#316 – How To Avoid Information Overload

In today’s time and age, information is available everywhere. It can either be a curse or a blessing. Some of our serious sellers out there are very concerned about information overload. In short, there are many Amazon and Walmart content, Facebook groups, podcasts, courses, and events out there. The question is, how do you break the noise that leads to analysis paralysis that prevents you from taking action? And how do you know what to focus on to really make a difference to your business? Bradley shares his thoughts in this episode.

In episode 316 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 02:30 – How Do You Prevent Information Overload?
• 03:00 – Facebook Groups: The Good And The Bad
• 05:00 – Bradley Hates Misinformation Inside Facebook Groups
• 09:30 – How To Know If A Facebook Group Is Good Or Not?
• 13:00 – Stereotyping Is Not Fair And You May Be Completely Wrong
• 18:00 – Helping People Versus Marketing Yourself
• 20:30 – Which Blog Or Podcast Should You Subscribe To?
• 22:15 – Slow Your Roll To Prevent Information Overload
• 23:00 – Good Information Comes At The Cost Of You Taking Action
• 26:30 – Virtual Assistants How To Know The Good From The Bad
• 28:45 – Book Knowledge Plus Experience Is The Best
• 30:00 – Amazon Courses, Which One Should You Take?
• 34:30 – Conferences, Which Ones To Go To?
• 35:00 – Building Networks Is Key
• 37:30 – Helium 10’s Conference In September Will Take It To Another Level

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’re gonna talk about information overload with all the conferences, Facebook groups, podcasts, Amazon courses, et cetera, et cetera. How can you focus on what really can help your business and what is actually noise that could be potentially harmful? We’re gonna talk about exactly how to do that in today’s episode. 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 Amazon, Walmart, or e-commerce world. And now that we’re in 2022 something that many serious sellers out there are very concerned about and rightfully so is what I like to call information overload, or a lot of people out there actually call it information overload. Now, what am I referring to? There are like a million Amazon Walmart courses out there these days. There are so many different Facebook groups there are virtual assistants, shipping companies, agencies telling you information, a lot of times conflicting about why you should go, you know, with them. There’s millions of Facebook groups out there, YouTube channels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera conferences, and all these things.

Bradley Sutton:

So the question is, is like, how do you get away from getting into analysis paralysis? Because you’re just going to go take in all this information and you can’t actually ever get anything done, and at the same time, if you do come to the decision, yeah, I need to kind of like focus on something that’s only gonna help me. Well, how do you distinguish what is going to help you with what maybe is just, you know, marketing noise or something like that? So I wanted to just address some of that today and talk about, you know, kind of like the things that I do to kind of block out the noise and some of the issues that I see in this space today, cuz there definitely are some issues. So let’s go ahead and do a deep dive into it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So the first thing we can talk about is, let’s just talk about Facebook groups. All right. I originally learned a lot about my Amazon, you know, knowledge from way before I work at Helium 10, from different Facebook groups, and joining Facebook groups are great. You can network with people, you can ask questions if you’re new, you can share what’s, what’s not working. But you know, for anybody who’s been around the Amazon world for like the last four years probably have noticed like me that, you know, some of these groups kind of get outta control. Now there are some groups out there where, you know, the originators or the group have just pretty much abandoned the group and you know, they still have tens of thousands, but it’s just a kind of a free for all for disinformation and people who are spamming you know, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what groups, you know, those are.

Bradley Sutton:

But then there are other groups where, you know, they’re seemingly legit. They have full-time moderators and still, you are like wondering like, well, is everything I read here good? Or I only wanna focus on maybe one or two Facebook groups so I don’t just get stuck, you know, reading things all day. How do I focus on the right groups? And so one of the most common things that people complain about nowadays is misinformation on replies, right? Like there’ll be a new seller who ask a question about something and then they get replies from that are literally wrong. Right. Now that new person, obviously the reason why they’re asking the question is cuz they don’t know the answer so that new person could just look at this reply and be like, oh yeah. Okay. That’s that sounds reasonable.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, but it could be something can negatively affect their business. Right. And how would they know? You know, how would you know? So you kind of want, Hey, how do I know what’s the best kind of Facebook groups to get into? And this is not something new, right? I mean, I’ve told you guys many times about my, how I even got hired at Helium 10. This was four years ago. I hated to see misinformation in Facebook. All right. So I was in these Facebook groups and people, you know, in 2017 were saying wrong things. And then I would hop in there like, no, you’re wrong. Like what the heck? You’re trying to mislead people. And it was because of me doing that. And because of people giving misinformation, replying to them that I kind of got on the radar of Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is not necessarily something new. It might seem like it’s more widespread because groups that used to be 5,000 members now have 50,000 members. So if there was like maybe you know, five posts a month that were bad and you know, now there’s like 500 posts a month that are bad. So it just seems like it’s, you know, more widespread, which just by definition of the size of this niche of Amazon, it kind of is, but, you know, per capita, I’m not sure if it’s that much more widespread than it used to be, but that is something that’s always gonna be the case. There’s people who with bad intentions sometimes give the wrong information. There’s people who actually have good intentions, you know, they’re trying to help this person, but they’re just misinformed on what the right answer is and they give a wrong answer.

Bradley Sutton:

So like, how do you determine that? And, you know, to you new sellers out there, I’ll be straight up. It’s kind of difficult, you know, even in the best Facebook groups, you might see some misinformation. But the way that you can kind of like, know, you know, are these Facebook groups, you know moderator moderated and things like that, it’s just checks, you know, do they have 24/7 moderation? You can even ask them, do you guys have 24/7 moderation in here you know, an easy way to know is how many spam posts like original posts do you see before it gets deleted? You know, like there’s people always posting like Bitcoin you know, hacks or, you know, completely irrelevant things, or, you know, Hey, we’re gonna sell all these Amazon seller tools for only $10, if it’s a $100, you know, obviously, these are, you know, software pirates and things like, do you see that many of those without them being deleted and things like that?

Bradley Sutton:

If so, yeah. You know what? I would just stay away from those kind of groups. If you see posts like that up for two days, or even like a few hours, that must mean that they’re not being watched. You know, very often by moderators. And that’s just a, you know, this is an actual expense. So not a lot of groups can afford to have somebody moderating these groups 24 7. Now we do that in the Helium 10 members, Facebook group, the Amazon FBA High Rollers Facebook group, we actually pay Helium 10 employees, not outside people, Helium 10 employees, 24/7 to be to moderate these. Now another thing that you wonder is, well, like, wait a minute, if Helium 10 members and FBA High Rollers are 24/7 moderated, maybe some of the Facebook groups you are in and you still see like misinformation or things.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you know, things slip through the cracks, you know, those kind of spam things or people sharing live videos that have nothing to do with it, those under no circumstances should you ever see in these moderated groups, but this does not, you know, having 24/7 moderation does not protect completely from misinformation. Now, the first reason of that is unless you are paying 24/7 to like some Amazon expert, you know, how would social media moderators know you know, if this PPC tactic is good or not, we don’t expect Helium 10 employees every single one to know those kind of things. You know, there’s very few people at the company who would know right from wrong. Now we actually have, you know, myself sometimes the other evangelists on Helium 10 like go into the groups and try and weed out some of those and if we see somebody giving misinformation, we’ll suspend them, we’ll give them a warning.

Bradley Sutton:

If we see spam or things, people breaking the rules, you know, there’s zero tolerance for that. We just kicked them completely out, but I’ll just be straight up. I don’t care. What kind of Facebook group you are in. If it’s for open membership, somewhat open membership, misinformation might happen. I mean, we have the Helium 10 Elite Facebook group, right? That’s a completely private group. You have to be in the Helium 10 Elite program in there, but still there’s people who just have different opinions on things. And they have zero bad intentions, but, you know, they might give a wrong advice or something that maybe they didn’t realize had changed in the terms of service. That doesn’t mean the group is bad, or that person is bad. It just, you know, means that you know, not everybody knows every single thing about Amazon at all times. Right?

