#158 – A Marketing and Webinar Expert Offers Tips on Positioning Your Brand on Amazon

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton welcomes Jason Fladlien. Known as the “100 Million Dollar Webinar Man,” he’s a marketing expert who’s known for developing webinars for Amazon (and many other fields).  

Jason got his start writing articles for the e-commerce space. He soon pivoted to take full advantage of the digital world and saw webinars on the horizon. He knew that as soon as the internet caught up with the concept, it would take off.

He began selling on Amazon in 2005. Now, he’s responsible for the education and training of many of the top e-commerce speakers.

Listen in to hear about positioning your brand, how to give Amazon “off ramps” and many other trending tips.

In episode 158 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss:

• 02:40 – A Small-Town Iowa Boy
• 04:00 – Starting with Music but Marketing Soon Took Over
• 06:45 – An Early Apple Computer Opened Up a Door
• 09:00 – Painting Houses and Looking for a Way Back into E-Commerce
• 11:30 – Understanding “Positioning”
• 14:00 – Finding One Solution Situations 
• 17:45 – Solving Many Problems at Once 
• 23:00 – Giving Amazon “Off Ramps”
• 24:00 – Understanding Amazon’s Style Guides
• 27:00 – Making an Emotional Connection with Buyers 
• 31:00 – Teaching Customers what Good Reviews Look Like
• 35:00 – Making 9.8 Million with a Webinar in Eight Days 
• 37:00 – Jason’s 30 Second Tip 
• 38:05 – How to Contact Jason

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, we’ve got someone who’s known to be one of the premiere pitchman of this generation. Having generated over a hundred million dollars on webinars. One time, almost $10 million in eight days on just one alone. He’s been also selling on Amazon since before FBA even existed. And he’s here to share his unique knowledge and insights with us. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody. And welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am 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 eCommerce world. And with us today, we have got Jason. Jason, how’s it going?

Jason Fladlien: Bradley. I’m pumped up. Let’s go, baby!

Bradley Sutton: All right. Now couple things. This is like, I probably know very little about your Amazon experience. Like Gulsen had set this up for the podcast and I was like, “What? Jason actually sells on Amazon?” I didn’t even know he dealt with Amazon. Now, one thing right off the bat, we were just talking, setting up our audio a few minutes ago. This is kind of weird for me because I went through your entire webinar course. I forgot what it was called but since I became the main person doing the webinars for Helium 10, Manny and Gui they’re like, “All right, Bradley, we want you to take this training here on how to present yourself on webinars”. And it was you and it was a long course. So what I actually did was I had you on like maybe 1.5x or 1.75x speed. So you don’t sound like you, because I’m used to like hearing you sound kind of like a chipmunk for hours and hours. Yeah. So I’m like, “Wait a minute. That’s not Jason, are you sure? Are we sure this is Jason?” We don’t have video here. I’m not sure– so I’m assuming this is you because you don’t sound like the Jason that I know from your chipmunk voice from before.

Bradley Sutton: But anyways, we’re not here to– we’ll talk a little bit about the webinars, but our main thing is to talk about Amazon here for our listeners. Before we get into your personal experience with Amazon, I want to just take it back for the audience to get to know you and for me to get to know you since I know nothing about you, but growing up, I know right before the call, you said you’re in Southern California. Now, is this where you’re from?

Jason Fladlien: No, the opposite. Right? I grew up in a little small town in Iowa called Muscatine, Iowa. Totally midwestern to the core even to this day and I moved out here about five years ago. I always think I’m like a small town, Iowa boy.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Now, growing up as a small town, Iowa boy, what did you envision yourself when you quote, unquote grew being a fireman, doctor, entrepreneur, what?

Jason Fladlien: Rapper, man.

Bradley Sutton: I love it. Did you ever, like, did you like take start taking music classes in school or to learn about the music industry at all?

Jason Fladlien: I started rapping when I was like eight years old and I’d love to perform in front of audiences and crowds. And really, music is the whole catalyst of how I got into the business of being an internet marketer, because I first started producing my own music, put my own album out and then try to sell it and become successful as a musician, utterly fail Bradley. And so I started figuring out what can I do to fix this? And then I stumbled upon business and marketing. And then pretty soon I was like, “Man, this marketing stuff is more interesting to me than the music was”. And the music used to be the most interesting thing to me. And so I was like, “All right, I’m going to do this marketing stuff to finance my music career”. But soon it became what’s music career? I just want to do marketing. And that’s really how I got into the business.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. Interesting. I mean I’m assuming throughout even high school, you were still doing your rapping on the side. Do you do talent shows and things like that?

