#672 – 7 Figures of TikTok Shop Live Sales!

Can you imagine turning your side hustle into a million-dollar success story on TikTok Shop? Discover the inspiring journey of Jared Mortensen, Founder & Chief Designer of Real Men Apparel Company, a former aerospace industry professional turned e-commerce powerhouse. With a background in finance and engineering, Jared’s story takes us from his Southern Utah roots to working with industry giants like Boeing and Spirit Aerosystems, before making a pivotal shift into the world of e-commerce. It’s a transformation fueled by innovation and learning, as he shares the early challenges and ultimate triumphs of launching his own business on TikTok Shop.

Navigate the ups and downs of starting an e-commerce business, as we explore Jared’s initial foray into Amazon selling and his eventual pivot to TikTok live streaming. He candidly shares the hurdles of cash flow issues and overstocking, which led to his revolutionary approach to live selling. Just before Black Friday 2023, Jared’s live streaming strategy exploded, generating nearly $2 million in revenue. He uncovers the impactful role live commerce plays in the digital marketplace, inspired by its booming success in China, and the remarkable achievement of selling 12,000 units in a single hour.

Unpack the tactics and strategies that make TikTok live sales a game-changer in today’s e-commerce environment. Jared offers valuable insights into creating engaging content and the importance of maintaining authenticity without striving for perfection. With practical advice on setting up streams and connecting with audiences, he emphasizes the power of affiliate outreach and consistent experimentation. Learn from his experiences and those of brands like Real Men Apparel, who leverage TikTok live selling to build a devoted fan base and redefine success beyond platforms like Amazon. Join us as we explore the evolving landscape of e-commerce and the limitless potential of TikTok.

Thinking about selling on TikTok Shop—or maybe you are already in it and ready to scale? Unlock all of Helium 10’s brand-new TikTok Shop tools with our Diamond plan—everything from bulk Amazon to TikTok listing conversions to instant Amazon MCF fulfillment. Best of all? You use the discount code TT10 to get 10% off Diamond for 6 months — even if you’ve used a coupon before. So go ahead and upgrade and let Helium 10 do the heavy lifting so you can focus on what really matters. For more info on our new TikTok shop offerings, visit h10.me/tiktok.

In episode 672 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jared discuss:

• 00:00 – TikTok Shop Seller’s Success Story
• 07:28 – Product Launch Success and Market Confidence
• 10:23 – Successful Amazon Business Growth and Marketing 
• 14:52 – TikTok Shop Live Sales Strategies
• 19:56 – Trends in Handwritten Content Marketing 
• 23:25 – Demonstrating Products With POV Shots
• 26:28 – TikTok Live Streaming Strategies
• 29:40 – Creating Content for Live Streams
• 32:50 – Maximizing TikTok Engagement Through Content Volume

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re talking to one of the TikTok shop sellers who has probably been one of the most successful with TikTok shop live selling. He has sold millions on the platform. How cool is that. Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we have got a serious seller on the show here. Podcast listener, he tells me, for years successful Amazon seller, very successful TikTok shop seller. Jared, How’s it going? Welcome to the show.

Jared:

It’s going really, really well. I’m super excited to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, as you guys might maybe if you’re just listening to this in the car, maybe we sound a little bit differently. We’re here in the Helium 10 office today, in the famous tequila room where we film Freedom Ticket and other things, because we just filmed a course on TikTok. We’ll talk a little bit about that later, but first, since this is your first time on the show, I usually like to get a little background. Now, you flew here today from Wichita.

Jared:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

But you said you were from Utah originally.

Jared:

Yeah, I grew up in Southern Utah.

Bradley Sutton:

Southern Utah. Like, what about? Or like not wait, what is it? What’s the one that’s right on the top of Nevada? There’s like this town on Southern Utah and I’ve done Zumba classes there.

Jared:

St. George.

Bradley Sutton:

St. George, Utah. That’s where I but the hottest Zumba class I ever taught. It was 115 degrees and we’re outside. People were like almost passing out. We had to go into this air conditioning room, but I’ll never get that. St. George, Utah.

Jared:

I’m about an hour north of St. George. So a little tiny town called Parowan, about an hour north. It sounds like heroin, but was a P.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Parowan, Utah. Never heard of that before. How long did you live there until?

