[00:00:00] Welcome to The Professor’s Podcast where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape, your host, Howard Thai, generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.

[00:00:21] Hey everyone, Hurricane Liz here, and I'm live here with Howie and our special guest today, and I want to give you guys a reminder. Howie is none other than the professor of all things as I've recently found out as he’s just got his stuff together. The guy travels tirelessly across the entire globe looking to find the best of the best at Amazon.

[00:00:44] That way he can have them on his first ever online virtual event. So if you don't know who he is, he's made news all over the place. He's been featured in the Wall Street Journal and all sorts of other publications like Buzzfeed news, highlighting the fact that he can pretty much rank in all on Amazon.

[00:00:59] And I've seen that from firsthand experience myself. So I'm really excited here to help him on these actual interviews with the top minds in all of Amazon. And today, we've got a great one because this gentleman that we're going to introduce here in a second comes from a country that I wasn't even aware existed. Howie, I think he said he's living in Andorra, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:01:21] Did you even know before today where that is? I don't even know what it is. I was like surprised as well. Like where's this place at? And then he told me it was in Europe.

[00:01:33] Right? Absolutely. And that to me is shocking Howie, because I always look at you, you know everything that there is about Amazon. So I almost make the assumption how he knows everything about everything. He's all over the place looking for these Amazon sellers, finding them in crazy corners across the world, and you always do it.

[00:01:50] You always seem to find the magical creature, almost the unicorns of Amazon. And, you find somebody that's just mastering exactly what they do. And today's a total exception to that, right? I mean, total, it's totally included. This guy has done, what I classified early on is I quit at this and so we'll talk more about what I quit at.

[00:02:09] He's mastered that and shown that it can still be done, so I'm super excited to talk to him. How about you Howie? Can you tell us a little bit more about this guy? This guy is very interesting guy because he's one of the only guys in the field that does PR, so that really knows how to rank people using PR. So this is going to be very interesting on, but listening to what he has to say about what he's going to talk about on topics.

[00:02:33] So I'm interested in starting this up, what’s up with him. Right. Earlier I mentioned to him that I've had, have had an employee write over a thousand press releases. I'm surprised that that employee actually stuck it out with me. You know him Howie, Joshua wrote a thousand press releases and distributed them out there, and I'll tell you what, it's a lot of work.

[00:02:57] So. I'm excited to talk to him and let's bring him straight on and I just want to remind people, this gentleman is going to be one of many actual speakers at Howie’s first-ever online virtual event called the Professor's Pandemic Event. And now remember, this'll be at online and you'll be able to attend it from your home in the comfort of your own home.

[00:03:18] You can sip your coffee, you can sip whatever you want while you watch long, you can even sip the gin and juice as you would usually sip the gin and juice with Howie at the club when you go to one of his live events, but this is going to be a little bit different. I'm excited for it. How about you Howie?

[00:03:31] I mean, the last time, some secrets that were spilled there, I told people they completely revamped my business and re-invigorated it. And, I was able to pretty much rank anything now effortlessly on page one. This event is a little special. I think. I'm pretty excited to see how many people is going to join us because a lot of people ask me, Hey, why don't you do a online mastermind or online one?

[00:03:59] And I'm like, I don't really want to talk too much. Out there like so people would like maybe copy it and everything, but I think it will do. Okay. I've heard a lot of good success stories on doing things online, virtual, so we'll see how it goes and stuff. But I have a question for you Liz. Did you say a thousand press release?

[00:04:23] How long did that take? Probably over the course of a year, maybe. Because I used to do a lot of articles like that, articles spinning, they call it. I use it like these back there back then, and there's like SEO, and then when you do like articles spinning and then do back links and stuff like that. So there's like this little, little software that there is out there.

[00:04:44] So for that, so I would think that thousand is a lot of press release.  But I know Joshua.  He’s good.  He's the one that makes the SEO copies of our PPE. Like a thousand is no tiny amount. It's, I've, I can't remember how long it took him, but he clocked it in at 1000 so I'm excited to see what Shane says about that. I mean, our guest today's Shane, am I pronouncing this right, Shane? Shane Oglow. Shane Oglow. Obviously, I want the people to understand what you do.

[00:05:20] It's very involved. As I said, I had to get a guy to write a thousand press releases, which as you can imagine, that takes an enormous amount of time. But there's ton of questions that I have for you. I'm even a little tongue twisted here because I just have so many different ideas running through my head. You, me and Howie had that conversation earlier. But my first question to you is, before I get a little too excited and ahead of myself here, let me ask you this first question.

