From Affiliate Marketing to Amazon FBA: Neil Twa's Story - 96

In this episode of the D2Z podcast, Brandon Amoroso interviews Neil Twa, CEO of Voltage Holdings, shedding light on the transformative journey from corporate life to entrepreneurship. Neil's narrative is not just about personal triumph; it's a testament to the courage required to navigate uncharted waters, emphasizing the essence of risk-taking and resilience in carving one's path.

Join Brandon and Neil as they embark on Neil's Amazon odyssey, uncovering the platform's dynamic evolution and its profound implications for e-commerce enthusiasts. From discussing the unconventional use of TikTok for organic traffic to refining product selection strategies, Neil shares invaluable insights to navigate the ever-shifting terrain of online retail. Together, they delve into the strategic imperative of embracing an omnichannel approach and skillfully adapting to emerging platforms like TikTok Shop, offering listeners a roadmap to thrive in the competitive e-commerce landscape.

Throughout the episode, Neil and Brandon dissect the multifaceted realm of Amazon FBA, dissecting e-commerce strategies, product categorization, and advertising dynamics. Delve into the intricate interplay between product quality and marketing efforts, illuminated by Neil's seasoned perspective on driving sales and fostering sustainable growth in the competitive Amazon ecosystem.

Concluding the episode, Neil offers a sneak peek into his latest book, inviting you to connect with him and tap into his wealth of experience to drive your entrepreneurial journey forward. Dive into this conversation filled with actionable insights and strategic wisdom, crafted to empower you in navigating the complexities of Amazon FBA and beyond.

Timestamps

🚀 Introduction of Neil Twa and his Entrepreneurial Journey (00:00:02)

🛒 Introduction to Amazon FBA (00:10:29)

💪 Embracing Risk and Persistence (00:01:46)

📉 Learning from Failures (00:03:58)

🛡️ Mitigating Business Risks (00:06:22)

🌱 Importance of Gradual Growth (00:07:52)

📈 Leveraging TikTok Shop (00:14:41)

📊 TikTok Traffic to Amazon (00:16:41)

🔁 Adapting to E-commerce Shifts (00:18:26)

🏷️ Exploring Amazon Product Categories (00:19:13)

💡 Neil's Product Category Insights (00:19:16)

📈 Expanding Product Offerings (00:19:46)

🌟 Market Segmentation Strategies (00:20:27)

🚀 Amazon Ads for Ranking (00:22:52)

💲 Pricing Strategies and Amazon Ads Evolution (00:25:03)

🎯 Target Audience and Investor Engagement (00:26:11)

🔑 Prioritizing Sales on Amazon (00:29:18)

📚 Neil's Book and Contact Information (00:32:54)

Neil Twa:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/neiltwa/

Voltage - https://www.voltagedm.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

I'm Brandon Amoroso and this is the D2Z podcast Building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey, everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency Electric, as well as the co-founder of Scaleless. Today I'm talking with Neil Toa, the CEO of Voltage Holdings, who is an aquiror and manager of Amazon, third party brands, fba brands, and has been in it for quite some time now. Thanks for coming on the show. Excited to have you on.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So before we dive into some of the topics we want to cover just around your entrepreneurial journey, but also some of the nitty-gritty around Amazon FBA can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself?

Speaker 2: 0:55

Yeah, I mean for the last 10 plus years I've been working on Amazon FBA directly, building brands, private label brands, and raising them up to exits. Eight years prior to that, I was in the affiliate marketing world online, had a killer game server company where we did voice over IP games and then had a management consulting firm. Prior to that, I left my corporate wife back in 2007. So ever since then I've been kind of on my own building companies and businesses and really focused on the e-commerce world a little over about 12, 14 years ago and then really went hard into Amazon in the early days and are still expanding that Amazon opportunity into multiple channels now, like TikTok shop and other places as well, which a lot of people are getting into very fast, especially on the creator side as well as the shop side.

Speaker 1: 1:41

What was it like making that transition from corporate to your own entrepreneurial venture?

Speaker 2: 1:46

Well, I mean, there's risk in all things. Right, I had an opportunity of fork in the road. Sometimes we get those opportunities, sometimes we have to create them. Mine came because they basically were outsourcing my division to Argentina and they said well, you can continue and move or you can do something else, you can early retirement. And I was like, well, I guess that's my fork in the road. So I took it and then I just kept taking forks in the road every year after that.

