon's best efforts with Amazon Lives, Amazon Post, Amazon Inspire, and that's really why TikTok shop has taken over in that regard. Not necessarily like I'm not saying that Amazon's going away anytime soon. Obviously that's a huge opportunity, but TikTok shop now owns the entire customer journey, from awareness through consideration, purchase, the customer service experience, all the way to rebuy opportunities, average order value increases, um rebuy rates, all sorts of things that TikTok shop makes available to sellers to be able to do and accomplish all within the TikTok shop platform. Are you guys seeing the potential and the opportunity here? And, as a marketer, this is why I'm so passionate about it, because if you own the awareness, if you are the one creating the awareness of the need and you immediately go into a checkout scenario, you win. The checkout is not okay we're making you aware and then you're being taken to a page where you and 100 other competitors are then brought up with different options and people are overwhelmed with options. It's not like that. It's literally going from awareness to checkout to back to entertainment in a matter of seconds. So TikTok really comes down to need awareness. Their focus is on entertainment and education and their goal is to keep users on the platform with their addictive algorithms. Users are made aware of products and the purchases is done within TikTok shop with quick checkouts and then buyers are back to scrolling within seconds. So that's really kind of the crux of TikTok shop there and live selling. I don't know if you guys have seen have been on the platform yet, but live selling it really had its heyday. I feel like you know as far as US consumer behavior goes in, like the late eighties, early nineties, Saturday morning infomercials Anybody remember those?   Michelle: I know I was like, always sucked in. I was always sucked into those Um. And then there's QVC and home shopping network where, you know, basically little ladies hang out to buy kitchen kitchenware, but TikTok shop, specifically, is bringing live, selling back, and it's crazy's crazy, the amount of organic viewers you get checking out your products live, seeing what you have to offer live, you know, and it's a form of entertainment, so they're already on there to be entertained and then they get to watch you pitch whatever it is that you have. That's kind of crazy. And also creators we have this. Creators have been kind of like put up on this pedestal as influencers, right, and this kind of title and with that has come a little bit of a combative nature. When it comes to working with brands, right, how many of you have worked with an influencer where you've reached out to them, you've tried to recruit them and they're charging like a couple hundred dollars of post to like two thousand dollars a post, five thousand dollars a post for the honor to get to work with them. Anybody experience that. And then you're like, um, what did I get from that? I got a post. Did it do anything, right? So the awesome, the awesome thing with working with creators now is that they essentially become affiliates because TikTok is rewarding them for sales that they make through the platform. So creators are now motivated to work with brands and to push products and seek out opportunities. It's no longer just like oh well, I'm a creator and so my creative needs are above your needs as a brand. Now they're willing to be more collaborative with brands in and focusing on content that converts and that drives sales, because, at the end of the day, they want to make money right and we all want to make money, and so it makes it more of a win-win relationship. So that's one of my favorite things about this kind of shift is it goes from the honor of working with a creator and an influencer to now like okay, we're affiliates and we're in this together.   Michelle: So there's kind of four native ways to discover and buy on TikTok. There's the browse area, which is shoppable videos. That's what you would generally see if you're just scrolling through TikTok. You're going to have some content that is just entertainment content. You're going to have content that's educational and informative and that sync to and our shoppable videos, basically, and shop pages. That's where you know brands show up with their brand presence, um, live shopping, like we discussed, and the shop tab. So that's the new kind of search functionality within TikTok. That's all about finding and discovery and searching for solutions. It's kind of crazy, but TikTok has now become a search engine for a certain demographic. Anybody who's less than 25 years old, instead of going to Google with their questions first, they're going to TikTok with their questions first, and it used to be that videos were what was served first in the search results and now it's product. Are you picking up? What I'm putting down? Like this is this is a significant opportunity. This is such a crazy shift and I will say that every almost like 80 to 90% of the in TikTok shop contacts that I have were recently recruited from Amazon. Like Amazon employees are moving over to TikTok shop just like clawing their way over here. So it's very soon there's gonna be some aspects that are native to Amazon that we'll start seeing show up in TikTok shop, especially this kind of search portion, the shop tab, and then the buying experience, like we've talked about, is very seamless, from the product page to the checkout page. You literally can like sync your Apple Pay with TikTok shop, click the side of your phone gosh and be back to doom scrolling in seconds, if I haven't, you know, beat that into you enough.   Michelle: But let's talk about this idea and this question is TikTok shop just a distraction for you as sellers? I hear this kind of objection a lot, and from really big sellers, and so I'm a little surprised. I'm always a little surprised because, like Kevin said, I think that if you have an opportunity to make money, are you going to say no to that opportunity, especially when it's relatively zero to low cost to get started? You already have inventory. You just bring it over to TikTok. So let's talk about just some case studies really quick. Every time I talk to an Amazon seller who is looking to expand off Amazon or diversify their revenue off Amazon, they're usually happy with like, hey, if I can get 5% of my Amazon sales off Amazon, like my Shopify site or Walmart or Etsy or something, I would be happy if just 5%. So here we have a few sellers and I'm just going to cruise through here. This brand got serious about TikTok shop beginning of April and year to date, they are 8% of their Amazon sales on TikTok shop. This brand launched in September of 2023 with TikTok shop. They're one of my brands and we immediately went viral. Immediately, like the bestseller that we had became a bestseller on TikTok shop and then, as we got to know our audience a lot better and affiliates a lot better, launching products on TikTok shop with them, we saw halo effect on Amazon. Every single time that we launched a new product on TikTok shop it would go viral. It would go viral on Amazon as well. Rank would skyrocket and along with sales. So their year to date revenue is 11%.   Michelle: Our biggest struggle with this brand is every time we go viral. Like it's really hard to forecast inventory for going viral. So we keep running into like our bestsellers going out of stock because they just take off. They just take off, so that I guess that is like one of the sides of TikTok shop that is a warning is that your shop could go viral and with your inventory. This seller I did a big training in Cancun back in February and in and around TikTok shop this seller was doing two sales a day before my training and after that, um, 180 sales in the week following. So I was a little proud of that. And then subsequently, uh, we've been working together and now their brands, their, uh, they have 15% of their total brand revenue, uh, of their Amazon revenue they're making on TikTok shop. I'm not going to talk a lot about these brands, because these brands are just like killing it. They're 16% of Amazon sales for this brand. This brand, gosh, they're just like. I just met with their category manager last week, their new category manager. They're number one in their category on TikTok shop, all of TikTok shop, and their year to date is 17% of their Amazon sales. So I guess you have to ask yourself, like, is it worth getting started? Like, yes, I think the answer is obvious, right, like I'm not doing a sales pitch here guys. I don't like this is you already have the inventory, right? You're already selling on Amazon. It's not too much more difficult to extend, uh, what you're doing and get started with that same inventory on TikTok shop as well. So, but there's some nuances to it and I want to talk about those nuances. So there are some keys that are necessary to a successful setup on TikTok shop. So this is where we're getting a little bit down into some specifics. On setup, I am not walking you through step-by-step a setup step-by-step at this point. This is not necessarily how to. This is more of kind of like lessons learned from setting up over 30 brands personally on TikTok shop and some of the nuances, some of the troubleshooting, some of the kind of like things to avoid, basically from a high level perspective.   Michelle: So this is kind of my setup checklist to be successful, this is what. These are all the things that you have to do one time during a setup. You need to get through your business registration. You need to complete that. You need to link a TikTok social account that is US based based with your TikTok shop seller account that is US based. You need to create or connect a TikTok ads manager to that account ads manager account to your TikTok shop account. You need to get your shipping set up and your listing set up and your content optimized for TikTok shop. You need to import available reviews, meaning, if you have like and this is all legal TikTok shop owns well, TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance and ByteDance owns lots of different tech companies. One included is the main tool that's used for importing reviews. So if you have a Shopify site or another website with reviews on it, then you can bring those reviews over. If you don't, you can import reviews from Amazon to your website and then import those reviews from Amazon. It's a little bit of a process. It's a process, but you only have to do that once. To help you build up, to start the process of building your review presence, you need to select and implement promotions for your listings, such as pre-shipping with qualifications, product discounts, flash sales. Now the new promo codes that are released, and for select accounts, if you qualify, there's now a customer marketing whole section where you can go back and offer, you know, present offers in app. So showing up in the customer's TikTok inbox, basically like they already bought from you once, or, if they're a potential client, you can get directly inside of TikTok users' inboxes with your offers. My marketing heart, it just loves this from an opportunity perspective and we can actually measure how many sales converted from those messages. I love email marketing, I love SMS marketing, I love all of that, but sometimes we just can't close all the loops. And when we're talking native platforms and the marketing opportunities that are native to that platform, we're able to see all those loops close. When it's when we're talking native platforms and the marketing opportunities that are native to that platform, we're able to see all those loops closed and the associated data with that. So we know what further to invest in, what's working, what's not working, and then, of course, they're the final step in success. A successful setup is making sure that you have an affiliate plan set up for affiliates creators to find your products and to start promoting them and to make sure free samples are available. We'll show that here in a second.   Michelle: Okay, the second thing that you need to make sure that you do is to review the prohibited products list. So just because you can sell something on Amazon and Shopify doesn't mean you can sell it on TikTok shop. And this is probably like the number one thing that I see sellers screw up on, um, that they just like rush to get all of their products on TikTok shop and all of a sudden uh, they didn't ever check prohibited products and all of a sudden their account gets deactivated. Um, because they're promoting products or promoting it in such a way that's against, that's either prohibited products or against community guidelines in how you talk about it. So the most suspensions and account deactivations could be avoided by checking this first. So essentially, just, I mean you could even just search for it TikTok shop prohibited products policy and go on there or also look at their restricted categories on there as well to see is my product a prohibited product? I've been surprised how many products are not allowed on TikTok shop that are allowed on Amazon and, of course, on Shopify. You can sell whatever the heck you want to. So it's definitely one of those things that just because you can sell it somewhere doesn't mean you can sell it on TikTok shop.   Michelle: And this is just from a having been through it so many times. Business registration is not what it used to be. In September, I was able to get just like a ton of brands on TikTok shop with very little effort. Now there's a few more steps. Now there's a few things that kind of slow people down. It's amazing to me how many sellers just like give up. They just roll over and they're just like oh no, I can't get it to work. And I'm like guys, you are Amazon sellers, it is selling on Amazon is not an easy thing. Why are we giving up so easily? Have some like, have some resilience here. Also, TikTok shop like says oh, your account setup failed. I wish they would use different language, because sometimes it's not true failure and sometimes it's like they're just um, you get to a certain place in the process and then the system is moving you forward, but it needs more information, like you need to submit additional documents or you need to submit them in a certain way, and so it says failure, but really it just means like you need to go add more, add more documentation or whatever it is that they're actually asking for. So my advice to you is just keep pushing forward, keep pushing through that. It is worth it in the end. And just as a little like hack is any requested documentation, even if it says that they accept PDFs and PNGs, only submit them as JPEGs. Like their system, their bots read JPEGs and more often than not they don't read PDFs. So just, even if it says it'll accept a PDF, just submit it as a JPEG. Okay, cause it will help you. And especially if you're talking to support, support. It's so crazy because support can't see submitted PDFs or PNGs, but it can see submitted JPEGs. Does that make sense? So that's a little, a little note for you to take and make sure that you're doing Okay.   Michelle: This is relatively new and this has to be. This is around community guidelines. Community guidelines were updated mid last month and essentially it's just saying hey, this is the way that we behave on our platform. So there's, they become a lot more strict about what creators as well as sellers can and can't say on their product. You know, on the platform and that includes your listings and what you say about your products, especially, um, you know if something has an effect on weight or weight loss, physical performance or physiological effects or changes. So in this example, I had a seller reach out to me and they're like I don't know what I did wrong, I don't know why this account is frozen, or this product is frozen, I don't know what's wrong with it. And all I had to do was read through the title to see what the issue was. They're essentially saying this eliminates snoring and enhances facial structure and post-workout recovery claim, claim, claim, claim, claim, like you're physiological effects, physical performance, eliminate snoring. You can't say that on Amazon had. Like how can you say that? Like you can't say that on TikTok shop either? Um, and if you have any product in and around weight loss, I'm not saying it's not possible to sell on TikTok shop, it absolutely is. But how you talk about it is really critical. You cannot say weight loss, you cannot say metabolism, fat burning oh my gosh. I had another brand that was just like beside themselves. They were so like offended that TikTok shop suspended their product, their you know key seller, and I was looking through their account. It was like weight loss, metabolism, dah, dah, dah. And I'm like you can't say those things. You. You failed TikTok, you know like. You showed up like, oh well, we can sell it on Shopify. Yes, you can sell it on Shopify, because on Shopify you can say whatever the heck you want about your product. There's nobody policing what you can and can't say on your Shopify site. But this is their market and so they get to say what you can and can't say. And it's not just what you say in the text, in your title, in your bullet points, it's also what you say in the images, on the products themselves as well. So if you have packaging that you're showing and it's making claims. You got to scrub that. You got to like, get rid of it if you have infographics. So that's why I say you're not just pulling over everything that you've created for your Amazon listing or your Shopify listing. You got to be really careful in what you're bringing over and being aware of these community guidelines and what you can and can't say. These are the main ones. It's worth looking at, it's worth reading through and I do talk about that extensively in my course where I detail and outline it, but these are the top ones.   Michelle: Okay, focus on your bestsellers. I often see that the second somebody gets started on TikTok shop, they bring their whole category, their whole catalog of offerings over at once and I really advise you to just test the opportunity and to learn the platform and which of your products is the best opportunity first. So too many products are a distraction to affiliates and your ops team. So, like in this example, this brand brought over gosh all of their products and anytime that they were doing creator outreach they basically all of their creator and targeted plans was just like hey, here's everything that we sell and that's a lot, that's too much. So instead we shifted their focus to okay, what's your best seller on Amazon, what's the one with the best reviews, the strongest call to action, the most obvious for how it helps a consumer? And they're like, okay, this one, their free sample request took off, the affiliate performance took off, their sales took off. So just don't flood. It's a distraction for your team. It's a distraction when you start to reach out to affiliates, so just focus on your best sellers first. Now hear me out. This is probably the biggest warning that I have for you. Second to prohibited products okay, so this is probably the biggest area that I want you to be really careful with. And don't use the shortcuts, okay. So oftentimes I see that sellers are you're on Amazon, you're on Shopify and there are apps available within TikTok shop where you can just sync your Shopify account or sync your Amazon account and sync over your listings. So all of your listing content immediately gets imported into TikTok shop, and I have seen so many issues with this. Like I've said so many times, there's things that you're saying on your listings that you can't say in a TikTok shop, and what happens, guys, is that your listings are not reviewed by human beings, right, they're reviewed by bots, and what I have seen happen so many times is that people have seen those listings and they bring over their entire catalog, like we just talked about, and they're making claims or bringing over prohibited products or something like that that they didn't know.   Michelle: I didn't know and immediately they get account violations and account violations and they get a million account violations and then their account gets suspended because there's a limit to your account violations that you can receive, and then you lose your account, your account gets deactivated and it's over before you begin. So that's an extreme example, but I have seen that too many times to count what also happens, especially in the case of Shopify. For example, if you're syncing your listings, let's say you want to make a change to your TikTok shop listing, like your price or your title or something like that, because your listings are synced with these apps. You can't do that because Shopify and the Shopify listing owns the TikTok listing, so you have to go and make the change on Shopify If you want to make that change, show up on TikTok. You see how that's a problem, right? So and it's not an easy fix, it's not, it's not just like a quick separation, um, because I have a seller, like I've talked about. He's number one in his category and he set this up, his like. When he first got set up, an account manager told him to do this and they didn't know. These account managers have no clue, they really don't, um, and so he is dealing with this issue. If he were to try to separate at this point, he would have to create a new ASIN, for lack of a better term. A new listing for one of his best sellers and one of the big areas of social proof on TikTok shop is to see how many people have purchased the product. He would lose all of that history on that listing that now has like a hundred thousand purchases. So, yeah, it's, it's like a serious deal. So please don't do that. If you're wanting any kind of true shortcut, use the bulk uploading options. This is new the import product upload accelerator. Go this route if you're looking for shortcuts. But, like I said, I really do want you to like set up your listings manually first, at least the first couple, so you understand what TikTok is really looking for, so you can then go and add more products in the future.   Michelle: Offer free shipping. Oh, my goodness, we're running out of time, guys, we'll send you these slides. Basically, bottom line, you set up the free shipping opportunities within the promotions tab and not when you're setting up your shipping templates and your shipping solutions. So it's a promotion and you can apply all sorts of qualifications to qualify for free shipping and fulfilled by TikTok is now a thing, and they're gonna start pushing this really, really hard. So start with your Amazon inventory, start selling via Amazon MCF syncing with TikTok shop. Once you've proven the opportunity for your brand, immediately apply for FBT as soon as you set up your TikTok shop account so that when you prove like, hey, is this an opportunity for me, cause MCF is expensive, you want to get that inventory into FBT and start taking advantage of the opportunities and like super cheap pricing that they have for fulfillment over there. Okay, I'm going to cruise through this, but, just like I showed you, there's kind of like the setup checklist and then there's the ongoing success checklist. This is what you need to do ongoing, daily, weekly, monthly to be able to make sales on TikTok shop. Really, what it comes down to is working with creators, making sure you have your free samples turned on. I have my three S's to targeted outreach, which is search, sort and then save. And just a warning if you are using bots or planning to use bots, that gosh. They've now put regulations in place where new sellers are limited and restricted on how many people they can reach out to because of these messaging bots that are out there. So I really recommend focusing on target collaborations versus and reaching out to creators that way, versus messaging and spamming methods. So this is my search and sort and save method. Essentially, you're under the find creator tab and you're searching via relevant search terms for your brand or your category. You're sorting I like to sort by GMB, and if they're fast growing that's even better, because then they're hungry, they're starting to see success, but they're not so successful yet that they you can't get the time of day with them. And then you hit the little save button over here and then when you go to target collaboration up here, you can import your saved folks I recommend at least 50 per day that you're reaching out to via this message.   Kevin King: Thanks everybody for showing up today. We'll be back again next month to do this again on a whole new topic. Remember there's a replay of this, if you missed part of it, in Freedom Ticket inside the Helium 10. So if you're a member of Helium 10 at any level, there's a little button somewhere up around the top in the education section or resources section that says Freedom Ticket. You'll be able to find this recording in a few weeks in there, added as a permanent addition to the Freedom Ticket. So thanks everybody for coming today and thanks again, Michelle.   Michelle: Thank you, bye, guys.

