Note:
This is an automated transcription and will have some mistakes 🙂
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Amazon, people, physical product, dry eyes, traffic, ppc, ecommerce, amazon ppc, sale, website, shopify, business, medicine,
SPEAKERS:
Amr The Internet Guy, Travis Ziggler
Online with Amr, the internet guy streaming today on your favorite podcast platforms. This podcast focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful and conducting their business on the web without being stuck with technology, getting a headache, pulling their hair out or buying expensive software.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of online. This is season two. And thank you very much for bearing with me during the summer when we had a big pose that was much needed to turn things around and come up with the new kind of the new version or the new system, let’s say of online, the podcast with the internet guy. And I wanted to say thank you to everyone who was sending messages and you know, asking why I wasn’t releasing any more episodes. So I needed some time to go over the whole business, including podcasting, and make a better plan, and also make the podcast better. And you will see that in season two now. So without further ado, let me introduce you to today’s guest. Today’s guest is recovering optometrist, and the first time I heard that word, I felt like what does that mean? And I’m gonna ask him when he comes on. And he turned ecommerce entrepreneurs. And you know, he went from a doctor, to a business owner, an E commerce owner, who’s doing about $4 million on Amazon $4 million in sales on Amazon. And he’s just cracked the code on how to make it on Amazon. And, you know, for everyone who’s thinking about or considering Amazon, you know, what are the steps they need to do in order to become very successful, making Amazon even recommend your products. So we’re going to discuss this with Dr. Travis Ziggler. Let’s meet him right now. I have a special guest with me. Hello, hello. Hey,
thanks for having me on.
Dr. Travis Ziegler is on guys and he’s the owner of I love it’s not I as a me it’s aI as an AI. There we look to Travis, there is something that intrigued me very much when I was reading a bit about you. You say I’m a recovering doctor.
You Yeah. So recovering. optometrists haven’t practiced in five years and focus full time on entrepreneurship online.
So you’re recovering from medicine?
Yes, it’s a it’s a world that surrounded by insurance companies now. So I say recovering. Because it’s a unfortunately, it’s dominated by insurance companies now and you don’t just get to doctor anymore.
Oh, my God. I think it’s getting a bit complicated. You know, being a doctor in general, like, there’s a lot of non medicine stuff that you have to do. And I was speaking to my brother in law, he used to be a plastic surgeon, and now he’s a business owner. So this business has nothing to do with medicine. So it’s like, Yeah, I’ve seen this happen before.
Just we explored both owning our own practices and starting an online business and the online businesses was more fun. And it’s more free. You can do it from anywhere. And we just started to go on with it.
And you just moved to Ohio. That’s is that right?
Yeah, we lived down south for a while. We lived in South Carolina, and then Austin, Texas. And now we’re back in Ohio, where we’re from.
Oh, okay, originally, you’re from Ohio, and then you left for Texas, then you came back? Yep. Nice. I’ve got a few friends in Ohio. Hello, Josh. I’m intrigued. You know, let’s say I’m a doctor and I have my own practice and something is happening. And I feel like I want to change my surprises not everyone will think ECommerce. Like the why? How did the change come about that, you know, if I’m not going to, you know, use my practice, if I’m going to close my clinic or my practice, and I want to do something different. What gives you the idea that this something different will be ecommerce.