Bradley Sutton:

So again, the answer to this question is like, how do I know if Facebook groups you know, are good or not just take a look at some of those things about how often it’s moderated and are repeat offenders still there. And that brings me to my next point. You know, a lot of times, you know, some of these things, we might not, even when I say we, I mean, people in the industry, not just Helium 10, who are in charge of moderating groups and things might not know that somebody is breaking the rules. Like for example, if somebody from a group you know, sees you post something, and then they slide into your DMs, you know, a lot of groups that actually is against the rules, and in Helium 10 and FBA High Rollers that is literally in the terms of service at the very top of the group.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s another way you can see is a group good or not is if that’s in the terms of service, like do not send unsolicited messages, you know, advertising or services. So but think about that by definition, DMs are private messages, right? We can’t see who’s sending who private messages. The only way that group moderators would know is if you are reporting them, right. Reporting them to the moderators. So, absolutely do that if you’re in any group and I’m not just talking about Helium 10, but if you’re in anybody’s group and that is clearly against terms of service and somebody sends you unsolicited message report them. That’s the only way that you can get that to stop it. And then you’re doing a public service because if they’re messaging you, I guarantee you they’re messaging like 75 other people who maybe are part of your network.

Bradley Sutton:

So save them from having that unsolicited message, all right, by reporting them. Now, one thing I’ve noticed is a, a lot of people just assume, you know, since Helium 10 or maybe you’re in another group out there, oh, this is the biggest group out that I’m getting this unsolicited DM. It must be from somebody from this group, but 90% of the time I’ve seen people report. It actually is not even members of the group. How do you know if they’re a member of the group or not? So that, you know, did this spammer come from group or not almost every Facebook group? I know Helium 10 members I’m not sure. I, I don’t know too much about the other groups, but you click on members. There’s something in a Facebook app and also on the desktop where you can click on the members, you can actually see who is in that group.

Bradley Sutton:

So you get an unsolicited DM go to whatever group you think it came from, hit the members type in their name, and you’ll see, are they a member of that group? If they are, boom, screenshot your message, report them so you can get them kicked out. What you might notice is that just a lot of these groups or the group that you think that these spammers are coming from, they’re not even coming from, that group, you know, because a lot of us, myself included we’re members of various different Facebook groups. So just keep that in mind that, you know, before trying to throw you know, some Facebook group under the bus, is that member really from that group or not, is a good thing to look into. Now other things about, you know, the Facebook group is do the moderators like post misinformation themselves, or the admins of that, of that group.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I would like to think that I I don’t as one of the admins of Facebook group and believe me if I ever do something, that’s absolutely, you know, against terms of service, you know, please let me know. I can guarantee you, I’m not doing it purposely. But if you see consistently the people who are supposedly the experts of the group posting misinformation, that’s another sign to kind of like, you know, stay away from that kind of, of Facebook group now. So many people nowadays assume that, oh, the bad players, you know, the people who are doing these things like unsolicited DMs and giving misinformation, oh, they’re all virtual assistants. Or, you know, they’re all from India, they’re all from Pakistan. Or if I see a Chinese name there, I guarantee that they’re part of a Chinese freight company who’s trying to solicit me.

Bradley Sutton:

And so you gotta be careful with that guys, because I don’t think that stereotyping is fair and, and it’s just not factual. All right. There have been people from United States, Germany, you know, Europe, Canada who are giving misinformation and we treat it all the same. We don’t care if you are, you know, from Pennsylvania or from Pakistan, or we don’t care, you know, if you’re from Germany or Georgia, if you’re breaking the rules of the group, we’re gonna take action. You know, it’s not like, you know, we play favorites either side, and then you guys too, just be careful with sometimes the thing I’ve heard, you know, very insensitive things being said when people stereotype, I don’t think you guys all do it on purpose, but just keep that in mind. It’s not nice to stereotype, right.

Bradley Sutton:

And not just the fact that it’s not nice to stereotype, but usually you’re completely wrong because somebody from a certain country could have great advice. Somebody could have bad advice. It doesn’t matter what country you’re from. It happens across the board. So, be careful with, you know, just with how you get in the groups and the things you say, because it’s not like one country is more or less as far as the bad players than, the other. It can happen anywhere. A couple of other things I want to talk about is, and this is the tough one. This is the tough one. And I can’t speak for other groups, but I’m, I’m assuming it’s a very similar thing in other groups is people sometimes wanna make a name for themselves.