Jared:

So I lived there 19 years, so that’s where I grew up. And then I went and spent a couple of years up in Canada for working for or doing a mission for my church, and so did that. Then I went back to the school down in Southern Utah, Southern Utah University.

Bradley Sutton:

Saluki, Southern Utah.

Jared:

No, it’s the T-Birds.

Bradley Sutton:

T-birds, what’s the Saluki? There’s something that’s Saluki is like the weirdest mascot. Yeah, the T-Birds, Southern Utah, T-birds.

Jared:

Yeah, it’s the most prestigious university in Southwestern Utah, what?

Bradley Sutton:

Which is not very, the only university in Southwestern Utah. What was your major then?

Jared:

I studied finance.

Bradley Sutton:

Finance. Okay, so like what were you trying to be?

Jared:

Just, I liked math, but I liked math with dollar signs. But I started as a math major and then I switched to finance and so I wanted to yeah, I’m not sure I wanted to move into some type of business. At that time I worked through. I worked at a aerospace company to put myself through college and so I studied engineering there, but the engineering program wasn’t accredited there at the university and so I really was interested in aerospace and so I did a minor in engineering and then a major in finance.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. And upon graduation, did you get into that field at all?

Jared:

Yeah, so I went to work for Boeing in Wichita. So that’s why I ended up in Wichita, Kansas. So I went to work in a business development program there in Wichita for Boeing and worked for them for a year, and then the division was sold to a private equity company from Canada and so I went with the spin-off. It became Spirit Aerosystems. So if anybody that flies in a 737, those are all made in Wichita. Nobody knows that, but they’re made in Wichita and then they’re trucked up to Seattle and they put the wings on up there.

Bradley Sutton:

Wasn’t that 737 the one where the doors were falling off like the last year? That was after you left, that was after you left the wing.

Jared:

Yeah, so I was at Spirit Aerosystems for a while and then I actually left and started a business in Idaho for a while. I sold furniture, bedroom dining furniture, pool tables, random stuff and then the housing market crashed. I went back to Spirit, did that for a while, then I went to Coke Industries, an oil and gas company, for a while, and then I went to Textron Aviation. So, and then I went to Textron Aviation. So I was there seven years, worked in finance, operations, supply chain, so it was aerospace for like 20 years. And then I got recruited to work at a pet products company in Wichita, which is totally random and private equity-backed pet products company that we put together, and one of the businesses that we purchased was an Amazon Pure Play. They guys started selling dog beds and cat scratchers on Amazon, and so that’s where I first learned about Helium 10, because they were using it, and I learned about selling on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you didn’t start your own business on Amazon, you were working for a company that you were optimizing for them. Now, then, was it while you were doing that, did you start saying like, shoot, I could do this on my own or I want to run my own thing? And said it’s working for the man? Was that the thought process there? Or how did you start your own e-commerce business?

Jared:

Yeah, well, that business that we purchased, we brought these guys in that really understood Amazon, and I saw that, hey, they had gone from nothing to $18 million a year in like six years, like on Amazon, without a warehouse, without offices, just working from home. And then they took our portfolio of pet products and then they blew it up. So Walmart was our top customer when we first joined, but those guys really just took these products and supercharged it. So then Amazon became the largest platform or customer within the business. And so I’m like, hey, there’s a lot of opportunity here. And so, as we got closer to exiting, then I’m like we want to go and we want to go and do something here. And so that’s where I’m always thinking about products. Like can I sell this? Like everything I look at, I’m like, how much did it cost to make that? And so I’m always looking for opportunities to like make products better and so that’s, yeah, it’s just what can I sell and what can we make money at?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so what year? Did you launch your first Amazon, your own Amazon, first own Amazon product?

Jared:

Well, I started designing stuff in 2021 and then it took a while, and that started kind of during the COVID stuff and then so I designed. I was hardcore designing stuff for probably six months and then-

Bradley Sutton:

This is a brand that you currently have the underwire and stuff and then this is a brand that you currently have the underwire itself. Well, I don’t think that that would have shown up as like an opportunity per se in like Helium 10 Black. So how did it come to you where it’s like hey, I need to design some new kind of underwear for men.

