#128 – Introducing Helium 10’s Portals, An Amazon Optimized Landing Page to Drive Outside Traffic to Your Products

There’s always something new happening at Helium 10.

Visits (pre-lockdown) from Amazon celebrity sellers and influencers, filming Freedom Ticket and Project X videos, and just this afternoon, a virtual cocktail party for the “office” to celebrate the release of four new tools.

Today, on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton introduces the newest thing to happen at Helium 10 and it’s a big one. This episode features Barcus Patty, the Product Manager for Portals, Helium 10’s new landing page tool.

Amazon sellers know that driving outside traffic to their products is important. Now, Helium 10 has developed a tool optimized for Amazon sellers, but that also works great for multiple eCommerce platforms which will streamline the entire process.

In episode 128 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Barcus discuss:

• 01:30 – A Report from Alabama
• 03:00 – Why is Outside Traffic Important?
• 04:15 – Controlling Your Own Destiny
• 06:15 – Amazon Rewards Sellers for Bringing Them New Customers
• 07:30 – Email is Not Dead
• 10:05 – Introducing Portals by Helium 10  
• 12:00 – Setting Up a Landing Page  
• 15:15 – Portals Will Make It Easy to Keep Track of Valuable Metrics  
• 17:45 – Optimized for Amazon Sellers but It Works Great for Multiple eCommerce Platforms
• 20:00 – Portals Offers Full Integration for Helium 10’s GEMs and URL Generation
• 21:40 – Using Deep Linking
• 23:15 – Portals Also Plays Well with Zapier
• 25:00 – Here’s How to Get Portals
• 32:05 – Barcus’s 30 Second Tip        

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley: Today, we’re going to talk to the product manager of a brand new tool that we just released here at Helium 10 that helps you do everything from building your landing pages, building your email list, generating custom two-step URLs, deep links, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley: 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 or serious sellers of any level in the eCommerce world. And today, we’re going to be talking about some new strategies that is going to be available from Helium 10, and because of that, I’ve invited a special guest; my brother from another mother Barcus Patty. Barcus, is how’s it going?

Barcus: It’s great man. I love that intro.

Bradley: All right, so Barcus you are a in Alabama right now, right?

Barcus: That’s correct.

Bradley: How are things going over there as far as like, are there cases of Coronavirus near you?

Barcus: I think there’s one case; it’s about 45 minutes north of me. There is nothing in my direct local area. There’s definitely a downturn in restaurants and bars and that stuff; school will be shut down for about three weeks starting tomorrow or at least through April 5^th, and that’s state mandated. I think everybody is still being a cautious here. There’s 29 confirmed cases in the state. I’m sure there’s more. And we’re all just kind of playing it by year. The local grocery stores, like there’s Publix and there’s Walmart’s, and a few other small ones, and they’re rapidly running out of all the main stuff. But it’s not horrible. Like I went this weekend, and I was able to try to stock up on some non-perishables just in case, let’s say, Walmart has to shut down.

Bradley: Were you able to get toilet paper or are you using your tree leaves yet?

Barcus: No. I do the paper products on Amazon Subscribe and Save, so I usually buy that. I don’t have a ton, but we’ve got enough to last us for a few weeks like paper towels and some other toilet paper and other paper products. I usually do that just because it’s just easier. The stuff I know we’ll always need some, I buy it in semi-bulk. I don’t have a ton, so nobody come ransack my house, please. We’re talking about serious strategies for our sellers, so that is why I brought you on because we’re launching a new tool in Helium 10 that is something that has been asked from us for probably ever since I started. It’s been almost two years now. But before we say what the tool is, let’s talk about why it’s even important to be doing the kind of activity that this tool is going to help sellers to do. First of all, let’s talk about outside traffic. You’ve got a lot of experience with sending outside traffic to Amazon from outside sources and like the kind of effects that it has. Why is that even important? Because some people might be under the impression that, “Hey, I only need PPC. Why would Amazon care if traffic is coming from out outside of Amazon?” Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Barcus: Yes. This is like one of my favorite topics, because I love seeing brands that are diversifying¾not only in brands, in complimentary products and multiple brands, but just selling elsewhere, whether that is retail, whether that is locally, other marketplaces or on websites. You’ll probably have to cut me off because I will talk about this a lot.

