#365 – Pioneering Internet Marketing and AI: A Conversation with Perry Belcher
Join us as we welcome internet marketing titan, Perry Belcher, to the AM/PM Podcast! Listen in as we journey through Perry’s remarkable career path – from humble beginnings before turning to digital marketing. Perry’s illustrious career even saw him get a personal call from none other than Jeff Bezos himself, a short story you don’t want to miss!
The conversation continues with Perry reflecting on the rise and fall of his business and partnerships. His journey, marked by selling health supplements to launching a digital marketing business, and finally starting the Driven Mastermind and the War Room, is an insightful one for any entrepreneur. Our chat also covers the importance of joining a mastermind group, the benefits it can bring, and how it can help you gain a broad perspective of different industries.
Lastly, Perry shares fascinating insights about the role of AI in business, specifically in copywriting. From reducing labor costs to crafting compelling headlines and stories, the potential applications of AI are far-reaching. He also discusses misconceptions people have about AI and the opportunities it presents. Tune in for a riveting discussion about the intersection of AI, E-commerce, and internet marketing.
In episode 365 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Perry discuss:
- 09:22 – Success in Real Estate and Selling
- 16:45 – Running Successful Events
- 23:30 – The Value of Networking and Collaboration
- 29:55 – Selling Event Recordings for Profit
- 34:19 – Cash Prize Incentives for Speakers
- 39:00 – Leveraging Email Lists for Business Success
- 42:06 – Artificial Intelligence And Its Impact On Internet Marketing
- 53:21 – Other Mindblowing AI Capabilities
- 57:27 – AI’s Role in Various Industries
- 1:07:38 – Follow Perry on Facebook for Updates
- 1:09:46 – Kevin’s Words Of Wisdom
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 365 of the AM/PM Podcast. My guest this week is none other than the famous Perry Belcher. If you don’t know who Perry is, Perry is one of the top internet marketers, probably one of the top copywriters in the world today. He’s got his hands in all kinds of stuff, from newsletters to AI, to print on demand to funnels, to you name it. In marketing, Perry’s either got tremendous amount of experience in it or he’s heavily involved in it right now. We talked some shop today and just go kind of all over the place on some really cool, interesting topics. I think you’re getting a lot from this episode, so I hope you enjoy it. And don’t forget, if you haven’t yet, be sure to sign up for the Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter. It’s at billiondollarsellerswithaness.com. It’s totally free. New issue every Monday and Thursday. It’s getting rave reviews from people in the industry and some of the top people in the industry as well as people just getting started. So it’s got a little bit different take on it and just a lot of information. Plus, we have a little bit of fun as well in the newsletter. So hopefully you can join us at billiondollarsellers.com. Enjoy today’s episode with Perry. Perry Belcher, welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. It’s an honor to have you on here. How’s?
Perry:
it going, man, Dr King, esquire at all. I’m doing great, buddy, I’m doing great. I’m just trying to survive this hot, hot, hot summer that we’re all having, you know.
Kevin King:
Well, you’re out there in Vegas. Y’all had floods, right. I was seeing some stuff on TikTok, like some of the casino garages and stuff were flooding.
Perry:
Yeah, there were some floods out here, so it’s been. We got like years worth of rain in two days or something like that, they said, which we could stand. It didn’t hurt. But the hot weather out here is just the way that it is. You get used to it after a little while.
Kevin King:
Yeah, it’s the same in Austin. It’s like 108, I think today, and I know you know, football season just recently started and everybody’s complaining that they’re doing a game. One of the first games was in the middle of the afternoon, like 2.30 in the afternoon and like man, half these people are going to be dying out there, you better have some extra medical. You know supposed to do these things at night in Texas during September.
Perry:
My kid did in the middle of the day and he had some days that they were kids passing out, you know. So I don’t miss the heat in Austin. I’ll take the heat in Vegas instead. It’s different kind of heat to me.
Kevin King:
Yeah, it’s not. It’s more of a dry heat, not that, not that human heat that we have here. I’ll take it so for those. There’s some probably some people listening that don’t know. They’re like who’s this? Perry Belcher character? I never heard of this Perry Belcher guy and if you haven’t, you’ve probably been living on a rock in internet marketing, because Perry Belcher is one of the living legends out there and when it comes to internet marketing, it’s not just he dabbles on Amazon, but it’s Amazon’s just a little piece of what he does. He does a ton of other stuff. So, and you’ve been doing this since you’re like, you’ve been an entrepreneur since you’re like I don’t know, three years old. I heard you selling hot dogs. I mean, you’ve pretty much done, everything from run from selling hot dogs to running, I don’t know jewelry, pear shops or something, to having little kiosk in the mall, to crazy kind of stuff. I mean, just for those that don’t know who the heck you are, just give a little bit about your background.