Jared:

Yeah well, men’s underwear is traditionally designed as if guys don’t have genitals, right, so they’re like it’d be like if all women’s bras were all a training bra. Women are different shapes and sizes, guys are different shapes and sizes, and so I was actually trying to find products that actually fit better for me, and I literally purchased stuff from all over the world like thousands of different sets, trying to find things that actually fit from and I just couldn’t find things that really fit really well. There’s a couple of brands that had some, some like a pouch product and external pouch product and one they had their pouch sizes like Mega man and Superman or Prime man or something like how do you know if you’re Mega man or Prime man or like what? And so like, how do guys and most guys don’t even know their waist size, let alone this pouch size type thing, and so that’s why I was just I was looking to trying to find something that was out there, and so that’s where I started designing and testing, and I probably reached out to like 50 different factories on Alibaba, like send them designs and did samples, and so it took me a little while to find stuff that actually got the price and the fit and the style that we wanted.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, when you actually put in your first order, it was during right in the middle of COVID?

Jared:

Yeah, I mean, it was on the tail end.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. And then how did your first product launch do on Amazon? Like, was it? Like, is it whenever, you can almost say it’s a new invention, you know, like some new concept? Yeah, obviously, underwear has always existed, but that particular kind of. Maybe we’ll show some shots right now of some of your product on Amazon, but for those watching on YouTube, but that would be pretty nerve-wracking like what kind of validation do you, like did you do any test runs? Or how do you have the confidence to come in to, like tackle this existing market that’s been around for thousands of thousands of years? You know, what gave you the confidence to just move forward? Well, you, there were some brands that had some product pouch products but now, if you look at the reviews, like, okay that I like this, it gives me more space, but it’s just like, still not enough, right, and so they just didn’t have enough space. So some of it is looking at reviews, and that was one thing that we learned from that.

Jared:

The e-commerce business, my prior business is that the guys that came into our business from the pet products company were really good at looking at reviews high selling items with lower views. They’re going in and redesigning those products, fixing those issues based off those reviews. So, using Helium 10, other analysis to really identify those products where there’s these gaps and then going and fixing those and then launching the products, and so it’s really just like that, right. So you’re finding a product where there’s I mean, find that most guys wear underwear, right. So there’s some guys that don’t, but so it’s a pretty large market as far as what they’re wearing. Some people buy a lot more than others, and so there’s a huge addressable market, right. But it’s like, are people really being served by the products that are out there? So if you look at the reviews, you could see that there was opportunity. Now it’s like how do you effectively go and market that? Now, there were some DTC brands that were selling some external pouch products, but they weren’t really doing anything on Amazon. So they’re selling really well off Amazon, but they’re not even really doing much on Amazon, or they are. Their listings were horrible, right, and so yeah, and so that’s where.

Jared:

But it took a lot of faith for us, right? Yeah, it’s like, hey, is this actually going to work? And the thing is the keywords that we want to target. There’s not search volume.

Bradley Sutton:

I was going to ask, like, what kind of keywords were you going after? Some of the more generic ones, or the few people who were actually searching for the specific kind of product that you were doing,

Jared:

Yeah, so a lot of long tail keyword stuff where there’s not as much search volume for those. And because I mean, you have these high search volume keywords for, like in our particular category, for men’s underwear, right, but they’re like massive search volume, like horrible conversion rates, right. So even the top like selling brands are not converting on that because it’s just too generic, right. And so I thought, oh, we’re going to convert on this. And I spent a lot of money on PPC, wasted all sorts of money running ads on this, and they’re like, oh, we didn’t convert at all, right. And so we really focused a lot on very, very long tail keywords that were very specific, related to pouch and external pouch underwear.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting. Okay, so then did you start well, from the very first product? I know like fast forward, you’ve got like thousands of SKUs literally now. But did you knock it out of the park? Was it kind of a slow ramp up or when did you know you’re like, hey, I did the right thing, this is going to be a success. I mean, we had sales our first day, right, so that was good. And now it’s all ads, right. And so, yeah, we’re just running ads because we’ve got to get some ranking and I was still learning. I mean, I’m using Helium 10 to go write all the listings and work to optimize that.

Jared:

And so, yeah, we had sales right from the beginning. We launched a boxer brief set and some briefs and a jock, so there’s actually three different products. We kind of launched all together with different parents. But, yeah, we had sales right from the beginning. Now it took us probably about I think it’s three months before I actually got a payment from Amazon. It’s all the money just where I get the PPC right and so.