Jason Fladlien: I really kind of just screwed around back then. I wasn’t really focused. And then when I became about 21 years old, I was like, “Let’s do this seriously”. And I would play any gig that would pay me money and I would try to get out there in any way, shape or form possible. Like I’ve– I remember playing kids 16 birthday parties, I remember doing battle of the bands, I remember doing pro-wrestling shows where I would rap in the middle of the ring during intermission. My favorite ever deal was when I played a hog farm. I played on the back of a flatbed truck. And to this day, probably the greatest show I ever did. It was a girl’s high school graduation party and yeah, that’s how I hustled, man. I just tried whatever I could to get out there in fine crowds and sell product, which back home–

Bradley Sutton: Tell me there’s a video footage of the hog show.

Jason Fladlien: There is not, there’s only one picture I have and I’m in a pink shirt. It says “flat” on the back of it and it’s me in front of a crowd holding it up and there’s all these Christmas lights. It’s pretty cool.

Bradley Sutton: That’s pretty cool. Then as you’re doing this, it sounds like you kind of saw that, “Hey, talent is important, but it also seems like just being able to network and earn market and get your name out there is a big piece of the game” is that when you started looking into, how to market yourself or how did that process?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, I had always had a very strong digital background, I guess you could say cause my dad was a very lowly paid high school teacher with the least amount of degree possible. We got paid the least amount of money, but by just happenstance, he was able to take home an Apple II computer, which there’s no way shape or form that we could afford that. And I was three years old and I was on that computer. Like kids today are on iPads, but back then there was no graphic user interfaces and there was no mice and everything was a command prompt to boot it up. I’ve been on a computer first-generation since I was three years old and I became fascinated like when the internet hit and became more of a mainstream thing. I worked one summer painting houses when I was 13 years old to save up money, to buy an old 286 computer.

Jason Fladlien: And I got the internet, which was like a 14.4 K modem internet and I was so fascinated by it. I learned how to program back then and write code and build websites when I was 14, like 1997. I have the strong digital background and all the music we produced was done digitally as well. And the internet was really fascinating for me and I liked marketing. It was natural for me to want to apply marketing in the digital world. And really what led to it is my frustration with marketing entertainment. Entertainment is very hard to know if people will like it or not, when they will like it, when they won’t like it. Like you look at TikTok and you’re like, “How was that thing ever popular?” and then television shows and movies like it is such a low hit-rate of success. The fickle desires of the, of the public on entertainment. And that’s what I really got into let’s sell solutions or very specific things that people want to buy, which is one of the reasons I love Amazon. You know, they type in whatever Bluetooth speaker, it’s not a shock then that they want to buy a Bluetooth speaker or like online. If somebody says, how to build a website, it’s not a shock that they want to learn how to build a website, but when it comes to entertainment, do I want to be entertained by music or some other movie art, whatever. It’s almost inexplicable, what people will buy, what they won’t buy. I had to learn the hard way marketing what I felt to this day is still the hardest product to market to get into where I’m at, which is selling solutions to problems and selling products where people are searching specifically for those types of products.

Bradley Sutton: I love that because that applies to both kind of like your two passions be it Amazon, that’s what Amazon sellers need to do or just in general, like giving solutions to problems is how people should look at things I feel. Instead of just trying to say, “Hey, I’m trying to make a new shiny object”. It’s like, “Well, what good is that shiny object? If it doesn’t solve anything?” What was your first like complete pivot then from the music industry to like, “Okay, Hey, you’re actually making money in the business”.

