#534 – From Running Amazon for Lego to Private Label to Agency Success

Video of the episode at the bottom

Stepping away from the comfort of a well-established brand like Lego, Silas has steered his career ship through the tumultuous waters of entrepreneurship and surfaced with a lot of insights. From launching a private label brand on Amazon to the helm of his own agency, his narrative is rich with the lessons of building businesses from scratch, the significance of co-founder synergy, and the hard truths of partnership pitfalls. Silas’ story is a testament to the resilience and adaptability required in today’s e-commerce oceans, and he doesn’t shy away from sharing the gritty details.

Tuning into the finer points of Amazon PPC, we navigate the complexities of keyword strategies with the precision of a Lego master builder. The conversation traverses from Lego’s expansive strategies to the necessity of adaptability in the private label and agency landscapes, where budget constraints demand a more tactical approach. Silas introduces us to his innovative keyword categorization, a strategy that has revolutionized advertising efficiency for businesses big and small. He even lets us peek into his toolbox, showcasing how tools like Helium 10 are not just for the giants but are instrumental for anyone looking to make a mark on Amazon and Walmart.

But it’s not all about keywords and conversion rates; there’s a heartbeat to Silas’ story that underscores the importance of mental health and personal fulfillment. He shares a candid account of his own struggles and triumphs, reminding us that well-being is inextricably linked to professional success. The birth of Copenhagen Commerce and the value of connections made through podcasting and networking events narrate a journey of rediscovery. It’s a compelling reminder of the power that lies in human connections and prioritizing what truly matters – a lesson that resonates with all of us, whether we’re building block by block or keyword by keyword.

In episode 534 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Silas discuss:

• 00:00 – Silas On Lessons From Lego to Amazon Private Label
• 02:17 – Advertising and Retail Management Career
• 08:31 – Optimizing Keyword Strategies for Success
• 11:57 – Lego’s ASIN Grabber and Enterprise
• 18:48 – Negative View on Mental Health 
• 19:48 – Starting a New Agency, Finding Fulfillment
• 27:20 – Amazon Keyword Research Strategies and Tools
• 28:39 – Building a Consistent Ranking System
• 30:55 – Favorite Helium 10 Tool
• 32:25 – The Power of Networking at Events

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got Silas, formerly from Lego, back on the show and he’s going to talk about what he’s learned from doing Amazon for one of the largest companies in the world, to running his own private label brand, to now running an agency, and all that we can apply to our own businesses. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews by following up with them in a way that’s compliant with Amazon terms of service? You can use Helium 10 follow-up in order to automatically send out Amazon’s request a review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don’t want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me forward slash follow-up. You can sign up for a free account or you can sign up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10.

Bradley Sutton:

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 a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and I here am physically actually in another part of the world. I’m here in Germany in the Avask headquarters and we are doing an event all day today and Silas here is one of the speakers at the event and he’s been no stranger to the show, but this is one of the longest times in between podcasts that we have done. You haven’t been on the podcast. It’s what? Three and a half years? Three and a half years, yeah, three and a half years it’s been. I’ve been, that’s all. It’s not because of me. I’ve been trying to get him back for two and a half years because we usually have people on once a year, but this man is a hard man to get a hold of. Very busy. We’re going to be finding out what he’s been doing. But, silas, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you back.

Silas:

Thank you, Bradley, love the intro and thanks for having me here again. I’m glad that we’re finding the time. It did take some time to be back here, but hopefully it will be worth it, awesome, awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

So now, if you guys want to get his full backstory, originally it adds all the way back in episode 148 of the podcast, but I think people know you from before as, like, a Lego master, the Lego guy. So what was your role over there at Lego when you were there?

Silas:

Yeah, I think last time when we spoke, my role was to manage advertising on Amazon across all of North America and Mexico included in that equation, and then, after that, it also became Walmart and Target on top of that. So that was through Walmart’s native platform and then through Cridio, where we ran ads on Target. My responsibility was building the advertising strategy, connecting it to retail, working together with content, making sure that we optimize it from an SEO perspective, and then, furthermore, I was doing training both in Europe and different places in Asia. That was what happened, I would say, in the year after we met last time.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one thing that’s interesting is that you’ve been to kind of all sides of the Amazon spectrum. You worked at a huge, you know billion, multi-billion dollar company, lego, and you’ve done private label and now you’re on the agency side. You can see multiple people’s accounts. Talk a little bit about the private label venture that you did.