Barcus: I really think that it’s kind of maybe ominous that we’re having this conversation right now, because everybody just got the email last night that Amazon is temporarily stopping a certain, a lot of categories, that will able to send in shipments through April 5^th, and that’s the exact reason why you need outside traffic. It’s to essentially control your own destiny with your business. If you learn how to effectively drive traffic, then you can send them wherever you want. Absolutely, Walmart is this powerhouse, and it continues to be a powerhouse even right now in everything that’s going on with the world. But there are tons of horror stories out there of, “Hey, I can’t send any inventory in” or “I missed the deadline for a Lightning Deal” or “I missed the deadline for prime day or for Q4” or “my list got suspended” or “my account got suspended” and they have to pull all the inventory out of there, out of Amazon. That’s only place they’re selling. Not that Amazon is a bad place, but if you want to scale these brands in any way, shape, or form, you have to at least start thinking about outside traffic, like bringing outside traffic to your listing, because, again, if you could do it effectively, then you’re not sitting on Facebook wondering, “Hey man, is everybody’s sales down?” You’re not that worried about that because you’re controlling that, so to speak.

Bradley: Absolutely. Now, just from an Amazon algorithm to your point though, so a little bit more on a nerdy level here, why do you think that Amazon algorithm and how does it favor outside traffic as opposed to eliciting¾that’s just all 100% of their traffic is just within Amazon search and PPC.

Barcus: I’ll try to answer that in the best way possible because the algorithm is constantly changing. We all know that. And I think that, in my personal opinion, based on experience of helping other brands and working with my own brand and working with friends, Amazon does favor outside traffic. To me, the logical reason is if I’m paying to send traffic, good traffic to my listing that converts, Amazon will reward me because those people are likely to stay on Amazon and purchase something else that might be a prime video or rental or that might be another physical product. Amazon’s released statistics in the past, and I don’t know what they are recently, but Amazon has stats that people that come to Amazon typically don’t just buy one product at a time. It’s free traffic for them so logically, it makes sense for Amazon to want sellers in other businesses to drive traffic to their Amazon listings.

Bradley: Absolutely. And Amazon dedicates a lot of new metrics, even now for sellers through Amazon attribution, so you can see kind of like the quality and the path that these people are taking there. We had Lazar on the podcast last month, so guys, if you haven’t checked out that episode, make sure to go back and look up Lazar¾L A Z A R ¾and check out his podcast about Amazon attribution. Now, let’s switch gears a little bit. What about building email lists? A lot of people say, “Oh, emails, is so 2003; it’s dead. There’s no point to build up your email list. Nobody reads emails.” Can you talk a little bit about the importance of still trying to build your own audience via email off of Amazon?

Barcus: Yeah, I really think that if the people that are saying that email is dead, they’re just not communicating with their core audience. Right? If you have really, really low open rates, you’re not talking to them in a way that makes them want to stay on that list or take an action, which is all of the conversation about copy and understanding your core audience, but it’s not dead. It’s just another way to communicate with people that are likely to buy your product and get people to buy your product become brand advocates, repeat purchases, increasing average order value. There are so many, and we all know, like, I think I know more than anybody at Helium 10, it’s really hard…

Bradley: You know more than anybody? Are you saying you’re smarter than anybody at Helium 10? (Laughing)

Barcus: Well, let me finish this sentence about communicating with people via Amazon’s buyer-seller messaging platform. Follow-Up is a great example. It’s gone through a lot of changes just in, I’ve been with the company like nine months now. It’s gone through a lot of changes, and Amazon is slowly restricting the way you communicate, the language that you use, how frequently that you communicate with people through buyer-seller messaging platform. And I understand Amazon’s side, so to speak. Customers’ privacy is a big issue and will always continue to be an issue down the road. I understand them wanting to protect the credibility of their brand as Amazon. At the same time, it makes it really hard for us to communicate, and it’s really asking for a review. It makes it difficult. Capturing people’s email addresses and building these lists, and you can build multiple lists and we could talk about that later, but people that are engaged with your brand outside of Amazon, it’s much easier to take them to Amazon. You know, if you have this list, whether it’s a weekly newsletter or you’re driving people to social media, any type of valuable content about your brand or anything that really is relevant to your brand’s products, just kind of keeps their mind in the back of their head: “Oh yeah, I forgot. I got to order this product. I meant to do this like two weeks ago.” And that happens more than you think. If you think about it from a consumer’s point of view, I get emails all the time. I don’t read a lot of them, but then I’m like, “Oh yeah. I need to sign up for that” or “I need to order that” or “I need to do this.” It’s just another way, and when you have this list, you can also push them into, if you want to get into text messaging platforms, Facebook Messenger platform, so you can start really segmenting these audiences. Not just email but other platforms as well.