Jason Fladlien: I lost every dollar I had to the music industry and I was so broke. It wasn’t even funny. I went back to work as a day job painting houses cause that’s what I always knew. And I would– I was like, “Okay, I gotta get out of this, make some money to get back into the game of music”. I started doing different various internet marketing activities in between the very long, 10 to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week that I was in there painting houses for this crew that I worked for. And the thing that actually made me money at the end of the day was article writing. I started writing articles for other marketers, this was back in 2007. When article marketing was huge because like Google had this love affair with easy and articles. You could put an article in there, get a lot of traffic. They would pay me money to write articles for them. And the first week I started doing that, I started making some decent money, like three or four times as much money per hour as I made when I was painting houses. Within seven days I was able to not do the day job anymore, focus on that and then I just wrote articles for the next six months and made some good money. But that was when I was like, “Okay, I got to figure out a way to not drive myself nuts, just writing article after article after article.” So I published a little guide on how I was able to write articles really fast, called how to write an article in seven minutes or less and I took that little guide. I sold it for four bucks as an info product, just a PDF on the warrior forum, which back then you could take out $20 ads in their classified ad section.

Jason Fladlien: And I put a little $20 ad out there. I said, “Listen, I got this thing. I think it can cut your article, writing time in half. I’m only asking four bucks for it. If you like to keep it, if not, I’ll give you your money back, buy it.” And this was a forum post. This wasn’t like a sales page or anything and people bought it and they went crazy over it. And like two weeks later I’d made $8,000 selling this little slang and this little $4 ebook. And that’s what I was like, “Oh my God. If I can just find very specific, very granular problems to solve and give very specific, very granular solutions to them, I can do pretty well.” And this was like a six page ebook, Bradley. This wasn’t anything intense. I’m like, you want to run an article, step one, open this site, step two, find your main point here. Step three, follow this template. Step four, do this step. I do this. It didn’t take a lot of time. Right? I’m like, that’s all I got to do for the rest of my life.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. Now just really quick. I mean, we’re, we’re kind of jumping ahead, but how would you tell somebody that, that mentality of how you took that problem that actually can be applied to physical products too? Like how to decide what direction you’re going to go to on Amazon. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, absolutely. So the number one thing that has made me successful in this business is understanding a marketing concept called “positioning”. And it’s probably the least understood yet most powerful concept in marketing if you get it. So I’ll give you an example. In the early days on Amazon, we would pick products simply based upon what the main image looked like. Everybody was red, we chose blue, right? I mean, that sounds stupid, obvious and simple, but that’s one of the ways that we were able to position our product to stand out. We might be selling the exact same whatever as everybody else, but our thumbnail was blue and everybody else’s was red. I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s the way it was another way that we would position Amazon products is like, say we’re selling kitchen products. We sold a lot of kitchen products and we would talk customers back then nowadays it’s a little stricter, but back then, we’re saying, Hey, after you buy your product, we want to trade recipes with you.

Jason Fladlien: We’re going to give you grandma’s secret apple pie recipe. We were taking a concept of positioning in Amazon where everybody thinks it’s some big faceless, gigantic multinational corporations that are selling product to them. And we made it like you and I hanging out in the morning before our kids go to little league together in the evening and we see each other at PTA meetings. We positioned our products that way, and that helped customers make purchasing decisions in a world where most of the products look the same on Amazon. That’s one of the concepts I learned later on from initially I discovered the positioning is if I teach people this one very specific article marketing technique, I didn’t tell him where to post the articles. I didn’t tell him how to monetize the articles. I didn’t tell him how to find the topics to articles even. I just gave him the example of how to write faster. I’m like that micro positioning of going very specific on a situation was powerful. You need leverage to be successful in any online business and that’s what we always look for. Be it Amazon, or be it on webinars, or be it with whatever space we want to make money online is where’s the leverage? What position can we take? So we can get the most amount of sales and have the most amount of impact.

Bradley Sutton: I like that. Going back in time again to–“Hey, I’m onto something here. So $8,000 of this thing that it took me hardly that long to put together because there’s an actual need.” What was your next step after that then?

Jason Fladlien: Just to repeat the process. I started hunting and looking for these, what I call one problem, one solution, one sitting opportunities, meaning I could find one very specific problem. I only had to offer one solution to it and I could create the product in one city. And this was accidental how great this shaped my marketing career cause I would just hunt high and low for one singular specific complaint. And then I wouldn’t know anything about it that morning, but by that night I would have a solution. What really blew the doors open for me is one of the, like the 10th product I created was how to set up a membership site in less than seven minutes or no, this one was six minutes. See, this is the innovation, not seven with six, right? How to set up– in less than six minutes using completely free software. And it was actually six minutes and 22 seconds cause I timed it. That was my headline. So I discovered how to do something specific in a very specific time without or with something else. In this case, how to set up a fully functional password protected membership site in six minutes and 22 seconds using completely free software, which nobody could figure out back then. I woke up one day, saw an opportunity by the time I went to bed that night, I had figured it out. I was selling the product the next day and that thing really put me on the map, but what was cool was each time I mastered one little specific technique, I started to be able to kind of take something from this past technique I mastered and stitch it together with this other thing over here that I mastered.