Silas:

Yeah, I think last time when we spoke, we just launched the products. It’s kind of a vulnerable place to open up this podcast, in all honesty, because we were doing swimwear made out of recycled plastic. I have a dad who works at Greenpeace. I always wanted to do something like in the green space next to my I would say corporate job and also just learn the chops of like starting something from scratch. But that business was gambled away Literally, literally. So I was doing it with a friend of mine and what happened was that he literally put everything on red. So one day I locked into our business account and all the money were gone. I think a strong lesson for me that doing a brand if it’s on or off Amazon is much more than just running ads and setting up listings et cetera, especially if you do with a co-founder. Building a business is tough and there is a lot of things that are uncontrollable, and I think I expected that as long as we were good at Amazon, we had a decent product, that would be enough. But in this case, one of my good friends at that time was addicted to gambling and after that he did pay most of the money back, but we did decide to close the company down simply for it being not the right start for our company to be born.

Bradley Sutton:

And this wasn’t just a random. All right, let me white label a box that you know, a brown box from Alibaba. I mean you guys put some investment in. I remember you know you flew to some island to film your. You were your own influencer. You’re running on the beach with no shirt on. I remember you know like with just the shorts. I mean like you guys put a lot of money and effort into the startup.

Silas:

A hundred percent. I feel like I’m the kind of guy that when I do something, I have to be fully committed to it. And in this case, if I was going to do this next to my corporate job, it had to be a significant investment. So, yeah, we flew to the Dominican Republic. The content did, the video created, some nice listings, worked a lot on like product development, et cetera were off to a good start and then something like this happened, and I think it’s just a testament to building a business is really hard.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, when you had it going at the beginning, what were some of the differences from the time at Lego, because Lego is a vendor central based and then this was your first, maybe, entry into kind of like seller central. What was some of the major differences? That was like a learning curve for you.

Silas:

I think a lot of it was due to product but also just launch. So when it came to product we kind of fucked up the sizes a little bit. Initially because we designed it. We launched in the US because we thought why not just go for the biggest market from the start? And in the US a medium is not a medium. A medium is more like a large and a large is more like an extra large. So there was a lot of instances where people they liked the product but they wanted it returned and then you have to pay for the returns et cetera. So that was eating up profitability. And then obviously from like an advertising perspective, you got to just eat into your profit a lot more than at Lego, where you can easily be at a 20% a cost and run like a what was at that time the world’s largest advertising account and scale that. But here we’re talking 50% a cost because we wanted to try to see if we could scale the business and build up ranks et cetera. So there was a much bigger need for investment than what we expected and I think we needed to make bigger changes to the product than what we expected initially.

Silas:

So just a lot of things. That, I think, is just testament to like. Starting a business is hard and I have a lot of respect and that’s also why I like working on smaller accounts. Also today, agency side, it’s just watching brand owners find product market fit, make sure that their products are always in stock, et cetera, get pricing right. There’s just so many components that I find fascinating, and that was also a lot of the places that we were struggling with in the start.

Bradley Sutton:

And interesting. You know, like you, coming from Lego, a big brand with huge brand recognition, and so that obviously was a driver for the sales. Now you saw the other side, where, which is the 99% of the world who start off from scratch with no brand recognition. Was that eye opening to see how difficult we have? We have it out there. I mean, you can launch anything at Lego and it’ll just crush it. It’ll just be crushed just because of the name, but I’ll talk about that.