Bradley Sutton:

And even if they’re not actively spamming you or advertising their services or DMing you, right. What I’ve seen happen sometimes is they do it indirectly where everybody out there with half a brain knows that this person is just advertising for their services, right. They do it in very slick ways. And you gotta be careful about this where they’ll post, like, you know, screenshots and they don’t advertise their service. They don’t say, Hey, go to this website, you know, sign up for my services. But they say, ah, I just wanna share with you guys a big success for one of my clients, look at this. So like, are they really advertising? They kind of are. And we all know that like, oh, my clients, or my students did this, or my student, let me show you the screenshot for my student.

Bradley Sutton:

And so the problem we have is, it’s like, what do you do about this? You know, let me tell you, I used to do that, but I’ll tell you right now, I did not have the intention of trying to make it aim for myself as far as trying to get clients. Like I wasn’t hoping somebody would DM me and I can get a client because as you guys may or may not know, I used to be a consultant basically like a Virtual Assistant for Amazon sellers before I worked at Helium 10. I’ll tell you right now, I didn’t, I never signed up one person in the history of my pre-Helium 10 days as a client of mine that came because of my advertising on Facebook. My only clients I had were like personal friends or people from masterminds, and my groups were like 95% of my business probably came from like less than 10 people.

Bradley Sutton:

So there’s a case where I would post things and I had zero ulterior motives. I actually did not want to sign up anybody. I, what would happen was I would get 30 DMs by people saying, Hey, can I hire you? Those 30 DMs I would say no to every one of them. Like, I’m sorry, I’m not really looking to hire any more clients, but then how do you really know? Right? How do you, if somebody was doing it just to try and help people, or if somebody’s doing it, because they’re hoping for DMS or they’re trying to promote themselves, it is a thin line and it is very hard. And, and I’ll tell you right now, I don’t care if it’s Helium 10 members or whatever group you’re in. There is no admin or, or moderators who have that exactly down to a science, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Where, how you can stay English. Now, there are somewhere it’s just blatant, right? Where, Hey, here’s my clients. And they give no real valuable information. So like, for example, in Helium 10 members, if somebody’s doing that and it gets reported and we take a look at it, we ask ourselves, is this person really just trying to help other people, or just trying to like, hope that they get DMS. And, and for us, a lot of times is easy, right? You can see the tell, tell signs like, Hey, my client did this, but there’s no real strategy given there. They’re like, they’re just trying to show off. And so, yeah, we’ll just delete those. I’ll tell you that right now, we delete those as much as we can, but then there are somewhere they’re like, I know this guy’s kind of a decent guy, but you know, like why did they post this?

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like, are they just trying to help people, or are they trying to make a name for themselves? And, and let me just say, make it a name for yourself. It’s not necessarily a bad or unethical thing. It’s marketing you market yourself. Right. But you just gotta, you know, my message to marketers out there is, you know, don’t do it in other people’s Facebook groups. You know, especially if it’s against the rules, you just do it in a upfront way. You know, there’s nothing wrong with making a name for yourself or wanting to get your name more known, but don’t do it where you reply to every single post in a Facebook, even though you don’t even have a real answer, but you just want to kind of get your name out. That’s not the right way to do it.

Bradley Sutton:

And then if you are trying to market, just be upfront with it, you know, I’ve told you guys this story before about when I was a Zumba fitness and instructor, and I started the YouTube channel. I wanted to make myself more memorable. Right. And so that people would remember me, even if they don’t remember my name and I had a stick as it were. And so I created this character called CrazySockTV. That’s why I was, I wasn’t Bradley sound. I was CrazySockTV. I was the crazy guy. Who’d wear a sock on my arm and then one sock on only one leg that was super colorful and do these crazy videos. And so like, that’s how I got known, got tens of millions of views, but I was very upfront with it. Every time people would ask me, like, why did you do the CrazySockTV?

Bradley Sutton:

I was like, Hey, I’m, I just want to be memorable. You know, like anybody can make Zumba videos, but I just wanna make myself kind of memorable. I was very upfront with it. So if you’re upfront with it, then, you know, it’s good. But if you’re one of those sneaky people, who’s just has these tactics on trying to always reply to post, just to get your name out there or make posts that really aren’t helpful to people, believe me, guys, people can see through that and we can see through that. And we’ll block you, but it’s not a hundred percent because sometimes people are so good at it. You don’t really know what this person’s intentions are. So, that’s my first thing. I just like a question for you guys out there. You can make a post about this in the Helium 10 members group, but I really want to know your viewpoint.