Bradley: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, without having a postpone any further, and a lot of you guys probably already heard about this in our mega webinar that we just did this week announcing it. The new tool that we have launched is called Portals by Helium 10. Portals by Helium 10. Barcus is the product manager for Portals here at Helium 10, so Barcus, let’s just dive right in. Let’s talk a little bit about what Portals is like. First of all, what were some of the things that we were hearing from our customers that kind of triggered us to say, “Yeah, this is something we need to focus on going forward?”

Barcus: As our customers’ businesses are maturing, they’re wanting to do other things than just sell on Amazon. Should I open a Shopify store? Should I open a WooCommerce store? Should I branch out into social media? Should I be doing any of these things? Should I get on Walmart? Our customers are getting to the point that a lot of them are already selling on other platforms. How do you do that? How do you get there? And one of the best things to do is start building an email list. Doing it from day one,  sets you up, so in two years from then, when you’re curating this list and communicating with them, you can push them anywhere. If you start launching a product on it on Walmart.com, you’ve got this list, “Hey, we just launched this brand new product. I’ve got 10% off. Click here to sign up and get your code now.” If these people are curated, and they love your brand and they bought them, that’s an easy ask for them, because they already liked your product. Our customers are just maturing to look into other avenues of revenue for their brand.

Bradley: Absolutely. Absolutely. Now what would you say is the main functionality of this tool? Like I know there’s kind of different ones, but let’s just take it one at a time. What for you, like if you’re using it, which I think you are for your own business, what’s the first thing that you want to use Portals for?

Barcus: Yup. Real quick, if you haven’t already figured out right now, Portals is a landing page tool that we’ve optimized for Amazon sellers. That’s the easiest way to describe it. But one of the first things to do is to set up a landing page, and if you don’t know what a landing page is, it’s just a simple webpage with a singular, in my opinion, you need a singular call to action. Drive them to this page to get them to do one thing, only allow them to do one thing, either exit or sign up for something or click here to buy. Now, first thing you should be doing is a simple email subscribe button¾an email subscribe page. And this just allows you to start gathering emails.

Bradley: Okay. Can you walk us through like the flow a little bit, like what you’re setting up on your own, and then where Portals comes into play, and then what the end result is.

Barcus: Sure. You can set up multiple, or we’re going to call them Portals, so when we hear Portals, that’s the landing page.

Barcus: You can set up multiple Portals within your account. What I would recommend if you’re new to this at all, if you’re like, “I don’t have an email list, Barcus. I don’t know what to do.” We have different themes and we have different templates in here, and the whole idea is to make this as simple as possible but still have some unique and some pretty cool features in here. The first thing I would do is a simple email subscribe landing page. You go in there, you put your copy in here and for whatever, give them a reason to do it: maybe if you are in a food categories, maybe you give them a recipe book that’s a PDF that they can either download or you can email to them; maybe there is a video that they can watch, so give them a reason. But you start driving traffic to the landing page, so people start emailing and subscribe. From there, you can start doing other types of landing pages for email subscriptions. For example, you could do a warranty page. You could have on a product insert or on the packaging on your Amazon, on your products on Amazon, you can have a QR code that links to the landing page or just the URL built onto the packaging itself: “Hey, click here to register your warranty.” Like, maybe you have a Bluetooth speaker that you sell, something that’s electronic that could break. It has batteries. It has multiple moving pieces that’s a little complicated. People want to sign up for a warranty because it just further enhances the overall brand image of your product. “We stand behind our product. You have a two-year warranty.” Whatever that is, set up a warranty page. You can also set up a giveaway page. Maybe you created an ad and you’re driving traffic from Facebook or Google or other social media and you can drive traffic to a giveaway page: “Hey, every month we’re giving away whatever we’re giving away¾an Amazon gift card, we’re giving away one of our Bluetooth speakers absolutely free. You don’t have to purchase anything. All you have to do is subscribe, click, give us your email address, and subscribe to the giveaway.” There’s multiple ways to start driving traffic and start getting attention for your brand.

Bradley: Are these landing pages hosted by Helium 10, right?

Barcus: They’re hosted by Helium 10. Correct.

Bradley: And then what kind of visibility is Portals giving the sellers? Are they able to see how many people are viewing it, and how many people are clicking on it¾things like that?