Silas:

Yeah, I think it was interesting because I think at Lego we did figure some things out in terms of, for example, we like all the percentage of spend on non-brained or unbrained or whatever you call it At the start, when I started, was like 90% unbrained, 10% unbrained. We reversed that, so when I left, it was 10%. Brain did 90% unbrained. So we did make a shift there. So I think the process around how to do build up like Asian tidying lists, how to do keyword research, et cetera a lot of that were similar to how we did it at Lego. The difference was at Lego we just went full in on everything. So if we had keyword lists that we uploaded to the advertising account, we’re talking like maximum. I think we even extended we got Amazon to extend the number of keywords that could be in campaigns so we could have more than a thousand, so we could upload like 2,000 keywords simultaneously. However, when I started both now agency but also private label, we actually went in and we started building a methodology where we rank keywords into A, b, c and D categories based on the number of variables that are in the keyword string. So let’s say, for example, that you had, if we take the Lego example or the swimmer example, if you have just dragon toys, there might be two variables, so that’s dragon and toys. However, if it’s dragon toys for a four year old boy, there’s four and year, and then there’s boy, there might be five variables in it. So then we say, okay, that is a longer tail keyword. So that is out of a sudden AA keyword, because the reality was we needed to like focus in also for the swimmer brain with the money that we have.

Silas:

Because out of a sudden, I was used to like free budgets as long as I could prove incrementality and I could prove that whatever we were doing were building rank et cetera. I had gotten to a place at Lego where I was just like okay, you can just spend as long as it’s incremental. Where now it’s like, okay, out of a sudden you have maybe $5,000 to spend this month or $1,000. You got to make sure that you do it on the right keywords that have the right conversion rate, that are driving rank et cetera. So you had to be a much more selective. Same thing with ascent hiding. I think last time we spoke that was like a big hack of mine, but like we used to do it, just like these massive lists where we would just like launch a thousand ascent in one campaign and just go like rogue on it and let the bitter decide whether it worked or not. But now, out of a sudden, we had to actually use some of your tips and tricks about, like, what is the right price point, reviews, ratings, et cetera. So the same thing with it, with keywords, we start to do with ascent, where we separate them into A, b, c and D ascent, and then we say, okay, the hypothesis is that A ascent have certain variables to them that should make them convert better and potentially also be cheaper to like serve an add on.

Silas:

So the nuances that came into play, which is so different, and it’s kind of like I had to like go back and watch a lot of the stuff that I’d watched initially with Lego from a different point of view, but it was a lot of the same methodologies and strategies that could be reapplied. I just had to do everything more granular, which is, yeah, it’s just interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s something interesting I wanted to touch on because, yes, there are some differences between vendor and seller and also, when you’re talking about a billion dollar brand with a brand new brand, no-transcript, there’s probably more similarities than differences. What a lot of people don’t realize. You know, like, when you were at Lego, it was so funny, boyan was making a joke. You know you didn’t have, like we didn’t even have enterprise plans in those days. Yeah, you, lego was using the same Like diamond plan that that everybody was using, and and you talked about the Ascent. You know your ascent targeting strategy. Remember you, on the episode you talked about, you would use ascent grabber In helium 10, which is a tool that probably 95 of you guys maybe Is not in your daily use because that’s like you know. You might not even know what is ascent grabber. It’s in the chrome extension. How, how are you using ascent grabber For Lego and to show me like, hey guys, my point is, if Lego can use it, it’s probably something you guys should be using.

Silas:

Yeah, I think I can use it in like any example. When it was with the swimwear, for example, we had a, we had a black, we had a pair of swim trunks that were black. So then what we would do is that we would go in on amazon research Okay, black swim trunks and then we would literally scrape manually like page one, two, three, four, um, and then we would scrape all the ascent, put them into our what we call our ascent targeting tool and in there we would say, okay, these are the ones that we’ve scraped, they’re all black, and then, based on that, we would then categorize them into abc and d Ascent’s and then we would basically launch them in ads. The same thing at Lego we would go dragon toys or Harry Potter toys, etc. And then we would scrape everything on those first four pages that was related to that. Now we’re also using black box, etc. Because we found like smarter ways to do it, where you can base it, where you do it based on a keyword string and then you can use black box to get all the ascent out. Um, we’ve also unlocked, like an easter egg with you guys, for cerebral where we can upload like multiple ascent and and we can get all their keywords. So, like we’re, we’re Expanding on a lot of the stuff that we, we did, but it’s just the same, it’s just with more granularity. It’s the same tools, it’s the same setup. We last time we talked a lot about, like my principle about discovering, winning algorithms, so finding things that work, and then, uh, you got to basically ignite the courage to pursue them. That’s what I think a lot about when I, when I do stuff is like is there something that’s Repetitive? Can I do it again and again and again and again? Then it’s a growth engine and then I’ll just hone in on that, and then maybe I need to twist it a little bit, and I think that’s that’s primarily what I’ve been doing since then Is twisting it based on on the audience and the product, etc.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you don’t have to be as big a brand as lego to have a good brand awareness. You know there’s a lot of people who maybe start off of amazon and then come on amazon and and they have Brand awareness where there’s a lot of brand search. You know you can find that in helium 10 Like, hey, is somebody searching for my brand? So speak. Going back to the lego side, talk about a company that is already dominating a certain brand. Like you know, you just launched something and and you’re gonna get sales from people having search keywords like branded search. You know, lego for five year old, lego for boys, lego for girls, lego, star wars, lego, whatever. But, as you said, you know you mentioned dragon toys. You know that’s a very that’s a generic keyword and that’s where that’s how you grow a business. A row of brand is getting new customers who aren’t searching for your brand. So talk about the strategy. Whether it’s lego or whether it’s a somebody who’s just got a lot of brand awareness, what is your strategy for finding those terms? That’s non branded, so you can grow your business?

Silas:

Yeah, it’s. Uh, it’s a lovely, it’s a lovely question. We’ve built a keyword research tool that sits on top of helium 10, um, so what we do there is that, uh, we manually use magnet and we just scrape based on seed keywords. In this case, for example, we have, uh, we have a client that’s that sells sunglasses, right, uh, so then it would be sunglasses for men, for women, could be black, blue, etc. We just put, put as many Uh keywords as we can into magnet and then we just export all of those keywords into our tool. Uh, it’s built in In google sheets. Everyone can build something like this. We do the same thing with cerebro. We take all the keywords, all our competitors that are best sellers, we take all their keywords, we put them into the same sheet. We take all the advertising data, um, we put that into the tool too. And then what we do is that, uh, we use a combination of, like just manual hands and then chat, gpt to go in and basically Remove all the keywords that are, I would say, obsolete.

Silas:

They’re not relevant, because there is still, like, when you Do a magnet search, search on, like sunglasses for men or women, there’s a lot of shit in there, let’s be honest, like there’s a lot of things that are irrelevant. So what we do then is that the tools like slowly learns about Okay, what are the, what are the words that it should not include. And then it goes and looks at the existing keyword research across magnets, cerebro, etc. And then it flags a. This keyword should not be in there. It could be like cheap, for example. If the word is cheap, cheap there, it looks for the entire list and removes it. It could be the word pink if you don’t have pink sunglasses, removes that. Um. And then we basically just do this and we probably start with like 150,000, 100, 100,000 keywords Uh. And then slowly we narrow down and then maybe we ended like 5,000, 10,000 unbranded keywords Uh. And then what we do then is that then we start Looking for those keywords what is an a, what is a B, what is a C, what is a D keyword from cerebral, from magnet. I know that I’m a little bit behind, but, like I probably like some of the Amazon data sources now are also valid Besides, like our own advertising data, so that we should be included in there. But then what we do then is that every three months we will go in and we will say, okay, based on organic and paid visibility, using cerebral for our own products, we’ll take all that data in there, will classify that, we’ll refresh magnet We’ve, we’ve refreshed cerebral and then that, on unbrained, at non-brained universe, just grows.