Jared:

But we understood that, right, we understood and that was really important for us because and that was part of the value of the podcast, like listening to that and just going in with eyes wide open that hey, I’m not just going to like launch this and all of a sudden I’m just going to start printing money, like you have to expect that, hey, I’m going to have to have so much in for my inventory and then I’m going to have to invest so much in my PPC and it’s going to take some time to come in, you know, to start cash flowing. Cash flowing that and so yeah. So I mean we saw a decent ramp up with the business, but we did a million dollars in our first 11 months, so that’s awesome. That was a decent amount.

Bradley Sutton:

And profit, profitable, I would assume which is more important.

Jared:

Yeah, yeah. So it took us about six months before we were actually like profitable and then we just ran. I mean, we launched in March, right, and so I guess decent timing, because we launched early in the year and then ramped through the holidays. Now, what made you decide to start on TikTok shop so well, TikTok, that was you know, so we were you know, so we did a million dollars our first 11 months there. On Amazon so in 2022 and the 2023, we were growing really, really well on Amazon and launched a number of different products and we brought in a ton of inventory for Q4. We’re super excited about, of course I we have some brought in some new people to help us with some inventory management and we double ordered some POs, and so that was the other thing as well, and so, like I had way too much inventory and so I tied up a lot of cash right in inventory, and so this is an issue when you’re dealing with so many SKUs. At that time, we only had a thousand SKUs right that we’re dealing with, right. But I mean, it’s really easy to make an inventory mistake when you’re doing that and trying to forecast demand, seasonality and things like that as you ramp in the holidays. So we brought in too much inventory. So I was really crushed for cash.

Jared:

I had no idea what we were going to do. It was the first time in my life I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make my mortgage payment, and so what are we going to do? I’m praying, praying, praying. What do we do? And the answer God told me you need to live stream on TikTok. And I’m like that really sucks. I don’t want to live stream on TikTok. That’s the last thing I want to do. That’s not my personality. I’m better behind the machine. I’m a designer. I’m not an influencer or anything like that. I had no experience doing that, but I go to China, to my factories, every two to three months, and so one of the factories I worked with they are live streaming on Doyen, and so I went and saw their live stream. I went to their studios and watched them do the live streams and they’re doing like 80 to $90,000 an hour USD on their live stream and it’s like it’s women’s apparel, but like holy cow, and so my eyes were really open to what was possible with a live stream. Now they have a host, they have two assistants, they have a manager I mean they have a whole team, but they really know what they’re doing and so it just opened my eyes. I’m like this is where e-commerce selling is going, and so just a huge percentage of apparel in China is sold on live streaming platforms, and so I knew that’s where it’s going.

Jared:

We’re just like four to five years behind in the US, right, and so, yeah. So my answer was behind in the US and so, yeah. So my answer was, as far as my cashflow problem was to, I need to start live streaming, and so we started a week before Black Friday 2023. And for us there wasn’t a lot of competition at that time on TikTok. Tiktok was pushing the live streams like crazy and it just it blew up for us.

Bradley Sutton:

So today, total, regardless of the source of sales on TikTok shop, how much would you say you’ve done? 2 million?

Jared:

We’re just under 2 million, I think. So probably just right around 2 million. I have to go rerun the numbers for the last month.

Bradley Sutton:

What percentage of that would you attribute to the live selling that you do over the whole time?

Jared:

Probably like 60 to 70%. It’s shifted. When we first started it was like 90% lives, right, and so it was like all lives, and then gradually we’ve transitioned to do more posts. So at the beginning it was like 90%, now it’s probably more like 50 to 60%, but overall, like we’re probably, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

In a one hour live, what’s the most number of units you have sold?

Jared:

Oh, most units?

Bradley Sutton:

Or gross sales.

Jared:

Yeah, I mean I think 12 000 is the most we’ve done in a in a one hour live.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you guys like to generate 12 000 dollars with one person streaming uh live and in one hour, that’s a. That’s a pretty good ROI right there. Okay. So, outside of live, how are you getting getting sales on TikTok? You have an affiliate kind of like an influencer outreach program as well.