Speaker 2: 2:10

It wasn't a perfect success. It didn't get started right. I mean, I got married in the same year. I left my job. We found out we were pregnant.

Speaker 2: 2:17

My wife got sick in the first pregnancy and had to go on bed rest, and so by the second year we were completely out of income. Both of our jobs had gone away temporarily and so I was left to basically figure out the grind, figure out what I was going to do and make some money. And if anybody thinks that you can just leap into a business and get it going without any sort of idea that it's just going to be a home run because you started it, I would say that's not the truth, and so if you feel hesitant to get started. I would also say you probably aren't ever going to do it if you don't put some risk into jumping one way or another. I was grateful that they pushed me a little bit to do that or I don't know necessarily that I would have taken that if not years later some other kind of event or something would have had to happen to make me push myself. But once I did I just hung on with both hands and haven't let go.

Speaker 1: 3:06

Now I feel like once you get a taste of it, it's hard to go back. The dime bag of entrepreneurialism.

Speaker 2: 3:12

Yes, I got my dime bag, I felt it and yeah, I ran with it. Yep absolutely.

Speaker 1: 3:18

But also, there's never the perfect time to do it. No, there's really truly important?

Speaker 2: 3:22

There is not. And if you're thinking about it or wondering, you know, even if you just start a side hustle of some kind to get your momentum going, I had mine going during IBM days. Like I said, there was a game server company that I ran ended up with about 20,000 customers on that system. But you know, try something, do something, don't be afraid to fail. Failure is just like my life story man. It's like fail, fail, fail, 10 failures and then one big up, and then maybe 20 failures and one big up. So it's not not a perfect process by any means and I don't want to make anybody feel like it is actually.

Speaker 1: 3:56

What's your, what's your favorite?

Speaker 2: 3:57

failure, my favorite failure, oh gosh, no one's ever asked me that question. My favorite failure is going bankrupt. Why?

Speaker 2: 4:10

Well, that's a great question, because I'm thinking through the other ones that I could have said it Well, I think, you know, because it really it helped me refocus priorities.

Speaker 2: 4:22

It was my favorite because it got me to stop shifting off of the what if that big, you know, harry, a day, if I don't get to a million by the time I'm 30, you know, I'm a failure in business ideology that I think a lot of people get into on accident because of the side hustle, the grind, the following their mentors, the motivational stuff online and all this you know shorts and the you know pump you up kind of video crap.

Speaker 2: 4:46

I think that just kind of warps people's minds a little bit to the reality of just trying and failing. And you know, I then eventually learned that the average millionaire fails more than three times in business and has more than three bankruptcies. And in that process I realized that, you know, the risk and the reward are so much greater. You just have to focus on the right priorities. At that point I was making the business more of my priority than family and friends and because of that I was stressing everybody out and making life more hectic and difficult. And when that time came to realize that all I, you know, I had to just focus on what was important. It kind of shifted my priorities and really changed my the course of my life after that.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Oh, that's awesome. I feel like everybody has that, you know, one pivotal moment. Yeah, that's a defining moment for them in their career.

Speaker 2: 5:29

I've had about three or four, so it was really hard to choose which one was more dramatic. Quite honestly, I'm a glit and for punishment, at times I like to test things. I've jokingly been called, you know, the guy who jumps off a cliff without a parachute continuously. But I pull people along with me. Now I figured out who's the. Who's a good people to come along, who are the risk, non-riskiest risk takers. So then they grab their backpacks and they jump with me and our goal is to try to finish the parachute before we slam into the, you know, to the ground. But you know again, there are levels to everybody's risk. You know, and I would just say, if you are very prone to risk or feel that risk is just something you cannot stop but it makes you completely nervous and fearful, then maybe building a business isn't for you.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And I feel like you know there are some ways to, you know, to mitigate risk. You don't have to go out of your way to create unnecessary risk. Yeah, how do you?

Speaker 2: 6:22

do that Absolutely. How do you do that? You borrow a phrase that I'm sure you've heard Maybe. If you haven't you don't eat the whole elephant in one bite. So if you want to get to be the guy who runs the business and has the family, or the person who has a life of travel and you know the lifestyle quote, unquote by design and you want to ultimately get to that goal, you can't just go eat that whole thing right off the bat and make it sustainable.