Barcus: Yeah. We’ve built in some interesting graphs, and from an account level, you can go in here and you can see all of your active Portals. You can see how many visitors you had, how many clicks, and how many emails you’ve collected. We’ve got a couple of the graphics too. We’ve got where you can actually compare this data to an account level. Let’s say you have three different active Portals going on, and you can kind of measure the difference between visitors, between clicks, between email collection, the click-through rate, so you get to kind of see like maybe there’s one ad that’s really outperforming some other. Maybe you have two Portals that just aren’t really doing much: maybe there’s a lot of visitors, but not a lot of clicks, not a lot of email collections, but you’ve got one that’s got tons of visitors and tons of clicks and tons of email. Go back and look at that ad that you created, that campaign, or wherever you’re driving that from maybe from social media. Find out what’s working with that message with your audience. And edit at a campaign level, and at an individual portal level, you can see a few things. You can see devices and countries and you can also see some operating systems. You get to see, are they using the Android and are they using an iPhone device? Are they using a mobile device or a desktop or which country they’re coming from, and we’ve got some other things too that we’re working on as well, but that also tells you, Bradley, maybe you’re driving traffic and everybody from mobile devices are really responding. Maybe that tells you like, I really need to focus on when I create these Facebook ads, for example, I don’t need to worry about desktops so much because I’m not getting a lot of attention. Let’s say you’re targeting San Diego for example in a Facebook ad and like, “Hey everybody in San Diego, I’ve got a special deal for you.” You notice that there’s a lot of traffic in the country section coming from Mexico. Maybe you only want traffic from the US, because it’s amazon.com and you’re not selling on Mexico’s marketplace yet. Maybe a dial that back down a bit. You can target 20 mile radius of San Diego, but maybe dial it back a bit because you don’t want to pay you for traffic that won’t convert. We talked a little bit about the email subscription. There’s also a thank you page that you can hook up to that. A thank you page, like, “Hey, thanks so much for subscribing. By the way, here’s some products that we recommend, some of our best sellers.” You can also drive them to download or watch another video. When it comes to building these pages out, we’ve got a couple of things. One thing I really want to point out too is these are optimized for Amazon sellers, but you can absolutely use this product for any product you sell off of Amazon. If you are selling products on eBay or Walmart, Etsy, for example, you can come in and build your custom product for this. It works for pretty much any type of product on the Internet.

Bradley: Oh, so then it doesn’t have to be just your Amazon account?

Barcus: No. Let’s say, we’re going to build out a product landing page, and I feel like we’ve made it as easy as possible. You pretty much just have to put in your URL for your product so you can just go to your listing. You don’t have to sit there and copy and paste the ASIN. You don’t have to remember your ASIN. Just go to your product list, and then you copy and paste and drop in your Amazon URL for an Amazon product. Now, this also works for multiple marketplaces. Right now, I know this is not live and we’re not going to release this tomorrow, for example, but right now we’re still trying to solve for like Amazon Japan because it imports things but not correctly, because it’s completely different type of alphabet, for example, not just a different language. It’s completely different alphabet. We’re working to solve for some of those, but the majority of Amazon marketplaces out there, international marketplaces, this works as well. Okay, so you put your URL in here and it pulls not only your main image, but all of your images as well.  It also pulls in your videos, and you don’t have to use your main image as the image for your portal. You can move around. You can select which one of your images from your Amazon listing. You can also upload your own image. You can also embed a video. If you have a video for your product that’s doing really well maybe on some other type of traffic or it’s built into the listing as well, you could certainly use that. But we also pull in a title, ASIN, regular price, and we pull in your bullet points too. You can edit those, but we figured that most of your benefit statements for your products are going to be in your bullet points, so that’s what we decided to pull. You can also completely scrap all that and change it all around. From this page you can enable a discount, so if you want to drive traffic and give them a discount, whether that’s 5% or whatever, you can certainly do that.

Bradley: And you can actually generate some special two-step URLs and other kinds of URLs within Portals, right?