Jared:

Yeah, so we work with an agency that helps us with affiliate outreach and I mean we’re using the TikTok tools for that. It’s identify affiliates to reach out to and reaching out to them via TikTok, or they’re requesting samples for us, right? So it goes both ways. So affiliates can come and just request samples and so we review those and then approve those and send samples. So we’re trying to do like roughly a hundred samples a week.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s awesome. All right, we’re going to go into a little bit in a couple of minutes here in a little bit more detail, especially on this live, because I think that’s where probably more than any other TikTok shop seller in the US I’ve met, he’s really got a great strategy for the lives. Now, for those who want to get more in-depth on the A to Z of TikTok shop, as of the time that this podcast was releasing that, you guys are watching this. Our brand new course should be ready in Freedom Ticket, all right. So those of you who have Helium 10, go into the Freedom Ticket program in Freedom Ticket, all right. So those of you who have Helium 10, go into the Freedom Ticket program and you’re going to see a whole new section called TikTok training. All right, half of the modules are with somebody from TikTok corporate headquarters. Half of them are with Jared right here talking about more ins and outs of his journey, be it from influencer reach out to advertising, to variation, structure of his listings and everything in between logistics, et cetera. So if you guys are Amazon sellers right now in the US and you’re interested in expanding to TikTok shop, we’ve got the blueprint in there. So most of you listeners are already Helium 10 members. That means you’ve got full access to this course for free. So hop in there and make sure to uh to get at that. Now for those who already just started selling on TikTok shop or they’re going to take that training and now get started. What are some tips of do’s and don’ts for Amazon, or Amazon live? Have you done Amazon live?

Jared:

No, I haven’t.

Bradley Sutton:

For TikTok  live. What are some do’s and don’ts that they should, you know, we don’t have to go over everything because we’ve got the course that a lot of it’s in, but what are some main points that you can share?

Jared:

Well, I would say the biggest thing with TikTok Live is just do it right. And it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be like overly scripted and just beautiful, right. Tiktok is a lot more raw, right it started. It’s really popular with teenagers, which is with raw cell phones, and so most of the content out there is just cell phone content, and so I mean you could see these polished lives and sometimes you go and look at a polished live on TikTok and it just it has 10 viewers, right, and you might see another live stream that looks like super, like rough and like why what’s going on here? And you’re getting like tons and tons of followers. And so the biggest thing that I think people have is they just overthink things and so you just one, you need to get out of your head and just go and just try it and just start and as far as and it doesn’t take a big set, a big setup, a nice studio to go and start right. I always I was live streaming for like for I don’t know, five or six months just with my cell phone, with my iPhone, right, and some some relatively cheap Amazon lights. I didn’t even have a really good mic at the time. I do recommend, if I was to do it again, I would start with a little better lapel mic but you can pick one of those up for like off TikTok for like 20 bucks, right. Or if you want a stationary mic but you know decent video that you can get off your phone but an iPhone a recent iPhone is going to work fine and a decent, decent mic. People will drop if you don’t have good, good sound and you want to have decent lights, right. I was live streaming in my warehouse so I needed a little better lights. If you’re in an area that has good natural lighting, you might need some ring lights or things like that, but it doesn’t have to be a lot.

Jared:

The big thing is just to really start, right? So check out live streams, see what people are doing on TikTok now and try to learn from them. But I would say, just start. You need to get your product front and center. You need a little bit of. You need a little depth in your shot is usually the best, and then you have the host. But so just set up the studio and then just get started.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s go ahead and I’m going to take out my cellhere for those watching on YouTube and hopefully we can screen share a little bit here. But what we want to do is we kind of want to like just take a look at some of what people are doing on live right now and then see if we can critique some of these and get some ideas here.

Bradley Sutton:

So first of all, let me oh, this lady. I saw her on live earlier today. We were filming the content. Man, she must be going crazy vibrating on this. What do you call?

Jared:

The vibraplate.

Bradley Sutton:

Vibration plate exercise? Is it actually like burnt calories?

Jared:

Yeah, they’re trendy, right, so it’s. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now there is just a lot going on. I see here I didn’t see this the last time she’s doing like some discount where it says but she wrote like a chalkboard here. I remember you gave a training about TikTok Live and says hey, don’t always just have everything, just like you know these modules and widgets and professional boards, but have like handwritten thing. It might, like you know, stop the scroll a little bit, right?

Jared:

Yeah, people want to read something’s handwritten, right. If it’s computer generated font, it’s really easy to ignore it. So you’ll see that on some live streams where you see it and you might think, hey, it looks like kindergarten level, but it’s very intentional, right, that they’re handwriting things. It might say free shipping, it might say the price, it might say some other features. So for us we have these mannequins. We have the names of the mannequins written on there, and you know, hand handwriting.