[00:05:47] I want you to pretend hypothetically that you and Howie are in an elevator, and obviously he is who he is, the man, the myth, the legend, as I like to call him. And you're on an elevator with him. You've got two minutes to pitch what you do and why you're just the man. What would you say to him on that elevator?

[00:06:07] Good one. So he recognizes that I'm a unicorn at this point. Right?  He's interested.  He’s picked you.  He wanted to know what else you do.  I think we’ve met.

[00:06:22] And this happens quite often. I mean, in fact, I met a new fellow who was asking me what I did. It's hard to explain sometimes what you do because all you’ve done has changed so much over the years as the online business has changed. But I think number one, I've been at it a long time in terms of, you know, online space and I started selling back in 2013. I had a lot of success early on now, like so many of us did, I think, and I started creating those connections.

[00:06:51] I got to know pretty much that we wanted the space for the most part. We did a lot of training, coaching, mentoring at the time. And actually at that time was mostly through the program. And I'm talking literally thousands of people that I've trained or coached. So since then, it's just been one thing after another in terms of either concrete or dabbling or learning, you know, around those immense changes that have happened in this entire industry and are going to keep on happening.

[00:07:20] And I don't want to ever sound like I'm tooting my own horn because I'm Canadian and I don't do what I don't ever really consider myself an expert or a guru or any of that  because I'm always learning, always, always learning. Even those areas that I'm really comfortable in discussing a lot of success because things are always ever changing.

[00:07:39] It's important I think, to stay really humble and open minded on any topic. I’m really just a student who just occasionally subs in as a teacher. So, if it comes to Amazon, I think I can talk pretty much any topic with, with a fair bit of authority. But like I said, I was keeping an open mind. So that's sort of where I stand. Okay, so I always ask these kind of questions to all our interview guests.

[00:08:04] So what do you consider yourself the most expert on. In regarding like PR, I know PR is pretty big or kind of a really big topic and stuff as well. You, what's the deep domain expertise of PR that you could say you are good at?

[00:08:24] Yeah, that's a good question. And that actually changes too. If I just narrow it down to two, I'd say probably the first is launching and ranking. Now, I've built a lot of courses over the years in case studies. And as these, you know, these long strategies that we've had, you know, for the last six, seven years, they change, you know, in reaction to things like the algorithm updates and Amazon tools and third party tools have become available.

[00:08:46] So what's it using PRs to launch and rank and very few people, occasionally I'll meet someone and usually really big sellers who are doing sort of a version of what we do and they're kind of like.

[00:09:00] Which, which we can talk a little bit more later. But the second, I guess is content. And those two things tie in. So content and PR specifically designed for, for ranking on Amazon, and the other is content and it's effective use. Retrospective, which is really funny because content is one of those things that most people feel they probably need, and they know the immense power of it.

[00:09:23] So there's really not a big secret power of content. And if they see how other brands are crushing it and don't really understand that I do, but rarely does anyone get it right and actually turn it into dominating online ranking results and traffic. So in my world, building a strong brand that dominates the internet.  Or, at least

[00:09:43] Their niche is paramount in this business, a very diverse range of optimized content. You'll see very powerful distribution is one of the primary things that we do. And that's really something, I guess I can talk. Okay, so can you tell us a little bit about how you think outside of the box compared to other experts in your field?

[00:10:09] Yeah. I suppose a really easy example is to talk about how we're using Amazon or using those press releases to increase our Amazon rankings. I mean, we do a lot of stuff, but this is really outside the box because no one else is doing it. And we'll be doing this for years for our own products and for products and client counseling.

[00:10:30] So back in 2015. Yeah. In 2015 it should say when all of the, you know, the so called experts, gurus are saying the PRs were dead. No. Bear in mind they were using the techniques that were popular at the time. They were working at the time. All of a sudden stopped working, and this really led us to investigate further, even understanding why, why did this change?

[00:10:53] It took us some time. It took us the better part of a year and a half, but we managed to dial it in and I want to say right now, it works. In a broader perspective, it works better than ever before. It's just not that lazy shortcut. It wasn't the past that people use. Right. And you know, that's a great answer, Shane.