Jason Fladlien: And I learned so much about so many different things on the internet that it was just became really powerful. Like when I saw webinars becoming a thing, cause webinars kind of existed, but this freaking internet speed was too slow for them and the companies that were creating the technology were too dumb. And so it was just not feasible and then it was, and I was able to hop on that first and be one of the first people to do that. And I had all these different skills that I could bring to the table from these products I created and I just kept chugging along. Like when Facebook first launched its ads, we were running some of the first ads. And when Kindle first opened up its store on how to publish Kindle books, we were publishing some of the first because Bradley, that was incentivized, I would learn it and then I would document it and teach it. I dig the gold and then I would sell somebody the treasure map and the shovel to also dig the gold.

Bradley Sutton: I like it. Now, this obviously was a number of years ago? And you use what you said, the warrior forum and you could, pay 20 bucks to put an advertisement, but let’s just say fast forward, maybe somebody is not going to become a huge tycoon, but maybe there’s somebody who wants to get started on Amazon, but they’re like, Hey, they need to get some capital. Like, are there any kind of micro ways kind of like how you started that people nowadays can just without much investment at all, like you. Like, I don’t think it really, costs a thousand dollars for you to make your paper on how to do that in six minutes and 22 seconds or whatever, but are there ways in 2020 that somebody could do something similar to help get that initial capital to do something else or what their passion might be, be it Amazon or something else

Jason Fladlien: Totally is right. And two things to that. First of all, I believe that it’s better to just come up with the capital. There’s a lot of reasons why I think Amazon is so effective as an opportunity for people to build an online business. And one of those is because of the barrier to entry. It’s not franchise level barrier of entry where you need a lot of money and you need a vetting process, but it’s not like anybody with a pulse level of barrier of entry, which is what a lot of internet marketing stuff is get started with nothing down, get started for free blah, blah, blah. Right? You’re going to pay something. You’ve got to pay time and or money, but usually both time and money. And usually the less money you spend up front, the more time you’ll spend up front to me, I’d rather spend money than spend time and that was true even when I was a less commercially successful than I am today. But I will tell you, here’s a thing that I look for the one solution that could solve many problems. And what I would do is I would start pitching myself to Amazon brands and being like, listen, I’m eager, I’m hungry. I don’t know much, but what I don’t know, I’ll make up for just by being extra, extra gung ho to help your brand. I can cut my teeth in this business and I want to make some money by making you more money. And then once I do that, then we’re both be happy. And then that’s when that person could potentially grab revenue. There’s a million opportunities on Amazon to enhance somebody’s existing brand that allow you to get experience in the Amazon space and the Amazon opportunity.

Jason Fladlien: And then you can reinvest that when you make the money into your own brands potentially, right? There’s so many ways to make money on Amazon. It’s just insane, which is why I like to play in Amazon because you don’t have to necessarily be better. You just have to be, and there’s so much more opportunity that can come your way, but I would always play in the arena that I want to cut my teeth in no matter what. So that way, not only could I make money potentially, but I have, I make experience, which will make me money. And so that’s where I would start looking at immediately is let me play within the system that I want to eventually build my own business and brand out of.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. All right, now I definitely want to come back to the webinar thing because I’ve heard some crazy facts and figures that I want to confirm with you, nine figures generated on webinars and things like that. I definitely want to come to that. Let’s go back to Amazon really quick. When did you discover the Amazon opportunity?