Speaker 2: 6:47

Usually, um, that's kind of like the lottery mindset mentality. Which you have to do is you got to start something and you have to just keep trying something and then, as you get successful in that, you build something on top of that framework. And as you get successful in that framework, you build something else. And pretty soon, every three feet up the mountain, you look back and you're like look how far I've come. Uh, look how much I've eaten on my elephant. You know you may not always be there and maybe that's something you work on the rest of your life with, but the end result is you got to challenge yourself, you got to keep moving forward.

Speaker 2: 7:15

I tell everybody you know, take a three foot step at a time, you can see how far you've come. You can see where you are. You might be able to reach back and help somebody else. So, bite something off, start something. Launch your first product. You know, sign up for TikTok creator and put your first video out there. Like you know, get a dropshipping account online and ship your first product. Like um, build a service. Find a little software you can create I mean with AI today, software as simple as plugging it into the AI and having it output the program you're interested in creating and then building that framework into something else. It's like, you know, the end result is you just have to get started on something. You're going to find your way through it, but you got to get started.

Speaker 1: 7:52

Yeah, what? Okay, what sort of led you to Amazon FBA, then Cause was your? Were you originally working in that?

Speaker 2: 7:59

No, no no, no, so I was actually in IBM. I was doing, um, I mean, there's a crossover, but it goes like this Um, I was in the what's called the knowledge management world. We were building latent semantic engines working with artificial intelligence and things called human machine language learning and artificial intelligence systems, building um databases and all kinds of cool stuff and search engines that would learn so fast forward. Amazon is just a search engine that learns. It just happens to produce products, uh, that are basically data, uh that translates into a physical product that shipped to the customer's house, unlike Google, which is just a purely digital product or or a search. So it's searching for physical products you want to buy. And I got into it because I understood the technology.

Speaker 2: 8:39

Later on, I actually had a management consulting firm and I was building that business. So I got into affiliate marketing and online marketing to learn how to build more leads and generate more for my business and found out I was actually very good at affiliate marketing. I was actually um dropping mobile apps into different countries and having them install the app and they were paying me on a click print install. So that was actually doing really well, and I had a couple of offers in South Africa for dating apps. That took off and all of a sudden I'm making a thousand dollars a day on mobile dating app installs, um, which I didn't expect to be doing.

Speaker 2: 9:10

But then as that grew into other projects where I learned to lead Jen for other companies.

Speaker 2: 9:14

A couple of them had products physical products and so as I was doing lead generation for their physical products, I suddenly realized there's no reason why I can't own the product at the end, since I know how to generate the traffic at the beginning and I started to do the quick research and in around 2010 and 11, uh, amazon was making some waves, as it was, uh, basically rolling out more third party access to their systems and marketplace to allow people to come on to the marketplace and sell their products.

Speaker 2: 9:41

It was kind of an evolution of, say, ebay, but with the physical product capabilities of more private label branded, and they were rolling out a huge amount of infrastructure, uh, in that process. And that led me to Amazon and started testing some products the similar way I was affiliating. I was just looking for traffic for products and started just flipping products for profit. I'd buy a few units here, 20 units, 100 units of this product and I flip it on Amazon. And once I started to realize how it was working, I realized there was a much bigger machine at play here than just flipping products, and I started building brands. What?

Speaker 1: 10:15

what was like the, I guess the point where you realized that this was going to be your, you know your sweet spot and that you were really able to niche down into this, because I assume you know the first year or so, at least, you know you weren't really sure if it was going to work or not.

Speaker 2: 10:29

Right. So at first it took us three years to get to our first seven figures in sales and in that timeframe we tested a lot of products, failed at a lot of things, made a couple of almost business ending mistakes in that process. Uh, we almost wired too much money to the wrong manufacturer. That was about that minute. We got that stopped at the last minute and thankfully that didn't happen. Uh, but we, you know, made some imperfect action and in the process, as I started to see it work, as I started to see the engine growing, you know, like we jokingly said earlier, it was kind of like a dime bag.

Speaker 2: 10:58

Once I realized that this juggernaut of traffic and buying traffic on Amazon was much easier to acquire than I was acquiring previously through other marketing means and it did not require me as much time, which I set it up, um, to keep it running I thought, well gosh, this is not only the, this is the best of both worlds.