[00:11:15] Although I have to say my Josh would probably totally disagree with you, that he thought that was lazy since he had to write 1000 press releases. Just to kind of get that same text that you're talking about through what you offer. But it's apparent that you have a very broad area of expertise, like I was talking about unicorn here, but we're talking about unicorn with deer, deer of, you know, headpiece.

[00:11:40] It's kind of ridiculous how much you actually know about Amazon. Just judging by what you've spoken about so far. So let me ask you this. What three to five topics do you think you could actually wow people with in all this level and area of expertise in the first ever Professor's Pandemic Event? Three to five topics?

[00:12:01] Well, I like to feel like I'm pretty well versed on everything, with the exception of PPC.  And that’s something I have to outsource to another agency to keep up with the day to day distribution. But I love, talking about content, well, I love talking about Amazon posts. I mean, Amazon posts are a very exciting. We've developed strategies that are absolutely killing it a lot of now. A lot of the sellers, even though the posts were for like 10 months. Just like last autumn, thing’s they didn’t know about.  Like launching

[00:12:30] and ranking just because I've been in this game a long time. I've seen every system come and go. Some work better than others. So I love talking about that new techniques and discovering it and talking about new ideas, diversifying traffic, and of course. You know, as it relates back to what I'm doing, or everything to do with building that online brand presence.

[00:12:51] That's, that's really what I will be talking about.

[00:12:56] I'm going to have trouble picking one of those three to five because there was a couple there that you mentioned that I'm like. How did I not know about this? And so I'm excited for that. Let me ask you this question. I know earlier you were talking about launching and ranking, and obviously it's something that you've been at since 2013 so you've seen it, as you said, every technique come and go, but can you really just launch and rank with PR alone?

[00:13:23] That's a good question. So yes and no. And the reason why. No, we've done this a hundred times and we just launched just with PRs. Sometimes we'll get some extraordinary results. Other times they'll come off probably just with so many factors going on with the PR of the title, the summary, the category, the search terms, actions.

[00:13:48] There's so many uncontrollable variables you can control, but you don't know how it's gonna be picked up by the distribution. So the problem is, is I could not emulate the results every single time when we pair up. Press releases with high quality external traffic. So back in the day, we're doing giveaways and coupons and all kinds of stuff we doing, which doesn't work or, or to work against.

[00:14:15] Now, it's mostly rebate traffic that is working well. As long as you, you've got a high quality rebate system going on so you're not inspired by scores, high quality traffic keyword driven traffic. Now that can meet your, your your PPC efforts that can be coming from Instagram.

[00:14:36] No problem. As long as it's high quality traffic, it's coordinated with PR so that the keywords are coordinated in their time at the same time. That's how I do it. We generally have three ways of launching our products. Launch just with PPC. Which sometimes we'll do some of those. I mean we probably all know people who just kill it cause they got a dial.

[00:15:00] Then most people I know can't do that. They don't have that belief to make that work practically every time. And then we add an Amazon posts, we do a launch. So that's what I'm, that's what I like to talk about. All these signals from everywhere. That's why, that's why I have a company called Signalytics. Okay. I have a question here. For what kind of problems do you see that  Amazon sellers are, are having right now in 2020 or regarding the pandemic

[00:15:38] to know where to start? You know what was asked? This question was asked. This very same question back back in January. And my answer is pretty much the same still. Obviously we have a lot more information than what we had back three, four months ago. But outside of many sellers, immediate problems, I mean, if you're not selling in an essential category that many sellers are faced with the challenge of potentially pivoting your business.

[00:16:03] Let's say you're, you're in the travel accessories category and you build your business around that. Do you hope that this pandemic stuff dissolves? Whether or not you think this whole thing is real or not, it doesn't matter because all we can do as sellers is respond and plan and it's a, it's a really scary prospect.

[00:16:24] I mean, are airlines going to survive? How long will it be before people start traveling again and spending money on it? So if you're in that category. It's a risk that some things might not be the same for a very long time, and others, those and pivoting towards PPE, personal protective equipment and other products that are related to the continuance of our current situation.

[00:16:46] That tune itself can be a risk because we don't know how long this will last. And you know, the others in this space are also rushed, rushing into that or rushing into that space, and I'm generally not a trend chaser. Then there's the potential issue that we hear about all, the second wave. So let's say you're sourcing from China, for example, trying to get shut down again in the autumn or the winter.