Silas:

And I think that’s how you build a business. Like I was talking to Cara like a second ago and I was talking about here, like what’s the percentage of Of brain versus non-brained or unbrained spend in your account, issues like majority brain, and I was like that’s not how it’s supposed to be, because then you’re not growing your business. I get simple for an agency honestly to claim that you’re doing well by just capturing someone’s brain terms, but the reality is like it’s the seller or Lego as a brain, etc. That has worked hard to gain that. That could be because of the TV show you’re doing. If you’re Lego, etc. It’s nothing to do what with what the agency is doing. Then there’s Certain things about what you do with the brain volume that I think is interesting. You can use branded search to boost new products, new novelty, and you can use it to drive up your ASP, your average selling price. So there’s a lot of things that you can do. You can even use where you target certain new products on your brain terms and then you use basically paid ads to Merchandise your shelf to make sure that it’s your newer products that are on top when you’re launching new products etc. So there’s something like I will. I’ve been a very, I’ve been very negative about brain Branded search, but I can also see like I think you get older and you get wiser, it does play a part. Yeah, it just shouldn’t be All geared towards your best seller product like that makes no sense.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we’re gonna get back into strategy, but let’s switch gears now. You know I Talk a lot about about, you know, health and things like that Due to my health issues, and it’s important as entrepreneurs that you know we’re mindful of mental health, physical health and the first thing you know, something I always make fun of you on, you know, when I look at your Instagram, yeah, like every morning you’re jumping into a frozen lake, sometimes naked. I don’t know how they allow that on Instagram, but Talk about that because that, just that, just to me. Like you know, you’re not doing that because somebody’s paying you to do that. I’m assuming there’s some kind of health benefits. When did you start doing that? Why and what’s the benefit?

Silas:

from it 100%. It’s going to get dark before it gets positive on this one. When so doing COVID, I was living in the US. I was sitting in the commercial role, I was having a lot of fun, but also missed home because I had three years in more or less isolation in a country where I’m not from. So I decided to take a Global role where I was head of e-commerce training for Lego In a time where you couldn’t really travel that much and at the same time, I had a Couple of family members really close that were dealing with anxiety and ADHD While I moved home. And then I was also doing a leadership education at Harvard one-year program. So there was a lot on my plate and I wasn’t really happy with where I was at In my career. It was. It looked good on paper, but I just wasn’t fulfilled. I was missing the community, the commercial aspects. I was missing being hands-on with Amazon. So You’re supposed to be at Harvard or you were at Harvard twice in school during the year and the first time I was there I got a legit panic attack for the first time in my life. So I think I’d been spending a lot of time being there for everyone else than myself and that turned into a depression. So I went on sick leave and I said, okay, I got to do things that are good for me right now. The first one was cold plunges super good for your nervous system jumping in the water, it stresses you out combined with like sauna, relax your shoe. Started meditating. You know that I’ve recently been to a 10-day silent retreat in Thailand. Well, you couldn’t speak at all for 10 days.

Bradley Sutton:

Couldn’t speak at all for 10 days.

Silas:

So I was doing all these things for myself to get myself back on feet. I still finished at Harvard, but family was main priority still being there for them while being able to be there for them, which worked out great for everyone, thank God. But just a super dark place allowed me to go in and re-evaluate what are all the things that I can do for myself to make me better, because I think I was just so surprised of like I was so strong, like physically, and I was having a career that was like on the uprise, but like mentally I’d never really worked on that aspect and I just realized that I needed to do more when it came to that, so started seeing a psychiatrist too. We’ve talked about that Great value there. I would say I’ve never been better, but I’m still doing it, because it’s just the best place in the world that the agency everyone has access every month to a psychiatrist. So that’s just a prerequisite that if you want it, you should get it like a coach. I think it has some stigma to it, but you know what, when your head is clear, you just make better decisions, also from a business perspective. So you have a long story, man, and it’s a little scary to like reflect back on, but taking that time was also what opened up the opportunity for me starting Copenhagen Commerce, which is our agency, together with Rasmus.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s important. I hope you guys have some takeaways there too, because on paper you might think, man, I would kill to be like. Have a high up job in a dream company like Lego, which probably you know a lot of people from Denmark it probably is a dream, you know what, when you kid like, oh, that would be amazing to work at Lego I mean anywhere in the world, you’d want to do that, but don’t you know. Or maybe it’s a dream job that your family had for you, or maybe it’s a dream brand. But at the end of the day, you know, your personal health, your mental health, is important and if you don’t find fulfillment, don’t let the definition of dream job or the definition of other people like oh man, everybody’s going to make fun of me if I leave this because it just wouldn’t make sense to a lot of people. No, you got to do you. First, that’s what Silas did, and now he’s in a. Now he’s in a good place. Now that kind of brings us to, you know, when you, after you left Lego, then you started your own agency. Now there’s an interesting story, right? About how you. That has to actually do with this podcast when I hear I haven’t heard the whole details yet, but I wanted to hear it first just like with you guys, how did you end up, you know, partnering with somebody and deciding to start the Amazon?