Speaker 2: 11:14

It doesn't take me as much time and I get a lot more out of it. So that's when I started to realize that the engine that Amazon was building in the juggernaut, uh, that they were, they were growing was going to be something in the next decade. That was going to be really big and so I just wanted to double down on it. So I just stayed involved in it, ordered more products, created more brands, brought a few family and friends along with me for the ride to learn how to do it and, you know, just kept in it because I just knew there was a lot more upside in opportunity to staying there longer. Uh, and it proved to be right. You know, amazon has turned into a juggernaut 28% of the market share. Um, walmart only has like 8% of the online market share. So they have become, you know, sort of the go to de facto standard for ordering products that get to your house in two days or less. So, yeah, it was a good place to hedge.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Hopefully you bought some stock as well.

Speaker 2: 12:03

I didn't buy any stock, that would you know. My strategies have been more wealth without Wall Street. So yeah, I don't have any stocks in them. Let me sound weird to some people. My, my investment strategies have been more alternative investing in people and businesses and physical products, in physical assets which is not real estate To some degree. I mean I have 50 acres in the country. That's my real estate portfolio and so I didn't really buy into the stock world much. I mean I could have. I probably should have in hindsight, but yeah, it's not really my thing.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Yeah, I mean the. You know, with my Shopify agency I didn't really have any Shopify stock either. Yeah, right, I still obviously benefited a lot from they call it hindsight is 2020, right? Yeah, could have benefited a lot more for sure.

Speaker 2: 12:46

Yeah, it probably wouldn't hurt to buy a few thousand shares back in the day and just let it ride. You know, yeah, have a lot of those go to would have showed us in life. But see, business is nothing but a series of problem-solving activities, which is what we're kind of talking about how to solve problems, either for your life or your situation or for other people. You solve problems For other people, you make sales, and you can make a lot of money doing that. Products are just solutions, you know, to somebody's problem or something that they're wanting to do, and so we basically provide those products as a median of exchange For what we provided to what they want the outcome to be the solution, and you can do that in a lot of different ways. Nowadays there's, in fact, some people I think Brandon probably acquiesce moving on things because there's so many things to do they don't know which one to try. Hmm.

Speaker 1: 13:31

I feel like the Looking back hindsight being 2020, yeah, it's very easy to pick the things that you missed versus you know, picking all the things that you did very well that other people Missed, yeah, and so you know, just get fixated on the one thing that you could have done versus you know, yeah really well. There's a bit of luck in business.

Speaker 2: 13:52

And so the longer you're in business, the more opportunities you have for luck, which is ability, just being at the right time in the right place, at the you know Right mindset to take advantage of the opportunity before it passes you by. And I would say right now, if I had to open my crystal ball and look into 2024 and say where am I going? What should we be doing? What's important? If you're in the 18 to 35 group, you got to be on tick-tock. If you're going to be in in returns in terms of creator, if you're gonna be in a creator, an affiliate, you don't want to do the physical product world that that place is blown up like crazy. If you just want to fill your data products and make you know little videos, I mean if you watch the Super Bowl, right, the guy that went up there, kanye, and did his video, right, I mean he made 19 million on a video that he shot from his cell phone in a car. I think so many people over complicate the effect of the message and not the median. Like we need high Hollywood production. No, actually, you know the worst. Sometimes the video is the better it does right, and so we got to test that. But if you're not in the crater side or even moving to the shop side, even with drop shipping products or potentially your Own branded products, you're missing out on a huge opportunity right now. Plus, it's organic, which is one of the things I love about and why I didn't. I ran brands up on Shopify over a hundred K a month but you got to do the marketing, the social, the SEO and a lot of other work to make the traffic and get the audience Conversation to convert. And then, of course, there's some additional mechanics through conversions and add to cart that you have to make sure you work on and obviously refine and do, and once you learn those things, you know it becomes second nature. But I prefer to Amazon because it already did all the split testing for me and all I had to focus on mostly was, you know, the marketing, the deliverability of the products and, of course, targeting my avatar and who I'm really gonna sell to and how that framework that can be become repeatable. I'm seeing that happen on tiktok shop right now. So if you're looking for another repeatable search engine driven organic traffic source, tiktok is another place to do that right now and because it's platform to consumer. Unlike Shopify or Amazon, is trying to pull influencers in from other locations. Their influencer, their product and their delivery mechanism are all in one place and so it's creating kind of a unique little ecosystem.