[00:17:09] So facing this, you stretch yourself thin right now. Double or triple down, put out a massive order to carry you through the holidays and maybe even beyond Chinese new year. Again, that's a calculated grips, either production outside of China or domestic production if you can, which is what some people have done in response to our current situation.

[00:17:30] Plus, as a response to that ongoing tariff. That's relatively futile as we see every country in some manner or another, taking some form of preventative measures. So there's never any guarantee wherever you're producing a supply chain. And that's, that's my big, big concern. And another thing, I think there's been a little bit of a low on the news front regarding this topic. But just before this pandemic situation, there was a lot of talk about how the government and Amazon will begin enforcing proposed legislation and really what that would mean to sell it.

[00:18:09] And I think that we can all agree that acting on this as good, I mean, you know, the market needs to be cleaned up of counterfeit goods. Absolutely. We all know the sellers are likely going to face the brunt of it in some way or another. So I think that's something else to really keep your eye on. Finally, I think the other big thing is that it's no secret that Amazon has been stepping on a lot of toes in the last couple of minutes and really pissing people off.

[00:18:38] Many sellers. You, I've found it necessary to move to FBM. Okay. So mostly due to extend the delivery times and

[00:18:49] often Amazon, eBay, or Walmart or Shopify or whatever, and this is good. This competition is good ‘cause I'd love to see you get knocked down hard and we can compete for our business. I've been saying this for years, right? No, I don't think that's going to happen, but at the same time, I'm not really a fan of monopolies.

[00:19:05] So yeah, I guess in my opinion, there's probably, I think there's probably more issues facing Amazon sellers than at any time before. Certainly any time, and it seems to me like you're pretty much an early adopter of a lot of these strategies that you talk about. I myself fit in the category of lazy Amazon seller.

[00:19:26] I try to let the early adopters test it out for me and then I'll start to dip my toes in there. But one thing has left me curious about these Amazon posts because I've never heard about them. I do consider myself somewhat savvy, but without spilling the beans and obviously not going into strategy.

[00:19:41] Could you just tell the listeners out there what exactly is Amazon posts, in case they don't know. I don't know. So I'm interested to hear what this is. Sure. It's a program that Amazon launched. I think it was back in October, November, right around there sometime. In a way, it's, it's Amazon's own social media network.

[00:20:01] It doesn't work like a traditional social media and you have little control. But it allows you to post a story, to post content, content, videos, images, whatever you want. And Amazon will determine the row, the relevancy of this on there. So if I'm only on mobile right now, so if you're a mostly a desktop here, usually you won't see it.

[00:20:25] But if you're on a mobile and you're looking for that carousel underneath with all  these different social media things, that's what it is. So me as a seller, If I see Howard's product like, Oh man, I'm gonna turn it Howard's product cause he's a competitor, can't do that. Amazon determines where it goes.

[00:20:43] So it's kind of neat. What's the interesting thing about the post is that if I click on it, you can buy it right from the post. But in order to purchase, it takes three, four or five clicks to get through from that front end to where I can actually purchase. So the, you don't get a ton of traffic through, but it's incredibly high conversion.

[00:21:06] Super high conversion because if someone puts four times, it's probably going to buy the darn thing. It's really interesting how it's affecting the PPC campaigns we have running and how it's ramping up our sales. But again, it doesn't work like a typical platform. So like on Facebook or Instagram, I put on a post, it stays there, right?

[00:21:23] It stays there. If that was on, doesn't like it or it doesn't get a lot of clicks or something just kind of disappears, you can come back later. You have no control over that. So it's kind of, it's kind of a wild card. You got to feed this machine. The way we feed it and the stuff we do that helps get all those people through that funnel to purchase our product and give all those extra great things that I guess is

[00:21:48] Right now, like a lot of opportunities out there for Amazon sellers because of the PPE. There's a lot of people that are switching that, or factories also switching and from like whatever they used to do. That's not something that well right now during the pandemic and switching into like maybe masks or shields, you know, just like.

[00:22:08] Glasses or goggles or whatever it has that sound really well. So what do you think, what do you, what kind of opportunities do you see in the 2020 as Amazon seller regarding the pandemic? I think, and I don't mean to sound mean about this, I think it's just the truth, but there's a lot of opportunities based on a lot of sellers tapping out  right now.

[00:22:30] There's a lot of people throwing in the towel. They've lost the revenue they need to survive. I can't blame them. I absolutely can't blame them. Will they be back? Some will, some won't. So that's going to free up some space. I mean, other people might be leery to jump in right now this year, given that Amazon is basically broken and they're hearing horror stories.