Silas:

agency. I took time off and I was working out during the cold cold plunge thing turn vegetarian, that’s another story Like. And I just slowly started feeling better and better and I could feel my energy come back. And then this guy called Rasmus Dignis, who is now my co-founder. He reached out to me and he’d reached out to me also a year earlier. And then he reached out again, super persistent, because he’d listened to me on the series seller podcast and he was like, do you want to go for a coffee? And I was like, yeah, we can go for a coffee. And I just started out having super open, honest discussion with him. I’m like I’ve been in a bad place. I don’t want to work so much. Right now I’m building myself up. We can start working together one day a week on one brand. That turned into two days a week, that turned into three days. Now we’re working together four days a week and I think it’s important to for me to note here we have a four day work week. I’m never going to work five days a week in my life again because the efficiency I have right now and effectiveness when I make decisions is just on a different level. So that is the ambition with everything that we do, and then we just got to automate our way to be able to scale, because I think you can do that nowadays with everything that’s happening with technology. But yeah, we met through you, so thank you for that. I actually brought a little present here.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s going on here?

Silas:

So this here is. It’s a Lego set. Of course I love it. We have to start where we ended.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s called the tranquil garden Because this is what I want for you.

Silas:

I want you to look at this and this be your tranquil garden, so that every time when you’re stressed I know you work a lot, you fly a lot, you build this set and then hopefully you sit down, take a breath, maybe meditate a little bit, but that it becomes a reminder for you also in your everyday life, because you do so much for so many other people that I think hopefully this becomes a reminder to do something for yourself and your family.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s awesome guys. This is going to go, once I make it, into the background of my podcast, which is my studio where I work. So this is going to be a good, and it’s like I got the Japanese theme the cherry blossoms and everything. I love it. Thank you so much.

Silas:

I really appreciate that. It’s a gift for both of us for bringing us together and, yeah, I mean we have shared passion for.

Bradley Sutton:

Japan right Future podcast guests. You want to get on my good side. Bring gifts. First person to bring a gift on the podcast.

Silas:

I love it.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, all right, let’s get back to the strategy as we close this out now. Now you’ve been on the vendor side, you’ve been on the private label side, now you’re on the agency side and you get to see multiple accounts and see things that work and don’t work. What are some of the strategies that you guys are doing that you think are somewhat unique? Something, maybe a couple of strategies that you’ve, through trial and error, work for you and that you think maybe our listeners can benefit from?

Silas:

Yeah, we’re sitting at a conference and I just had a conversation with two sellers out there who were both I don’t want to say a little bit complaining about the size of their catalogs, that they had so many skews right in the catalog, and one of the things that I recommend to every time that we have a new client or meet someone is to narrow in on fewer skews. It sounds quite simple, right, but what we do every time is that if you have a big catalog A, b, c and D products and then A products they get a special treatment compared to B, c and D. It could even be if your catalog is massive, you only focus your ad spend on A products Same thing with. From a content perspective, those are the ones that get the most love in terms of title, bullet point, bagging, attributes, et cetera, descriptions. So it’s just having that focus on fewer products, I think, is number one. Then, if you can automate your reporting we have that in Looker automated so that you don’t have to necessarily sit and look at the data and pull Excel spreadsheets et cetera, it just saves you so much time. If you’re capable of doing it and spending time on it, then I think. Thirdly, we talked a little bit about it, but I think doing taking the time to do super solid keyword research from the get go, like get into Magnet, get into Amazon’s data sources, get into Cerebro, look for all your competitors’ keywords, et cetera, understand what those A keywords are. And those A keywords are the only thing that you focus on in the start. Those are the ones that go into your rank campaigns, that they go into your manual campaigns, et cetera. And those are the ones that just like where you track everything through Like a little hack could be for your A products Every week, you Cerebro.