Perry:
Sure, I’m world famous in Kazakhstan. I started out, you know, I grew up really poor in little town in Kentucky, paducah. It’s a sound of dead body makes when it hits the floor. And I’ll as soon as I could. I stayed there until I could drive. I could drive a car. I got the heck out of there and went to the big city, nashville, you know, and I got into, you know, early on I got into retail and I owned 42 jewelry stores. At one time when I was really, really young, before I was old enough to buy beer, I owned 42 jewelry stores. Isn’t that crazy? That’s crazy. Not that I didn’t buy beer, but as long as I was legally buying beer Exactly. You know. So I was in retail. I went out of, you know, eventually I made three different runs and retailed it, Okay, and then I got into manufacturing. I found I really enjoyed manufacturing Great deal. I still do a lot of manufacturing, as you know and then along, I guess about 1997, for those young whippersnappers that were born about then that are on in your Amazon crowd right In 1997, they invented this thing called the interwebs and Jeff Bezos started a store called Amazon and I sort of got. I sort of got all caught up in the web thing. And you probably don’t know this story. It was a true story, Kevin. I got a call from Jeff Bezos when I owned craftstorecom, so this was in probably 1998 or 1999. I got a personal call from Jeff Bezos wanting to talk to me about buying craftstorecom and rolling it into the Amazon family. And then they were only selling books, they were bleeding I don’t even know $100 million, a quarter, or some crazy number. And I’m like dude, you’re, I’m reading about you, you’re losing money, I’m making money. You know, I think you got this reversed. I probably should buy you. I swear to God, I said that. Yeah yeah, I said that that was about best I can figure about a $750 million mistake.
Kevin King:
Well, it’s funny you say that, because I mean we go back, we’re old school when it comes to way, before you know all this internet marketing craze. We were doing old school marketing, you know, by by putting a postage stamp on an envelope and sending it out. And I remember I have a couple of similar stories back around that same time, early late 90s, early 2000s. The guy at MySpace had just started somewhere around in there and those guys reached out to me. I had a newsletter, an online newsletter going at the time, and they reached out to me to do something and I turned. I just ignored them. I was like what’s this MySpace thing? I never heard of it.
Perry:
I did the same thing with Jim Barksdale. You know who that was. Yeah, yeah, barksdale wanted to buy one of my companies and I blew them off, and he was Netscape you know they also used to do back you might remember this back.
Kevin King:
I had several different websites and to get traffic back before there was Google and all these. You know, this SEO and all this stuff is basically as Alta Vista and you know, I love that, I love that Yahoo and all these guys and you could just just by putting stuff in the meta tags, you’d rank, you know on top of the crap out of yeah. You put a text down at the bottom and all the good, all the good, all the good all the good, all that kind of stuff. But I one of the things, what you might remember this there is what’s called ring sites. So in order to get traffic, you go to some guy would figure out how to get people to his site and then it would be like next or previous, and you’d hit a button and it would go to the next, previous, and then we had a newsletter that was doing about 250,000 emails a day back before can spam and all that stuff and to get traffic to it. You know, we were getting on Howard Stern Show when he was on terrestrial radio and we were doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But I was working with a site called BOMAS B-O-M-I-S and they had one of these ring sites and we they were like one of our top sources of traffic and I just remember there’s two guys there running out of their apartment or something. I talked to one of them. This is like probably around 2000 or so, ish, 2001. He said, hey, you’re going to be dealing with me from now on. My buddy is moving on. I’m like all right. I said James is moving on. I said, ok, cool, what’s he going to do? He said I don’t know, some sort of encyclopedia or something. I’m not sure what he’s going to do. He’s got some some crazy idea. Turns out it was Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia. I was actually working with Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia before he was Jimmy Wells from Wikipedia. Isn’t that crazy? It’s crazy, I mean the stories that we can tell from the early days of the Internet.
Perry:
When I look back, I just can’t. You know my buddy’s favorite saying, and I’ve adopted this I can’t believe how stupid I was two weeks ago.
You know like you. Just you just realize you know just the boneheaded stuff that you did when there was so much opportunity. The first domain I ever bought this was like just when domain registrations came out I bought formulas, the number four you oh wow com, the most worthless domain anyone could ever own, when I could have probably bought internet.com Pretend to buy anything and I bought the most boneheaded stuff. You know.
Kevin King:
Well, you remember the guy that he got in early he bought was at sex.com or something for, like you know, 10 bucks or whatever it cost to register it back then before there was a go daddy, yeah, and remember the fight like 20 years ago over that domain because it became like the most valuable domain on the entire Internet or something. Remember that huge fight about that.
Perry:
It was. It was crazy, but I know there’s been a bunch of those stories. Man, I’ve got some friends that really did well buying domain real estate early on. I bought a lot. I mean I’ve, over time, I still think domains are a bargain. I really do Most. For the most part, I own stuff like sewing.com and makeuptutorials.com and diyprojects.com. I still own some big stuff that we operate and I own a bunch of other big stuff that we don’t operate and you know I’m buying after markets.