[00:22:49] Plus there's lots of products that do not rank as a result of being out of stock which represents yet another opportunity as I mentioned before, a trend chaser. But you can bet that those already pandemic friendly niches and those admitted quick pivots will do quite well. I also, there's a story out there right now that's going around, especially in Shanghai and Shenzhen, Chinese sellers are actually kind of going

[00:23:18] To Amazon and kind of protesting. They're waving flags and saying that Amazon are is like a, it's like taking their money and stealing their money. I see this a lot right now. They're the kind of opportunity stage. People see that as an opportunity, right? And then they just jump into it. But because there's this thing called velocity of sales.

[00:23:39] Or this limit that Amazon cap set you. A lot of people are getting suspended and Amazon holding their money and all that. All that stuff. So it could be an opportunity, but something that you have to watch out for because Amazon is known to suspend people for, for just having too much sales in their platform. Even though it's like a pandemic, people have more rush in sales for that, but they're just suspending everyone.

[00:24:07] I just had a friend that got his, his account kinda suspended for like I think it was like 4, 4 million something dollars hauled in there. It was the same guy as I was talking to you about Liz. The 300 K guy is making 300K a day in sales. So with the big ramp in velocity like that, it's just like there is an opportunity and you have to.

[00:24:30] Make sure that you plan everything correctly because it also can hurt you too. Because of, you know, you have a cashflow issues and, and other stuff like that. So these Chinese sellers are actually going in and protesting because they're the ones that has been jumping on these trends and faster than anyone else because their opportunity is right there cause they are right next to the factory.

[00:24:52] So they're very quick. So you see a lot of these things where on Facebook maybe you'll see it posted up of Chinese sellers getting the protesting. It's kind of funny in a way. So I don't, I don't know if us people would go in and protest like that, but yeah, it's kind of funny. Yeah. So Shane, you know, you mentioned that you can't really predict what's going to happen.

[00:25:15] It's pretty chaotic. There's no telling what could happen in the next six to 18 months. There's all sorts of people hammering down on Amazon, and then there's all sorts of sellers having problems. But what about off of Amazon? Earlier you mentioned Shopify and Walmart and other platforms like that. What kind of opportunities do you see, and do you see the possibility for expansion now more than ever off of Amazon to kind of try and help out with seller sales?

[00:25:45] And we're seeing a lot of people, I'm not going to say jump ship, but certainly, diversify in what they're doing. You know, I was one of those guys back in 2016 when Alibaba was coming into town giving Amazon a run for their money. I was rooting for it because again, I like competition because I like the platform to compete for our business versus us having to always kind of trying to cozy up to them.

[00:26:11] So I was a little shocked when Alibaba didn't do that. And you know, Walmart started to come online to make it a little bit of a push, but they're still dwarfed in sales compared, compared to Amazon. Walmart has the stigma, it's got a certain type of buyer. Now that is changing a little bit online. The customer avatar for Walmart is changing from, from their in store avatar.

[00:26:35] I think that's a good thing. I think it's really important. You know, the problem in the past was that when you are getting all of your sales through Amazon, you go on thinking, you know, time is money. You know, you only have so much time in the day, so how much time are you going to spend to learn a new platform, go to ebay, figure it out, go to walmart, go to shopify.

[00:26:56] It takes time for maybe 3% of your sales, 2% ,10, 20%. Obviously you know it's, you can get back 10 to 40% then now you've got an income stream. Okay, fair enough. How long was that going to take and when Amazon was still and still is the King of the fall, but when that's your, your, it's hard. It's hard to take your focus off of what's doing so, so well and focus on other things which could play out.

[00:27:21] You just don't know, right. For a lot of the smaller sellers that are growing because they don't have a team, they don't have VAs, you know, it's really tough for them to do that on their own. In a way, this is good for us sellers diversifying, giving some business and some input to these other platforms out there and expanding, and it hopefully well, consumer behavior will adapt to that too.

[00:27:45] You know, a lot of people got lazy with prime and click it. We all know that Walmart has their own shipping.

[00:27:53] There's so many options now. It's not like it was three, four, five years ago. So you know, why, although it's a little bit painful it could be good. Right. And you know, you mentioned in there, Shane, that obviously you've got a ton of friends. We talked about that earlier, but one thing that you were talking about, which is Walmart, I've actually got something interesting to share with you, and I'm not sure if you can tell me what you've heard from other sellers, but I basically have a brand that sells about $2 million a year on Amazon, and I applied to Walmart.