In episode #2694, we discuss the strategies and practices that have made Amazon a powerhouse in the business world. From their unique approach to meetings—using narratives instead of PowerPoint presentations—to their hiring practices and the Bar Raiser program, discover how Amazon's methods can be applied to your own business. Gain insights into the current state of the tech industry and the importance of investing in valuable skills. Tune in for all this and more on Marketing School.   Don't forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube!   Check out more of Eric's content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil's videos (Neil Patel YT)    TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Today's topic: How to run your company like Amazon and Why Google and Microsoft Are Laying Off People  (01:02) Eric explains how Amazon replaced powerpoint presentations with written narratives and memos to encourage clear thinking. (01:32) Eric shares his experience implementing the memo-writing practice in his own company. (02:04) Eric gives an example of a memo he recently wrote and how it helped clarify the company's goals. (03:10) Eric explains the process of reading memos during meetings at Amazon. (04:34) Neil mentions Amazon's focus on hiring talented individuals with strong systems and processes skills. (06:00) Eric shares that Amazon pays most of its employees in stock and limits salaries to $160,000 to align long-term interests. (06:49) Eric reveals that Amazon no longer relies on traditional reference checks during the hiring process. (08:03) Neil discusses his company's approach to reference checks and the value of (negative feedback. (08:04) Reference checks can save you from making a bad hiring decision (09:09) Amazon's Bar Raiser program focuses on hiring people smarter than you (09:57) Amazon's hiring process is thorough and values-driven (10:33) What works for Amazon may not work for everyone (11:08) Azure's growth is outpacing AWS (11:57) Google and Microsoft may be cutting costs to increase profitability (12:30) Keep investing in valuable skills and providing value to succeed (12:51) Make a company more money to earn more money (13:14) That's it for today! Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more!   Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Single Grain

Do you want a self-managing company where you only focus on the highest level stuff? That's the holy grail in business and every business owner's dream.   Here's the deal: this cannot EVER happen if you don't have a congruent team that follows strong guiding leadership principles. Like Amazon's. I'll go through Amazon's leadership principles with you and help you understand how to translate them into your business.   This is bigger than core values.  It's your Northstar.   JOIN NOW and discover why and how to set up your principles to live and die by.   Jeff Bezos didn't build Amazon by accident...

In my new dating course, No Cold Approach in The Cow Pasture, one of the strategies I lay out on how to find women is via Facebook and Instagram. I learned this strategy a while ago from my good friend Benny Lichtenwalner, and it very much is like shopping for women on Amazon. A lot of guys complain about the types of women they find on dating apps, well here's an alternative solution for you brother! Let's talk about it today! // BOOK // Get my Amazon #1 Best Selling Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNH88C47 // COURSES // No Cold Approach in The Cow Pasture (Online Dating Course): http://dates.comeonmanpod.com Practical Law of Attraction course: http://loa.comeonmanpod.com Everhard Academy: https://learn.erikeverhard.com/bundles/everhard-academy?ref=7b3c4d The Clarey School of Economic Philosophy: https://theclareyschoolofeconomicphilosophy.teachable.com/?affcode=636918_r5uujdh8 Jon Fitch's Practical Self-Defense: https://gumroad.com/a/780330707/ubexvq RP Thor's Courses, Coaching and Group Membership: https://gumroad.com/a/505970387 // COACHING AND OTHER RESOURCES // Beer Club: http://beer.comeonmanpod.com Coaching: http://gumroad.comeonmanpod.com FREE PDF with 20 Dating App Openers! Join my email list: http://list.comeonmanpod.com MERCH: http://merch.comeonmanpod.com Recommended Reading: https://is.gd/COMPBooks Get free shipping from Duke Cannon on orders over $25: http://duke.comeonmanpod.com The CURE for male pattern baldness (Skull Shaver): https://bit.ly/428k9Xy Donate to the show: https://streamelements.com/se-847333/tip Join the 3% Brotherhood: https://www.facebook.com/groups/3percentbrotherhood // SOCIAL MEDIA // Follow on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@bestmenspod Follow on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/comeonmanpodcast/ Follow on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ComeOnManPOD Follow on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/comeonmanpodcast // OTHER MEDIA // Watch on YouTube - http://youtube.com/comeonmanpodcast --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/comeonman/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/comeonman/support

Join us today with Tom Read, CEO of the UK Government Digital Service, and Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister, as we delve into diversity, accessibility, and post-pandemic inclusivity in digital services. With a remarkable background in tech and public service, these two experts bring extensive expertise to the table. During this episode, Tom and Audrey emphasize the significance of digital accessibility in community centers, including rural areas and prisons. They also explore inclusive website design principles for users of all backgrounds, including non-tech-savvy individuals. Host ⎸ Sam Robbins (TaiwanPlus) Guests ⎸ Tom Read and Audrey Tang Season 2 of Innovative Minds deep-dives into artificial intelligence, digital democracy, and freedom of expression with leading tech figures. This podcast is released under a CC BY 4.0. Creative Commons licence.

On episode #207 of The Author Factor Podcast I am having a conversation with John Rossman, the mastermind behind Amazon's marketplace and the best-selling author of books like "Think Like Amazon" and "The Amazon Way." In this insightful interview, John shares his strategies for helping businesses thrive in the digital age. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the value proposition for the reader and effectively communicating one's message. His approach to leveraging the book as a powerful calling card and the long-term thinking behind the book's impact on his business mindset is incredibly inspiring.Listeners will gain valuable insights into writing a quality nonfiction book, building leadership for innovation, and leveraging it for personal and professional growth. John's focus on writing durable and evergreen content, creating consistency, and developing leadership within a business offers practical strategies for anyone looking to write their own nonfiction book.From clear communication to leveraging the book as a business card, John's journey and strategies are a goldmine of inspiration for aspiring nonfiction authors. Tune in to this episode to gain valuable tips on how to make an impact with your nonfiction book and lead with innovation in the digital era.Learn more about John Rossman by visiting JohnRossman.com.For more details about our short, helpful book publishing program, visit BiteSizedBooks.com.

Building an Army Word-of-Mouth Referrals with Podcast-Guesting Listen to the full episode 136 with Iggy Fanlo on Joe Lemon Show: https://www.thejoelemonshow.com/136In this podcast episode, host Joe Lemon converses with Iggy Fanlo, CEO and founder of Cloud Med Spa. They discuss the company's go-to-market strategy, which heavily relies on podcast guesting for exposure and attracting healthcare providers. Fanlo shares his experiences on prominent aesthetic podcasts, which led to inquiries about franchising and accelerated the launch of Cloud Med Spa.Like Amazon, the platform provides software, services, and procurement services to healthcare providers. Fanlo emphasizes the importance of hard work and dedication for success and highlights the positive impact of Cloud Med Spa on healthcare providers' lives.### **Connect with Joe Lemon**Recovery Lab Show YouTube: https://recoverylabshow.com/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joealexlemon/IG: https://www.instagram.com/joealexlemon/→ Let's Connect + hit the icon on my profile + tap into the Joe Lemon Show↳ Be the first to see (all of) my posts and stay connected.↳ Listen to the podcast - TheJoeLemonShow.com Let's Connect with Joe Lemon InstaGram: https://www.instagram.com/joealexlemon/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joealexlemon/   Don't miss an episode of the Recovery Lab Show on YouTube: https://bit.ly/453fAjo --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sales/message

Listen to the full episode 136 with Iggy Fanlo on Joe Lemon Show: https://www.thejoelemonshow.com/136In this podcast episode, host Joe Lemon converses with Iggy Fanlo, CEO and founder of Cloud Med Spa. They discuss the company's go-to-market strategy, which heavily relies on podcast guesting for exposure and attracting healthcare providers. Fanlo shares his experiences on prominent aesthetic podcasts, which led to inquiries about franchising and accelerated the launch of Cloud Med Spa. Like Amazon, the platform provides software, services, and procurement services to healthcare providers. Fanlo emphasizes the importance of hard work and dedication for success and highlights the positive impact of Cloud Med Spa on healthcare providers' lives.### **Connect with Joe Lemon**Recovery Lab Show YouTube: https://recoverylabshow.com/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joealexlemon/IG: https://www.instagram.com/joealexlemon/→ Let's Connect + hit the icon on my profile + tap into the Joe Lemon Show↳ Be the first to see (all of) my posts and stay connected.↳ Listen to the podcast - TheJoeLemonShow.com

Sally Hendrick interviews Amy Nelson about how her family has been fighting Amazon for over 3 years tooth and nail with their hands tied behind their backs. It's all too common in the US unfortunately. Get show notes at ShoutYourCause.com, and follow Amy on TikTok at amy_k_nelson.

Want to not just grow your coaching business but keep it growing for years to come? Taking a leaf out of Amazon (or founder Jeff Bezos) book would be a wise move. This simple piece of wisdom from Jeff Bezos dramatically affects the growth of a coaching business - both short and long term… Want to work closely with us to grow your coaching business to 6-7+ figures? Discover The Private Coaching now: https://www.neilshoney.com/privatecoaching