Speaker 2: 15:52

I don't ever believe that if I were to go forward in time ten years and say tiktok would overtake Amazon, that's not gonna happen. Amazon is going to change. They will all change to some degree, but it's just too big of a juggernaut now To basically be taken on. Can they chip away at a lot of market share? I think they are and I think they will continue. And it will be a huge opportunity as they test more things and drive more Traffic this year for you to get organic you know search engine traffic plus paid traffic I ran about 250,000 a year last year on tiktok ads and see that opportunity grow in an organic way and then crossover to Amazon.

Speaker 2: 16:26

So we'll see up to 25% of the traffic from tiktok shop in the bond, amazon buying the product because it's more trusted authority right now. So whenever you lift up the tiktok shop this year, you're gonna see that spillover hit Amazon. So if you're not on Amazon, you should get there. If you're on Amazon, you should get the tiktok. If you're on Shopify, you should be one on one of the other platforms. You should create three legs of Omni channel presence to capture all potential social traffic, search engine traffic and major market traffic out there. You should be on those platforms, even if you're just planting your flag right now.

Speaker 1: 16:56

Is that where you're seeing the most success right now is and generating traffic via tiktok?

Speaker 2: 17:00

Yeah, because I mean, I've been playing as a creator for a while, just shooting up stupid videos and make between a thousand and fifteen hundred bucks a month on literal autopilot from videos I shot months ago Because it's just organic and continued traffic to go on and I just flipped a few products and I did it to show a few people and some some of the younger kids that were asking me how to make some side hustle money Because I can't afford to get into full products. Well, I was like well, look, let's just go on tiktok and start playing with creator videos and see what happens. I ran it up to over a thousand bucks a month in literally passive income. So if I can do it, just about anybody can get out there and do it. So there's yeah, there's a lot of opportunity to create those kinds of wealth building and if you stop on in that one for a second you realize you're. The most of those are all physical products. So the logical step is, if you build a platform of being a creator and you start to determine which products are more successful, we'll go build your own version of that product, go innovate a version of that product and launch it on tiktok shop and then go affiliate your own product. There's evolutionary paths there to building some of that opportunity. And then of course, cross it over to Amazon and make sure you get it on Amazon too, so that you have a secondary channel for people to land on who may trust that authority a little more and you can pick up those Additional sales like found money.

Speaker 2: 18:14

But Amazon is a different game. It's a different beast now than it was 10 years ago and I just want to make sure we're very clear on that has its huge upside potential. It just has a little bit more of a run at it. You shouldn't really flip products on Amazon anymore. That's kind of closed to the doors. You shouldn't, in my opinion, dropship from Amazon unless it's your own product, your own brand and in your own warehouse control system in the United States, in case they go audit you.

Speaker 2: 18:37

And really wholesale can be good if done correctly it can pull some additional cash flow in. But it's hard to scale. I tried wholesale about six years ago on a large scale. I went to 10. We had about 20,000 square foot warehouse space and about 12 employees and we ramped up to about 10 truck rolls a week. But all said and done, by the time we got up to eight figures, we had about a single digit in profit, which really wasn't sexy. So our private label brands were doing mid-20 to 30% net profit. So it's much sexier to do private label on Amazon if you're really going to go after it.

Speaker 1: 19:13

What sort of products are you?

Speaker 2: 19:16

Everything but we don't sell supplements anymore. We don't sell electronics. You can sell something electric, but electronic is more challenging, higher cost and more failures. And we don't sell clothing, really because it's lower margin, higher volume and very competitive, especially on Amazon for those types of products and everything else we've kind of sold, from kitchen to outdoor gears to all kinds of stuff. We sold supplements in the back of the day but sold that business a while back.

Speaker 1: 19:47

So I have two questions there. What's your favorite product category right now? If you were going to enter into Amazon with a net new, product.

Speaker 2: 19:55

Well, there's about six. The top three, or at least top two, are Holman Kitchen and in time of year when we're recording this I'm not sure when it's going live but outdoor gear, as you head into the summer months, is going to do great. If you build two or three or four other SKUs in there so that you have additional SKUs for additional times of year, so you're not just locked into the summer on certain seasonal products, Then you can build up an outdoor gear brand pretty quick. And those are some of the really good ones that are going down on Amazon right now.