Jason Fladlien: Here’s the funniest thing I was selling on Amazon before FBA stood for Fulfillment by Amazon. And that was because I was putting my music on Amazon. This was back in 2004, 2005, some ancient, dinosaur time on the internet. I’d always had as good understanding of Amazon and even when Kindle first came out, I had understood it. But in the end of 2012, by pure accident almost, we had this business where we were sell info products and software, mostly software to customers. And we did a lot of affiliate marketing too, because we had a big audience and all of the sudden, just it was December. We’re about to go on vacation. I did something I never did before, which is really just put an offer in front of my audience without vetting it. Right? And this thing just sold unbelievably well and nothing made sense cause it was about how to sell physical products on Amazon. And we’re like, “What?!” My business partner and I were like, “Huh, how did this happen?” I mean, it didn’t– none of it made sense, but we didn’t care. We just knew this is where the demand was. So when 2013 rolled around and the same product was now going to become a launch and they were going to do it in a big way. We have like what I like to call insider information. We knew the market was hot and ravenous and excited about it. And so we took this position where, when we first pitched the opportunity as an affiliate, we said, we’re going to do this alongside you. We’ve never done this before. In fact, we’re pausing an already seven figure, multi-seven figure business or pausing of that, that we know could just continue to make money, to invest in this new thing and we’re going to document it every step along the way. And so we sold the heck out of that course more than anybody else and now all of a sudden we’re obligated to follow through. We’ve got to figure this Amazon stuff out ourselves. We can’t just be an affiliate and that’s when we got in the Amazon in 2013 in March, we started selling product on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton: I have found that I have to, you know, stay current, you know, like I just wrote a blog last week about some something new on Amazon that just popped up before bundling. You know, I would never would have known about that if I wasn’t just in the game every day. Despite my day job being Helium 10, I’m running a side businesses to, for the company or for other people just not to make profit, I’m not making money on it, but I just need to like see what’s going on. That’s really cool that you did that. There’s some people out there in the educational space in Amazon or in any educational space, they’re teaching stuff based on either what they read in a book or what they did five years ago. But unless you’re in the game right now you can’t really, you shouldn’t really be teaching anybody now because of all that experience you’ve had with your own Amazon business, doing these one-on-one calls and just seeing what’s out there. What are some of the commonalities you have seen as far as first of all, what the biggest opportunity for Amazon sellers are like something that most of the people you’ve talked to or you’re seeing, they’re like not doing it and they totally should be doing it.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah. I think we overestimate these days, how much sales come from search results on Amazon? And I can’t even quantify this. I still can’t figure this out. I have no idea half the time where our sales are coming from on Amazon. And our customers too, we try to figure this out and we can’t, we just start our hands and be like, we’re getting sales somehow some way, but we don’t know exactly what or how. So, what we’ve discovered is how do we influence that, which we can’t kind of account for. And we have, I call this the shock and awe approach. And if you heard it from somebody else, I guarantee you, they co-opted that for me originally, because we used to say shock and awe Amazon. So if you’re in all the different places you can possibly be in feeding Amazon as much data as you can possibly feed Amazon. Then it seems like if all else is equal, Amazon’s like I can send my traffic to your listing or somebody else’s listing. They tend to send them to your listing and what we tend to do is we try to give Amazon as many off-ramps. If you think of Amazon as a highway, we want as many off-ramps from that highway to lead to our listings as humanly possible and we will do anything and everything that we can to influence that so I want to know every possible program that my Amazon product can be listed under. I want to make sure that I have some sort of influence possibly over Amazon’s choice, even if it’s a super obscure Amazon’s choice badge that I get, I want to be in the right different categories and make sure that the way that the categories are categorized, make sense and maybe possibly get a best seller badge too. Because a huge vote of confidence. And honor, if I can influence mover and shaker status, then I want to try to do that. I definitely want to be in the top 100 of whatever subcategory I am and try to be strategic about that if possible. Now every category has its own little unique things, right? And so I always recommend clients and they don’t seem to do this, which kind of which blows my mind.

Jason Fladlien: But Amazon has these things that they publish for free that you can find that nobody seems to read and I read all of them, they’re called Style Guides, right? And so the different style guides that Amazon has are very different these days than what they used to be. And they will say, do this, don’t do this, do this, don’t do that and they will give me more insight into specific category. I always read my specific category that I’m in the style guide before. I mean any new product, but I also read every other style guide. I have learned more about being in this industry or this category from reading other style guides cause Amazon gives you the peek under the hood of this is what we are interested in and this is what we’re not interested in. And so they will tell you certain things like, you know, item type keywords and refinement type searches. And I can’t justify rather than any of those make any money on their own. If I can just get the most refinement possibilities correctly, configured as possible for Amazon. But it seems like the more I comply with all things, Amazon, the more likely I’m able to make unaccountable sales so I do it.