TikTok is launching its Shop feature in the U.S. after mixed success in other countries. Meanwhile, Amazon's Inspire feature brings short-form video to its shopping app. WSJ's Meghan Bobrowsky on why the two companies are taking pages from each other's playbooks.  Further Listening: -How TikTok Became the World's Favorite App  -The Billionaire Keeping TikTok on Your Phone  Further Reading: -Amazon Confronts a New Rival: TikTok  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever wondered how to make the most of the 'Honeymoon' period when you first start selling on Amazon? Or how to get people to organically search, find, and buy a product without breaking Amazon's terms of service? Tune in to the latest episode of Serious Sellers Podcast, as our host, Bradley Sutton, unveils the intricacies and updates to the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy, along with his prelaunch plan, the Bali Blast Strategy.  He shares effective ways to use PPC to catapult your product to the top of the search, and how to utilize Helium 10's Keyword Tracker tool and boost to gauge your bid's success. We'll discuss strategies for attracting customers to a product with no reviews, and you'll discover how to use tools like Helium 10 Audience and the CPR number to monitor and increase your orders. The episode also sheds light on SEO and its relationship with Amazon listings. You'll find out why a simple listing score formula isn't sufficient to rank on Amazon, and why optimizing your listing for Amazon customers, as well as its algorithm, is pivotal. Let's dive into the evolution of Amazon's algorithm over the years, and why sprinkling specific keywords a certain number of times isn't as effective as it once was. To top it all off, we'll explore how developing a tool with a potent listing score creator, like a “Surfer SEO for Amazon listings” can guide you in optimizing your listing and the importance of testing your strategies. Buckle up for an episode packed with valuable insights!   In episode 500 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about: 00:00 - Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy and Results 03:35 - The Maldives Honeymoon Effect  06:50 - Amazon Keyword Research and Competition Analysis 10:53 - Getting Ranked for Keywords With PPC  15:30 - Improve Amazon Ranking With PPC and CPR 18:49 - Amazon Algorithm Changes and New Strategies 25:20 - The Significance of Amazon Recommended Rank 28:23 - Analysis Of The Project X Coffin Bath Tray Keywords 34:40 - Relevance of Keywords in Amazon Ranking  42:44 - Listing Optimization and Test Launches ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today's episode 500 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, and we're doing it live right here from the Maldives, as usual, because we're gonna go into the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy and some of the new twists and turns that have come up because of the test I've been doing. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Two, three, four, music you want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's Keyword Research tool, Cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. H10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Serious Delors podcast discount coupon, SSP10. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and, as you guys can see here. I am back here in the Maldives, Waldorf Astoria. The place that started all the way back in episode 200 was when I first started filming out here the Maldives Honeymoon launch strategies, and then every 50 episodes we'd come out here 250, 300, 350, 400. I actually skipped 450, but so this is the first time back in the Maldives since episode 400. But the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is just a strategy. I just made a funny name to it so that we can try and get the most out of what we call the Honeymoon period, when we just get started selling on Amazon for a certain product, and so we're going to dive into it and what's the latest here on this strategy. So make sure to stay to the end, because we've got some new things I'm going to be talking about today. But just some background again. Bradley Sutton: Honeymoon period what is it? Well, the Honeymoon period is that's not a term that I came up with. That's a term that relates to the first few weeks, the first couple months sometimes, of a listing where you get more bang for the buck. It basically refers to how, if you have a four or five year old listing and you do a couple PPC sales for a keyword, not much is going to happen, right, but if you have a brand new listing sometimes just changing the title, sometimes just changing a keyword here or there, sometimes just getting one sale on a keyword, sometimes just getting a few sales on a high volume keyword It'll start moving you around on the organic side. Big fluctuations might happen on your PPC on a positive way. And we call this the Honeymoon period. This is not an official Amazon term, but it refers to the fact that when you are selling a new item, especially one that doesn't have much history, what happens sometimes is that Amazon doesn't have enough data to kind of know what you're relevant for, and so any little micro actions where on a more mature listing is not going to have much of an effect because Amazon's got so much data and so many clicks and so many things to kind of measure and understand what it's relevant for. Those micro actions on a newer listing where Amazon's just trying to figure out what is this product going to be good for, it has a lot bigger effect on it. So we call that the Honeymoon period. Bradley Sutton: All right, now what I started doing, like five, six years ago, is I launched a lot of product. By the way, I've launched over 500 products now, but even more than four years ago I had launched over 400 products and what I found was I always was experimenting. I found, like these, certain micro actions as I just made up that term now for myself I guess, these micro actions that could help me get even more out of the Honeymoon period, that would help me get off on the right foot. You know, just like you know, honeymoon is for a wedding, right? You want to get off on the right foot, and so then I was like, okay, what am I going to call this? I'm like I'm going to call this the Maldives Honeymoon effect, because these actions have a lot bigger impact, even more than just, you know, what we normally would see on the Honeymoon period. And so that's why I just went ahead and named it this thing, and I came here to the Maldives here to record it. So what is the latest with the Maldives Honeymoon method? Bradley Sutton: Well, we're going to go into some different strategies here, but let's do a recap. A lot of these methods is actually in prelaunch, and in prelaunch I made a new name for it. You know we call it the Bolly Blast. So I'm not going to go too, too in depth. But if you want to have a Bolly Blast, you know prelaunch these are the steps that leads the Maldives Honeymoon launch. Check out episodes 466 and 467. If I'm not mistaken, it's a part one and part two about all the things you need to do to get your listing ready. So h10.me forward, slash 466 or 467. You can also search that up on YouTube on our Helium 10 channel and in there I think I have like a 47 step process that happens before you even launch the product. Let's just review some of those you know. Again, those are two hours of episodes you need to go back and like listen to to get the full details. Bradley Sutton: But in a nutshell, you know it starts at the product research stage, right, picking products that potentially have lower title density. Title density is something that we have exclusively at Helium 10, which measures the number of listings on page one that have a certain keyword in phrase form in the title. So when I say certain keywords, the searched keyword. So, for example, if the keyword is coffin shelf and you see in Helium 10 that the title density is seven, that means that the last time Helium 10 check, there are seven listings on page one that have that keyword in exact phrase match in the title. All right, if you have a listing or a keyword that has title density of 40, that means there's 40 listings that have that exact keyword in the title and that means it's going to be a little bit harder to rank on that page because Amazon algorithm, you know, heavies or favors heavily the title as far as what a listing is relevant for. So it doesn't mean, you know, you can't launch against a keyword that were a title entity it's 40. It just means that, hey, it's going to be a little bit more of an uphill battle where sometimes you have a lower title density and Amazon thinks you're relevant. And, by the way, guys, I'm going to drop some bombs here about how you can know what Amazon is relevant or what's relevant to Amazon. But anyways, if you have a lower title density sometimes it's going to be a lot easier to rank. Sometimes even from day one you can be on page one potentially. Bradley Sutton: So that's one of the things we talk about in the Bali Blast method and then other things is about. That has to do with the keyword research, understanding where Amazon puts relevance as far as things that are in your listing, as far as keywords go from the title to the bullet points, and so we talked about getting all of the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, your direct competitors or the keywords that they're ranking highly for. We talk about getting opportunity keywords finding the keywords that maybe only one of your competitors ranking for, and that means you're going to be able to potentially rank for that keyword when you're only competing with one of your competitors, as opposed to five or six of your competitors. There are other keyword research strategies we talked about, such as trying to find complementary products. So these are all. Again, we're talking about pre-launch right now. Bradley Sutton: How do you put the right keywords in your listing Complementary products? But basically that means maybe you see your competitors have a frequently bought together type of product. For example, if you're selling a coffin shelf or your competitors are selling a coffin shelf, maybe you see in frequently bought together, which you can find in Helium 10 Blackbox, a history of other coffin shelves being bought with a coffin letterboard Right. Well, part of the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is that you want to get index for some of the main keywords from those coffin letterboards if you have a coffin shelf. So if you see that for these coffin letterboards, these five coffin letterboards. One of the top keywords is coffin letterboard and another one is Halloween display or something like that. So those top keywords from those coffin letterboards, even though they might not be directly relevant to your coffin shelf, you're going to want to get index for those listings and then from day one, you're going to be able to target those in product targeting, ppc, and then also you'll get a little bit more breadth, some width to what you're going to be showing up for, especially in broad campaigns and auto campaigns. So that's another strategy to use too. It's also a strategy to get index for forbidden keywords. Like, maybe you're related to an adult product or a drug related product. You can't put adult related products or keywords in your listing or drug related or other forbidden keywords. Well, if you make yourself relevant to the non-forbidden keywords and you're listening by sticking them in there, you potentially could get index for those forbidden keywords just because Amazon deems you as relevant. So that was another strategy we talked about in the Bali BLAST method. Bradley Sutton: Now, originally in the original Maldives Honeymoon strategy, when you're launched, we talked about using search, find by and two step URLs and things of that nature. Now that's no longer something that Amazon really wants you to start doing. And it's actually interesting. I was looking at the terms of service and it doesn't mention anymore the two step URLs. But it does talk about trying to manipulate your keyword search rank in the code of conduct. And that was a different change a couple of years ago where Amazon started specifying that they don't want you trying to do those kind of URLs and things to manipulate what it says the search rank, keyword rank. Before then we always would talk about, hey, doing search find by doing two step URLs, things like that, because in the Amazon terms of service it only talked about manipulating your sales rank, like your BSR. So then Amazon kind of cracked down on the keywords too. So that really changed the Maldives Honeymoon method. We do not suggest anymore getting friends and family or using services that are going to go out and get 40 people to search, find and buy your product with a keyword. That's pretty explicitly against Amazon terms of service. Now it wasn't before. People are trying to say, oh, it's always been against service. No, it hasn't, which is why Amazon changed it to make it against terms of service later. Bradley Sutton: So how did we change the Maldives Honeymoon launch strategy then when we couldn't use services like AZ rank or rank bell back in the day. So how can you get ranked for keywords right away? Well, we changed the Maldives Honeymoon method to be strictly PPC, so the whole theory is still the same. You need people to search, find and buy your products after searching for a certain keyword, and the more people that do that, that's what's going to get you ranked on page one. But when you have a brand new listing, how do you get on page one? How do you get people to even see your listing? You know, the old way was just doing search, find, buy, right, you know, getting two-step URLs, having a service send people to an exact keyword and they find you're listing on page six or seven and then they'll go ahead and buy it and then they'll move you up. But you can't do that anymore. So what we talked about, I think starting in like episode 300 or 350, was do the same thing with PPC. Bradley Sutton: So how do you get people to organically search, find, buy without breaking Amazon terms of service, you know, without using an outside service, without using friends and family, et cetera? Well, you got to think what is going to make somebody, if they happen to see your product, buy it, no matter what. Well, the first thing is what's going to make somebody see your product if you're not using outside service? The answer is easy it's PPC. So you've got to find the PPC bid that is going to get you to the top of search. You could do a top of search modifier in your PPC or you can just up your bid, you know, and do a fixed bid or down only bid, that's at a high, what you think is going to get you top of search, naturally, and then just make that the bid. Now how you know if you're getting that is you put your keyword to keyword tracker. After you put a bid of like $3, just say $3 on the keyword coffin shelf, I put coffin shelf into my keyword tracker and then what I do is put my keyword tracker on boost. Boost is something that checks it 24 times a day and now within an hour or two, I'm going to see a couple different spots on where I'm showing up randomly in the search results and different browsing scenarios and different locations. And then if I'm like ranked one, two or three, I'm good to go. If I'm ranked like eight or nine or below or something that probably I'm going to need to raise my bid to try and get my rank high. So, anyways, that's step one. Bradley Sutton: But if you have a brand new product and has zero reviews, obviously you know how do you get people to buy your product. Right, with the old old days again, search, find, buy you're using these outside services. They were getting incentivized to buy the products like, hey, you get the product for free, basically, all right. Now, now we can't do that anymore. So what is the incentive, I guess you could say, for somebody to buy a product that has no reviews, that they've never maybe heard of the brand? How do you get them to go ahead and purchase your product? Bradley Sutton: Well, the answer is by choosing a price point that makes them buy the product you know like no matter what. So that price point is different for every product. For example, if coffin shelves are all costing, or retail price, $25. So what you want to do is think what price point is somebody going to see this with? Like man, this is an incredible deal. You know, here's this other listing that has a thousand reviews, a lot of social proof. But I'm going to go ahead and get this other one. Well, maybe that price is $13, you know, 50% off? Are you going to make money at 50% off? No, you're not. But the whole point is, you know like you used to have to pay to get orders in the beginning to get that momentum and to get that sales velocity and search velocity, so you were paying money anyway. So to me this is a good investment. So you know you choose whatever that price is of where, when your competitors will buy that product. Bradley Sutton: And one way that you can, you know, do some product research. If you don't have, like Facebook groups where there's a community that's around coffin shelves and you could like do a quick free poll and they're asking them what price, or something like. Let's say, you don't have access to anything like that, use Helium 10 audience. All right, helium 10 audience it's a pay-per-use service inside of Helium 10, powered by Pikfu, where you can go and choose your target market. Like, let's say, your target demographic is females from the age of 18 to 30, who are prime members. You can actually choose that target market in Helium 10 audience and then just find 50 of them and within like three hours you'll have the answer to questions like hey, at what price point would you go ahead and buy this product even though it had zero reviews, and compared to and you can even have the other products there, even though the other products had a thousand reviews, and you would have pictures of it. So then you're able to see, you know, maybe, what price point somebody would buy that from your target market. Bradley Sutton: Or you can just guess. You know, I don't like guessing, you know all the time. So I like to go ahead and, you know, actually get some information. So once you've got that, then you go ahead and launch with that PPC and then in Helium 10, there's something called the CPR number. All right, the CPR number in Helium 10 tells you approximately how many orders over eight days eight to 10 days, I should say where it gives you. If you, if people, if that number of people search, find and buy your product, it gives you the best chance. Doesn't give you a guaranteed chance, but it gives you the best chance to get to page one of a certain keyword. All right, and so that's basically what I've been doing for the last two years. A lot of people have been doing this as well. You know, literally thousands of people are using this technique in order to to get to page one. Bradley Sutton: You monitor how many orders you're getting each day with the CPR number. So, like, let's say, the CPR number is 100. I like ramping up my order. So if the CPR is 100, I don't want to just divide that by eight or 10 and say, all right, I need 10 per day or 11 per day. No, what I like to do is I like to make it look organic. I like to start off slow, maybe day one, and get two or three. So the way I know is that, you know, I'm checking my, my PPC reports in real time and if I get two clicks and purchases on a certain keyword, I actually pause that target so that I don't get more. All right, I kind of want to like make it look a little bit more or organic and then the next day I started again and try and get maybe six or seven orders. Next day I try and get 11 or 12 orders until I can, you know, hit that CPR number and then go back and I'm going to check where am I ranking? Did it help my organic ranking? Bradley Sutton: Now it's important that again, when I said that you're you're choosing a, a cheaper price point, you don't put your list price or your regular price at this cheap price. No, because the problem is, if you do that, you might end up not being able to raise your price in the future. So when you choose, like, let's say you choose a $15 price point for your $25 coffin shelf, well, I'm going to make that a sale price or I'm going to make it a coupon discount, like, so maybe I'll put the price at $25, but then I'll put a, you know, 40% off coupon in order to hit that, that price point. All right. So again, don't put your regular price at that. And again, back in the Bali blast method, I had other tricks and tips about how to get, like, strike through pricing. So again, 466 and 467, make sure to check those episodes to see how to get you know, special strike through pricing and things like that. But but that's. Bradley Sutton: You know, in a nutshell, what the Maldives honeymoon strategy has always been, you know is is launching on five to 10 keywords. One other trick we usually do is hey, in the Maldives honeymoon strategy, don't just choose five or 10 completely different keywords like coffin shelf, gothic decor, spooky bedroom, mysterious oddities and Halloween, scary things Like. Do you notice the difference in those keywords? They're all completely different. They don't share keywords. What you try and do is find the embedded keywords that you can launch in groups, all right. So when you're doing your research in helium 10, you're going to find groups of keywords that have very similar roots. You know, like coffin shelf, gothic coffin shelf, gothic coffin shelf for bedroom. You know there's like six, seven keywords in there. You know coffin shelf for bedroom is also a keyword. So what you do is you try and launch all of those keywords at the same time, so they're all sending those relevancy signals for that root keyword to Amazon. All right. So there's another strategy that we use in choosing the keywords. Bradley Sutton: Again, that's mentioned in the Bolly Blast Now. Here's the thing here. Now let's talk about some new stuff. All right, that's just kind of like a recap of the OG Maldives honeymoon strategy and Bolly Blast strategy. What is new for 2023, 2024? And I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say something controversial, and that is I almost recommend doing a test listing if you're in any kind of a newer niche. All right, literally doing a test listing first, and you could potentially even do this for more established niche, all right. So that's the end game of what I'm about. That's the controversial thing that I'm launching now with this Maldives Honeymoon Strategy. Let's take a few steps back to explain why I'm suggesting this and what has changed on Amazon in the algorithm. Let's take even three steps back before there. Bradley Sutton: Listing optimization is important. All right, how you have the keywords, how many times you have it in your listing, where you have it. It's important, you know, to really send those relevancy signals. However, it is not as important as it was in the older days. Let me just tell you right that right now and it's also not a foolproof way to get ranking All right, do not use some kind of like formula where I'm going to use this keyword this many times and here and here and then, that's equal success. No, all right, if anybody tells you that that is incorrect. Bradley Sutton: People like using, like listing scores you know, like people have been, who have been using Helium 10 for years, have done something kind of like rudimentary, where you know they take what we teach them and say, all right, hey, I know I have to have. This keyword is my most important keyword and it needs to be in my title and in one bullet point and in one search terms. And I'm going to give myself three points to have that. And and then I'm going to give myself one point for this. You know, people I kind of do that myself. Like it helps me to kind of like know where my, my keywords are. Bradley Sutton: And people have asked, you know, helium 10 for probably like three or four years now to do some kind of like listing score, where we take an algorithm and assign points to it, right, and in the past we've always said nah, like I'm not sure how valuable that will be. But, but recently, you know, I started writing blogs again. Maybe you guys are watching seeing some of my blogs at Helium 10.com forward slash blog. But you know, seo is an important part of a company like Helium 10 and any company like that. So when we write SEO blogs, we're trying to rank for keywords in Google and Bing, right, it's kind of similar to making a listing for Amazon. Bradley Sutton: It's not just let's randomly put together some words and make some something interesting. It could be the most interesting blog in the world, but if it doesn't have the right keywords in the right places and the right number of times, you're not going to get seen. So we we've been using, you know, for the last like year, this tool called things like surfer SEO or something like that it's called and like it gives you all the important keywords and then it tells you how many times you need to write it and like where, and then it gives you a score based on if you've optimized your listing around those keywords. I'm like, hey, this is kind of like a cool idea. You know, maybe we can do this for Amazon. You know sellers because you know people have kind of like been asking for something similar to this, and so you know this might be a way to help guide people to, to kind of know how strong their listing is as far as best practices. But here's the key Again, even though Helium 10 is working on something like that, once that comes out, don't just think that's all you need, that you know what. Bradley Sutton: All you need in order to rank is to know how many which keywords there are, how many times you put it in your listing and in what places, and try and get some high score Is a high score. You know, using this algorithm important to send relevancy signals to Amazon. Of course it's important, otherwise you wouldn't even be working on it. You know it's just a general truth in SEO, but the Amazon algorithm is so advanced these days, it is not enough just to have some kind of mathematical formula. And of course, it goes without saying you have to optimize your listing for an Amazon buyer, all right, which no algorithm can measure, all right. So I'm not even going to talk about the strategies there. But obviously you need to make sure your listing is attractive to a human being, right? All right, so that's a separate conversation about. You know how to do that. We've done podcasts about, about how to do that and really be able to connect on an emotional level to sellers. Bradley Sutton: But what about the algorithm? Like, why am I saying that just having a score is not going to be enough? Well, first of all, amazon algorithm does not work on a certain score. It's not like Amazon is scoring your listing as far as all right, it has this keyword four times, it's got to this root word three times and they've got this in the bullet point here in the title, and so it's always going to, you know, have some kind of formula that Amazon scores it and then that's how it deems you as fully relevant for all time. No, that's not the way Amazon works. Back in the old days, in the beginning, amazon did work a little bit more like that, you really could control how you know relevant you were to Amazon. You know, because the Amazon algorithm was not as as developed and I say this not, trust me, guys, I am. I do not have any secret access to the Amazon. I have contacts at Amazon who developed the algorithm and and develop tools like brand analytics and things like that. That does not make me some kind of special. You know, savant as to what the Amazon algorithm, helium 10, no other tool out there, no other guru out there knows what is going on with the Amazon algorithm. Bradley Sutton: People speculate, you know. They'll say, oh, I read this scientific paper. You know we've read all the scientific papers. You probably heard a couple episodes ago or you know we went deep into that. But at the end of the day, nobody really knows. Everybody's just speculating, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with speculating. Bradley Sutton: I speculate too, but what I like to do is I like to speculate based on tests and that's all I do. That's why I run Amazon accounts. I'm not trying to make money Nowadays. I'm trying to make a little bit more money in my Amazon accounts because that's what I do to to to support my, my kids, who are employees of my, my Amazon company. So now I have to make a little bit more money than I did. But my main point in running Amazon businesses is I use them as like my playgrounds to like test what is and isn't working with the algorithm. Bradley Sutton: Because, again, amazon doesn't make its algorithm public. The only way we kind of know how it works is by seeing what happens when we do things on Amazon and then just like measuring the results. But no matter what we do, again get it in your mind, guys there is no exact formula, and anybody who says there's an exact formula to rank on Amazon like an exact keyword the same time, every other time they're full of nonsense. All right, you know, even the helium 10 CPR numbers. Like we've always said, it gives you the best chance, but it doesn't give you a guaranteed chance. You know, every time it's based on a lot of trial and error. You know, I did a one and a half year case study to come up with that CPR number, all right. So what have I found that is working with the Amazon algorithm now and why is it different? Bradley Sutton: All right, well, number one is that a kind of important metric in helium 10 that people overlook is now a super important metric. All right, and what metric is that? It is Amazon recommended rank. All right, that is a name that we kind of made up, but it actually comes from an actual data point in Amazon. It's one of the things I'm very proud about. You know, I've made up the Maldives honeymoon strategy and you know I don't invent a lot of things, but this is one of the things that I discovered about five years ago and back then, like five years ago, I was like, oh man, everybody's going to copy us and start showing this. Nobody ever came up with this. I'm sure somebody's going to show it now. You know somebody's going to try and figure out where this data point is and show it to people because it is super, super important. I'm just shocked nobody's copied us in the last five years since we had this. Bradley Sutton: But again, Amazon recommended rank is coming from Amazon, where it kind of like says hey for X product and Y keyword. We think Y keyword is kind of very relevant to this product, or not so relevant, or medium relevant, etc. Amazon has a scoring system for every single product and almost every single keyword, where at least the top 1000 keywords if the product has a lot of history, it will go ahead and say, score it as far as how relevant it thinks for advertising. And in the past it was never something I really talked about too much that everybody should have to do because it was mainly about advertising. But it was a great metric to have because it kind of gave you insight into at least how the Amazon advertising algorithm thought that you were relevant for a certain keyword, right, or in relation to a certain product. But now, guys, in the last six months and all the tests I've been doing with launching everything else, it is all of a sudden a super indicative Metric on how just Amazon search algorithm thinks you are relevant. All right. Bradley Sutton: So I did a couple of tests with, like this, coffin Bath tray. I use the helium 10 project X account. I use a couple you know friends accounts because I wanted to have like Different accounts and different products, different ASINs, to kind of like test my, my theories right. And so I chose coffin bath tray because this was something that didn't have a lot of history on Amazon. So this is especially geared towards you people who are are getting in these niches where they're not completely saturated, all right. So because of that. Bradley Sutton: Amazon doesn't have that much data in order to know from day one what you might be relevant for. You know it's different, like if you're gonna launch some collagen peptides. There is hundred collagen peptides who've been selling millions of dollars a month and you know hundreds of thousands of customers have bought collagen peptides and Amazon has tracked every click and how they interact with the listings. They've got so much data on exactly what is relevant to collagen peptides that from day one of a brand new collagen peptides listening, you're probably going to be able to, you know, to get relevant for the right keywords but in a newer niche is a little bit different. So, sure enough, when I first launched these two coffin bath trays, I did on separate accounts. I did it with separate kinds of listings, one like a more in-depth listing and and I use the best practices again, you know I use that, my own scoring system, even on how to get you know Like I put coffin bath tray, like you know, like four times in the listing and long tail versions of I did all the right things and and get this. Bradley Sutton: The key words that I was relevant for from day one Was not coffin bath tray. Alright, if I was looking at the Amazon recommended rank from day one on one of the products. Or again, I launched pretty much the same exact kind of product. It was just different kinds of listings in different accounts at the same time. So I could, you know cross cross, see the number one. There was only one keyword on one of them that it was relevant for. Like Amazon only recommended one keyword. It was bath. Bath tray was kind of crazy, right. One keyword, bath tray. No other keyword had it on Amazon recommended rank. By the way, when you use that in cerebro in helium 10 to get the Amazon recommended rank, you have a listing up for five minutes. We'll already have Amazon recommended rank. This is something we pull from Amazon in Real time. Bradley Sutton: And the other product that I launched it was actually relevant for like 40 keywords from day one and the top three was interesting was bathroom decor, wineglass and candle holder. Very interesting. Alright, bathroom decor was super generic Word wine glass, what you might be like. Why does it have wine glass? Well, this, this, this coffin bath tray. I had in the. I think I put in the title and you know I had in the description that it has a slot for a wine glass. Alright. And then I also put that I had a slot for a candle holder but Amazon thought that this was a wine glass in candle holder. So from day one I was not. Bradley Sutton: I couldn't really do the Maldives honeymoon launch because for coffin bath tray, I was indexed for it but Amazon didn't think I was relevant. It would not even show me in PPC for coffin bath tray when those was the number one, most important keyword. I was optimized everywhere for it. It had a low title density. There was hardly any competition for coffin bath tray two years ago. I would have been on page one instantly for this, but because Amazon couldn't figure out that this was a coffin bath tray, it would not give me any PPC impressions. Alright, that's crazy. Bradley Sutton: So then, what are some of the things I started doing? I started changing up the listing. I had it coffin tray and other keywords. I wasn't even indexing for more times. I had to special features. I was trying doing search terms. Things were not working. I would see little bits of movement, but it was not moving like it would in the old days. Bradley Sutton: And this is a listing again. I just barely started. I started it like so definitely in the honeymoon period. So what got me to get coffin bath tray to Amazon recommended rank number two on one and Amazon recommended rank number one. What it was was I did an old-school two-step URL alright, I did an old-school two-step URL. It was the field ASIN URL. Alright, I did a field ASIN two-step URL and then I got somebody to buy it. I think one of them I might have got you know, chevali to buy it, and then the other one. I went to AZ rank and I paid AZ rank to get somebody by it. Bradley Sutton: Now I know what you're saying. Wait, bradley, didn't you just talk about how that kind of stuff is is against Amazon terms of service. Now, I think there's gonna be different opinions on this, but I could not care less in this instant about Keyword ranking. I was not trying to increase the keyword rank at all. Alright, I didn't even look at what the keyword rank was. My point was I knew I was not relevant for it to Amazon and so I was trying to send a relevancy signal to Amazon. So it knows that, hey, this is something important and this is something that you can give me impressions for in PBC and I'll gladly pay for clicks. So, in my mind, my interpretation of Amazon terms of service. This is not against the terms of service, because I'm not trying to manipulate or affect Amazon keyword ranks. I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to pay Amazon some money in PBC and and make sure that they know that I am Relevant for it. So what I did was I just I just did one order, one field ASIN, where somebody added it to the car and they they bought the product for with the keyword coffin bath tray in it and, guys, less than 12 hours later it not only was it not Amazon recommended rank at all, it went to number one. Amazon recommended rank on one of the products and number two on the other product. For the top, amazon recommended rank just with one. Bradley Sutton: Feel ASIN now, because Amazon said two-step URLs for ranking is not good anymore. We took those off of our helium 10 gems page. So you guys want to know a trick to do a two-step URL still with a keyword. Right, go to index checker in Helium 10, put your ASIN, put that keyword in there and, whether it says is index or not index, you'll see it has check marks and dashes or whatever. Right click on the dash or the check mark, alright, and then do copy URL. Alright, so that URL is a feel on the field ASIN one there's a, there's a, there's a field ASIN check, copy that URL, replace the keyword and the ASIN with yours. Or if that's exactly the keyword in the ASIN and that's the exact URL you can use in order to get somebody to buy your product with the field ASIN two-step URL, and then that should get you the impressions and it should send that relevancy. Bradley Sutton: So again, this might be a controversial thing. You know, I'm definitely. You know I have a good relationship with Amazon. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna suggest something that is blatantly against Amazon terms of service. That's not how I roll, but you know, anything can change. I am like 99% sure this is not against Amazon terms of service Because, again, I am not trying to manipulate sales rank, I'm not trying to manipulate search rank. I'm just trying to let Amazon know that I am relevant for this keyword when on this new product. Bradley Sutton: So again, once that happened, once I did that one boom, I got to the very top of the search results in sponsored alright, I'm not talking to, you know, search rank and then I got some organic orders from sponsored and then that brought my organic rank up after just like two or three orders more that I got it got me to like the top of Page one for that keyword, just like the regular Maldives honeymoon strategy. It was very interesting to see because on August 2nd this is months ago this is one of the I do tests constantly, guys. So this one coffin tray you know this is just one. I'm just giving you, guys, one of the examples I've done. I'm looking here at my notes. On August 2nd, you know, the top 10 were keywords like bath tray, tray, decor, very generic keywords. It like he obvious Amazon couldn't figure it out. And then on 8, 4, 2 days later, every single one of the top 10 keywords on one of them was all had coffin in it. So finally I got Amazon, just without one order, to understand that, hey, I am relevant for coffin related keywords and in the other product it didn't show all coffins, that I didn't have coffin as many times. In listening again, listing optimization is still important for the, for the algorithm, but at least the number two keyword was coffin bath tray, and then a lot of the other keywords were were just generic. Now here's the thing, though. Here's a Again, I can do a podcast episode of just about the test. I mean I literally did like 75 tests and tweaks just in this case study alone for these two products. Bradley Sutton: Interestingly enough, before I started getting relevant for with the Amazon recommended rank for coffin bath tray, my number one Keyword on one of the products, like I said before, was bathroom decor. All right, very generic keyword, very high search volume, way higher than coffin bath tray. But because Amazon gave me a recommended rank of one which is not really from Amazon, amazon gives a score and then we translate the number one score into Amazon recommended rank one, because for bath bathroom decor, I Could actually target it in PPC and I was already ranking like on page five for this keyword. I didn't even get one sale for one at the cart one, nothing. And I was on page five for the super high volume search term, just because Amazon gave me a high recommended rank. Bradley Sutton: Now you might think, well, why didn't you double down on that? You know, Bradley white, you know, to me I couldn't care less about the word bathroom decor. You know, like I don't think that people who purchase or who search bathroom decor we're really going to buy, you know, a coffin shaped bath tray. But that just shows you again how today, in 2023 and 2024, this data point is super important and has wide reaching effects as far as how you or how Amazon thinks that you are relevant. So, at the end of the day, I had this product running for three months now and what I did was after the three months, and you know one. Bradley Sutton: My theory I wanted to test was well, is the Amazon algorithm trained All right now that I've been selling this coffin bath tray when nobody else was on these two accounts for three months? You know what, if I launch a new coffin bath tray, is Amazon, from day one, going to go ahead and understand now what this kind of product is? Because it has got this history and the answer is interesting. The answer is still no, not really. So I launched two products on two different accounts today. One of them I just made with the listing builder AI that we have that uses ChatGPT made a great listing, but it was optimized for the keywords that I knew were relevant. And the other one, I use the exact same 100% listing that I've had up for three months, thinking that, hey, now that Amazon recommended rank is very high for these products or for these keywords, well, it should know right away and copy that Amazon recommended rank. So here's what I found out on the very first one, the top three or four keywords that are Amazon recommended rank. On this brand new listing that I had really optimized for coffin bath tray, wine glass, charcuterie board, bathroom tray, wooden tray and bathroom caddy. So a little bit different than when I started off. On the other one, but again no coffin related keywords. So, even though it's you, I did everything right and optimizing my listings to make it somewhat relevant. At the end of the day that ASIN is still going to need me to run a field ASIN two step URL in order to let Amazon know that I am relevant for coffin tray. Bradley Sutton: On the other listing that was in Project X, where I copied the 100% same listing that's been up for three months, word for word. I changed like a couple, like just one or two words just to make sure it wasn't the exact same listing, so I should say 99%. Here is the top three keywords from Amazon recommended rank bathroom decor, wine glass and candle holder. Does that sound familiar to you? Exact top three keywords of when I started with that other product, even though now that same product has the number one keyword is coffin bath tray, which it should. So again, it shows listing optimization, guys, is not the end all be all. Having a perfectly optimized listing at times is not enough. It's more. It's probably going to help you more in established categories. But even though I've had this product selling for three months, amazon still needs more, a bigger bump in order to make sure that some of these niche keywords it knows that it's relevant for it. So the Amazon algorithm is not perfect. It was perfect. It would have known from day one that hey, this is a coffin bath tray. This other coffin bath tray has been getting sales from coffin bath tray, coffin bath caddy, you know coffin decor and all these keywords. This product is very similar. We're going to put it number one. All right, that's actually how I noted the Amazon algorithm work back in the day. Bradley Sutton: But this is a new year, a new Amazon algorithmic shift. I guess you could say where this is not. You know this strategy is not necessarily working anymore. You've got to send those relevancy signals to Amazon. So for now, you know my way of sending those relevancy signals is, and you shouldn't need this for every single keyword. Guys, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying go, go and every single one of your 10 launch keywords you're going to have to do a field as in two step URL. No, like, I think that Amazon probably wouldn't, you know, like that, because that almost would be considered manipulating sales rank, because you're getting all these sales that are not necessarily real orders. But if you find yourself having trouble getting relevant for a keyword because Amazon recommended a rank is off, try that out, get one or two orders, just try one at first for a field as in two step URL in order to send those relevancy signals and then the next day, wait 24 hours, run it again. Bradley Sutton: And this is why I said that kind of like off the wall thing earlier where I'm now suggesting that you might want to always do a test listing. Now, all right, I didn't say that before you know. I said do kind of test listing so you can, so that you can know what kind of exposure you're going to get on PPC to validate some, some theories you have. When there's not enough information from existing competitors, you know you might want to make sure that you validate your idea with a test listing. But now, guys, I'm saying, if you're selling in a newer niche, especially and maybe sometimes, even if you're an established niche, it might be worth it to spend you know 50 bucks and get another UPC code and just do a fulfill by merchant listing, send a couple of or have a couple of units available and have your listing that you want to go with and then see immediately what does Amazon think that you're relevant for right. And then if you're completely fine with this listing and you have the right keywords for Amazon recommended rank from day one, all right, well, you're good to go. That means go ahead and launch your regular product once you're ready and you can have that exact listing, knowing that from day one you might have that. Bradley Sutton: But if you're like me and you have to do like 40 tests or something to try and figure out, how do I make Amazon think I'm relevant for this important keyword? Well, you don't want to be doing that on a live listing when you're trying to like get you know, make advantage of your honeymoon period. So what the best thing to do might be to spend a few bucks and try a field ASIN, two step URL to see if that helps your Amazon recommended rank, to see if that helps you get those PPC impressions that you're going to need to do the Maldives honeymoon strategy from day one and then, once you figure out what works on this test listing, now you can start over again once your inventory comes in, or you can, you know, maybe your inventory is already there and now you can start off on the right foot so that you know from day one I'm going to send this field two step URL, you know, to go ahead and get this order or to get to get relevant for this keyword or maybe something you maybe have to optimize your listing in a different way. Again, like I said, listing optimization is important. Sometimes it can help. It can definitely help you by by doing things differently. But instead of trying to do all this trial and error on a live listing, when you're trying to you know, get your, you know, get your sales and everything do it like on a test listing first. That's what I did for this coffin tray and that's what I'm going to do for any probably the next few of my launches, or I've been doing it on some of my launches and it's going to be doing what I'm going to be doing, going forward on some of my launches. So, guys, let me know what you think, but this is the Maldives honeymoon strategy, like version four, 4.0, a lot of it's the same, but there's some new things that are different here. Bradley Sutton: But the very important that you guys know your Amazon recommended rank and especially if any of you guys have issues ranking for keywords or getting sales or getting impressions in PPC, just run your listing through Cerebro and check what that Amazon recommended rank is All right. So, number one again that means that's the keyword that Amazon thinks you're most relevant for, all right. Number 20, that means Amazon thinks you're 20th relevant, all right. The coffin shelf is a great example. The old coffin shelf seems to be completely locked in at a low Amazon recommended rank. Our Project X coffin shelf is like rank 25. For that you guys can see that yourself. Anybody can run the Helium 10 coffin shelf in Cerebro and you can see what the Amazon recommended rank is Right and it's not high. And that's why we're not ranking high organically. I don't know what happens, you know, like a shadow ban or whatever. I don't want to try and speculate on that, but in even in that case, this Amazon recommended rank is highly indicative of what's happening on the organic side. So, guys, I hope this helps. Let me know how it works when you guys try these strategies out, and especially, even if you have a more mature listening, let me know in the comments below what does it say for your Amazon recommended rank, the one that you've been struggling with? Let me know, and let me know how you fix it. Bradley Sutton: I'm not sure when I'm going to come to the Maldives next. You know, 500 was kind of like all right, I'm going to keep going until 500. So maybe if there's going to be a new strategy I need to come up with, I'll have another reason to come out, to come out here. This is my favorite place in the world the Waldorf Astoria. They always take care of me really well. If you guys make sure to you know, if you want to know how I afford this place, it's like $2,500 a night. Check out my travel hacking episode. Just look at up. You know Sirius Sellers podcast, travel Hacking. You'll find that episode and then you can see how I am able to get to this place without having to pay money or ask helium 10 for money for it. But anyways, guys, hope you enjoyed this episode and here's to another 500 episodes. Bye-bye now.