So we just started serving a person. So we saw a lot of dry eye patients in our practice. And with Dr. Patients, they’re suffering from a lot of dryness, of course with their eyes, but a lot of inflammation in general. And so we had a situation in our lives where Western medicine did not work for us. So we battled infertility for years. And we tried everything with Western medicine. And we switched to Eastern medicine, which is more herbals, acupuncture, really getting to the source of the issue. And we got pregnant in five months. And so three years Western medicine failure, five months Eastern medicine, we now have three kids. So we thought Why can’t we apply this to dry eye? Now we’re Western medicine trained doctors, meaning that you come in to see us you have dry, we’ll give you a medication to help you with that dry. So instead, what we started doing online, is we started serving dry sufferers in a more natural holistic route. So replacing your breakfast with a green smoothie, drinking more water, and just decreasing the overall inflammation in your body, which will then help decrease your dry eyes. And we sent about 100 people through this kind of training we went through, it worked incredibly well. So we started just serving more and more dry people, we started building up our audience around dry, and just serving, we didn’t have a product to sell. And then one day in our practice, somebody came up to us and something that we prescribed for dry, had they increase their price from $30 to $300. And they said, You’re the entrepreneur, fix this. And that was the discovery of our first product was, we found a way to manufacture that product. And we made it better than what was out on the market. And that was our first product, we then launched it to the audience that we’d already been building around dry. And it was an instant success because it was something that they needed. And we made it a little better. And we’d already been serving them without selling them anything. And so they are naturally inclined to just by as law of reciprocation states, you give some thing to somebody, they’re naturally going to want to give something back to you. And that’s not what we’re going for, we’re just looking to make an impact. So it’s all about service, finding somebody to serve, and then serving them with, you know, no agenda. And then eventually, when you have something to come out, sell it to them, and they’ll more likely buy it because you’ve been serving them for so long.
And that’s pretty interesting. Because like we we say the same thing. And in our world of web design and development. Like you’re on different groups and stuff and you see someone struggling with something, you know the answer, right? So the easiest thing is just to write the answer and send it to the person, you don’t expect anything out of it. And nine times out of 10 You either get a referral, or you get the same person say, Hey, can I hire you to do it? Like, you know, that? I like your answer. But I don’t want to break things on my own. I want you to do it for me or something like this or do it for my client. And but usually like, you know, you keep serving, and whatever comes comes doesn’t matter. I don’t think about it. And I think most people don’t think about it. I like the approach of you know, for example, I suffer from dryers all the time and I keep using eyedrops. Never thought ever, that I can treat it from the inside. Like I do drink a lot of water as well. But of course, like you know, I don’t do the smoothies. And I don’t know like being busy. Usually you don’t watch what you eat and stuff like that. And I realized that, wow, it can work from the inside.
Yeah, you’re also in Vancouver, which tends to be a drier colder environment to begin with. And so that is going to contribute to it too. But yeah, medicine or your your your food is medicine. And so whatever you’re putting into your body is going to result in the outputs that your body does. So if you put in poor building blocks, you’re going to get poor results, which is inflammation. And that’s when you’re going to get dryness. Eczema is probably one of the most common Eczema is dry skin. And so that’s very common, just a food allergy, most likely gluten or dairy. And once you eliminate those offending agents that eczema usually goes away. Same thing with dry, it’s usually something like gluten or dairy. Once you eliminate those offending agents, then it tends to go away.
And let me go back a little bit to the E commerce. I don’t want to wander away from it and talk medicine. Because the show is about business. Everyone who wants to do e commerce like for somebody who’s starting? Usually from experience, they tend to gravitate towards something ready like platform that’s ready made like Shopify, for example. Or the likes of Shopify, I think there’s square there are a few more of these ready made platforms where you pay monthly. But I can see that you found your success on Amazon. And so I’m interested to know did you try Shopify first and then go to Amazon? Or do they go side by side? Or how did the journey go the journey to ecommerce.
So we still 100% To this day focus on Amazon. But we have our Shopify store there. And what’s happened is our focus on Amazon. So we send our email list Amazon, or YouTube channel to Amazon, or facebook group to Amazon and accumulatively. All of those groups together make over 120,000 people on that list that’s built over the last seven years. And when we send all that traffic to Amazon, Amazon rewards you by increasing your organic rank. And so for when somebody comes on to Amazon and searches for eyelids pipes, for example, that’s one of the products we sell, we’re going to be on page one for both of our products, because we send all that external traffic to Amazon. And Amazon loves external traffic, because you’re referring them and they’re going to reward you for that referral. They even actually give you a 10% bonus for that referred traffic that you send over there using special links. We also focus on Amazon PPC, or pay per click Amazon advertising, that those two things sending external traffic through our audience, and Amazon Pay Per Click are what helped us build our business. And as a result, people audit just organically came back to our Shopify store. And so our Shopify store grew, and was usually about a quarter of what our Amazon store was. And so at our peak, we were doing close to 5 million a year, 4 million that was on Amazon, 1 million was on Shopify. And so everything grew together, even though we didn’t pay attention to trying to make sales on Shopify, it still happened organically as a result. And we did that through just serving our audience with articles around problems that our products were would solve, getting them on an email list, and then sending them to Amazon to boost our keyword rankings. And then that whole cycle keeps continuing as you push more and more traffic to it.