Speaker 2: 20:24

And those are huge market share opportunities for those products.

Speaker 1: 20:29

And what's your favorite product that you've done thus far?

Speaker 2: 20:32

Favorite product. The most boring products that last the longest are my favorite and one of them is kitchen towels. We launched this as one of our second brands and it took off. That was like eight years ago. It's been producing daily, weekly, monthly for eight years. There's been additional variations that have been launched. I ended up selling that brand to my partner, who now runs it continuously in our Holdings company, so that I could go do other things and he could focus on more operational things. So we took over the management of that brand but it still sells today. They've added on different variations and what was cool about it is it helped me discover something and I'll give you a pro tip for anybody listening real quick.

Speaker 2: 21:11

You may have seen this in the market. You may have noticed that Stanley, when my dad, for 30 years working as a guy in the manufacturing plant and took a thermos of Stanley Thermos Cup the green one with the silver lid every day to work for like as long as I knew him. Now they've moved over slightly in a different audience category and targeted more of the pastel colors feminine audience, if you will and got kind of out of the worker's mug and got into the everyday everybody kind of mug and that thing's trending like insane and has caused their business to go through the roof. And they simply took one product and just innovated a slight variation in the audience. They did what I call a two millimeter shift to the right, and so when I saw this again, it reminded me of things that we've done in the brands in the past, and one of them, with the towels, was we discovered that there was another audience buying our towels and it was crafters and people who like to take the towels and put embroidery on them and then sell them in the market.

Speaker 2: 22:09

And so once we realized that, we shifted the brand just a little bit to also include those people and it doubled the business. And so it was not didn't reinvent the wheel, didn't have to go get an entirely new product. We just tapped into a slightly different avatar or a slightly different audience than the one we originally intended to sell to, and as soon as we discovered that, we unlocked another large audience for the same product. One product, multiple audiences. So now we approach that as part of our playbook. We look for products and develop products that have multi-audience opportunities, and we'll pick a particular audience to start with and then move that product into separate audiences, so we can talk one to three different audiences with one product.

Speaker 1: 22:52

Are you so with those products that you're selling on Amazon? You mentioned the organic reach, tiktok, stuff like that. Yes, are you using Amazon's ad platform at all?

Speaker 2: 23:01

100% Amazon PPC has evolved a long way. It was a very basic kind of targeted display ad way back in the day and very basic interface and not a whole lot you could do with it, but it was very impactful on the ranking of the product. So it was one of the only places that you can go in and pay for traffic and ads on their PPC or pay for click platform and actually see the organic range of your product go up. So that's still one of the greatest opportunities of Amazon when it's done correctly. So fast forward and about six or so, seven years ago they started hiring a bunch of Google AdWords engineers away from Google and started to shift the internal keyword traffic and PPC system of Amazon very closely in parallel to the way AdWords works. So if you've done any Google AdWords search traffic broad phrase keyword traffic Amazon PPC now runs like that.

Speaker 2: 23:53

So it has a specific function and feature. We use it to kind of help rank products. We use it more like a tool we call the rob the train strategy. So there's a train of products moving and 30 seconds or less on Amazon every day and the goal here is to basically just try to rob the train away from other brands that have market share currently and go in and buy their customers away from them.

Speaker 2: 24:14

If you can't buy a customer, as Dan Kennedy says, then you don't have a business. So we go in and we acquire those customers and then we see the rankability. So, unlike a, maybe a Shopify or a website, if you go in and pay traffic media, tiktok, google ads et cetera you're not gonna rank your website. And I can't go in and buy AdWords and see it rank on Googlecom for search, but I can't in Amazon. So it's still in a tremendous play with the organic rankability and engine of Amazon to be able to use PPC to start out the product, even if it has no reviews, and start seeing it rank up organically. And then use PPC to kind of put rockets on that Falcon rocket, if you will and see it raise up and then I can actually scale back my ads. And in some cases we have case studies where we turned ads off completely and the organic rankability of that product just kept going up because it had met certain market share criteria.

Speaker 1: 25:03

Yeah, I feel like the Amazon ads platform is extremely powerful and just keeps getting more and more powerful, and I think I just saw something where you can now advertise or use it somehow like off platform.