Corporate America like Amazon, Nike, CVS are only hiring 6% of WHITE APPLICANTS! 94% NON WHITE?!

Kiri shares lessons from past Q4's, as well as lessons learned from 2023's summertime Prime Day so that consumer brands can be best prepared for the peak selling season. Discussed in this episode: Prime Day learnings - any level of Prime Day activity, no matter the promotion, led to a higher uptick in sales than not doing any promotions at all. Simplicity was in favor. Coupons were the top-used promotion among Acadia clients, Clients using coupons saw a 322% increase in daily sales compared to the daily average in the two-week lead-up to Prime Day. Clients offering anything between 5% and 75% off. Prime-exclusive discounts (PEDs) were the second most popular promotion. The flashier deals, like lightning deals and spotlight deals, are smart bets – for the brands that can afford them. These placements cost more and can be trickier to navigate Have backups for deals that don't run.Advertising Top-of-funnel ads that build awareness and consideration need to run early Switch to performance ads during the event to capture demand Understand that ad performance will suffer leading up to the event. Some brands say they don't want to participate in running ads or discounts - beware! Ad spend rose 338% year on year, reflecting an annual trend in increased CPC of 30%. BUT conversion rose 23.6%, in step with spend. At the same time, ROAS was up, avoiding erosion thanks to higher overall prices and better conversion rates that offset higher costs. Consider that if your competitors are leaning into tentpole events with ads and promotions, but you are not, their BSR will improve and yours will fall behind. Are you willing to take a long-term hit for a short-term saving?   Read our 2023 peak season prep guidelines (with timeline!) here. Read our Prime Day recaps on the Acadia blog. 

In this episode we are going to answer a question from one of our viewers and get into a great discussion about the main things we like about Amazon Influencers. Lots of interesting side conversations on this one and sorry we didn't get to some of the stuff that we promised to get into, but we'll cover these things in another podcast! For feedback/questions or if you'd like to be a guest on our podcast, please email us at sidehustleheroeshq@gmail.com Join our Side Hustle Heroes HQ Facebook group to be part of the Side Hustle Heroes HQ community and be the first to get access to the latest tips and strategies for our latest side hustles. ---> https://www.facebook.com/groups/sidehustlesheroeshq Subscribe to our YouTube channel for additional video content not covered in our podcast. ---> https://www.youtube.com/@SideHustleHeroesHQ

I've identified 7 specific strategies and tactics that Amazon successfully uses and you can leverage these same strategies with your Facebook and Instagram Ads, even on a small budget. Website: https://philgrahamdigital.com

Happy Valentines Day. The AHA says it's time to give up the ghost, the new entrants are going to win the Primary Care space and it's time to fall back and pick your partner. Today we discuss.