Bradley Sutton:

She’s got the product like would you say that she’s just an affiliate or she’s the brand owner? What do you?

Jared:

She’s an affiliate.

Bradley Sutton:

She’s an affiliate. How can you tell just by looking?

Jared:

Yeah, just her as far as her account, right, she’s not a branded account, so it’s more of this merge fitness, right, and so she’s probably, if you, if you click into her shop here in the shopping bag, you’re probably going to see other products that are fitness related sort of stuff, and so she’s got kind of a thematic shop and as an affiliate, and so she’s um selling exercise related equipment. So typically most branded accounts will like, okay, this is the brand of the product and that’s going to be the name of the of the account. Now you can have brand, you can have like a marketing accounts where you might have a different name if you want to market more broadly. But yeah, so it’s kind of the difference, right. So if you see like a neural gum right with up there in the upper left-hand corner, you’re going to see their brain or dude wipes, right, you’re going to see that their brand up there in the tag in the upper left hand corner, so the upper left, you see there the likes, the number of likes that she has in the live, and you got some coupons going on there. But the most important thing with the shot is, I mean, you got to be able to see the product, the host and then the like I said the depth, but she’s got the flash sale going. Does she have a flash sale?

Bradley Sutton:

That is a flash sale. It’s going to start in 30 days.

Jared:

Can I say it’s not started. So she’s got the product pin there at the bottom. That’s at the full price. She’s probably previewing it right now and then the price is going to drop here in a second, so she’s talking about it. So, with TikTok, a lot of the sales are going to be impulse buys, so some people are going to come in there. You’re wanting to drive urgency. That’s why you have the flash sale. So it’s like, hey, if you’re missing out, you want flash sale, so you’re going to get a good deal. You want urgency, so there’s usually a timer on there. Okay, we got four seconds before the flash sale starts, and so it’s like building the anticipation.

Jared:

Okay, this flash sale is going to start. Oh, look at that, the price dropped. Well, the price-

Bradley Sutton:

It’s only going to be $12 or 12, 12, 12 minutes more.

Jared:

Yeah, so she’s got the flash sale going on for 12 minutes here, and sometimes you might do a limited stock, right? So, so when we’re, when we go live, when we start off, like our very first product that we might launch with, we would do a flash sale. But we’re only going to do five units and I’m going to do it at 60% off, and so I’m going to limit that. So one it’s. You’re getting a short amount of time. You get only certain number, quantity and in a certain price, and so it’s like, oh, I gotta jump on that. This is one of the food cutting ones right there.

Bradley Sutton:

So this guy’s DJing right here. He’s not even selling anything,

Jared:

Yeah, he’s just talking there.

Bradley Sutton:

So, oh, here’s one that’s not even showing their face. They just understand.

Jared:

It’s a POV, right? So he’s got the flame going on the background. That’s for interest, right? So they’ve got the screen in the background with the fireplace, the fake fireplace kind of flame thing going on there, and then they’re just. So a lot of tech products. You’ll see that where you’re demonstrating the product, it’s a POV-type product. You might see people that are selling the consoles in their car. So they’ll actually be sitting in their car and they’re showing the thing where you can watch videos on your console in your car, and so those are POVs. So you have a couple different depending on your product. You might do a POV which is like what this is, where you’re actually just showing hands with the product, versus an apparel product, where you actually need to see the product have a little more depth. It really depends on the best way to demonstrate your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, All right. So I mean, this guy’s got 77 live viewers and he’s not even showing his face. He’s holding his phone up. Let’s see if he can see any more. We have somebody showing the picture of their phone. Oh, there’s another vibrate. If I would have paid $79 for the other one I would have been mad. This vibration played for $59.

