Steven Pope of My Amazon Guy: Five Things You Need To Know To Run A Very Successful Amazon Business

As a part of my interview series about “Five non-intuitive things you need to know to run a very successful Amazon business, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Pope.

Steven is the founder of My Amazon Guy www.MyAmazonGuy.com. He started his career as a TV reporter in Idaho, then was an eCommerce Director for 10 years for brands ranging from Gold & Silver Coins to Women’s Plus Size Clothing. Steven then created My Amazon Guy, a 175+ employee agency that focuses on growing traffic and sales on Amazon. Steven not only owns MAG but also My Refund Guy, 2 Amazon Brands: Momstir & Age of Sage, and a Holster company HOLSTIT. Steven has more than 900 tutorial videos on YouTube showing how to handle ANY problem faced on Amazon and has interviewed every major player in the Amazon space on his podcast.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share with us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?

I started a career as a TV reporter right when the 2008 crash happened. It was like being in the elevator on the way down. Soon after I went back to school, picked up an MBA, and broke into ecommerce and eventually Amazon. That was like being in the elevator on the way up. I was hooked immediately!

Can you explain to our readers why you are an authority about selling on Amazon.com?

I actively help more than 200 brands grow their sales on Amazon. I have a podcast where anyone can see my expertise for themselves with more than 900 videos on every Amazon selling subject. I’m a literal walking encyclopedia of all things Amazon. YouTube.com/MyAmazonGuy

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

One of my clients sells sporting goods rope and tie-downs for like boats and kayaks BUT someone decided to use the rope for Japanese sexual bondage and then included a photo on their five-star Amazon review…. Because of this one review Amazon changed the product category from sporting goods to “Adult” and my client is now freaking out. Story ended okay, I had employees file tickets with Amazon seller support to adjust it. Amazon is like an evil overly powerful AI that can just suddenly ruin people’s lives. This wasn’t a person who changed the product category to adult from sporting goods, it was an algorithm. Like, how does a small business know how to deal with random crap like that without help from an agency like ours? A couple weeks, a single mom with a special needs son called me because her product was suddenly suspended from Amazon with no explanation. That was her entire income suddenly gone. It turned out she had one advertising keyword in violation. We had her back up in 24 hours.

https://youtu.be/GPT69xdLikE

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Work Life Balance is blurring when you sell on Amazon. I’ve had pallets of candy delivered to my home and stored in my garage. I’ve shipped 1000s of hot sauce bottles into Amazon’s FBA warehouse for them to simply ship them to consumers in padded envelopes. Like WTF Amazon? Video clip: https://youtu.be/Dbx7_yfDBnQ

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I’m launching an outbound sales team for the first time. We got to 7-million annual gross sales without making a single cold call or email. I just integrated Hubspot, and am painfully creating a CRM for the first time in my company. As an Amazon Agency and Amazon Seller, I never had to build a CRM because Amazon handled customer interactions. So now as a business owner, it’s a completely new thing for me. How it can help you learn from what I’ve done is you will have to do something new to break the next ceiling. Put on the gas, no brakes, and close every other competing priority out until you launch.

Ok. Let’s jump to the core of our discussion. You are a seasoned Amazon expert. Can you share with our readers five, non intuitive, insider tips, in order to be as successful as possible on Amazon? Please share a story or example for each.

This video explains it best, hopefully you can embed it into the story! https://youtu.be/gxsAZ1cH56g

00:00 [Product Launch Guide] Amazon FBA 2022

00:16 Should you go all-in on 1 item or moderate strategy launch 3 products at the same time

01:12 Live sample items for discussion

02:24 Why launching 3 products at the same time is problematic

04:02 As an item increases in its velocity, the higher up it will leapfrog all of the KW rankings

05:04 A thousand KW indexed in 30days is successful

05:48 Free SEO guide: https://myamazonguy.com/search-term-optimization/

07:40 Don’t miss the crawlable text on your A+ content

09:33 Get in 500 words in your A+ content

11:08 To be findable you must Index for hundreds of KWs

12:34 Advertising Logistics

17:07 Basic checklist on the listing

19:16 KW research using Helium10

21:20 Live demo on KW research

25:23 Stick with the product you understand the best

Amazon sellers have a reputation for being great guerilla marketers. Do you use any clever and innovative marketing strategies that you think large legacy companies should consider adopting?

Here’s guerilla tactics in action. Every big company is getting SEO WRONG on Amazon.

https://youtu.be/x9tnNDNJ9i8

Many Amazon SEO tools are incorrectly counting spaces against your character counts for the search terms field on Seller Central. My favorite 2 keyword tools Helium 10 & ZonGuru and many other tools are counting spaces towards your 250 character count. Why does this matter? Because that’s 30–45 extra bytes, 5–10 extra key phrases you can add to your search terms field that the tools are telling you that you don’t have room for.

00:00 EVERY Amazon SEO Tool is WRONG

01:29 SEO tools are counting characters instead of bytes

01:59 What is a character and what is a byte

02:43 PROOF!

05:06 Is a space a byte

06:23 Should you include commas in your search term field

07:41 Spaces and commas don’t count

08:17 Amazon help file that proves all

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I go through my historical failures in the below video and how I got through it to be a successful Amazon seller and Amazon agency owner that I am today. It’s okay to fail. Get back up, you can do it! https://youtu.be/XNCU7AKv60Y

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Put employees first. Employees should come first before customers and clients.

Here’s real quotes from my employees:
“My favorite thing about working at MAG is the work-life balance. I love that I have a great degree of control and freedom within my job. I work full-time on a flexible schedule and my boss trusts me to produce high-quality work and results. I love that MAG enables me to love and enjoy my other passions in life.”

“The endless amount of support and opportunities for personal/professional growth are big ones, along with the camaraderie I’ve built with my coworkers (despite working from home). The biggest perk, though? Working with my cats.”

“Growth Potential: My Amazon Guy is a company where you can grow. There are so many learning opportunities to improve skills and advance your career. Due to the Founder’s focus on Employees above all, this is an environment that helps you reach your full potential.”

See 50 other My Amazon Guy employees share their reviews here: https://lnkd.in/gCy8SNr8

We put employees at the top of our pyramid, then clients, and management/owner’s job is to serve everyone above them.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Jeff Bezos. If you Google “Amazon Guy” I come up #1, but Mr. Bezos comes up #2. I’d like to ask him how it feels to not be the most important Amazon Guy in the world. Haha, kidding. Obviously I owe my entire livelihood to Amazon and I would just like to say thank you Jeff for starting your business by selling books out of your garage. If it wasn’t for you, I would not have been able to create 175 jobs.

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!