being profitable on Amazon in 2024 has become incredibly tough and there's a lot of mistakes people commonly make Amazon is a lot harder now and it only takes one or two mistakes to seriously hurt your business in this video we're going to cover the five top deadly mistakes that people are making right now on Amazon and exactly step by- step how to avoid all of these mistakes these are mistakes that we have personally made and we've lost tens of thousands of dollars because of these mistakes I'm joined by my good friend an Amazon expert James lie he's been selling on Amazon for the last 12 years he's been a mentor to people like me and Travis marzion and he consults a lot of Trivium clients and guys make sure to pay attention to each and every mistake because each of these mistakes has cost me personally a lot of money James thank you for coming man let's talk about the first deadly mistake Amazon PPC the first Amazon PPC mistake that people make is not monitoring their campaigns closely enough a common behavioral pattern that customers make is that they'll create campaigns on a Friday and then they'll let it run and not check in on it until Monday or Tuesday or sometimes they just forget about it entirely and they realize they're just blowing through their budget and they could very quickly saved a ton of money by adding keywords to their negatives or turning things on and off yeah I've been a victim of that too because a lot of times when I've created campaigns on Friday I don't pay attention to them because I'm not working Saturday and Sunday and a lot of times they'll overspend when I could have just monitored it and if something's overspending just added as a negative yeah definitely super important to monitor your campaigns closely so as soon as you create them monitor them every day until you dial them in amazing and what are some other mistakes people are making in Amazon PPC okay so another mistake for Amazon PPC that people make is not immediately adding negative keywords when they create their campaigns so often times you'll have a product that might have a similar keyword in it to another product that's completely unrelated and so if you have a phrase match when people search for a particular keyword that's related to your product other keywords for products unrelated to yours will show up as well and if you're aware of that from the beginning as soon as you create the campaign you can add those to the negatives yeah so for example this happened to me where I have an electrolyte powder and then there was this keyword amino acid hydration people were looking for amino acids that had hydration in them but that was not my product my product was a strict you know hydration powder so I took amino acid added as a negative phrase and I never showed up for anything that has amino acid cuz my product doesn't even have Amino assets and if you're having a hard time figuring out if there are other products that have these kind of keywords that will show up when you don't want to spend money on them you can just very quickly add or create a auto campaign and then monitor that really closely and you'll see see all the other keywords that your product is showing up for and since we're on the topic of adding negatives here's a very quick and easy way for you guys to audit your campaign so what I like to do is I go into the targeting Tab and in the targeting tab I'll put some criteria so orders equal zero and then I'll sort by spend and I can start seeing the largest to smallest amount of spend probably do this for like last 30 days and any keyword that has spent you know 50 to 75% of my product sale price so if I have a $30 product anything that spent 15 to you know $225 with no sales I'm I'm going to go in either lower the bid or pause that keyword cuz it's just not converting now I also do another filter where I'll do the AOS is let's say greater than 80% and sales are two or less so like one or two orders aost is high what's the point of having those keywords let me lower the bids or again pause them and I'll do the exact same thing in the search term report so download the search term report put those filters in there and then in this case add them as negatives right especially in Auto Brad and phrase CU you can add negatives so I'd rather add the negatives first and then later on op the bit let's also talk about outlier keywords okay this is a really important one um and I think a lot of people get tricked by this so this is a great way to save a bunch of money so if you take a look at your campaigns you'll often times see okay there's this keyword that has an amazing AC cost let's say it's like 5% AC cost and maybe it only had 10 clicks this is where you actually have to use your brain if you think about it you look at the keyword and you're confused as to why anyone would have converted through this keyword it just doesn't make any sense because it's so irrelevant and sometimes these flukes happen these what we call outlier keywords happened and so if you use your brain and you think why would anyone buy my product through this keyword the mistake people make is that they'll double down on that keyword they'll increase the bid they'll think oh man this is a 5% a cost this is amazing let's increase the bid on it and let's try to get more conversions a couple weeks later they realize that that a cost is now 80 90% because it just didn't make sense so sometimes you really just need to use your brain and say okay this is an outlier maybe we shouldn't spend money trying to figure out whether or not this is actually going to be a good keyword cuz I can tell just by using my brain that this keyword sucks yeah yeah a lot of people are very robotic in their optimizations they'll just go find keywords they're converted increase the bids or you know graduate them launch them in more campaigns and you know I'm a fan of obviously taking a keyword that is converted and then trying to scale it if it doesn't make sense don't spend money on it right