Jared:

See, she’s just showing it here, but she’s showing on her phone. She’s probably showing how to check out. She may be going through kind of a checkout because there’s still a lot of people learning to buy on TikTok. So as you’re live streaming, that’s one thing you have to do sometimes is actually show someone how to actually go to the cart, how to add it to the cart, how to check out right and so how to add the coupons, and so there’s some education involved with helping people, because you might even have people that are TikTok natives. They spend a lot on TikTok but they haven’t actually purchasing on TikTok, and so you actually have to show them how to buy.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ve been seeing this so much on my feed because I have cats, this uh, automatic litter thing. But this guy’s got a lot going on in his background and the foreground. He’s got somebody else’s hands on. He must have an assistant who’s showing some stuff here pointing but yeah, 200, I mean 269 dollars, that’s, that’s-

Jared:

So he’s got some ears things going on there, so there’s like some character type things.

Bradley Sutton:

2,000 people are watching.

Jared:

He’s got a lot of people in there. He had his little cat mitten and so they’ve got some pop-out stuff going on. So they’ve got a little more sophisticated software that’s going on here. That’s running all those different images and in-screen videos.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so guys, this is not. I mean, some of these look pretty good, but it’s not necessary. You saw the one guy. He was just showing his phone like with maybe a computer screen in the background or something, so you don’t have to go. You know like really hard. Now, how many hours a week is your team live streaming, would you say?

Jared:

We are typically live streaming four to five hours a day.

Bradley Sutton:

Four to five hours a day? Wow, all right. Now, if I’m just getting started on TikTok shop, how much should I plan for that? Probably not four to five hours a day, I’m not sure if I have that time to try to do it.

Jared:

Yeah, I would encourage you. When you go live, you need to go live at least an hour, because the algorithm has to learn the audience that you’re going to that may be liking your product or interested in your product, and so you got to spend some time teaching the algorithm. And if you go too short, if you go less than an hour, the algorithm learns that, hey, you’re just not serious about it and so it’s just not going to give you traffic even on that live or future lives, and so you have to go longer. Tiktok really wants you to go live on the live stream, but preferably if you can get to two and three hours to start to help train the algorithm, that can really help. But at least an hour you want to go live. Rarely do you want to try to cut it less than an hour, even if something’s going wrong or you’re not getting the viewers? Try to get past the hour mark and so you can make sure that the algorithm thinks you’re, you’re actually serious and so, and I would recommend trying to go a few times a week to start with, and you need to test some different times because, depending on your product, you might have different viewers that are watching during different times.

Jared:

There’s some groups of people where they’re buying during the day, right, and they’re really good. It just depends on the product. We go live in the morning from like seven to eight nine, because we’re catching people before they go to work. Now you might have people that are at lunchtime and then we do more at like the 7 to or the kind of 6 to 9 pm range from central time. But you need to test different times, right, and really see what Sundays might work really well for you. Saturdays might work better for you, but in the afternoons, okay, people are sleeping in or they’re doing things they’re out and about in the morning but in the afternoon they’re better. It’s going to be different in the summer versus the winter, right Because of the daylight and things like that, so you just have to test different times and see what’s going to work better for your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you’re interested to take a look at what a professional live streaming operation is like follow Real Men Apparel on TikTok. If you’re in the United States, actually you can see it. You just won’t see the shop outside the United States. But get some ideas from what he and his team are doing on their lives. They’ve got some cool stuff. They named their mannequins and everything. You have Bill and Tyrone and Haas I already know the names of their mannequins.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ve been watching their lives so much, but it’s kind of like shocking. You could get some like really diehard loyal fans on TikTok shop that you would never have on Amazon. Like you said, you have a guy who like drives hours and hours, just like moderate your lives for free of charge or something crazy like that.

Jared:

Yeah, it’s crazy. You know we we literally have people that have signed up as moderators. We only let people moderate, help, help. We only let people help us on our live if they’re, if they’re, if they’re, if they’re, if they’re customers right and so so these like loyal customers that come and hang out on the lives and if they do enough, then we set up as a moderator and literally this is not not paid right. They just they just want to do it. They are very passionate about the brand and we have one moderator that he will drive from Minneapolis on a long weekend for his holiday. He’ll drive from Minneapolis to Wichita to come and moderate in studio, and so that’s the amount of connection that we’ve been able to build with our tribe through TikTok, and we couldn’t do that through Amazon. It’s completely different, and so it’s really helped us build a connection with our tribe and the people that are customer-based. That we can’t do through Amazon.

Jared:

Makes sense Now, something that maybe made you take a step back is when you heard him say oh hey, you should try at least always an hour. Now maybe you only have one or two products and you’re thinking how in the world do I come up with an hour of contents and things to say about a coffin shelf and a coffin bath mat or something? But the way you explained it to me before is it’s not about coming up with a full script or a full hour of unique content, but what do you guys do?