INTRODUCTION: Emily Dufton“An oracle ofknowledge on all things marijuana” - BostonHeraldI'm a drug historian and writer based near Washington,D.C. I received my BA from New York University and earned my Ph.D. in AmericanStudies from George Washington University. My first book, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana inAmerica, traced over 50 years of cannabis activism and wasnamed one of “The8 Best Weed Books to Read Right Now” by RollingStone and one of “The Top 5Cannabis Books to Have In Your Personal Library” by 10buds.com.Since its publication,I've become a commentator on America's changing cannabisscene. I've appeared on CNN,the History Channel andNPR's BackStory with the American History Guys, and my writing has been featured on TIME, CNN,SmithsonianMagazine, and the WashingtonPost. I'm currentlyworking on my second book, Addiction,Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and the War on Drugs (under contractwith the University of Chicago Press). It's the history of the development andcommercialization of the opioid addiction medication industry. In 2021 I won a LukasWork-in-Progress Award to help finance its writing. In 2022 I won a Robert B. SilversGrant. I'm deeply grateful for all the support.I'm also a podcasthost on the NewBooks Network, where I interview authors on new books about drugs,addiction and recovery. I live in the People's Republic of TakomaPark, Maryland, with my husband Dickson Mercerand our two children.  INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to):  ·      A Look At The History Of Marijuana ·      Emily's Halloween Candy Advice·      De'Vannon's Experience With Hallucinogenics·      Great Grassroots Advice For Marijuana/Drug Activists ·      President Joe Biden's Major Moves For Marijuana·      The Inappropriate Relationship Between - Church + Media + Government·      Political Influences And Implications On Drugs·      The Balance Between Parents Rights And Kids Rights·      How Grassroots Organizations Impact Federal Policy·      Why We Shouldn't Assume Decriminalization Is Here To Stay  CONNECT WITH EMILY: Website: https://www.emilydufton.com/Grass Roots: https://www.emilydufton.com/grass-rootsLinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3ganBPgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/emily.duftonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/author_emily_dufton/Twitter: https://twitter.com/emily_duftonMedium: https://medium.com/@ebdufton   CONNECT WITH DE'VANNON: Website: https://www.SexDrugsAndJesus.comWebsite: https://www.DownUnderApparel.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3daTqCMFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/SexDrugsAndJesus/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexdrugsandjesuspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TabooTopixLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devannonPinterest: https://www.pinterest.es/SexDrugsAndJesus/_saved/Email: DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com  DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEs ·      OverviewBible (Jeffrey Kranz)o  https://overviewbible.como  https://www.youtube.com/c/OverviewBible ·      Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed (Documentary)o  https://press.discoveryplus.com/lifestyle/discovery-announces-key-participants-featured-in-upcoming-expose-of-the-hillsong-church-controversy-hillsong-a-megachurch-exposed/ ·      Leaving Hillsong Podcast With Tanya Levino  https://leavinghillsong.podbean.com  ·      Upwork: https://www.upwork.com·      FreeUp: https://freeup.net VETERAN'S SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS ·      Disabled American Veterans (DAV): https://www.dav.org·      American Legion: https://www.legion.org ·      What The World Needs Now (Dionne Warwick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg INTERESTED IN PODCASTING OR BEING A GUEST?: ·      PodMatch is awesome! This application streamlines the process of finding guests for your show and also helps you find shows to be a guest on. The PodMatch Community is a part of this and that is where you can ask questions and get help from an entire network of people so that you save both money and time on your podcasting journey.https://podmatch.com/signup/devannon  TRANSCRIPT: [00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to! And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right at the end of the day. My name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world as we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your life.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Emily Dufton is an author, podcast host, and a drug historian who has blessed the world with a phenomenal book, which is entitled Grass Roots. The rise and fall and rise of marijuana in America. This book offers phenomenal advice for marijuana slash drug activists and encourages us to not arrest on our laurels, assuming that drug decriminalization is here to stay.Now, I fell in love with Ms. Emily when I discovered her while [00:01:00] listening to the, the. To The ReidOut podcast hosted by the great Joy-Ann Reid over on msnbc, and it was a surreal delight to sit down and talk with Emily about what's going on with drugs right now, as well as what was going on with drugs back then.Also, would like everyone to please check out our YouTube channel because for this very special episode, Emily and I have dawned our Halloween costumes. She's a hot dog, and I'm Fred Flintstone, and you have got to check them out. Have a super safe Halloween everyone.Hello and happy Halloween everyone, and welcome to this very special edition of The Sex Drugs in Jesus podcast. I wish you all a very, very spooky weekend. I have with me the great. Multi talented, multifaceted, delicious, and nutritious. Emily din, How are you, girl? Emily: Oh my God, I'm feeling delicious and nutritious.Thank [00:02:00] you. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm De'Vannon: so fucking lely. Like you look delicious and nutritious. So you're dressed as a hot dog. I am. So I'm curious and you told me, Previously that you're a hot dog every year, and so I've been wondering, so some years, are you like a vegan hot dog another year?You're like a Polish sausage. You switch up the bond, like how exactly does it go? Emily: Oh, the hot dog is in the eye of the beholder. I, that's how it is. I think, you know, I live in Tacoma Park, Maryland. It's known as the Berkeley of the East. I think many people see me as a tofu dog, as a beyond beyond.Hot dog. Others as DC adjacent, you know, were like, I could be a half smoke. I could be, I'm just I just wear this because it's a costume I found on the side of the street in Capitol Hill in DC where I was living at the time, and I thought, [00:03:00] This is amazing. Someone is just giving away a hot dog costume.I'm going to give it a home and I'm going to be a hot dog every year from now until it literally falls apart. And so that's why I'm a hot dog every year. De'Vannon: looks brand new. I love it. Emily: Thank you. It gets washed from time to time. De'Vannon: from time. Good time. Look, I love me a good wier girl. So , Emily: I could be, I could be the wier of your dreams.Who knows? Let's see. We can put the, the top up for a minute. See you. De'Vannon: It's great. That is one. Okay. All right. There y'all. So . So Emily is an author and a drug historian. She holds a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University. She is the author of a fabulous book called Grassroots, the Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America.Has to do with how, how, how, how, [00:04:00] how earnest hippies, frightened parents suffering patients and other ordinary Americans went to war over the marijuana. It was a little mm-hmm. description I had of that. Before we go much further, I wanna take a moment to give a shout out to Ms. Joy and re over at the readout on msnbc, because that is how I discovered.Oh wow. . I saw you on her podcast and then I heard what you had to say about your grassroots book, and then I fell in love with you and when I built up the courage and got, got, got more bodies of works under my belt, I sent you a message, you know, hoping and praying that you would respond and you did.And so, Emily: Paul touch my heart. I'm so happy to be here. And honestly, like I The idea that, that, oh, you would be at all nervous to talk to me, makes me just like ache a little bit on the inside. I'm so happy to talk to you and this is such an honor for me to [00:05:00] be here. We are. You wrote a book, We Are equals, We know, We know what it is to go into the, the pain cave of writing and, and try to create something intelligible and lengthy about complicated subjects.You know, so writer to writer, you and I are, we are. Eye to eye. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. De'Vannon: The sausage and so, So I'm like a glittery version of Fred Flinstone because, As far as I'm concerned, we all know what Fred Freestone and Barney Rubble were really doing over in Bed Rock, Honey and Emily: Rock. I mean, come on.Yeah, it was right inDe'Vannon: Barney Rubs a total bottom. I know. It . So, So in your own words, I've given like my take on, is there anything you'd like to say about yourself, your own personal history or anything? Emily: Gosh. [00:06:00] Like, like about writing grassroots or about like what? Like about me as a human being. De'Vannon: Anything about you at all.Your favorite color, Favorite place you've traveled. We're gonna get into grassroots right after you. Tell us whatever you'd like to say. Just about yourself. Oh my at all since I've already given a little history, so you don't have to Oh, Emily: lovely. I'm a Piy, Sun Sagittarius, Rising Pisces Moon. I have two children a boy who's six and a little girl who's almost three.I'm working on my second book right now, which is about the history of medication assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, and I won a couple grants to fund the work, and it's been super awesome. And hopefully I'm gonna go to Switzerland either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year to compare addiction treatment programs over there with America's treatments.So those are, I think by far the most pertinent facts about me that everyone should, [00:07:00] should know. .De'Vannon: I think those are pretty damn good and relevant facts. the, the, the resurgence of healing with the drugs. Look, I just got back from Portland, Oregon dealing shrooms. And sell. So that is a cell aside, but, and what the fuck else I did?Mdm a I had never been shrooms before in my life and since I'm a veteran who suffers from ptsd, O C D and you know, all of these things and I saw on Netflix and the How to Change Your Mind documentary on PBS history of Mil illness. Documentary, how they've been using these hallucinogenics to help veterans.And I thought, Okay, I'm not gonna wait for this to be approved. I'm gonna fly my happy ass up here and do these shrooms. Man, it took seven grams for me to like fill anything. And apparently that's like a lot. And wow. I don't know, apparently besides the Emily: social work. Oh, that context. Yeah. So you did like an official, like, like clinical trial?It De'Vannon: wasn't a trial I paid for this. I [00:08:00] found a social worker who was willing to to do it in a psychiatric setting. Uhhuh, he feel like his woods are like an hour north of Portland into his cabin in the woods. So that, cuz he was like insistent that the environment be like, Right. And so it was like a guided assistant thing.It was, it was clinical, but I paid for it. I wasn't, I didn't wait for a trial Emily: to come. Totally, totally understood. That's awesome. How was it? Was it a good experience?De'Vannon: It follows me, so in a good way. So like if I smoke weed, it does not have an effect on me. I've tried different strands, different states, different times.I used to sell the hell out of it back in my drug dealing days, but I never fool with it too much. I used to sell shrooms. I never did 'em either. But I have discovered that if I do like a CBD gummy, I will be sitting around looking like EE from South Park. I feel that. But, so the, the C B D [00:09:00] does the same thing that the MDM A and the shrooms did.It quiet hit my mind. So I was expecting to have one of those like, really jerky experiences like I saw in the documentary, but that did not happen for me at all because my mind is always like this with the OCD and the PTSD and everything. Mm-hmm. . So for me, what those, what those hallucinogenics did was it just neutralized.And so I was just like, still just silent, quiet. And so I have found things that I used to, that I used to have anxiety over. I don't anymore. And so basically that peace, it, it attached itself to me in those, in that state of mind. Emily: I love that. So, so quieted your minds downed. How long did the quietness.De'Vannon: It's ongoing. So I was, while the drugs had their effect on me, okay, on this room, you know, the trees started to like move and the prints, you know, the pattern in the carpet started [00:10:00] dancing and doing his own thing and whatnot. So that was kind of freaky. But once that all settled down, , you know, you know, So it's not like it was, I, I have found, this has been like maybe three weeks ago that I was in Portland.It hasn't changed. You know, I still feel peace. It's like, and I experienced the same thing when I started experiment, the CBD gummies, which has only been like maybe two or three months ago. Mm-hmm. That I discovered that these gummies will have an impact on me. That's interesting. It's like, it's, it's a permanent thing with me.Emily: Wow. And have you had any kind of I don't know, like sessions or counseling or anything to kind of talk about like, But you know, sort of digesting the effects of it or like, maybe I don't even, I don't even know what the word is, but have, have you communicated at all with the guy who led the session since he, De'Vannon: He was, he is open to that and he wanted to schedule a follow up, but [00:11:00] I, and I can reach out to him if I want to, Emily, but I, I was ready, you know, like writing my blog and my books in the show and I see a, a social worker every week anyway.I see a licensed family marriage, the. A couple of times a month for me and my boyfriend, and then I see a hypno therapist once a month. And so I'm always professing and manifesting the change that I want. I went into it already. I didn't really embody to do too much handholding, and I'm all like, I'm ready to let this shit go.Like we talk about it, but it's already done . Emily: That's great. And this is the thing that allowed you to do that. Like you're just like, I just need that final push to get it out. Right. I love that there's a guy. Oh yeah. Sorry. Keep going. De'Vannon: You go, You're the guest girl. Oh, Emily: no. I'm just saying there's someone so I live right outside of DC in Tacoma Park, Maryland, and which I think I've said already but.There's this doctor who just moved here and [00:12:00] started a practice where he's doing exactly that. He's using Ketamine though. And so he's doing these like lead ketamine therapy sessions. And then afterwards he offers sessions to, I'm trying to remember like the verb he used. It wasn't like aggregate, but it was like to sort of like digest the experience.So you have this experience with ketamine that will hopefully release in the patient, the same kind of things that released in your experience. And then he would kind of provide the counseling or the, the therapy sessions to help sort of bring, make, make manifest the effects. And I thought, Oh my God, like, here it is.It's, it's, it's here. You know, like sort of this pro, this ability to access these drugs in a therapeutic. You know, private, like obviously like , you know, industrial way, but it's here. And God, that is like 10 years ago. I think experiences like yours are like the one that this doctor is offering would've been like [00:13:00] unimaginable.And yet now they're here and they're moving into all these communities. You know, it's not just Portland, Oregon, it's like here in, right outside of DC it's everywhere. And that to me is a totally fascinating aspect of like drug policy in the United States. It's wild. Totally. De'Vannon: I'm so happy to have it here too.But as you warn in your book grassroots that we're about to get into you know, these things tend to come and. At times. Yeah. Because this wasn't the first time that we were on the border of finding therapeutic uses for drugs before the drug war on drugs. Shut it down. Right. And so we're happy to have it back.And towards the end of the interview, I was most intrigued with the, the six lessons that you have for grassroots advocate for people at the end. And so I really gotta let you give that advice because I really feel like people need to hear that because people. Are feeling really grass rooty these days.It'll be . Emily: That's true. ,De'Vannon: it would be great for them to to to hear, hear [00:14:00] your advice so that they can be helped. Emily: I had to go get my copy. I haven't looked at that in a while. That's right. I forgot. I had like six little lessons in the back. Yeah. The one I remember, the Yes. Make your argument as sympathetic as possible was lesson one.Mm-hmm. . Because the more you center like a really sympathetic identity in the middle of your campaign, the more likely people are to. Feel bad for you and generate empathic warmth and support, right? Which is why you always see like puppies, like with their ribs exposed cuz they're starving in the rain, chained to a box and you're like, Please take my money to save the puppy.Lesson two. It's all about the money, which is exactly what we were talking about. Money buys influence. Lesson three, Be prepared to watch your progress disappear. Lesson four, don't rely too heavily on the White House. Lesson five, Respect your opposition and lesson six, keep a sense of perspective.Wow. I forgot I wrote these. That's so interesting. Yeah, [00:15:00] like, you know what's, Sorry, De'Vannon: keep going. No saying. So. We'll talk about those towards the end, cuz I thought those would be cute. Okay. So you can just kind of like, you know, peruse over that while we're going through. And and then of course people go by the books.So if you're a grassroots person and you wanna figure out. How to escape some pitfalls and things like that. I think this is a really good book and if you wanna have insight cause we're all also passionate about this, you know, this resurgence and everything. But I think that your book, you know, is like so evergreen, you know, in the, in the sense that, you know, it's an ongoing battle in this country because as you say, it's the rise, the fall, the rise, you know, it goes back and forth.There's no reason for us to be so arrogant as to assume that it can't fall again, because as you lay out in the book, every time we have. Arise for decriminalization. There's an opposing force that wants to fight that. Right. And so, and it was no different then. It's the same way now. So you wanted to give a warning though, for Halloween candy.I [00:16:00] wanted to be sure that we have time for that, because that was something you specifically requested. And so tell us your, this is, this is Emily's warning about this Halloween came to y'all. Oh Emily: my God. It's less of warning and just more of like a. I, I just every year, Well, this year in particular, I feel like there have been a lot of news stories about the rainbow colored fentanyl that apparently is going to show up in children's Halloween staes nationwide.And I love it because like, it just goes to show how. Drugs. The concept of drugs, right? When we talk about drugs, we're never just talking about drugs, right? We're always talking about larger issues and larger questions and larger ideas. And I feel like this, like the new fear of 2022, Halloween, 2022 of Fentanyl being dispersed widely in like Halloween candy is just, it's a really convenient vehicle for like political mud slinging, right?And. [00:17:00] You know, so the right can mud sling at the left by saying, Oh, it's the liberal's open border policies that is allowing Mexican cartels to funnel this rainbow colored fentanyl across the borders. And now it's gonna, now my kid's gonna eat it thinking it's a sweet tart and die. So that's how, like the right is mudslinging the left and then the left mud slings the right in return by saying, right.You're so stupid. No drug dealer is going to give away drugs for free. That is not how drug dealing works. . So there's just this and like, you know, so whenever we're talking about drugs, we're always talking about so much more than just drugs. Like there, like the concept of drugs is weighted with all of these other topics that we like, press upon it.And it becomes something that's like, kind of like a football, right? It's just always being thrown back and forth, you know? People are always going to use the concept of drugs or the concept of punishment or the concept of treatment as a political vehicle to achieve [00:18:00] other ends, right? Whether those are financial or moral or law enforcement, whatever.But I just feel like the Halloween candy saga that we go through every year is like kind of a good sort of visual entry point on to this topic that like, Drugs are always much more than just drugs, right? There are ways for us to discuss as Americans and as human beings, concepts that are obviously like much more complicated and oftentimes more complex than just like fentanyl or pot or whatever else itself.So I guess that's like my opening concept for conversation . De'Vannon: Yes, as a former drug dealer, I can attest to what Mr. Mrs. Dustin is saying is true. We don't to run around giving away drugs for free honey, especially not to little children who don't have money to come back and buy any once they get addicted.That's . Emily: It's, it is a profoundly bad marketing plan. No one [00:19:00] benefits from it. No one benefits . De'Vannon: But you know, just like, you know, as you state in your book You know, the fear mongering, you know, the fear mongering is like a big deal coming from the left. And so, I mean, coming from the right and so Emily: and sometimes the De'Vannon: left , it can, it can, mm-hmm.it pains me to say, but it's just so true. You know, Emily: sometimes we have to be honest about our own, you know, . De'Vannon: You know what? I don't, I don't, I don't want, I don't want a political party. I just wanna be like me. I just wanna be like me. I know. Whatever makes free to be you and me. What do you think about what Biden did though with the rolling back the the, the, the legal, the, the cases against people with the marijuana charges?Emily: I mean, it was really interesting, right? It was kind of came out in nowhere, right? He hadn't talked [00:20:00] much about. Marijuana policy at all on the campaign trail or during these first two years? I remember Kamala Harris during the Vice presidential debate was the very first presidential or vice presidential candidate to ever say during a debate, like, Yes, I support decriminalization.And she said that. So Kamala mentioned it, but like Biden never did. So he comes out and he makes this announcement and. Like it's immediate effect is going to be relatively small because the only marijuana convictions he's allowed to overturn are ones that he can control and he can only control federal convictions for possession.And that's not the, like that many it's about 6,500 nationally and it's, I don't know the number. No one would gave it. No one would give it. But it's also convictions for possession in DC because DC is federal. So that actually, that number might be more considerable than 6,500, but like I have not seen [00:21:00] a news outlet give it yet.But anyway, like that's pretty small compared to the millions of people who have been arrested. It's kind of a drop in the bucket. But what he also said was he was going to talk to eight, the Department of Health and HHS Health and Human. Services. He's going to talk to the FDA and he is going to talk to the DEA for the three federal agencies in charge of drug policy and talk about, and he wanted to talk about descheduling cannabis.So right now, pot is a schedule one drug and it's been a Schedule one drug since 1970. And, Being schedule one, that means that the federal government considers it to have no medical utility and a high risk for abuse, which is of course very silly. Since 1996, it became medical marijuana. So of course it has some medical utilities.Schedule one placement has been kind of nuts for at least since 1996. [00:22:00] He wants to talk about descheduling it, taking it outta the schedules completely. And if you deschedule a. That means it can become a legitimate legal marketplace item like cigarettes or alcohol. It could become a commercial product, and that is a really big decision.It's already kind of becoming a commercial product, but those industries are like very cottage still. Like there is a huge medical marijuana industry and there is a growing recreational cannabis industry, but there's still like, In the span of things, right, Like along the spectrum of, of products, it's still fairly small.So to deschedule it completely and turn it into a commercial product that would transform the cannabis industry in the United States and ultimately worldwide. So it's a huge decision. It's a huge, it's this, this the beginning of a huge conversation. So like right [00:23:00] after he made that announcement it was right before last weekend.People were like, I didn't really know what to make of it, honestly. But the more I've read, like things on Twitter from people I respect and some articles, the more I realize he's launching like a pretty huge conversation. And now would be the time for activists who are interested in creating, as, you know, equitable and kind.Fundamentally good natured and industry as possible, like now would be the time for them to really get involved because, you know, conversations about, about descheduling are happening and those are, those are important. And you know, the time to influence the marketplaces now cuz it's starting to take shape, which is crazy.I mean, it's like the same thing we were talking about before where like now you can go someplace and have like ketamine treatment, like these things are available. So it's time to figure out what, like we actually want the industry to look. De'Vannon: [00:24:00] Hell yeah. Something to tap into that energy and push it forward.I feel you on that. So, so, so in your book, you, you take us from like prohibition