Bradley Sutton:

What would you like for like our group or any Facebook group out there? Like, how do you want those kind of posts moderated? Do you just wanna say, you know what, we can never tell the person’s intentions. So if somebody is a service writer or agency or virtual assistant or anything like that, just not have them post at all, like initial posts that are kind of showing off things, or, you know, the flip side of that is there might be some legit good strategies that we might miss out on because we don’t know what that person’s intentions are. So I’m just curious which direction do you think Facebook groups could go, you know, make a post in the Helium 10 members group and let me know, we’ll just make one post and people gonna reply there. All right. So, so that’s Facebook groups.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s, no number in my opinion about how many Facebook groups you should be active in to get a good variety. Maybe three or four, because it can get to a point where you don’t have time to go through all the posts. So I’m not sure if three or four is a great number, you know, maybe for you is five or six, I’d be curious to get your opinion on that. In general, how do you know, you know, which blogs to read or that you should subscribe to, or which podcast you should subscribe to? It’s hard, you know, it just look at the things they say, if they say nonsense things like, oh yeah, the A10 algorithm is in effect and it’s, it’s kicking our butts or things. You gotta know that there is no such thing as the A10 algorithm.

Bradley Sutton:

Right. I don’t know if that was started as a joke or somebody like legitimately thought there was a such thing as A10 algorithm. I mean, A9 unless I’m just having a brain fart here, that’s like the name of the, one of the subsidiaries of Amazon, right. Is the people who make up the algorithm, the company is actually called A9. And so people, you know, kind of said, oh yeah, this is, would they just made up a name of A9 algorithm, which, which is fine. You know, there’s nothing wrong with making up names. I make up names a lot. Maldives Honeymoon you know, Amazon community has made up names. Indexing was kind of made up by Manny Coats back in 2016. The honeymoon period, that’s not an Amazon term, but everybody knows these are kind of made up terms.

Bradley Sutton:

But if you see podcasts and blogs trying to like publish things as, oh yeah, this is official, there is an, A10 algorithm, you know that’s probably a sign that this is not a great source of information. You know, if people are not upfront or they try and push things as fact that is just opinion or they trying to make the new names seem like these are official things that Amazon has released. So just be careful of things like that. But you know, there’s tons of great blogs out there. And I’m not just talking about the Helium 10 blog, which, you know, in my opinion, obviously is the best, but there’s, I read other blogs too, you know, not even Amazon related. So, but again, slow your role so that you don’t get caught in information overload.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. If you subscribe to like 17 different blogs, that might not be a good move, even if all 17 of those blogs have nothing but good information, right. You’ve got to have a balance between the information you take in, and then the action you take. That could be like one of those Instagram story, like quotes or something. I just forgot what I said. So I can’t repeat it. I’m gonna have to watch the replay what I just said, but that sounded pretty good, but it’s true. People sometimes say, oh, there’s no such thing as too much good information. Well, guess what the guys there is when it comes at the cost of you actually taking action. Holy crap. Was that another quote that I just did? Oh my goodness. I’m full of quotable things today, but it’s true.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, you could sit there and listen to all the best podcasts in the world, but is it really a value to you if you don’t actually take action on what you’re learning. So again, find your sweet spot, you know, and everybody’s different. Everybody’s different. Like if you have a full time job, your sweet spot might be, Hey, I can only listen to one podcast or one blog, you know, a week. That might be it. If you have all the time in the world, maybe that number is like six or seven or eight. Find that sweet spot about how much good information can take in without it actually coming at the cost of not taking action on your Amazon or Walmart business. For me, like, I honestly don’t listen to any other podcasts anymore other than, you know, AM/PM podcasts and our own because I don’t drive anymore.