Jared:

Yeah, so I mean, some people think about it like I can’t live stream for an hour. It’s like you think of it like a television show or something like that, where it’s like unique content for that entire time with a TikTok live stream. It’s Groundhog’s Day every 35 seconds, right, and so it’s literally like you’re saying the same thing again and again and you feel like you maybe go brain dead, right, because you literally I’ve said this like 10,000 times the same script. But you take your Amazon bullet points. You kind of script them out, put them on a whiteboard and you just talk through the benefits. Right, you demonstrate the product and you talk through it and then you just loop. Right, now you’re going to get comments. People are going to ask questions about it. The key is to not have those distract to distract you, but you just integrate it, and the more you do it, the more reps you get, then the more easy it is to integrate those comments seamlessly into your narrative, right, and so you can just talk and it can flow, but you got to get reps. It’s just like a sport or like a musical instrument. You got to get repetition in there, and so you can’t be afraid to just start, because that’s where you’re going to get your reps. 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Before we get to your 30 and 60 second tip, you’ve been using Helium 10 for a number of years. What’s your favorite tool?

Jared:

My favorite tool so well, Black Box. But there’s a lot of things that yeah, when I was first starting, I think I mean we’re using that a lot. So, but yeah-

Bradley Sutton:

All right, Black Box, and if we were to, there’s something that we don’t do now, whether it’s for TikTok, whether it’s for Amazon that could make your life easier or that you’re having to do something, use your own thing, or whatever. What is something that Helium 10 can make for you and your underwear company, Real Men Apparel. That would make your life easier.

Jared:

Affiliate outreach working through some of that that’s a big gap that we have right now is automating the affiliate outreach.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s coming. Probably by the time you guys hear this episode you’re in a sneak peek might be available. We have our influencer finder and it helps you to automate some of your outreach to the TikTok influencers and we did launch that for Amazon. We have an influencer finder for Amazon that elite members have access to, or you can look for Amazon influencers where hey, show me all the Amazon influencers who are in this who have made videos for this product and who have done at least this number of videos and who have an Instagram link in their bio or something, so you can actually do that now with Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, you know how we do it on the podcast. I ask the guests give a 30 or 60 second tip. So let’s maybe make it about TikTok or TikTok shop. A 30 or 60 second tip, so let’s maybe make it about TikTok or TikTok shop. What’s something that you haven’t said today that can be a quick hitting tactic that people can use for an instant win on TikTok shop.

Jared:

Well, on TikTok, I mean, key is content, right, and just getting a lot of content out there and you might feel that you’re actually getting rep, like you have to create all this like very, very different content all the time and you again, you just overthink it, similar to like the live streaming and like you just need to start but with posts, just do different like. Just like, take some simple videos like your product. Okay, I’m doing a video on this mic or a post on this mic. You’re just doing some very simple shots of the mic and you’re testing out different hooks, different voiceover hooks on that and then just iterating on it, right? So TikTok is very much about volume on the post and the videos, and so it may be a three second, it may be a five second, it may be a 10 second video, but just getting content out there, so creating different content. You can literally do videos of your product, just these really, really simple videos. It’s throwing a CapCut template and then you can. It’s amazing how much different content you can create with, like the same, just a couple of video shots. You might be holding yourself back because you’re not willing to go and put content out there that looks nearly identical, right, but it’s crazy because you might have 20 videos and they almost all look the same and one of them just takes off right, and so it’s literally about just, it’s a volume game, getting more volume out there, and then just certain things will just take off,

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right. Well, Jared, maybe by the next time you’re on the show you might have reached 10 million worth of sales between Amazon and TikTok. I know you’re working on some exciting stuff that potentially we could talk about next time, but thank you for helping us out on the TikTok training course. Thank you for sharing your knowledge on the podcast. His theme is, you know, pay it forward. Right, and like he listened on the podcast. What I want is somebody right now who just learned about TikTok shop. You guys become successful. I want you to come on the podcast and help us and help other people pay it forward guys. That’s what the game’s all about. So thanks a lot, Jared, for doing that on this show, and we’ll definitely be reaching out to you next year to see what you have to share with us.

Jared:

Awesome, I appreciate it.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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• 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.
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