Speaker 2: 25:15

Yeah, so Twitch or FreeVee or Amazon's platforms they've purchased recently, we can now do sponsored brand TV ads so we can run ads for our Amazon products out into the great TV world. If you've ever watched a FreeVee movie on Prime or whatever and you've seen those advertisements, we can do that now. So they've expanded the reach. And it's also important to know and I actually wrote this on our sub stack for voltage recently that they are profitability wise. Amazon gets its profit from their AWS, their web services divisions, all the hosting and web services hosting and Twitch hosting and this kind of stuff. But they're about to. Amazon advertising is about to overtake profitability of AWS in 2026, as is predicted. So they are becoming a display advertising engine that happens to sell products and that is going to be the predominant profitability system they have as it moves past 2026.

Speaker 1: 26:08

Yeah, they've have quite the beast of an engine over there.

Speaker 2: 26:10

They absolutely do and we pay for it, which we got to be careful. So we don't. We don't launch products and I wouldn't advise anybody on Amazon to launch a product for less than $50. Now If you're going to play under 50, you're going to have to understand the Chinese sellers and manufacturers are playing at that. Amazon is actually wooing them into those categories for volume reasons, etc. And they will do some underhanded tactics and other things and I don't know, at times it feels like Amazon's letting them do that. I don't know if they are. They're just simply circumventing the systems.

Speaker 2: 26:38

We don't do anything black hat, but it appears they do at times and because of that they're kind of wrecking the market share. But but where we play in the branded world, where we play as the 50 to 150 retail price point range, we focus more on the problem, the reaction and the solution. So we play more on that brand and brand avatar value and let's just on commodities of products below 50 bucks that it can be moved and valued really at their price point or the amount of reviews they have. And we're really looking for those people interested in more brand driven, are willing to pay more for this than the next product because of the perceived or high perceived value of that product. So we've been playing for more than five years in that product range, which elevates profitability.

Speaker 2: 27:16

And from profitability, obviously acquiring more customers gives us growth, and growth gives us the opportunity to find one of those products, or two or five, and then that'll pop off, which is where our scale comes from, right. And then once you get to those levels and it takes typically three to five years to run a full business on this but by the way guys you speak, you know we can run businesses to eight figures in three to five years. It used to take three to three decades to do that. So we have I know everybody's so short-sighted at times and they forget oh my gosh, three to five years, that that feels so long and it's like well, you know it used to take a long time to get to eight figures in business, but now, with these types of mechanisms and the amount of people online in traffic, three to five years is not very long to build an eight figure company and with the online marketplace and the search engine traffic and the multiple channels of traffic we've got now across these different platforms.

Speaker 2: 28:04

it's not unrealistic anymore. It's doable.

Speaker 1: 28:08

Who? Who are you typically selling these brands to?

Speaker 2: 28:11

So we sell into investor groups. We buy to from our own, uh in portfolio, if you will, which are the business builders that work inside of our incubator to build up their brand circles. In three to five years to exit, we have what's called a first right of refusal, or we make an offer to buy their brands. It's one of the reasons they got involved with us is that we look at an exit. So we have an investor pool group behind us, uh, that is interested in buying these companies. They are not wanting to invest in Wall Street, like we joked about earlier. They're not. They're kind of done in the real estate world, are already penciled in quite a bit on the real estate. So they're looking for different ways to divest income and create less risk through multiple investment strategies.

Speaker 2: 28:46

Ecom, or purchasing Ecom companies, is becoming a large factor for people who want to buy a cash flowing business, uh, who's year to year cash and cash value is saying more, greater than real estate, based on its marketability or product type and brand. And so we're selling to those groups of people with the expectation that we run the company. That's part of the deal, uh is that they could buy the company as an investor we take part ownership in the company, and then our operations team help run, helps run the company, uh, which makes it, you know, less friction for them to get involved. So we're typically selling to investment groups, home offices, family offices, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Got it Okay? Oh well, this is all I mean. Very interesting different side of the uh you know equation that I don't work with too much. Yes, and we're very Shopify focused. Sure, but before we, before we hop here, is there one like tip or trick that you would give for any Amazon sellers that are out there listening to this? Yeah, when it comes to 2024.