So Amazon became like the top of the funnel like you want to, this is the centralized spot where everything else comes to.
Yeah, so a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs, they have this struggle constantly of like, do I send them to my website? Who do I send them to Amazon, we decided consciously first, to just send it all to Amazon and just see what happens. And a lot of people are scared of Amazon because Amazon can suspend your product. You don’t control the platform. It’s Amazon’s customer, Amazon’s customer, not yours, yes. But what we found is that when we push more traffic, that way, we shot up in the rankings, made more sales, and then inside the packaging or on the box, you can then give them an offer to get them back onto your website. So our offer is scan this QR code, it sends them to a website. And we give them seven free eyelid wipes as a result of putting in their email address. And so then we increase our email list, we send them seven free eyelid wipes. But a key part of that is when they put their email address in, it sends them an email, and they actually have to respond to that email. So then your email gets put into a safe list for them. Because they’re responding and replying to your emails
is when they’ll go to spam. After that you got to top of
funnel Amazon traffic, get them over to your website with a free gift. That’s just a no brainer for them to offer. And then get them to reply to that email. And then it’s kind of game over from there you have their information, you’ve already got their product or product in their hand, you’re then getting them another product in your hand. And then I always sell consumables, so then they’ll gonna buy over and over again. But the key thing with consumables is it better be a good product.
Of course, yeah. You don’t want them using it once and then never using it again.
Well, I’ll give you an example we have. So I also own an agency that helps people build this whole funnel with Amazon PPC, with blogs and everything. And one of our clients has a product that she really wants to push. And it’s got two and a half stars on Amazon. And so my wife and I ordered it to really test it out. And it’s a gummy vitamin and it tastes straight like fish tastes like fish oil. Oh, and all the reviews are terrible. I tasted it and I couldn’t, I couldn’t even swallow, it was so bad. And she needs to fix that because it’s not never going to work. No matter how much you push traffic. It’s not a great product. And especially if it doesn’t taste good, it’s never going to get the traffic or the sales that that you want it to get.
I love this spin on SEO because like not many people are aware that you can. I mean, we all know that you can steal stuff on Amazon. But how many of us have tried it? I think maybe less than 10%. And people are scared for different reasons. You’ve mentioned some of them. Some of the reasons that people that scare people is that Amazon can delist your product or take it offline. And some of the other things is like you don’t have control over the platform itself. But really I mean if you’re using Shopify you don’t have control over Shopify or there is not it’s not like building your website for example with something like WordPress and WooCommerce where you own every aspect and you can test functionality you can develop new things and and whatever but the main thing is is that most people don’t know how Amazon work and I think also many people don’t know how much like with Amazon charges you like I’ve heard things that probably they’re not true like they take 25% or I don’t think is it that high? The Amazon commission
so the Amazon referral fee is 15% if the and then once you use once you if you use them for their FBA centers, their fulfillment by Amazon centers, you’ll pay it pick and pack fee and a shipping fee, on top of that usually ends up being anywhere depending on your product 25 to 35%. But all you got to do is factor that into your margins and make sure that’s factored in. Because once you have that factored in, then you can set your price accordingly. And make sure you can set a higher price, our products are higher profit margin, because we price them a lot higher than our competitors, our main product is $30 for a month supply, and our competitors eight. So it’s a big difference. But we have an audience and we have a in my mind a superior product. And so then we can sell more because we have more advertising dollars behind it.