Bradley Sutton:

I used to listen to tons of podcasts, you know, not just, you know, Amazon really, actually mostly not Amazon related because I would drive an hour each way to work. Now at Helium 10’s a remote company I literally barely drive it all. Matter of fact, I need to cancel my Audible account because I used to listen to like a bunch of Star Wars and Star Trek books and things like that. But since I don’t drive, I just don’t listen to podcasts anymore. But anyway, you know, find out what are the good podcasts like who has the guest that you can most relate to, or who has guests that almost always talk about things that you’re interested in? What happens sometimes is that you know, maybe all the guests that somebody has, you can’t really relate to them. Like if somebody’s has nothing but Etsy guests and you never wanna sell on Etsy, well, you know, probably don’t listen to that podcast.

Bradley Sutton:

Right. and so, you know, there’s some advice too about which information on podcasts and blogs, you should do make sure there’s accurate information. They’re not making up things without being upfront about it, that, that they’re not still telling you things that are out of date. Like, like, Hey, go run a search, find, buy campaign for a hundred percent rebates and then ask for a review. I mean, like you see that kind of stuff, you know, run for the hills, right. I’m going back to what I was talking about earlier with some people saying, oh, it’s Virtual Assistants or things ruining Facebook groups or things like that. First of all, it’s not necessarily, but the common next question is, well, how do I know who are good Virtual Assistants versus who are ones that are new and don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s a very, very valid question. And especially if you’re a newer Amazon seller, it might be hard. You know, even though, you know, some of the worst Virtual Assistants out there, if you’re new, guess what, they still probably know more than you. And, and you would not know any different that something they say is right or wrong. So I’m not gonna go too much into detail on that. That’s why I did the episode, the previous episode. Look at the episode I just did with Saqib Azhar who leads the enablers group. I had him on to ask all these question, like, how do I know who’s a good virtual assistant or not, what should I hire them for? Instead of me going into that here, you know, just take a listen to that episode and you can get, hopefully, all your questions answered as far as that goes.

Bradley Sutton:

But here’s what I say to everybody who first asked me, you know, yes, I like Virtual Assistants. I myself was one at, at one point, yes, there are great sources of them like the enablers group, like you know, there’s, there’s good people on Upwork and Fiver and Online Jobs in the Philippines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But my first thing I always say is try and learn it yourself. I only say, Hey, go out to hire an agency or a Virtual Assistant help with your time management. If you’re new, I would highly recommend doing it yourself first. All right. Can a professional do a better job with PPC from day one than you could on day one? Probably I would very well much say yes, but one of the problems is if you don’t learn every aspect of your Amazon business first, right?

Bradley Sutton:

How do you know if this person you hire is even doing a good job? You don’t, right. Especially if you never learn it, they could be giving you some report on your PPC. And, and that this is, oh, this is great stuff we’re doing awesome. And you’d be like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah. I don’t know any better. Right. So I hire, recommend guys learn this stuff yourself first with Helium 10, especially those of you who are Helium 10 members, you’ve got all of the education that you need to get a good basis. I mean, this is the education that even six, seven and eight figure sellers are still going to. So you think that if they find it interesting and valuable that you, as a new seller, can’t, we give you A to Z with the Freedom Ticket. So those of you who are in Helium 10 make sure you’ve gone through all of the Freedom Ticket to understand everything and that gives you a solid base.

Bradley Sutton:

And people have said, you know, or my people have said, my dad used to say this. He had a saying experience better than brains, right? Even if you have a bad experience, but if you did it yourself, you learn so much from that, as opposed to just book knowledge. As I say, Freedom Ticket is kinda like book knowledge, very important. You gotta learn the basics, but experience teaches you so much. So before hiring an agency before hiring a virtual assistant, and again, there’s nothing wrong with either of those, all right, nothing wrong with either of those. I have a lot of great friends who are Virtual Assistants, who are agencies, try and do it yourself first is my opinion. And then you’ll be able to better distinguish who are the good ones, or who are the bad ones.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ll know what to ask them, like the questions to ask, like, Hey, here’s a scenario agency, Virtual Assistant. You know, my ACoS on this is this, and my click through rate is this, you know, what would you do if this or X, Y, or Z happened? And you can make a much better decision on if they’re good or not, by how they answer, cuz you, you can actually know if they’re answering in a wise way or not. So what we’ve talked about so far, we talk about Facebook groups. We’ve talked about agencies. We talked about Virtual Assistants, by the way, we’re highly, highly expanding out for the next few months, our trusted partner directory. But depending on when you’re listening to this, it might be called something differently. But you can go to like directory.helium10.com.