back in the first part of the last century, you know, all the way up to the day and I thought it was very artfully done. So I wanted to read a little excerpt about about the way. Marijuana was viewed back then from way back in 1917 from, from your book, if I may.And so those said, the 1917 report from the Treasury Department noted that in Texas only Mexicans and sometimes Negroes and lower class whites smoked the marijuana for pleasure and warned that that drug crazed minorities could harm or assault upper class white women. I felt like this, you know, that sort of thinking still informs policy today and I felt like when movies like The Terrible [00:25:00]Truth and Reefer Madness, which you mentioned, the book came out, I felt like that was like media's way of locking arms with the government and echoing what they're saying.And you don't really get into too religion deeply. But I feel like the church also. Touched and agreed. Yes. Emily: So, so the church was responsible for paying for the production of the movie Reef for Madness. I don't which church it, it was, I don't remember, but it was funded by Evangelical Christians. There you go.There's your connection. Mm-hmm. . De'Vannon: And see, I don't know, like, I, I hate the fact that the church. I would've rather the church stand up and say, You know what? It's not for the government to enforce morality because God is not forced. He's always gave the children of Israel a choice. He never came down here and mandated things in the way that we're trying to mandate them.So why don't we back off and leave this whole morality [00:26:00] thing to the church instead? The church was like, Well, we like to control people. The government likes to control people, so why don't we see if we can control them all together? Hmm. So I Emily: collaborate. Oh my God, it's so true. And it's been so powerful, like for so long, for so long.But it's true, like can you legislate morality? I mean, like, that's just this eternal question and you know, you really, you really can't, you can't punish someone until they're good. It just doesn't work that way. You. De'Vannon: No, nobody responds to that. You know, our children don't. And I love that your kids are like, pretty much the same age as my two kids, which happen to be like Maine Coon mixed cats.You know, My oldest boys about is about to be six in March, and then my girl is threeOh, Emily: we have babies the same age. That's so funny. That's crazy. Wild. But it's true, like you can't make them be good through [00:27:00] fear or punishment like ever. Ever and . And then it just always makes things worse. It always makes things worse. And that's why like, I mean, that's why it's so hard oftentimes to have like rational discussions about things like drugs or religion because like people just get too emotionally involved and you kind of think like, you're gonna, you're gonna believe my way or I'm going to hurt you.Like I'm going to defend this to the point of violence. And it's just like, that's why I , some people get mad at me. Grassroots because they felt like I didn't take a firm enough stand, you know, either way. And some people also like seem to have a really hard, a hard, they seem to have some difficulty with differentiating between smoking pot and writing about pot as like a historical phenomenon.So like a lot of people just like make these really dumb jokes, like yeah, I bet you're using a lot. Grass when you're writing grassroots or whatever. And I was like, No. I was writing like a [00:28:00] deeply researched, like historical book based off of my PhD dissertation. Like, no, I wasn't high the whole time. Like, that's ridiculous.But people were upset with me because I wasn't taking firm enough stand. Like I wasn't coming out like very strongly as an activist for legalization or, or alternatively against it. I didn't make my, my political position clear enough. And I don't know if. Like in the same way you're saying like, Well who should legislate morality?You know, in the same way, I don't feel like history books necessarily have to be legislating morality, right? Like I don't feel like I needed to tell people what to believe. I just wanted to tell them what happened and how we got here. So that as things move forward and as we continue to watch this really like unique historical period evolve, we'll be more prepared to understand.The potential downsides that might occur or the potential benefits that might occur, and like try to maybe guide the process [00:29:00] more toward the benefits, like rather than the downsides. So it's, you know, I do feel like there's a real need to understand drugs in like a non-emotional, non hot take, non, like just understanding them as like a historical artifact where.Certain things have happened from 1917 to today to create the world we live in, and we should probably understand how we got here. And so I wrote a book about it, , and now we're talking about it. All right, , De'Vannon: just bring it full circle. I love it. And you're right, your book is very energetically neutral. It is very energetically like neutral.Yeah, I did pick up on that. And you know, most of you know historians, they just tell what happened and so I, you know, I was interviewing somebody else and I was, and he had gotten some reviews that kind of roughed his feathers and I was telling him, You know what, I'll tell you the same thing. Like Amazon and all these different book places don't.Perform mental health test [00:30:00] on people who go in there and leave reviews . So there's no tell on what you're gonna get, so Emily: please gimme the most recent report from your therapist before you post on this review. . Oh my God. The best review I got was someone was really mad that I was mean to Nancy Reagan, and they were like, it's not like she committed tax fraud.Nancy Reagan's not that bad. And I was like, Is that your bar? Like tax fraud? Or? So that was everyone else's reviews on Amazon are almost all from my friends, so those are all nice that Perfect. They're all the friends. I ask like, Please leave an Amazon review for my book. Thank you. De'Vannon: Hey, nothing like that inner circle chosen family, baby.Oh baby. That person commented on the tax fraud, though, probably commits tax fraud and they were projecting that. Oh my Emily: god. 100%. De'Vannon: Yeah. . So I wanted to talk about Atlanta 1976 because. [00:31:00] I felt like Miss, Miss Marsha Sard, and I have to admit when I read that name immediately, Andrew DeMar Shinard from Rent from the MusicalOh my God. It came to my mind and I had to go look it up. I was like, Is there a relation here today, tomorrow for me? What's going on ? So, but there is no relation. So it's, it's Emily: inside a gay boy. No, I can't unsee it. I can't unsee it. De'Vannon: and Atlanta especially. Cause my boyfriend is from Atlanta, you know, from that area.And so Hills, well todo neighborhood. Marsha is you know, she's walks into like her teens having this party and everyone's. you know, paring it up. Her and her husband go out fine, like the weed butts and everything like that. And, and then she goes run snitch to all the other parents because of course there was other teenage there.And we all know [00:32:00] snitches get stitches, y'all. And so what I documented was the parents' reactions usually that the parents' reactions ran the gamut from shock, confusion, indignation, concern, denial, and hostility. Now in the book, you, you know, this woman is like, Slated to be a Democrat. Mm-hmm. . And so that really, really shocked me.And and her, her emotions. I don't feel like those emotions have changed over the years. I feel like that's the same way people react to Dave. Would you agree? Emily: Yeah, I think, I think you're onto something there. Yeah. Like it, it was her, her politics are really interesting. So Keith, she goes by Keith, which again is kind of.You have to get, wrap your head around this woman, this like mom of three who goes by Keith. And then it's hard cuz I'm also writing about Keith Strop, the founder of Normal, the National Organization for the reform of marijuana laws, which are like, you know, going gangbusters at this time. [00:33:00]So there's a lot of Keith's, you know, so keep the Keiths straight in your mind.But so Keith Shart is this mom She has a PhD in British literature. She's not teaching, but her husband is at Emory, and so she's like home with these kids. So like I see her as being really smart. probably pretty bored, right? Being home with kids, like when you have a PhD and you're clearly like a life of the mind kind of person.Being home with little kids can be like really boring and you can have like maybe a lot of leftover energy. And so she throws this like backyard birthday party for her 13 year old daughter. And like the kids are acting weird and she's kind of freaking out and she sees like they're up in their bedroom, like looking out in the backyard, her and her husband and they see the lighters flicker in the bushes, but they assume it's cigarettes.But the kids are like really acting funny. And so once everybody leaves, they go into the backyard and they're searching around and they [00:34:00] find. Roaches. And they also find like, like alcohol containers, right? So the kids aren't just smoke smoking pot, they're, they're drinking too. , The scandal, the scandal 13, I mean 13 is young.Like for, like, I was not, I was not playing those games at 13, but I understand that my experience is not the experience of everyone. And, and now I'm like, as a mom, I'm kind of like, Oh, if I caught Henry doing that, like I'd be probably be pretty pissed. But but anyway, so she. She goes into like hardcore activist mode, like right away, you know, she was like, Boom.And she is buoyed by the concepts of. Second wave feminism that are like really prominent at the time where you do consciousness raising groups and you get together with people who are sharing your same experience and you talk about it, right? Because the personal is political and you try to figure out a way to change society for the better.Like that is very much like the kind of social [00:35:00] milu that shoe hard is coming from in, in 76 in Atlanta. Because remember, like Atlanta's pretty liberal at this time. Like Jimmy Carter is governor and he is running for president. You know, like it's the bicentennial. Everybody's like super patriotic, right?It's an interesting time. So she gets together with all the other parents and she's like, Our kids are smoking pot. This seems to be an issue like this. This. This is, this is something we should probably pay attention to. And she kind of blames it on the fact that for the past three years, more and more states had steadily been decriminalizing marijuana possession.So it started in Oregon in 73, but by 76, I think there were probably like,Probably like six, five or six states by that point that had decriminalized, right? Georgia wasn't one of them, but others did. And so there's this burgeoning drug paraphernalia industry, like basically just like today, this was happening in the mid, the early [00:36:00] 1970s where like. A semi-legal cannabis marketplace was taking shape in America.And when a marketplace builds and expands, more people tend to utilize it. So more people were using pot, more people were smoking pot, and then it was trickling down and it was getting to kids. So like Keith Shoe hard's, daughter 13 found some pot and was smoking it at her birthday party. And like that made shard really upset.So even though she was a Democrat and she was a liberal, She was really opposed to what the liberal agenda had pushed, which was decriminalization. So she starts basically a nationwide grassroots army of parents to overturn decriminalization laws and kind of stop the burgeoning paraphernalia industry.And it just so happens that in 1984 years later, when Ronald Reagan gets elected, he takes their concept. Nationalizes [00:37:00] it further and then turns it into federal policy. So it was the parent movement that gave us basically the entire concept of just say no. So yeah, the 1980s were birthed in the 1970s in Atlanta, Georgia in 1976.De'Vannon: Right. And right. Thank you for breaking that down so beautifully. And I, and I felt like from, from the way that you wrote, you really, really wanted people to know the importance that small community groups like this actually, the impact that they have on federal policy, not as, so that we don't undervalue this or underestimate.Totally. Emily: And so it's amazing. Well, when you tap into a zeitgeist like that, like, like what, what Shoe hard and other people in Atlanta tapped into was something that And ended up people were feeling nationwide. And that's the exact same thing that was happening with medical marijuana laws. And it's the exact same thing that's happening with legalization laws now.I mean, people are tapping into like it's a zeitgeist straight now. You know? Like more like I think Maryland, where I live is, I think we're [00:38:00] voting to legalize this. I think we're voting to legalize next month. Like it's movement, baby. It's movement. De'Vannon: May the force be with you? May Emily: the force be, I think it'll pass pretty easily.I think it'll pass pretty easily. Now it's just a matter of what the market will look like, what we'll actually do with it in the. Which is crazy. It's a De'Vannon: step. The thing that stood out to me about Mrs. Manas, was she, she, she kept saying like, it was like, for the children, you, the children, half of the children, you know, I'm getting like flashbacks to one division, you know, for Disney when they're, you know, her and vision, you know, Wanda Envision, you know, wanting to max him off.Yeah. Marvel, you know, I'm like, geeking out right now. But , they kept saying that thing for the children and there weren't any fucking children. Because she had, she had put 'em all to sleep, but she, I, I was like, Okay, I wonder if she asked the children what they want or was she just using them to enforce her agenda every time?I see like a [00:39:00] politician, especially like, I mean, you know, especially like the Republican and stuff like that, wanting to enact negative policies on behalf of veterans. For instance, me being a military veteran, I always, I'm like, I don't want you to do that. Like everything you're doing, I don't want you to do.You didn't ask me . So, but they're like, Our veterans wouldn't want my choice. Yeah. no. And so, I don't know. That stood out to me like right, like the children, but they don't. I don't know what to call that. What do you call that when people do that? Are they, are they calling themselves doing it in the name of righteousness?Are they getting, Now you're a parent now, so you have this feeling. Would you go and do something this adverse on behalf of your children without consulting their opinion FirstAnd I don't understand Emily: that they prefer that. Right. They would love to, they'd love to gimme their opinions. Right. But you know, I. I think you're to a really important question, right? Which is like, [00:40:00] where do the rights of children end and the rights of adults begin, right? So like when, when Keith, Shar, and every and everybody else in the parent movement is saying, Oh my God.We have to repeal decriminalization laws because of the children. Like do it for the children. The children are being harmed by these drugs. But then that transforms from like, we have to have these laws for the children to, We have to excessively punish. Adults for drug possession or dealing or whatever else excessively punish them.Like especially after the 1986 Drug Abuse Act, right? When you're getting mandatory minimums of 5, 10, 15 years when we're locking up millions of people for drug possession. Like where does the rights of children end And like the range of adults in and the pushback to that. But what about the children line of thought did finally start to come in the nineties, right?[00:41:00] When marijuana legalization efforts dovetailed with the gay rights movement in what I think is just one of the most fascinating, like historical co ever, right? So in California, in San Francisco, as AIDS is starting to. Decimate the gay population. You have a couple of activists, including Dennis Perran and Brownie Mary Rath Fund, whose real name is Mary Jane, which is crazy.They're using marijuana to like give to these aids patients who, like doctors don't wanna touch, nobody wants to get near them. No one knows what to do. No one knows how to treat hiv. It's brand new. Right? And Brownie Mary and Dennis Perran are. Have a, have a pot and infuse brownie, like you're gonna get your appetite back, Your nausea is gonna chill out.You're gonna feel pretty good. You're gonna have some energy. You can like go to the [00:42:00] bank. You can do like an errand right before you die. A horribly of aids like my God. Right? So they're saying, where did the rights of children end? Yes. We kept children so safe from pot that like by the early eighties, like no one is smoking pot anymore and we're locking.Tens of thousands of people, right? Like every month, right? Okay, great. We've done it. We won the drug war. But now it turns out this substance does have some medical utility for a patient group that is increasingly becoming like really sympathetic. You know, like cuz you have, I mean Arthur Ash contracts, hiv God, that little boy got it through like a blood transfusion or something.So you start to like have like really sympathetic feelings towards, Oh, Princess Diana visits the HIV clinic in the San Francisco General Hospital. Right? Like suddenly it becomes really sympathetic and laws start to change, right? Suddenly adults rights, especially like adults dying of AIDS and cancer, like their rights become much more important than protecting children from pot.And then, [00:43:00] Can kind of move like fast forward into the two thousands. 2010, the legalization movement joins with the social justice movement. So in 2010, Michelle Alexander publishes her book The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, which is canonical at this point. Canonical, I tell you, and like it is all.The effects of locking up nonviolent offenders, the vast majority of which are black men. Like, well, what have we done in America By locking up millions of people, more people, more black people are incarcerated in the United States than in South Africa at the height of apartheid. Like what effects does that have culturally, socially, economically?It has effects. And she lays them out and we're all like, Oh my God. Now we know. And laws started to change right after that, right? In 2012, you have the first states legalized Colorado and Washington by combining legalization [00:44:00] with calls for social justice, right? If cannabis is the source of massive amounts of black incarceration, legalized cannabis, right?That's one way to like act on social justice, and it was also legalized through. Outright calls for generating tax revenue, right? Like here is something that we can legalize and tax the be Jesus out of. And not only are we like doing good on social justice initiatives, but we're also gonna make a boatload of money.Like it's a total win-win at the moment. And that's basically, again, arguments for the rights of adults, right? Should we, should we incarcerate X number of million of people, millions of people for cannabis possession? So again, like. Argument for its children's rights, which was like so immensely powerful in the 1970s and eighties has now I would say, really been pushed to the back burner by almost three decades of really concerted and very powerful and very influential activism for adults rights to access cannabis, [00:45:00] for medical, and then social justice and economic initiatives.De'Vannon: And that's the tea. Y'all, Y'all have it? Emily . Emily: There's, there's 50 years of cannabis history guys. Woo. . De'Vannon: And, you know, I work with you know, so many people right now, and I, and I, I love how you, I feel like your book is almost like a, a user's manual for people who wanna get into this fight. You know, you're giving historical context, you're giving advice and everything.And so You know, I'm thinking about, you know, a friend of mine if her name is iFit Harvey, she runs the people of Color Collective. People of color, Psychedelic Collective, which is based out of New York City. And you know, and I, and I work with them, you know, I just did an interview, you know, for, I gave them an interview the other day and we were talking about like you know, marijuana, you know, the way it's, you know, criminalized here in Louisiana where I live versus where one of their.[00:46:00]Satellite locations is in Oregon, in Portland. And so, you know, things like this are very helpful you know, for young people cuz these people are really, really like young who have started this, you know, psychedelic collective and everything like that. And so I think, yeah. Right. I think books like this are so like, useful.So we're nearing the end of our hour and so I just wanted to mention. You mentioned normal earlier. I wanna tell people that stands for the I think you said, at the National Organization for the Reform rather than repe of marijuana laws. And then we'll go right into talking about like your your lessons and things like that.And, and we may just pick like one or two that that's important to you. But and so another little, a final ex sweep from the book. I'm channeling my inner Bugs Bunny, so an ex. From the book, it says normal, you know, or ML argue that marijuana smokers or consumers not deviance and deserve the same rights to protection and [00:47:00] safety as any other group.Including access to the drug without pollutants or contaminants. A competitive marketplace free from monopolies and conglomerates, and especially freedom from harassment by the poll lease. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. felt like a, a Southern Sunday. GodEmily: I love it. I want you to record the audio book. That's great. I love it. . De'Vannon: Oh, I'll do it. I love getting on this microphone right here and do it. I did my own audio book. Oh, that's awesome. And so I wanted to bring that up because like you had normal fighting for it. You had Miss, Miss Minnaar fighting against it back then.Like you say in the book, we have the same thing now because I don't want people to wrestling their laurels and get so comfortable thinking that it's a home run. It's a clean slate. You know? We must stay vigilant. Emily: Mm. Yes, totally. I think that's, I mean, it, it does [00:48:00] feel like to me, I feel like. Pot becomes the scariest drug around when there's no other boogie in.So in like the 1970s, early 1970s when the first decriminalization laws were being passed, we're also kind of going through a heroin epidemic, right? And right now we've been going through the opioid epidemic for like, whoa, 30 years or so, . But it's kind of coming to its natural. At the same time that the legal cannabis marketplace is really starting to heat up and when opioids become like, when there's no like, like meth was a boogieman for a while.Crack was a boogieman for a while, but opioids have been a bo the boogieman for like 30 years. And if that starts to tamp down, if we start to feel less scared about that and there's like sort of like a void in like the drug boogieman cuz you know, we always need a drug boogieman. We're America, we need a drug boogieman and.Pot. Well sometimes I think come back and fill that [00:49:00] role. Like there, there could be widespread rejection of the legal marketplace. I mean, in certain places, right? Like in Massachusetts that legalized. However long ago, some communities don't want it, and they are allowed to say within that state's jurisdiction.We do not want any cannabis marketplaces within our community borders. So there's gonna be some nimbyism and there's going to be some nimbyism like, yes, in my backyard to it. But again, it's, you don't know what's like, we don't know what's going to happen. This is a brand new marketplace that could bust its boots like.I mean, it's been around for a decade now, which is amazing. But things are gonna get big fast and if people don't like it, it could very well turn, turn back around. I mean, that's not impossible. It's not, it's improbable, but not impossible. Mm-hmm. . De'Vannon: So what I'll do in the interest of time, I'll just read the title of each of the six letter , then people can go and buy the book to get the advice that you have in there.Do it. I think that and after I [00:50:00] read the titles, and I'll let you have our last word. . Which is a, which is another a page I borrowed from the book of Joy read because she she always gives her guests, you know, like the last word and everything like that. And so I thought you a good idea. I'm very inspired by that woman, and so, oh, I love it.So, lesson one, make your argument as sympathetic as possible. The lesson two, it's all about the money. lesson three. Be prepared to watch your progress disappear. That's the most shocking one for me and in my inten, in my opinion, the most sobering, less than four. Don't rely too heavily on the White House, and she means over multiple administrations.And then less than five, respect your opposition, less than six. Keep a sense of perspective, which is also a statement of humility. So her website is emily din.com, Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, India, [00:51:00] Instagram, medium. Oh podcast. You can listen to Emily conduct interviews, new books.Networks has a Drugs Addiction and Recovery podcast. This book is grass Roots. And then she already mentioned the other one she has coming out. So with that, I'm gonna shut my cock up. And any last , anything that you would like to say and just take it away, darling. Emily: Oh, My gratitude is to you for, for having me, but also for bringing your message and your love, and your light and your spirit to the people.I am grateful to you and for all the work you do. So thank you very much. De'Vannon: All right. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Emily: Don't eat Fentanyl Candy .De'Vannon: Thank you all so much for taking time to listen to the Sex Drugs in Jesus podcast. It really means everything to me. Look, if you love the show, you [00:52:00] can find more information and resources at Sex Drugs and jesus.com or wherever you listen to your podcast. Feel free to reach out to me directly at DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com and on Twitter and Facebook as well.My name is De'Vannon, and it's been wonderful being your host today. And just remember that everything is gonna be right. 