Silas:

Every other week you put in your A product and then you export all the data for that. You take a spreadsheet. In column A you say this is the date of either to pull the data, this is the ASIN you put in the ASIN that you pulled the data for. Then you make a formula. You can just ask chatgbt we’re based on the paid and organic rank. You say whether you classified the keyword as being on page one, two, three or four, and then you pull this data in this way every single week for maybe two months. When you’re running a new test or something like that. You take all the data, you put it into a pivot table and boom, then you would have an overview in a graph of how many like you’re, all your page, page one, two, three, four positions across your entire catalog. And you could even put a filter on up in the top and then you can sort by ASIN and then you basically have your own visibility tool where you can see your paid and organic visibility on a weekly level at an ASIN level and you can use that to take all those keywords If you’re ranking, let’s say page three or two or something like that put them into a rank campaign If you feel like they’re good, you can take all the keywords where you’re on page two, maybe put them in the title, et cetera. So like building those systems that allows you to scale something consistently.

Silas:

And then I mean, finally, take care of yourself. I mean that’s the biggest one for me. It’s like when you’re mentally in a good place, there are like no limits to what you can do. And I often see this like grind mentality, where it’s like people they work all the time, 24, seven, et cetera, and that becomes like a batch of honor. You know what? It’s really cool if you can build something. If you work four days a week and the moment when you put that constraint on yourself, you will think differently about your time Because, like, that’s just the thing, if you allocate time, you will spend that time. I’ve spent enough time in corporate, in meetings, et cetera, just spending time on things just because you’re there for like 40, 50 hours. And then, if you have 40 or 50 hours, you’re going to spend 40 or 50 hours, and I think that’s also Rasmus and I like we wanna build something that’s like sustainable for ourselves and our families one day, right? So, yeah, that’s probably some of the strategies.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. Love it. A lot of value here. Now you know you’ve talked about using a lot of different Helium 10 tools, you know, be it Chrome extension, Cerebro, Magnet, Black Box I think we’ve all mentioned or here in this episode. If you were to pick one tool which is your favorite that you think brings you or your clients the most value, which tool is it and why did you choose it Like? Why is it so valuable to you?

Silas:

I love Cerebro. It’s just my tool. I feel like Magnet is really cool but, like when you do keyword research, it’s just like all over the place and you need to like do so much manual cleaning of the data that you have to build something yourself, whereas the Rerebro, that is literally like putting in a product that you define that is relevant so you can do keyword research with it. We can also do what we just talked about before, which is tracking organic and paid visibility. You can just use that tool for so many things and it’s quite simple, like it’s really simple. I’m sure that there are other tools out there where it’s like a Bradley should go and teach me about tool X, y and Z, but that tool has just been like a day one for me and it’s also just. It does a lot of the things that we just needed to do and it just does it consistently. And then we have unlocked. Like this Easter egg is kind of like hidden I probably shouldn’t say it but where you can put in like multiple ASIN set the same time of like competitors through Helium 10. So we can put in like a hundred competitor’s queues and get all their keywords and then we can use that as like the point of departure for keyword research, which is just so powerful, right.

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, love that tool. Well, Silas, thank you so much for joining your perfect example of why I always preach to people to network at events. How I met Silas was not through Helium 10 per se, like on a chat or something like that. We were at a Helium 10 social at a conference and we had like a little party. He came up to me, we just hit it off and I was like back in 2019 and now we’ve been close contacts ever since. So go to conferences, guys. Go out of your comfort zone, meet people, build your professional network and you can have like lifelong friendships. Bring you Lego gifts across the world as well. So thanks to Silas for coming on and let’s make sure that it doesn’t take three and a half years for your next episode to come back.

Silas:

I promise, I promise it was so nice to be here. Love it thank you.

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