Bradley Sutton:

And these are people that came from suggestions from our Elite members and from our own network at who are kind of some of the best in the game at what they do. Be it an Amazon management agencies, PPC agencies freight companies, inspection companies you know, graphical companies, photo fee studios, et cetera, directory.helium10.com. We vet these as well as we can. Now that that being said, you know, sure. Maybe we get a bunch of good reviews and then the people turn out to not be so great. Well, if that happens, we’ll kick them out of the directory, but that’s a great way to start. If you do need to, hire an agency or something like that down the road.

Bradley Sutton:

Courses, you know there are a lot of great courses out there, not just Helium 10. You know, I took a bunch of courses you before Helium 10 even had a course when I first learned Amazon. Right. and so, like I said before, though, the danger is that if you just take courses and never take action, how valuable are those courses really to you? So if you are a Helium team member, it’s a no brainer. Obviously, you’ve got the Freedom Ticket course, which by itself costs a thousand dollars. If somebody were to go to freedomticket.com. But if you’re a helium team member, you got full access to that for free. So you should be taking advantage of that course. So again most of you would be just fine going through with the Helium 10 Freedom Ticket course. I mean, it has the most modules out there of any of the larger courses.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, we’ve got over a hundred modules there 30, 40, 50, 60 hours of training not just from us or from Kevin King, but we invite a lot of people that are not even on the payroll of Helium 10 experts and well respected people in the field to give modules on this. So definitely make an effort to take in the Freedom Ticket course. But if you have extra time, you want to get a more specific course. Like I want a PPC only course, or I’d love to have a deep dive into, you know, Keyword Research. There’s other great courses out there, you know? Absolutely. There are great courses, but how do you know if they’re good? Not, you know, well, we’ll see. When was it made? Is it frequently updated? You know, like Freedom Ticket 3.0, just came out a few months ago.

Bradley Sutton:

And even since then we’ve updated modules, added modules, taken off modules, as things are now not in concordance with, with the terms of service or as things develop on Amazon or Walmart, you know, we’ll go ahead and update it. But if you see a course out there, it’s like the same exact thing that has been there for three years. Guess what that course probably is not gonna be very beneficial for you because as we know things on Walmart and Amazon change all the time, so go with one that is frequently updated. Is there a too much to pay or not enough to pay for a course? No. I mean, I know there are some four, five, $6,000 courses out there. A lot of people have taken those been successful. So I’m not gonna say, oh, just because it costs thousands of dollars it’s not gonna be good.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, think about it. If a course costs $6,000, but from what you learn from it, you end up making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, that course was worth it, you know? So there are some expensive courses out there that are good, but if there are courses that require you to like put something upfront or, Hey, well, you know, we’ll do this. If you put this money in escrow or you give us this kind of money, we’ll we’ll do this or that, you know, I’d be wary. I’m not sure what the word is there but of those kind of offers. So you know, know what you’re getting to first of, of course, if anybody has a money back guarantee, that’s always a good thing, you know especially once the price gets higher, you know, usually once you get into the course, you’ll know within the first like few modules, like, ah, this is garbage. This is not for me.

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s good that if there is a money back guarantee, you can, you can take advantage of that. So that would be one thing to, to look at, look at who are the creators of the course, what’s the reputation in the space. Are there a lot of reviews that talk about how good or bad the course is? Is this person only an Amazon seller from like four years ago and is still basing their information off of what worked four years ago? Are they actually in the game? Now, these are all kind of things that you should consider before paying money or even getting a free course. I don’t care, not just talking about money here. It could be a free course on you to me, right. But it’s not gonna be worth your while. If it’s completely out of date.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing is conferences. You know, the world knock on wood is hopefully gonna be getting back to normal again over the next few months. And that means more Amazon conferences. I mean, you know, there’s a lot of Amazon conferences when even during the pandemic, there are still Amazon conferences. So you can just imagine how it’s gonna be once things open up again. Right. How do you know which ones to go to? Personally, I think like anything that’s local is a good bet to go to like, like if there’s a, if there’s a conference in, in Vegas and you live in Vegas, you should probably go to it, you know, but if it’s free, but if it’s expensive, like, yeah, you gotta like, no, like, should I pay money for, for this event? Same kind of stuff that we’ve been talking about today. Look, who’s putting it on.