Amazon's leadership principles (Core Values) have been the most critical element in their unprecedented success. Value alignment first, and skills second. So why is this not a standard practice among all up-and-coming startups?  The reason I believe is that leaders then become accountable for their actions when they misbehave.  Without values, it is easy to hide. It is easy to rationalize bad decisions and easier to deflect blame when the shit hits the fan. This is why 9 out of 10 startups fail. Without the right people, your company will not be able to execute.  And the right people are attracted to more than just money. They want growth, structure, and purpose.  When your company demonstrates that none of these elements are present, the A-players run!  And what you are left with are the people who are willing to take the job.  Guest Bio: Steve Anderson is the CEO of Catalyit. He has spent decades shaping the insurance industry through a deeper understanding of emerging technologies and how businesses today can best integrate and leverage them.  Steve is a sought-after speaker and influencer. He is also the author of the widely-anticipated book The Bezos Letters, where he reveals 14 principles for business growth based on the ideas and patterns that emerged when he examined Jeff Bezos' 21 annual letters to Amazon shareholders.  TODAY WE DISCUSS: Balancing need with patience to get the right hire How to put the right structure in place to land them HIRING STORY: Hired an operations manager, who seemed like a good fit. Terminated after 3 months. Hired too fast! Pressure to move fast from start to offer in 3 days. The person already had an offer. He didn't follow his own advice.   Challenge? Balance need with hiring the right person Miscasting a hire Don't hire when you rushed to fill a position The interview process is not intentional.  Not having a hiring process, hiring questions (winging it) Rick's Nuggets:  Problem: Pacing is determined by the candidateClue that the person just needs the money Mitigated by disclosing your hiring process & timeline  Intention: purpose of the interview? How do we solve the problem?  Structure Have a good job description Have a good hiring & interview process Intentional interviews Amazon  Will you admire this person?  Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group  Along what dimension might this person be a superstar Don't cave into the pressure  Candidate pressure Own need pressure Find short term solutions while the interview process is moving along Be willing to fire fast Not fully committing or fully focused Not understanding urgency  Rick's Nuggets: Evidence trumps assumptions Pacing determined by the process, not the person No need to fire, when you have hired the strongest person Key Takeaways that the Audience can plug into their business today! (Value): Process is key to success Need a place to start - Use Amazon's hiring questions Culture fit might be more important than skills.  Guest Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetn/ Personal: https://thebezosletters.com/ Company: https://catalyit.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/catalyit/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveTN Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SteveAndersonNetwork/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/steveanderson/ Host Links:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-girard-07722/ Company: https://www.stridesearch.com/ Podcast: https://www.hirepowerradio.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeEJm9RoCfu8y7AJpaxkxqQ Authored:  "Healing Career Wounds"  https://amzn.to/3tGbtre Startup: www.intertru.ai HireOS™ inquiry: rick@stridesearch.com Show Sponsor: www.intertru.ai www.stridesearch.com