Barcus: Absolutely. We’ve essentially integrated our GEMs page into Portals. If you’re not familiar with GEMs, it’s Helium10.com forward slash gems, G , E, M, s. You can build several different types of URLs for your Amazon product. We essentially built that into Portals, so it makes it really easy. If you want to create multiple different URLs, like I want to do three and you want to test these out and see which one works, if you want to try to get different keywords, you can certainly do that. You can also do a couple of cool things that I’m really happy about. You can install a Facebook or Instagram pixel. It’s the same thing for Facebook and Instagram, so if you have a Facebook pixel, you have an Instagram pixel. You can put in your Google Analytics tracking code or you can do a custom tracking code. Now, what all that means is it allows you to track activity and retarget people based on their activity inside the Portal, and we have a custom option because we realized that social media is constantly changing. Like for example I don’t know, a lot of people know this, but Snapchat for example, has their own pixel. TikTok has it, but right now, it’s kind of gated, and you have to be spending on tons of money each month just with TikTok to be able to access that pixel. But one day we assume that it’s going to become available and it will be easy to integrate here. These pixels, these page tracking, all that does is allow you to track activity once they leave your portal. For example, if you’re trying to drive traffic to, for sales, maybe you retarget these people in seven to 10 days. “Hey, what did you think of the product?” and you could do that based on their activity on the portal. If you know that everybody clicked a button they can go to, you can retarget them seven to 10 days later saying, “Based on everybody that visited this page, Hey, what did you think?” Something else that’s really cool that we have is deep linking. Now what deep linking is? Very simply, if somebody is visiting your portal from an Android device or an iOS device and they click there and it takes them to Amazon, it will take them to your product on the Amazon app, but they’re not going to go to a mobile site and you can turn that on or turn that off. I would recommend leaving it on all the time. There’s much more likely to have a better conversion rate if that’s turned on because we’ve all used our phone to go to Amazon’s mobile site before and it’s just awful compared to the Amazon app and there’s just less things that the customer has to do if the product is already inside their Amazon app. It’s right there. They click add to cart or click buy now and boom, it’s done. It’s over with.

Bradley: Do two-step URLs work with deep linking or is there something that falls away there?

Barcus: No, they all work together. If for example if you don’t want to draw them directly to your product, if you want to drive them to, let’s say, you’re on page five for a keyword, the deep link will take them to that spot on the Amazon app, so then you can instruct people that if you’re going to do that, you knew what you really want to instruct your customers to, “Hey, you might have to search for this product.” And really it’s just scrolling with their thumb or finger.

Bradley: Okay, cool. What else does the tool have that maybe we haven’t mentioned or maybe another use case, like can anything that is done there like trigger any kind of automations at this time?

Barcus: We’ve got an integration with Zapier and what that allows you to do is really connect to multiple other platforms and automate certain things. Probably, what’s going to be really popular as far as a few options is you can hook up your email subscription or your sales page to an email sequence maybe with MailChimp. If you have a MailChimp account, you can create a free account with them if you don’t already have one, and you can create a free Zapier account too. It’s Z A P I E R [dot] com, and Zapier is really just a hand holder. When you set it up, it’s going to recognize that Bradley went to Barcus’ portal and gave his email address, and your positioning on that email on that portal should be like, “Hey, give us your email address. We’ll let you know when this is coming out. We’re also going to let you know…” Basically, you just want to let people know before they put their email address, “Hey, we’re going to be contacting you.” People assume it, but you still want to be very clear in the message. But when Bradley goes to Barcus’ Portal and puts in his email address, it will fire an email sequence from MailChimp. And maybe that’s a three-email sequence. Maybe that’s longer, but you know, it can be something like “Hey, thanks for subscribing. Be on the lookout. Your coupon code is coming on our launch date of March 31^st,”  for example. But you could do other things too. You can take everybody that interacted with your portal and you can push them to a Facebook custom audience, so you can automatically retarget them. There’s a ton of things you could do, and we could probably spend about four days explaining all the cool things about Zapier. But it’s very simple to set up. If you’re currently using zapier.com, you’ll instantly know how to set this up. I’m really happy about that because that allows some automation there because everybody in this business time is our greatest asset. The less things that you have to do manually, the better.

Bradley: Okay. That this is all exciting. I know there’s plenty more that we can talk about now. Not everybody at the beginning is going to be able to get access to Portals, so it’s possible by the time that you guys are hearing this podcast that we’ve already filled up our beta group of 1000 users. But if that’s the case, guys, just make sure that you can upgrade your plan to Elite, and those members who have Elite, I’m not sure, it might be Diamond too, I’ll have to check on that. But at least Elite for sure, you guys, even if the original beta group is closed, anybody with Elite will be able to get in and possibly with diamond as well. But for those who are not able to upgrade to those categories at this time and they weren’t able to get in the first thousand, is there a timeline on when this might be open to the rest of the audience?

Barcus: Yeah, so right now, it is limited release a beta. It’s closed beta, meaning after that first thousand people, we’re not going to let anybody back in. And this is something kind of new that we’re starting with Helium 10, and we’ll probably see in future tools. A closed beta, like it’s been in a small beta program right now, but the concept with beta is,, before we release it to everybody, we want to get some user feedback, but we also want to test the waters with it so to speak.