Bradley Sutton:

Look who the speakers are, you know, find out people who have gone to previous ones and ask ’em if they think it’s beneficial. For me, the actual most beneficial thing, which is why sometimes I’ll go to a bad conference or something, is I go, not for the, you know, the seminars that they’re gonna give, but I go for the networking because regardless of how the conference is there’s gonna be good Amazon sellers who go to that, you can meet and build your network. I mean that I’ve told you guys many times a story of how my I can owe my whole Amazon journey, kind of to this one conference that I went to. And I met people there that I’m still connected to, to this day. So networking is really great. Like maybe The Prosper Show, for example, coming up in March, we’re gonna be out there.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re gonna have a Helium 10 social. We’re gonna rent out this big club for another big social, and you can meet people. I know a lot of people who don’t go to Prosper, but they go Prosper as in they go to Vegas, just so they can like meet the people at the different meetups, cuz every big conference, they usually have lots of meetups that people organize. And sometimes the best information you can get is by networking with other people. Now there are courses out there like Prosper that actually have really good seminars. So if you can afford it by all means, you know buy a ticket to Prosper, sit through the seminars and I guarantee you’re gonna learn a couple things. I have never not learned things at any conference I have been to, but if you can’t afford the ticket to a conference still consider going, especially if you live in the area because the networking that you can get before and after these events sometimes it can be even more valuable than the seminars themselves.

Bradley Sutton:

So we’re gonna be attending a number of conferences domestically and internationally in 2022. So you know, if we ever announce it, you know, it would be great to meet you in person, come out to it. We’ll definitely be a Prosper. We have the Sell and Scale conference that we are putting on in Vegas in September. There’ll be more information coming on that’ll be hands down the most epic, epic Amazon conference ever done. And I’ve been to like a lot of them and I don’t wanna, I’m not putting any other conference down. Those conferences I’ve been to that are big, were amazing, love them, but we’re just taking to another level with a Sale and Scale. So you, you guys are gonna be blown away when more details come out about, about that.

Bradley Sutton:

But again, maybe going to a conference twice a week around the world might not be a great thing. All right, moderation is key. Don’t do things again. The theme of today is don’t do things that come at no matter how good they are that come at the cost of actually taking action. So find what number works for you, make sure that if you do go to these things that you do participate in the networking events. All right guys. So I hope this has been helpful with those of you struggling with information overload, with analysis paralysis us with not being able to distinguish the good from the bad. I’m sorry that sometimes in these cases, I didn’t give you like a clear black and white answer because the fact is that there isn’t a black and white answer for some of these questions. It depends on you, the individual, and there are just some things that there’s not a clear direction on.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, you know, how to distinguish the scammers from the non scammers in a Facebook group, right? So sometimes you can tell easily sometimes you can’t. But I hope that you found this valuable. I would love, love, love to get your feedback on this. So please, you know, let me know I’m sure I’m gonna post this in the Facebook group, like a link to this episode in the Helium 10 members’ Facebook group. So find this link and you know, reply right there on anything in this episode that you’d love to give me feedback on. And maybe there’s something in here I didn’t cover, well, let me know in there. And I’ll be happy to reply and maybe include it in a future episode. So again, guys, thank you very much for listening.

Bradley Sutton:

Don’t forget to subscribe all of our podcasts, AM/PM podcast series, seller podcasts, mainly on apple podcast app. If you have an iPhone or if you don’t have an iPhone, you can always try Spotify as well, leave a review. If you haven’t let us know what you like about this episode or what you don’t like. You know, we’d love to get your feedback. It helps us you know, to keep this show as relevant as possible to you. If you guys are not Helium 10 members, you don’t know what this Freedom Ticket or some of these other things are that you’re, that we’re talking about, you know, make sure to sign up at heliumten.com. You can sign up for a free account. If you want to hop in right away, start taking Freedom Ticket. You can use the discount code SSP10, SSP10, in order to get 10% off, for life on your Helium 10 account. So guys, thank you very much for tuning in and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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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.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart 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.