Yeah, and then there’s another lesson like, you know, you need the advertising dollars, like in your case is clear that you’re getting ROI. For every dollar spent advertising you probably have, I don’t know the number but at least more than $1 return. So it’s profitable. And this is this is the key. Many people tried to do this on their own. I think having a network like Amazon and an environment like Amazon has tried and tested, they have great support in general, even if you’re a seller, like as a buyer, when I buy some something from somebody, not from Amazon directly, and I have an issue. The first thing is I go to Amazon and ask them, hey, what can you guys do, and they either tell me 123, or right, this person will write to that person. And they’re usually very helpful. And it’s good to have this support behind you. We’ve touched upon it that they’re only charged 15% for the referral the rest is using is for using them as your fulfillment center. So I’m assuming they come and pick up the stuff from your warehouse or your house or wherever you know, your stock is. And then they take care of the rest. So it’s pretty much kind of like drop shipping.
Yeah. And so what we do is we have them pick up something from our warehouse. And it’s very reduced shipping rates to get it into Amazon, because they do so much value. And you can even have them pick up from your warehouse in China, or you’re like, yeah, if you make things in China, you can have them do it there. Most of our stuffs made in the United States, and they’ll go pick it up directly from our manufacturer, and send it right into Amazon. And then they distributed across their entire network of whatever it is 50 warehouses that are across the US now or whatever country you’re selling in. Yeah. And therefore you get Prime shipping. And people can get it. I’m in Columbus, Ohio fast. Yeah. And I can get things in four hours now. And it’s just crazy. Because people deliver things to my door at 3am. It’s the most absurd thing. Yeah, that was an Austin before this. And Austin wasn’t that fast, because they only have one warehouse. But Columbus, I think has two. And so I get things in four hours. Now I get things at three in the morning, I get things at midnight, it’s just crazy.
Have you had any shipment come via drone yet?
I don’t think they have that functional yet. But it feels like it’s functional with how fast it is.
It’s amazing. So what’s your kind of the take on if somebody wants to make it on Amazon? What are the steps? I mean, we’ve covered something like I would believe it’s the most important is to have a good product to start with. Right? So let’s everybody thinks the product is a good product. So let’s assume they have it. What’s the kind of like the steps that they should look at if they want to make it on Amazon?
Yeah, so great product number one, like we talked about. Number two, you have to build your audience you have to build, you have to serve a person, the days of discovering a product that will sell well on Amazon are gone. Because if you find a product that is going to sell well, there are Chinese manufacturers that can out price you all day long. And so it doesn’t matter if you can get to the top and sell a bunch because once China comes in, you’re going to lose the pricing or you’re going to lose that margin that you had. So making sure that you build that audience to serve a person, a specific person dry, I separate my my instance for my brand. But then my other business, the agency, we serve Amazon sellers, people that want to sell on Amazon, we teach you exactly how to sell on Amazon. And so once you build that audience up, you can then sell to that audience, send them the external traffic to Amazon, and then really get behind amazon PPC really learning it inside and out. I have a free Amazon PPC course where we teach you exactly how we do Amazon PPC in our agency. And the reason I do that is because like you said earlier in the episode, we teach you how to do everything but then they end up usually hiring you because they don’t want to do it themselves. And so that’s kind of the key thing is learning to build an audience and then learning to sell to that audience and then learning to advertise on Amazon. Those are kind of the three crucial steps and we talked about funnel traffic. The next step after that is Google ads. So we do a lot with Google ads, and sending that traffic to Amazon. And we do that across a bunch of accounts too. And we see it time and time again, when you send external traffic via audience, email lists, Google ads, Facebook ads, we see rankings increase as a result, because the higher you ranked on the page on Amazon, the more sales you’re going to make. It’s just, it’s that simple. And so the faster you can get to that page one, the more the better you’re going to be. And so just learning how to get to page one is so crucial. And it’s doing those things, PPC, great product, external traffic, Google ads and external traffic to it, as well
as the seller on Amazon. Usually, when somebody buys, and if Amazon is your fulfillment center, D, you don’t get a lot of information about the
buyer, right? You get zero information on them.