[00:28:23] And went through the conditional approval. And then next thing you know, I get a, you’re declined. So then I decided to sign up with another actual account for Walmart this time, not putting an Amazon store URL, not putting any type of store URL at all. And I use my agency account website and guess what?

[00:28:44] I got an approval. Have you heard of anything as crazy as that? Like I didn't exactly know what Walmart was looking for. Here you have a successful brand, been selling for about five years on Amazon, doing extremely well on Amazon. Yet they would allow a totally separate business that has never even sold on Amazon.

[00:29:04] No, I can't say I've heard that. I've heard of some process and if you leave your application open for too long, you'll, you'll get shut down. It can take a few weeks to get it backup. We didn't fill in your shipping information or you didn't do your setup or the gate, but it's been a long time. I've set up.

[00:29:23] I haven't heard that. Here's a little trick or hack. You know, anytime you're applying for a new account, just put Howard Thai’s picture though.

[00:29:31] I like it. I'm going to do it immediately after this. I don't think there was that much of a delay in my actual application. I think I waited one minute to go and hunt down my pay in my account. So I thought that was completely awkward. But you know. Who knows what Walmart and Amazon think about. I forgot to mention to everybody listening that I discovered that during this whole pandemic, my pack of three rubber chickens were classified as essential, which basically means you could use rubber chickens apparently for just about anything.

[00:29:59] And I've discovered since then about 21 different ways to use them, but Amazon thought they were essential. God bless America. You gotta love it. Regarding regarding the thing you were talking about, Shane, a lot of us are, there might be a lot of people dropping out of Amazon and there might be a lot of people actually going back in because of their job situation.

[00:30:22] The US where there's a lot of unemployment, at least for now, until the doors opens up. We don't know what's going to happen, but I think for, I've had, I had lunch with one of my friends in Hong Kong. He's like, he's like everyone, like everyone else. He’s like. His office closed and then he actually is working at home.

[00:30:43] So he's kind of liking the idea, liking that, that kind of freedom of working at home. And he's asking, he's actually asked me, Oh, is there anything that I can do, maybe get you sell online, Amazon or something? And then he doesn't know too much about it. So I was talking to him about it, all  the good, the pros and cons of a new seller jumping on.

[00:31:04] So it's kind of interesting. I think I will. There's going to be a lot more buyers, buyers because they get used to buying on Amazon now, and there's a lot of sellers. I would say a lot of sellers coming to try it out, try to get that freedom back from the pandemic regarding the multiple multichannel marketplaces. I am actually, if it's not too much work, I would actually, I try to stay away with multichannel if you're not big enough yet, because I see that there's a lot more opportunity on Amazon.

[00:31:35] Because you do, you kind of learn one marketplace. You could apply to all 12 or 14 or 15 of these countries, you know, and before besides you, before you watch another one. I know, I know. Walmart is getting bigger and bigger and especially this is from the pandemic. They grew like five times more. So in sales, from what I hear a lot from other people, but Amazon is still pretty big, but Walmart is getting, it's getting up there.

[00:32:02] Another, other thing that is, I'm kind of interested in how U S is going to play out on that ups. USPS is going bankrupt again. They do this every year for, I think that's how they raise the money. But, uh, the government seems like they don't want to, don't want to bail them out anymore or something like that.

[00:32:19] That's what Trump says. But so that would relate to how is the people going to get their packages cause a lot of the people are getting their packages, do a  USPS like even even like a lot of the third parties like ups and DHL or FedEx, they all have their own PR, like partnership with USBs, meaning that the last mile is dropped off by U S P S meaning like UPS has their UPS.

[00:32:49] Mail innovation, am I a FedEx smart post? You got DHL, DHL, global mail back then they call it, but now it's called DHL  e-commerce. So these are like big, big, big, big partners with USPS. So, with that said, maybe our cost of shipping is going to go up too. And Amazon relies on them too. So a lot of them with a small light, they using USPS for their small light package as well.

[00:33:19] So we'll see how that works. So Shane, I know you remember how we were sitting at the, at the event, and then I was drawing you a little bubbles of what, what I was doing, I was showing you, what do you think about that? Well, I think that's awesome. I mean, you know, I think he even mentioned it earlier today.