Bradley Sutton: I like that. It doesn’t take 17 hours to read a style guide it’s pretty easy and then you can get some insights into making Amazon happy making the algorithm happy or doing what they want, that that could help you out.

Jason Fladlien: And Bradley, most people have never read a single style guide from cover to cover on Amazon in the dang category that they’re in. Right?

Bradley Sutton: Yup. So important. That’s awesome. I love that. Now one thing that I’ve always tried to teach, you know, when I do videos and stuff, because on the flip side, like you’re talking about is kind of like making Amazon happy. And I tell everybody that is important. You’ve got to be compliant with what the category wants about your length of title and do’s and don’ts, and you’ve got to send what I call relevancy signals to Amazon so that they’ll even index you. And so that if you get action on a keyword, you get some, some love and yes, you’ve got to be happy for– make Amazon happy from Amazon sellers. When I tell sellers too, it’s like sometimes we get so much in this mindset of only just worried about the algorithm and making Amazon happy that we forget about who we’re trying to sell to. And it’s a customer. And like, what I teach is like, Hey guys, you’ve got to be able to make an emotional connection within your listing to these buyers who don’t know your brand from anybody else. They have no loyalty to you at all. You like have a very small window to get their attention and then make them just stop in there in their browsing tracks and say, “Wait a minute, this is interesting.” One thing that I teach is like, “Hey, it’s really important to like, for example, using Helium 10 Review Insights to look at where are the common things that people are talking about and the competitor’s listings and, and call those things out.” But you know, beans being so good at understanding a customer avatar mindset, what are some things that you could recommend as far as how somebody can make that emotional connection with their potential buyers in an Amazon listing?

Jason Fladlien: It’s really interesting to Bradley cause we’re in– in most situations we have far more control over the sale than we do on Amazon. Amazon wants to– everybody wants to homogenize the environment and so, and they want everybody to have the same amount of images, same amount of benefits, blah, blah, blah. Right? We don’t have a whole lot of leverage from a copywriting standpoint, unfortunately, cause that’s usually how we beat big brands is just by being more heart to heart with our customers. But there is value in the reviews, the reviews more than anything are going to influence somebody who’s clicked on your listing, who is targeted to your product, but isn’t sure if they should purchase it or not. And so not only should you practice really powerful review hygiene, making sure that you are being represented on your listing as you should be with your reviews, which some people, most people don’t pay any attention to that by the way, which is crazy to me, but whatever.

Jason Fladlien: But the second thing is I always read at least 200 reviews for a product before I ever sell my product that I want to sell. So if I have an idea for a product that I’m like, I know I’m going to sell this product on Amazon, I will read 200 reviews of that product. And how long does that take? Well, how fast do you read? I mean, just do the calculation. If it takes you six hours, it takes you six hours block out a day and there you’re done. And what I actually will do is I’ll print them off and I’ll highlight passages and phrases and then I’ll take those things that I think are powerful and I will then put them into a document. And now I have this. Now, if you throw that document away, I guarantee you you’re still going to be better than anybody else because you’ve absorbed something from the market that nobody else is aware of. And you know, the market’s language, you know what they want, you know, what they don’t want, you know, what they struggle with, you know, what they don’t struggle with. So not only will this help you pick a right product, if you want to position your product to be unique, but it will also tap into what information you should put where, because when people are browsing, there are certain things that you can grab them with that are important to them. Based on the reviews, and the more reviews you read, the more patterns you’ll notice. And over time, the better you’ll understand that when a customer says this, it means that it doesn’t mean the same thing they say oftentimes, right? So there’s a little translation after a while. But when we go in and we understand these types of reviews, everything from the product name of what we call the product to the keywords we go after. All of that is influenced because I have this understanding of really, truly the psychology of that purchaser. And I don’t know, here’s the thing I always think of Bradley, unlike a physical store, you can’t pick these products up, you can’t examine them from multiple angles. You can’t pull over a sales clerk and say, “Hey, listen, I got a couple of questions. Does it come in this size? Or does it come in that size?” Right? That’s the limitation. It’s a significant limitation of the online world and so how do we make up for that and understanding and empowering the customer to have all that information, to make it as if they’re asking and having a conversation with the sales clerk and make it as if they can touch it, feel it, smell it, drop it on their foot, right? That is often the difference between if we are successful or if we’re not successful.