away maybe wait until two or three conversions and then say okay maybe there's something I'm missing right I don't think the Skyword should convert but it's converted three times that's enough data exactly it's not enough just to use math just to analyze the data you have to use your brain as well all right guys deadly mistake number to not maintaining a high seller performance James what are the mistakes people make which results in them not having a high seller performance which then results in them hurting their you know business okay so one thing that you want to take a look at is your order defect rate if it's too high also if you're getting too many returns that's going to affect your ranking in Amazon so everything will affect whether or not Amazon wants to promote you as a seller or promote your product so if you think about Amazon and the psychology of how they're thinking about their products that they're listing or they're promoting they want to provide the customer with the best possible shopping experience and if they know that your product has a high return rate or defect rate they're not going to promote that product no matter how well SEO your product is the other thing that is really important is to pay attention to policy violations and take a look at your account health because if you start accumulating too many policy violations if you have any trademark infringements or anything that's just against Amazon's terms of service they're also going to penalize you as a seller by not promoting your listing the same way as everyone else okay so there's a new policy right now with shipping where you have to maintain a certain a minimum amount of stock and I think that's about 30 days now and you have to be within that window and 180 days worth of inventory and if you have less than 30 days worth of inventory or over 180 days worth of inventory they're also going to penalize you and charge you additional fees for that so this also affects your seller performance if Amazon sees that you're possibly going to run out of stock pretty soon it's not going to create a good experience for the customer so they're they're going to devalue your listing yeah yeah one thing that I've noticed a lot before they ever announc this cuz we track in my real profit inventory levels at all times for and sales at all times for our clients every time someone started going under 30 days of inventory left at Amazon immediately their sales worsened and I was like this can't be like a coincidence right cuz every single client the second that they drop under that 30-day Mark I'm like sales are down and it makes total sense because Amazon only wants to promote the best sellers that are going to give the best experience to customers if you're running out of stock it's a bad experience for customers cuz they want a product and they can't buy it all right deadly mistake number three not split testing your images we've talked about this a lot too many people will spend so much time building a beautiful listing really nice images all of that good stuff and then never touch it again so walk us through why that is a mistake and how to fix that mistake yeah so there's this common behavioral pattern among sellers which they just set it and forget it because they regard the process of building out your listing and your images and the photography it's a grueling and painful process for a lot of people and so they're just super relieved as soon as they launch their product and the problem is they never they never continue to optimize it they don't touch it again so you need to be testing your listing copy and and your main images all the time so in the form of AB testing against your own copy or your titles or your images and AB testing against competitors as well if you have a main image that's really well optimized and you look in the search results against your competitors and you can see that you really stand out it is going to be a matter of time before your competitors recognize that this is a great main image and everyone's going to start to copy you so what you need to do is regularly go in and see how you appear among the search results and constantly think of new ways to stand out among them so main image optimization is super important and just because it worked once it doesn't mean it's going to work over a long period of time one of the benefits of main image optimization is a better clickthrough it obviously and if you think of Amazon as just a funnel right at the top you have Impressions then you have clicks which is people coming into your listing and then you have sales people converting so with everything being the same an increase in your cook rate means more people coming into your listing with conversion rate being the same it means more people are going to convert so just by optimizing your main image you can increase the number of people you know coming into the listing and converting and not only that but I've also noticed a better click through rate results in a lower cost per click and this goes back to the psychology of Amazon where they want the best experience for their Shoppers when they see a product has a better clickr it it means more people want them so they're going to show you up you'll also probably get a better organic ranking exactly the increase in click-through rates and conversions that's ultimately going to be the biggest factor in determining your search engine ranking within Amazon yeah and it all tracks back into making more money all right so if I want to optimize my listing images and want to do some split testing can you give me some step-by-step instructions I should take you know as a seller who maybe just starting out or hasn't optimized their listing images yet okay so one of the main things that you can do for your main image is to show as much context as possible it's not good enough just to show your product bottle or the packaging by itself so you want to show the context preferably if you can show the