Bradley: All right, no worries, no worries. Now we’re going to get into Barcus’ TST, which is your 30-second tip. It doesn’t have to be about Portals. It could be, but before we get into that, we’re going to play the search volume game. I don’t think in my previous times we’ve had you on, we played the search volume game with you. Basically I’m going to give you three keywords and you are going to tell me what you think the search volume of each one is or not, which search volume goes to which. I’m going to give you three keywords, three search volumes; everybody who’s listening to at home or on the car be playing along right with us. The three key words are, let’s see here, beard trimmer, and then we’re going to go with beard oil for men, and we’re going to have beard growth kit. Okay. Now one of these keywords has about 90,000 estimated monthly searches. Another one has about 23,000, and the other one is not too far off, so they’re kind of close together. The least one has 17,000. Which keyword goes to which search volume?

Barcus: I’m going to say the beard growth kit is 90,000. Beard oil for men is around 20, and then so beard trimmer should be 17.

Bradley: All right, so somebody very experienced with beards, having a luxurious one himself, and one who is in the beard category in Amazon, you got one out of three correct. All right. The actual number one is beard trimmer. Believe it or not, 90,000 people are searching for beard trimmers. Maybe because it’s getting warmer, so the people who had the long beards, maybe they want to trim it, I don’t know. But the beard oil for men is 23,000 and the beard growth kit is 17,000. There you have it guys. I guess people aren’t that interested in growing their beards right now.

Barcus: I haven’t optimized my listings since Q4, so that’s right. Nobody buys a beard trimmer in the wintertime. Most of the time they don’t.

Bradley: There we go. There we go. All right, so now we’ve come to the part of the show called the TST or the T S T, thirty-second tip. What is something that you could give of value, a strategy that is actionable, somewhat unique? It could be about Portals, it could be about trimming your beard. I mean, it could be about anything, but something that’s  valuable for our listeners that you can say in 30 seconds or less. Go whenever you’re ready.

Barcus: What I love to do is do competitor research and it’s not just on Amazon. I go to their websites and I sign up for all of their email lists. I sign up for everything I can. I contact customer support and ask them questions. I’m not rude or mean, but I’m just asking real questions. I want to see how quickly they’re responding and how often and how well they respond. That’s the kind of level of competitive research that I do.

Bradley: That is pretty cool. I have never heard of that before. The thirty-second tip is over, but what are some insights, what’s like a cool thing that you have learned by using that strategy? It’s actually pretty interesting.

Barcus: One of my biggest competitors, they built a quiz, and they did this like eight years ago. They built weight into all that answers. Oh, they built this quiz about basically what kind of man are you? You know, so it could go very well or very badly, very quickly, you know? But they didn’t really right. And they did this like 2012, 2013, but they built this quiz,  like, Do you like this? Do you do this? Are you outdoorsman? Do you sit at your desk all day? Anyways, so they weighted all the answers and then based on all the answers they calculate it. And then an automated response, this is the kind of person you likely are and these are the products that we recommend. And that allowed them to build a list, and this is like pre Amazon gold mine rush. They did this 2012, 2013 allowed them to build a list of way over 250,000 people. This is this is several years ago, so that’s a really advanced level of building an email list. But that kind of stuff still works.

Bradley: Cool. Cool. I love it. Love it. Never heard that one before. Anyways, Barcus, thank you so much for joining us and getting us excited about this new tool. It’s going to be exciting to see how the users out there use it. If you guys are already using Portals, by the time you hear, this let us know in the comments. If you’re on one of the pages, do comments, let us know how you’re using it, how you like it, what you don’t like about it. I promise Barcus’ feelings won’t get hurt. He takes constructive criticism well, even though he’s a smartest guy at Helium 10, so let him know how he can make it better. You’re never going to live that one down. Anybody at the Helium 10 socials, people at the Helium 10 socials, they’ll see you. They’re like, “Oh, okay. So I’m the immature when you’re the smart.” Okay. But anyways, anyways, thank you. Barcus for joining us and look forward to whatever your next project is here at Helium 10.

Barcus: Yup. All right. Thanks man. I appreciate it.

Bradley: Quick note, guys, don’t forget that regardless where you are listening to this podcast, whether it’s on your iPhone or on Stitcher, on Spotify, that you hit the subscribe button so you can be notified every time we drop a new episode.