So you have to build your list. So you mentioned something earlier, but I want to go over it again. Because I think it might have been overlooked. When people are listening to the episode, you send them the opt in on the product itself. So you’re building your list from buyers like real buyers, they already purchased the product.
Yep. So Correct. That’s one way. And so that’s one of the biggest ways that you can build your list. That’s called post purchase marketing. And so after they purchase, you’re marketing to them over because the hardest sale is that first sale, the easiest sale is selling to them again, and again. And again. It’s also the cheapest sales as well. So your profit really comes on the back end of making that first sale. And that’s where a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong is they don’t focus on that post purchase marketing aspect. But that’s where the profit comes. So we can advertise more and get more aggressive because we know the lifetime value of our customer. If you don’t know those back end numbers like lifetime value, you’re going to lose. And you need to know that most people just focus on that instant, first sale. Yeah, but I’m willing to lose in that first sale in order because I know my lifetime value. So the second way we get opt ins, is we make blogs around problems that our product solves. So we talked about dry earlier, we make blogs around dry. And we talk about our products in those blogs and how they help with your dry. And then in those blogs, they’ll click over to buy on Amazon, even though I have them on my website, I’m going to have them go over to Amazon, because there’s less resistance there on Amazon to buy on that blog as well,
we’ll have to click in the info. Because last night, so you know who that is.
Yep, so we can get the pixel, you can do a match service or whatever. But we also try to get them to opt in to a free dry book. So we have a book that we wrote around dry called rethinking dry treatment. And we get them give them that for free a digital version of it if they put in their email address. And so that’s another way that we get the opt in. So that’s pre purchase marketing, our pre pre purchase marketing, they haven’t bought yet. And we’re trying to get them to buy either on Amazon, or on our website after they’ve opted in.
I like that we I mean, I’ve been a web designer, I would usually I would usually tell people bring everyone to your own website, because you want to, you want that traffic. And you want them to get interested you want them to engage and stuff like that. But to be honest, most small businesses, they don’t have a big budget to have a website that will have different funnels and different things to download and, you know, different paths as per se for the user to take. And it will be very hard for them to get that engagement up and running. Unless they’re willing to spend a sizable amount of cash on a monthly basis for a certain amount of time to just get you know, the traffic is not only to get the traffic to come but to get the traffic to convert. And it’s harder. I think you just mentioned it like right now. There’s less resistance once they go to Amazon because it’s eat like once you’re there, you know you’re buying like or you’re at least looking to buy. There’s I’ve never seen that happen before. Make Amazon the thing the
the episode on Amazon, if you pull out your phone and look at the Amazon app, there’s click now for one, one click purchasing, and they have their information, one click it sent to them. Now something that I want to really focus on is the blog posts that we’re making are not product specific blog posts. They’re around problems. When you focus around the problem instead of the product. Your clicks are a lot less expensive. There’s a blog that we wrote, wrote that gets one cent clicks to it because it’s around the problem and nobody is advertising around problems. Everybody is advertising around products. So, again, the problem being dry, the product being artificial tears. So those are two examples, artificial tears will probably be a $5. Click dry is probably like a 30 cent click so much less expensive. And you’re warming them up with the information on the page. And once they’re warmed up to buy, sell them on Amazon.
I love that idea. And I love the fact that you’re marrying the PPC on Google with PPC on Amazon. Yeah. And we’re getting traffic from two places or more. And at the same time, you’re getting to rank higher on Amazon, as well as on Google at the same time.