The Don't Quit Podcast looks at how professionals work and how you can learn from them. This week's guest is John Rossman, the author of The Amazon Way book series, a former Amazon leader, and writes a weekly newsletter titled The Digital Leader Newsletter on Substack.   Website: https://the-amazon-way.com/ Book: https://the-amazon-way.com/the-amazon-way/ Newsletter: https://thedigitalleader.substack.com/ — Email the Host, Nick Mann, at Nick@TDQPodcast.com Check out the official The Don't Quit Podcast: TDQPodcast.com Follow the show on Instagram: @TDQPodcast Follow the host on Twitter @MannDesigner If you enjoyed this episode, please give a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for listening!

The podcast news team tackles the topic of quality when disruptors enter the healthcare space. Join Senior Editor Nick Hut and Policy Director Shawn Stack for a hard look at issues of safety and best practices when customer convenience reigns supreme.   Mentioned in this episode: Amazon's health ambitions sometimes clashed with medical best practices, nurses say

Welcome to The Profit Talk! In this show, we're going to help you explore strategies to help you maximize profits in your business while scaling and creating the lifestyle that you want as an entrepreneur. I am your host, Susanne Mariga! I'm a certified Mastery Level Profit First Professional. Let's dive into strategies to maximize profits in your business! In this episode, I interview Steve Anderson. Today, Steve talks about The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, which has become a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and an international bestseller. He also talks about the concept of risk and growth and how Bezos can help you achieve greater results. To know more about Steve, connect with him on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetn/ and to grab a copy of his book, go to https://thebezosletters.com/    Visit my FREE Facebook Group, The Profit First Masterclass, where I'll be sharing additional exclusive trainings to members of the community.   If you're excited about what's next for your business and upcoming episodes, please head to our itunes page and give us a review! Your support will help me to bring in other amazing expert interviews to share their best tips on how to powerfully grow in your business!  DISCLAIMER: The information contained within these videos is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute, an accountant-client relationship. While we use reasonable efforts to furnish accurate and up-to-date information, we assume no liability or responsibility for any errors, omissions, or regulatory updates in the content of this video. Any U.S. federal tax advice contained within is not intended to be used for the purpose of avoiding penalties under U.S. federal tax law. 

Gamer Rage. It's real. How to spot it in someone you live with. How Disney is planning to be more like Amazon. I Love my Job Week -- tell us what you DO, & why you LOVE it.

There's a really strange line in Amazon's terms and conditions! You know the way we never ever read the T&C's when purchasing something or agreeing to anything on the internet? Well, maybe we should start. For Dave's World, Dave showed us this very strange line that's in one of Amazon's T&C's. Let's all hope they're just having the craic! Click Play to find out the line.

Discover why copying the branding approach behind the global goliath that is Amazon.com is a horrible idea - and what you should be doing instead!EPISODE LINKSFree Training - How To Stand Out From The Crowd Online: https://linkedinriches.com/stand-out-crowd/ FREE RESOURCESThe Ultimate LinkedIn Profile Template -- Get the EXACT words, phrases and formatting hacks that turn your LinkedIn Profile into a lead-generating, client-attracting piece of content: https://nemomediagroup.pages.ontraport.net/ultimate-profileWant to Get More Business Using LinkedIn? Grab a Free Digital Copy of My Bestselling Book: https://linkedinriches.com/WHERE YOU CAN FIND ME:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hirejohnnemo"Done For You" LinkedIn Lead Generation: https://nemomediagroup.com/Free Tips, Trainings & Resources: https://linkedinriches.com/free/

John Rossman (Rossman Partners, Managing Partner) is the author of The Amazon Way book series, a former Amazon leader and Managing Partner at Rossman Partners. Mr. Rossman is an expert leveraging the Amazon leadership principles to help others innovate, compete and win in the digital era. One of the leading innovation speakers, John delivers practical techniques and strategies the audience can apply in their business. John advises leaders on strategy, leadership and digital transformation. John was an executive at Amazon.com where he played a key role in launching the Amazon marketplace business as the Director of Merchant Integration, and went on to have responsibilities for the enterprise business at Amazon. Mr. Rossman's blog is www.the-amazon-way.com. He writes a weekly newsletter titled The Digital Leader Newsletter on Substack.

For the full show notes and transcription checkout: https://www.superpowers.school/ Watch episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/paddydhanda?sub_confirmation=1 ★ BUY ME KO-FI ★ If you enjoy the podcast, then you can donate a small amount here as a token of your appreciation: https://ko-fi.com/paddydhanda Contact Paddy at: pardeep_dhanda (at) hotmail.com Steve Anderson has spent his 35+ year career helping the insurance industry understand, integrate, and leverage current and emerging technologies. From business management systems to social platforms, Steve analyzes what's happening now and explain its implications for the future. He has spoken in all 50 states, and internationally, and addressed companies like SAFECO, AAA, and Nationwide. He is on the faculty of credentialing organizations teaching thousands of professionals annually and is a writer/contributor to multiple publications. Steve has a Master's Degree in Insurance Law, and was personally invited to be an original LinkedIn thought leader/influencer where he now has over 340,000 followers. He also is a Top 20 Global InsurTech Influencer. Steve's first book, The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, (Morgan James Publishing), will be available in September 2019. In the book, Steve deconstructs Jeff Bezos' 21 years of personal letters to Amazon shareholders through his unique lens of risk, providing readers with a guide on the key takeaways and principles that Bezos leveraged in turning an online bookstore into a trilliondollar company in just over two decades. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/superpowers-school/message

For the full show notes and transcription checkout: https://www.superpowers.school/ Watch episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/paddydhanda?sub_confirmation=1 ★ BUY ME KO-FI ★ If you enjoy the podcast, then you can donate a small amount here as a token of your appreciation: https://ko-fi.com/paddydhanda Contact Paddy at: pardeep_dhanda (at) hotmail.com Steve Anderson has spent his 35+ year career helping the insurance industry understand, integrate, and leverage current and emerging technologies. From business management systems to social platforms, Steve analyzes what's happening now and explain its implications for the future. He has spoken in all 50 states, and internationally, and addressed companies like SAFECO, AAA, and Nationwide. He is on the faculty of credentialing organizations teaching thousands of professionals annually and is a writer/contributor to multiple publications. Steve has a Master's Degree in Insurance Law, and was personally invited to be an original LinkedIn thought leader/influencer where he now has over 340,000 followers. He also is a Top 20 Global InsurTech Influencer. Steve's first book, The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, (Morgan James Publishing), will be available in September 2019. In the book, Steve deconstructs Jeff Bezos' 21 years of personal letters to Amazon shareholders through his unique lens of risk, providing readers with a guide on the key takeaways and principles that Bezos leveraged in turning an online bookstore into a trilliondollar company in just over two decades. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/superpowers-school/message

Gareth Soloway joins me today to look at the current economic environment and what we might expect moving forward. We look at the predicament that the Fed is in right now, the impending crash of bitcoin, and the similarities to Amazon over 20 years ago.   Follow Gareth Soloway on Twitter https://twitter.com/GarethSoloway   Join my private community on Locals https://heresyfinancial.locals.com