[00:33:39] You're all about diversification and diverse signals as part of part of ranking strategy. And I think I told you back maybe 15 or something, I made some course. It was this stupid long spreadsheet. I had like 20 different traffic sources on it, Twitter ads, group-ons,

[00:33:56] and you know, the parental principle came into effect where, you know, maybe 20% of it wouldn't even be worthwhile. But the point is, I was doing my best, you know, back, those are the days to send these different signals. We don't have to go that crazy now. And I think that's what the whole premise behind what you are designing and your launch and rank is hitting it with a lot of powerful different signals.

[00:34:18] And that's the way to go. If you're a one chicken.

[00:34:24] Yeah. Let's not say it won't work for awhile. It could cause problems for your account. So I'm a huge fan. Yeah. I'm like, everyone is doing rebates right now. Rebates itself is not as strong as if a word is, you know, like you said, put some rebates in there with some PRs and then put some other signals in there.

[00:34:47] You know, because PR, cause rebates. You get thinking about it this way, where rebates, everyone's doing rebates. So how do you stand out from other people? You know? So yes, right now it works, but it will change because Amazon itself is, it's AI. Their search is based on AI, so they're looking at signals from everywhere.

[00:35:08] So if other people have more signals than you, then you're gonna get ranked up higher. You know? Through blogs do tumbler through like all the other crazy sites out there that that can push traffic or what's the authority cause Google is. Google is still the King in SEO. So Amazon's trying, still following, following what Google was doing through even their advertising and even through, even through there, the way stuff is getting searched on Amazon.

[00:35:39] So it's very, it's connected. So Shane, what's your final words for our audience here? Final words. I mean, anyone's struggling, anyone wants us to incorporate brand, increasing their search results and online authority, I'm happy to chat. That's sort of what we do. Other than that, I guess I just want to thank you guys for having me on.  I’m really looking forward to mastermind

[00:36:02] Yeah, absolutely. I am fishing. Thanks so much. And so how are you? That's pretty much it. What did you, what did you find from Shane? Anything that are new that you learned? I know for one, I'm going to go check out this Amazon Posts. I didn't even know that thing existed, but you know, even YouTube recently has launched YouTube stories.

[00:36:19] So they're taking a crack at TikTok and it is YouTube. It is the biggest and most consumed site in the world. So I don't doubt they potentially even do it. Yeah. So right now, I  think I talked about this before other other places, but like right now, the new trend is going to be social commerce, meaning that you're going to have these influencers, micro influencers selling products.

[00:36:41] That's going to be the new thing. Just like how they have it, like a TikTok in China, they already have it where you can actually have an add to cart button and you can advertise and then you can be able to have people buy it on your products. So people, whoever  those influencers will be, it will be the next thing that these big platforms are going to be focusing on.

[00:37:07] Amazing. Well that makes it a pretty good reason for me to crack out my phone and start doing these things here. So thanks again, Shane. I really appreciate your talk. It was absolutely amazing and I look forward to what topic you're going to cover at the first ever Professor's Pandemic Events. So thanks so much.

[00:37:22] And just to say goodbye here again, learned so much today and was honored to have Shane here, but if you want to hear more from Shane or any of the other geniuses that we've actually pre-qualified as you saw. It's been a heck of a prequalification process. Then I encourage you to head on over to a9mastermind.com/ppe.

[00:37:42] To get more details on the first ever online virtual from the comfort of your own home Professor's Pandemic Event. Howie any last words before we say goodbye? This is going to be a very crazy event because all these guys that I picked out of traveling all day. Different masterminds or these different events that I go, I'm always like, like they say, I'm always out there listening and trying to figure out who's the best of the best to give value to our audience and to our mastermind groups.

[00:38:16] So if you, for those people that are actually coming to the mastermind, you guys can get a lot of good stuff. I promise you that. Yeah, unfortunately we won't get to go out to the bars and hit those hard, but I will make sure I have my virtual bottle of vodka here to take a couple shots live with some people loosen up and you know, they say that the real magic comes out when the actual vodka bottle does.

[00:38:38] So we'll see what happens. Anything can happen. Once again, if you want to find out more about that event happening at the end of June, go to a9mastermind.com/ppe and I look forward to seeing each and every one of you live at that actual event. So have a great day. Hi guys, welcome to the Professor’s Podcast where we discuss the best  strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business.

[00:39:04] In the current virtual and economic landscape. Your host, Howard Thai, generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.