Now, something that worked incredibly well, even to add another layer to this, like, you can just do this, and it’s simple. And it’s not hard to set up. But if you want to add another layer, this was kind of killed by the updated iOS update that killed the Facebook pixel. Facebook pixel still works a little bit when they’ve landed on a website, or on a blog article about dry, I will then do a Facebook ad for the product that was mentioned in that blog article. And for people that have visited that blog article, so then they’ll get a Facebook ad or the product they just saw on an article when they’re scrolling their Facebook feed. And again, that will go over to Amazon to buy as well.
I love that. So before we go, let me sum it up again. Great product. Build your audience. What was number three? Drivers? PPC,
yeah, Amazon PPC. So in house PPC, then external PPC. So Google ads, Facebook if you want to, but Google ads is one of the easiest ones,
and take care of the post purchase marketing because that’s the easier sale. And you know, your your cost for PPC is much less when you’re doing selling to somebody who’s already purchased from you. And yeah, of course, look after customer service like, Yeah, we don’t have to mention that. But I feel sometimes we need to.
Yeah, I mean, that’s that’s, that’s in a nutshell. A lot of us overcomplicate business, and you don’t have to you can simplify it. And the thing is, this is worked for my ecommerce business, but it’s also worked for my agency. We have a Facebook group, where we put out Facebook Lives that talk about what we’re doing in the agency, and how little over the shoulder over the shoulder shows that you can actually see what I’m doing. We teach you how to do Amazon PPC, we build our email lists as a result. And we just provide value. And as a role result, people hire us. Same thing we teach you what dri is, we show you how to help it. And then we sell you the result of the product. And so I’ve done it in an agency market, and I’ve done it in product physical products market. So it works for really any market. It’s all about service and just serving somebody, once you serve them, they’ll buy back from you.
Perfect. And if people want to get in touch with you, where do you want them to go? The agency or Amazon?
Yeah, so if you have dry our websites, I love the sun.com Ey e love the sun.com. And then if you’re interested if you’re a brand owner and interested in our Amazon services, it’s profitable. pineapple.com. So profitable pineapple.com. And then if you want to just engage with us, our Facebook group is called Amazon PPC pros. And so Amazon PPC pros, that’s the easiest way to get a hold of me, you can just send me a message on Facebook from that group.
I’ll post these links below the podcast episode anyway. And why pineapple?
Why pineapple because So long story short, I was at a conference and we hadn’t had a name yet. And out of the 1000s of vendors and exhibitors that were at this conference, I remembered one. And that was design pickle. And they had a pickle dancing outside their booth handing out pickles. I was like, this is brilliant. What should we do? And we sent a survey out to our audience and they picked a profitable pineapple.
Okay, that’s interesting. Something that sticks in your mind.
Exactly in a space that everybody’s about scale and having these like robust, intense names. We wanted to make it more fun and then people remember us because they just know me as the pineapple guy. And I wear wear this hat to all the conferences so people know me with this hat on
fine Apple guy. Like the internet guy was born out of people not being able to remember my first name. It’s like what was his name again? That internet guy.
You have a pretty easy first name, I thought.
Yeah, you have to roll the hours after a few drinks. It becomes easy.
Okay, got it.
Thank you very much for for being here with me today. Really appreciate your time. And I’ve had a lot of fun. I appreciate you having me on. Hi everyone. And before you go Thank you for being here. And just a quick reminder that the links will be posted below this episode. And I wanted to also remind you that if you or someone you know have been thinking about e commerce, but you’re not sure where to start, or specifically, you think it’s too much of a technical project, and you’re not a techie, and you want to discuss options with somebody, like some of the examples that I get is from people who are not sure whether they should be using Shopify or WooCommerce, or square or something else. And what’s the difference? What are the pros and cons? And you know, how big of a, of an ecommerce project you have in mind and is it complicated? Can you start now? Do you have to start later? Do you have to hire anyone? There are many questions so for for these questions. I’m offering complimentary half an hour zoom consultation that you can book just by heading to human talents.ca that human talents one word.ca/booking I’ll be happy to serve you and I’ll be happy to you know, give you a hand in in help you understanding where to start with ecommerce. Thank you and see you