Bradley Sutton: I like it. That’s something very important. You know, some people– it’s still retail, but there’s a lot of things you can and can’t do in brick and mortar as opposed to online. And you have to kind of like keep these things in mind. You don’t want another thing that what you talked about the reviews is something that you can’t just do walk into a store. You know, you’re doing some competitor research. You can’t just look at some products. And then all of a sudden know all of the things that those customers’ products talked about. You know, like you can do that online, like you just said on Amazon. You’ve got to take the time to do that. I like that.

Jason Fladlien: What we do with our customers then is we teach them what a good review looks like. And this is a missing ingredient I think that we give that a lot of people don’t, as we tell our customers, we say, listen, it’s important that you write an honest review of this product, regardless of how you feel about it, because this will help us either make the product better or if the product is exactly right, it will help somebody else make their decision. Here’s what a good review looks like because there’s a problem. Most buyers, they are scared to leave reviews because they go back to the days of grade school where their elementary teachers would force them to write. And most people have a poor associating with– association with writing words on paper or on cyberspace, right? They’re very nervous about that. They’re afraid they’re going to say the wrong thing, or they’re afraid that they’re not, they’re going to agonize over every single word. And most people don’t leave a review unless they’re absolutely pissed off, which is no good. Or if they’re super-duper incentivize, which is usually against terms of service on Amazon. Even if you think you’re being cute and clever, and it’s trying to incentivize them in other ways, you’re probably going to get caught. But even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. The reviews all come across, not as a hundred great reviews, but one review repeated a hundred times. They come across as insincere and inauthentic. And so we actually teach customers what a good review looks like. One of the things we always tell customers, which increases our review rate is this, just capture your initial thoughts. A lot of people aren’t aware of this, but you can go back later in edit your Amazon reviews to continue the story of how you interact with the product as you go along.

Jason Fladlien: And they’re like, “Wow!” So more people– most people won’t give you a review at first, rather because they want to spend more time with the product, which is good for them, but it’s not for you. Now, I will tell you the best reviews I’ve discovered cause I’ve read several thousand reviews on Amazon. The ones that are most favored by customers are the ones that have one or two or three updates where they’re like, this is my favorite review ever. “I got home. I use this once. It was so great. It was fantastic. I love it.” And then updates, seven days later, “Everything I said was true, but it’s even better than I thought it was because no, one’s done this, this and this for me.” Right. And then 30 days later, “Oh, I forgot to add. It’s also, you know, train my dog, how to speak, speak Portuguese.” You know, they’re like, Oh my God, this is the greatest review ever. That’s what we want. We actually want them to leave their initial thoughts and then come back and edit them and so we just, we coached them on what a good review looks like. And as a result, we get more good reviews. Like the worst reviews ever are, the one sentence reviews works as intended. It was great. Loved it. Fantastic. Right? Yeah. I would rather you not leave a review cause it looks like it’s paid for, it looks in authentic. The best reviews are the ones that are like 700 words long. And so we tell customers, we’re like, We love it. If you pour your heart out, you cannot write a review. That’s long enough. I don’t care if it’s a short one or a long one, just write it from the heart and write whatever you feel is coming to you. In fact, it can be very, very liberating to know that you can just write as long as you want to write. And that’s awesome because people don’t think that anybody would read a 700 word review. So they censored their own reviews. And the reality is customers love long reviews and they definitely increased conversion. So there you go.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I love it. That’s great stuff there. I mean kind of teaching them about what you can do on like a lot of people don’t even realize you’re not locked into that review. You can go back and change it. So just even just telling if somebody is using like Helium 10 Follow-Up to automate the review request, well you can just put that instructions in there. Love it. Now, switching back off of Amazon really quick, I want to do some shock and awe really quick about people who don’t understand the power of webinars, but you don’t have to give the actual product or the company or anything, but like, just think back to one of your most successful webinars that you yourself did or you help somebody do and generally what kind of thing it was or service. And then like you know, some crazy figure, like in two hours you guys had X number of signups or X number of revenue generated. Let’s do some shock and awe real quick.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah. So I did $9.8 million off a webinar in eight days. And that was by the way, the fifth time that I had rolled that webinar out, in a three and a half year period. And it just goes to show you is like, you gotta keep asking your people to buy and you got to keep going back and trying to improve it and asking them over and over again. And the more you’re willing to continue to make these incremental improvements, the better off you will be. But yeah, it’s a– I love webinars Bradley because most people can’t do them right. And they’re very hard to do initially until master them and so there’s that barrier of entry again. It’s not clogged up and crowded. And you know, I always live by the saying that life is easy when you live it the hard way and it’s hard when you live it the easy way. I try to make it hard enough at first so it’s worth acquiring the skill. Then I can just coast down the hill on easy street. That’s the power of webinars. But again, at the end of the day, it’s the same as Amazon. We have to position ourselves in a way that helps the customer know that buying with us as a safe bet and on a webinar, it’s a lot of information and then an ridiculous amount of awesome products and bonuses, and perhaps even a better than money back guarantee, which is always in the case when we do these records setting type of webinars, but on Amazon, the specifics might differ. But if you approach it from the perspective of how can I make it easier for my customer to buy than to not buy, that’s going to be your North star, that’s going to help you more than really any tactic, which may be short, lived on Amazon, could ever help you.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I mean, something I definitely learned, from watching your courses, like some people are scared about the pitch, like, “Oh no, we don’t want to come across as pitcher.” Like what I have to make 30 minutes of my webinar a pitch or same thing on Amazon, pricing, I’ve got to be the cheapest price. But if yoi first of all have a valuable product, either for Amazon or a valuable product, you’re giving on a webinar or a service and it’s not BS. I mean, this is like something that legitimately can help people. Hey, don’t feel bad about the pitch. You’re bringing value to them even more than what you’re asking from them to give to you and it’s the same on Amazon. If you have a real quality product that’s better and you feel confident about it. You don’t have to be $9.99, like everybody else, because everybody’s $10.99, you could be $20.99, you know? And I think that’s a–