product in use that communicates so much more to the customer and increases your chances of getting that clickthrough the other thing is if you have your product packaging welld designed you should definitely incorporate that into the main image because that's additional real estate within the main image to utilize for marketing so you can have text on there where normally you can't put text in your images but if it's on the packaging itself and a lot of people will just have uh renderings of packaging done just so that they can get that additional real estate to put marketing messages within their main image guys this is crucial please pay attention to this you have a main image right you can't do anything with that main image right CU it's already your product but what you can do is you can create packaging and manipulate what's on that packaging to have selling points so when someone types in electrolyte powder and in their mind you know they're looking for a sugar-free electrolyte powder that has hydration whatever you can't showcase that as much as you can on the bottle but when you have a box in the back or something and you put these selling points and USDA organic and you know featured in Forbes and all this type of you basically are selling in the main image where you couldn't before and obviously the rest of the images you can sell a lot easier you know the main image is where you're capturing attention and you're getting people into the listing yeah exactly and other things you can do is play around with colors too it's really hard to understand the psychology of the customer and often times Trends change so something that would work today might not necessarily work in a year so you can test trending colors uh color schemes on the packaging or on the product itself and also one amazing thing is Amazon released manage my experiments right where you can literally now take each one of your images and split test them on Amazon with real data against older images so that's definitely something I think everyone should be taking advantage of is go look at your images this is what I like to do right and data dive makes this easy too because you can pick like 10 competitors and it will show you all of their images stacked against your image and you can just browse through all the images and say okay what are the selling points of my product what makes my product better than everyone else let's go look at the negative reviews you know jungle Scout has this AI review analyzer you can look at the summary of the negative reviews and positive reviews in each product summarize that stuff down and then each image should communicate why your product is better than everyone else while your product doesn't have any of the negative reviews while your product has all of the positive reviews cuz you know what someone is looking for you know the problem that they have that you're solving with this product you know what people have experienced negatively or what they've read in negative reviews so if you can overcome all of those objections in the images you're essentially going to make more sales the goal is to convert a sale exclusively through images so you have the power of visual communication so when you plan out how you want to set up your nine different images basically want to walk the customer through the sales process you can introduce the product you can make sure that you show a hero shot of the product something that looks really visually striking and beautiful you want to show the product in use with context you want to show other things like how yours compares to a competitor make it very easy for them to see the pros and the cons or like us versus theirs any other warranty information or any other benefits from your brand deadly mistake number four not improving your product this is by far the number one reason I think Sellers and Brands they shut down their business because they launch a product that was good and then they never make it better again and then guess what Chinese competitors they see it they make the product they copy them and you're done because they're cutting you like half the price right so tell us about this deadly mistake and how can people avoid it yeah so the main thing you need to do is just to understand that you're not going to make a perfect product you have version one version two version three is going to come out and it should come out and your customers will understand that over time you need to pay very close attention to the customer messages the questions that they have the negative reviews that you're getting the negative reviews from your competitors as well because instead of treating this as something that's negative it's actually positive it's a blessing to have basically the market give you feedback basically focus group for you to tell you exactly what they're looking for in your product yeah every NE ative review essentially has a reason why someone didn't like your product sometimes it's a preference right and there's not much you can do that right maybe you can launch some different variations that's like a good thing too but essentially every negative review tells you why someone didn't like your product if you take all of those negative reviews all of your competitors's negative reviews and then the second that you launch the first version of your product you're already in R&D for the next one and then the second you launch the next one you're already in R&D for the one after you'll always stay ahead of the market because again if I just see a product on Amazon and you know that Chinese competitors are watching right right if I see a product on Amazon and it's doing well the first thing they're going to do is going to be like amazing I can make this in my factory for 50 cents you know every time you order that's an opportunity to make a modification to your product you can think of it as Improvement Cycles every time you place an order with your factory in China the other thing I want to