Speaker 2: 29:39

Yeah, yeah for sure. Um, I think that the thing it's not really a tip or trick, it's kind of a fundamental of business, but it ties into something that I I've now have talked enough about on podcast. I've come to realize this isn't kind of a common knowledge in the world of Amazon. Uh, and that's related to making sure that when you sell a product on Amazon, you know your role. Too many people spend like way too long at the very beginning, focus too much on the product, innovative development and not enough on proving they can sell the product. So for those of you who are listening, who might have Amazon experience or know about this or go thinking about getting started, really sales fixes everything. So the first thing to figure out is can I sell this product Number one? That's your very first thing to figure out. And it realized it becomes you realizing that you're the marketer, you're the brand developer and you're the sales channel person of that product. Amazon is actually delivering that product to the customer. So that's their role. My role is to give them a good enough product.

Speaker 2: 30:35

Okay, that I don't get a negative review while I'm testing this out, and so I'm not going to sell cheap Chinese crap or bad products, but I'm not going to spend a whole lot of focus on making my product terribly better than another one in the market. All I want to do is say can I pull a product up in the market, very similar or next to another brand? Let's say it's Lowe's selling a product and I bring up a Bros next to it. I just want to know that I can sell in competition with Lowe's. Okay, if I do that, then I can prove innovation of product will create higher value, brandability and move that product into the market greater.

Speaker 2: 31:06

And so, from a business, brand development, marketing and sales strategy. That's my role, and I think too many people get caught up in the product role and get hung up on the product too much and then don't sell it well enough. Right, you can have the other problem you do a really great job on sales and marketability and have a really crappy product and watch the whole thing fail on the product because the reviews are bad and nobody wants the product. So it's really making sure that you sell the product and then develop a good product, a better than product, through innovation and you meet the combination of success that people will actually have on Amazon If you only focus on one of those other things. You're going to end up failing in this market. Okay.

Speaker 1: 31:42

It's, uh, you know I speak about it a lot where you you know, if you don't have a good product, no matter what you do from the marketing standpoint, and also, since we focus on retention a lot, no matter how many emails and texts you send somebody, uh, if they didn't like the product, then it doesn't matter.

Speaker 2: 31:57

They had a very good first product.

Speaker 1: 31:59

Yeah, yeah, you really need both. Um, but I think you know a lot of times the product side things get overlooked and the marketing is really there. I I don't think you know the. I've come across a lot of instances where the product is really great and just for some reason, you know, they can't figure out the sales and marketing.

Speaker 2: 32:19

I've seen both sides of the house. So that's why I warned to make sure that you do produce, especially on Amazon, where reviews are more critical to the longevity of the business, as opposed to maybe Shopify, where you can't get deranged or have problems with your account If the reviews don't match up with expectations in the marketplace. But certainly one of the things you have to be much more cautious about on Amazon is ensuring the quality of product maintains good reviews, which maintains good seller health account status.

Speaker 1: 32:47

Well, thank you so much for coming on. Absolutely, it's a really insightful conversation. I know you think you just had a book come out as well.

Speaker 2: 32:53

if you wanna, I did a gratuitous plug coming in for those of you who are listening and almost audited income with FBA just went live in January. The forward was written by Kevin Harrington, original shark on Shark Tank as seen on TV and inventor of the infomercial. He wrote the forward for our book, done business with him in the past so he had a very nice thing to say about us in there. And it is a collection of 15 experts in the online marketing, e-commerce, wealth preservation, financial, et cetera who speak to the different parts of the playbook that we follow in voltage and then kind of follow through that conversation in the different the four or five different steps that we take to build a business and they kind of speak on the different areas of that aspect in there. Been very well received, got five stars so far on Amazon and you can grab it on our website as well If anybody wants to grab a copy and get started learning about how to build wealth on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 33:45

Awesome, and before we hop, can you let everybody know where they can get in contact with you? Yeah, yeah absolutely thanks.

Speaker 2: 33:51

Voltagedmcom. That's voltagedm or digitalmarketingcom. It is Neil Tua last name, not an accolade, not a PhD or MBA. It's actually my last name, so you can Google me, which means you'll find me on all the social medias. You can feel free to welcome, say hello and connect with me on a social media account or check out any of the free trainings or the book or anything else. Learn a bit of you know. Learn more about what we're doing. It'd be great.

Speaker 1: 34:14

Awesome. Well, thank you again for coming on for everybody listening, as always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or electricmarketingcom, and we will see you next time. Music.