Jason Fladlien: Yeah higher will price stand out more than a lower price will. So there you go. There’s positioning for you right there. I’d rather be higher and stand out.

Bradley Sutton: We’re coming to the part of the, shall we call it that TST 30-second tip. So you’ve been giving us lots of, strategies for both things, throughout this episode. But what is something maybe that you can say in 30 seconds or less, that is really valuable, really actionable. It could be about webinars could be about Amazon, whatever you want. It could be about rapping. I don’t know. Go ahead.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah. The more product you have on Amazon, the more profits you’re likely to make, most of your products will not do very well, but you need a lot of products to find the one or two or three that are breaking out. So instead of picking the perfect product, put a lot of product out there and then back the ones that just somehow break out,

Bradley Sutton: Love it, All right. Now we’ve already gone like more time than I think of any recent episode I had just cause there’s so much cool things you have to say, but if somebody wants to find out more about your coaching on Amazon or, or how you have that course that I took and you know about the webinars, because I think we peaked people’s interest about that $9.8 million in eight days. That’s kind of, it might be interesting in a couple people, but how can they find you on the interwebs?

Jason Fladlien: Yeah. The best thing to do is go to Amazon, ha get it right. Go to Amazon and just type my name. And there’s a book there called “One to Many” by Jason Fladlien that documents my webinar process. But I believe if you read it, you really understand the psychology of marketing and positioning and persuasion, which is helpful in any business that you ever want to be in. And the good news of all is unlike my other courses, this book is the hardest thing I ever created and it’s also the cheapest thing I sell. So figure that one out. Right?

Bradley Sutton: That’s awesome. Now Jason, you know, something you and I– I’m pretty protective about how I run the Helium 10 webinars now, but like with absolute savant on it, you and I need to collaborate on one of these future ones. Let’s see how you can, like maybe up my own game. I’ve tried to emulate you as well as I can. And I’m pretty proud about what we do with the webinars. And we know we have, sometime a few thousand people in the room and stuff, but maybe we can collaborate on one of these future webinars. Awesome. Awesome. All right, Jason, we’ll touch base with you maybe in a year or so. And see what new and amazing things, or if you’ve come out with your next album or your comeback album. So we’ll talk to you maybe in 2021.

Jason Fladlien: Excellent. Look forward to it. Bradley.