touch on is a lot of people are reactive to other Sellers and this is a big mistake and they see a seller improving the product in a certain way and they just think okay let me just do exactly that if you're constantly just copying what everyone else is doing you're always going to be a step behind the competition you should give yourself credit have some respect for your ability to be Innovative and creative in a way that no one else has done when we innovate or come up with ideas to improve a product we are not allowed to look at any competitors so we have to come up with unique ways to improve the product from our own brains and then afterwards we can look at what the other competitors are doing but at least give yourself some credit for your ability to innovate and to be creative the fifth deadly mistake on Amazon and one of the biggest ones is having a bad Amazon SEO walk us through what bad Amazon SEO means to you and how people can fix their Amazon SEO again like as we mentioned that you need to constantly be testing not just you're listing images but it's just as important to test your copy so that's your titles your features and your descriptions bad SEO is when people think that all they need to do is stuff every field with keywords and all the different keywords it gets to the point where it doesn't read naturally anymore so you'll just have a really poorly reading title or features or descriptions just cuz everyone's just trying to get that keyword density in there let's not forget that it's not enough to to rank well what is actually going to help you rank organically in Amazon ultimately like the biggest factor is going to be your sales and your conversions right doesn't matter how many keywords you have in your copy if it's not going to convert because the listing just doesn't read well and it's just not good sales and marketing copy there's no point the way you do it is first you start off with keyword research you can use different tools like helium 10 or jungle Scout what I like to do is I Target two to three what I call short tail keywords and these are going to be the highest search volume keywords and the ones that you want to utilize to Target in your title and your features because those have the most weight right when you have your second or third tier keywords which are also called longtail keywords you can utilize your product description to Pepper that into the description naturally what I personally do is I use chat gbt to incorporate the additional keywords so that it reads naturally so it doesn't sound like someone is just keyword spamming that's the thing you want to avoid at all costs is keyword spamming and Amazon's algorithms can pick that up very quickly the other thing you can do to improve the SEO on your product page is make sure you fill out the FAQs like the questions and the answers so you can have friends ask questions and in this section this is where you can include keywords that are not absolutely related to your product but definitely will help so you can even have people ask questions um that incorporate other companies or other brands in there and say like how does this compare to whatever brand and then you can answer it and you can use that to fill your product page with all these additional important keywords that's actually a really good hack because sometimes you're not allowed to use certain keywords like weight loss testosterone or something sometimes you know I can't use my competitor keywords like liquid IV but if I can just say is this better than liquid IV does this have sugar like liquid IV and then it's all of this is SEO building in my listing to liquid IV which you know millions of people are looking for final thing I'll talk about regarding SEO is that you want to make sure that you walk your customer through the sales process it's not enough just to be you know a description of the product you want it to be a sales process so you want to make sure when they click buy they have full confidence in knowing exactly what the product is exactly what they're getting exactly what the benefits are so you can introduce the product explain the benefits explain how it Compares with your competitors any other guarantees that you have but you want to leave the customer feeling completely confident with the sales purchase if you have SEO content in your descriptions like you have just a bunch of keywords stuffed in there it's not necessarily going to convert well right you might think okay cool I have like you know 5% keyword density for my target keywords if it doesn't convert Amazon is not going to consider that strong ranking juice for your organic results ultim if it converts that's what's going to boost you in the Organics yeah I love it I completely agree and I always like to think of Amazon SEO as where are other people getting their sales from what are people searching and you know then landing on search results and making sales from and then once I start thinking in that frame it's now marrying sales and SEO at the same time cuz it can't just be beautiful copy that doesn't Rank and it can't just be robotic SEO copy that doesn't make sense to the human being that's buying the product exactly it's the Art and Science and there you have it folks the top five deadly mistakes on Amazon do not make the same mistakes I made do not make the same mistakes James made we lost a lot of money we do not want you to lose a lot of money so don't make those mistakes James thank you man for joining me where can people find you you can find me on Instagram at Jim Skillet and if you want you can book a consultation call with me yeah I'll leave his consultation call booking Link in the description guys so make sure to check it out if you need help on Amazon I can't recommend James enough he helped me when I was starting out I didn't know much about Amazon he was one of my go-to people and he's been an amazing mentor to me for all these years so see you guys in the next video thanks minina [Music]