Now I bought conventions.com for a little over $400,000 two weeks before COVID Boy. That timing was extraordinary. You know what could go wrong. Conventions are impervious to depression and so anyway, yeah, so I started buying. You know I got a manufacturing and I immediately saw the benefit of online selling because you could cut out all the different layers of middlemen in the in between the consumer and the manufacturer. So I’ve been a manufacturer selling direct to consumer for a long time. And then I got. I got in business with Ryan Dice. After I got in a lot of trouble, almost went to jail in the supplement business scares me to death to this day. You know I lost everything I had, almost went to the clink, and when that all got settled out I went to business with Ryan Dice and we he turned me on really to the information selling world.
Kevin King:
How’d you guys meet up? Was it at some events, or did you just meet up? Yeah, we met up.
Perry:
Yeah, I’ll tell you, the story is pretty funny story. So we met at a Yonix Silver event. We went to dinner with, you know, all these millionaires, you know in the room, the millionaire mastermind people, and we went to this big dinner and we had like 20 people at the dinner and when the check came it was like, well, I only had a salad, well, I only had the soup, and you know they’re all dividing up checks and crap. And I’m like, come on and Ryan looked at me and I looked at him. He said do you just want to pay this bill and get the hell out of here? And I said, yeah, so we split the bill. And that’s how we became friends, how we met. And then, you know, when I we knew each other through Yonix and then when I got in trouble in the supplement business, I mean, I had loads of friends when you’re, when you’re now and when you’re when you’re netting out half million dollars a month and you’re flying all your friends on private jets, the Thomas and crap on the weekends, boy, you got lots of friends, you know. And as soon as the money ran out, well, guess what? The friends ran out. You know, you know everything was, you know. Nobody knew who I was. Then, you know, and Ryan called me and said hey, man, I got this business in Austin. It’s doing a couple million dollars a year. If you’ll come help me run it, I’ll give you half of it. Oh, wow, and we did $9 million in the first seven months.
Kevin King:
And that was a digital marketer. For those of you that don’t know, that’s correct.
Perry:
Yeah, it was called touch tone publishing then, but eventually we rebranded it became digital marketer and then out of digital marketer came traffic and conversion summit and out of traffic and conversion summit came the war room mastermind and we ran all three of those for years. And digital we sold a TNC to a Claire and Blackstone Blackstone group about four years ago, I guess. Then I sold my interest in digital marketer to Ryan and Ryan, roland, richard about two years ago and then we dissolved war room about a year ago I guess they were going a different direction and and Kossim Islam and Jason Flylon I started driven mastermind so but yeah, it was a great, great run with. Those guys are super good, guys are super, super smart and we were business partners for 14 years long time. It’s a long. That’s a you know outlast a long time.
Kevin King:
That’s a long time in this business longer than all my marriages, almost divine, you know. So going just down. We’ll talk about some of those in just a second, but just down that back what? What got you in trouble in the supplement business was it claims that you just didn’t realize you couldn’t be. Yeah, what was the it?
Perry:
was kind of a combination. I was. I was legitimately a pharmaceutical manufacturer. We were an FDA pharmaceutical manufacturer. I got all the licensure and all that I got in trouble with the state had nothing to do with the federal. They called in federal, they called in DA, they called in everybody, like guys. Everything he’s doing is correct. But the state took issue to some claims and what ended up happening? They realized that they had not. The thing is, once the state gets their tentacles into you and have your money, you know it’s really hard to get rid of them, right? They’re like a tick. But. But at the end of the day, the only thing that that that they actually that stuck was something called ways and measures. So that meant that my equipment wasn’t precise enough to put the exact amount of product per bottle. So let’s say it says it’s two ounces right, mine might be 2.1 or 1.9 ounces right, and that’s there’s. There are state laws about that. They’re called ways and measures laws. They’re governed by the people who manage gas pumps, if you could believe it. But out of everything that they originally said that I was doing, they dropped everything else and that was the only thing that actually, at the end of the day, was it? But I had to settle it and they got all my money and all my stuff and left me three million dollars in debt. And when, when I went to Austin and we hustled hard, you know, for a couple of years, and I paid all that off, I didn’t file bankruptcy on it and it was hilarious because I threw a Perry’s broke party. Yeah, about two years in, when I got to zero, I got back to just broke. I wasn’t three million dollars, right. I threw a giant Perry’s broke party as maybe one of the most fun parties we’ve ever had. It was a little you’re in.
Kevin King:
Austin’s, you do that out at Willie Nelson’s ranch. Because, I was tapes, remember he did that when he got in trouble for seven million bucks and he did some sort of big ass fundraising party out. He has this like old ranch out West of Texas, west of Austin that’s. It’s got a studio lot on it, basically an old.
Perry:
House. Then I just had it right over the house and we had a big pool party and, oh my Lord, so many drunk people. It was a lot of fun, it was good time, so I got a lot of friends at Austin and you’ll talk digital marketer.
Kevin King:
the conference from like. I think the first one’s a few hundred people to what the? Now it’s five, six thousand people, or yeah, we get the biggest internet for if you’re an internet marketing, yeah, just in in general, it’s not just Amazon, it’s like across the board, it’s the biggest one out there, I think.
Perry:
Yeah, before the year before COVID, I think we had the biggest year was seventy two hundred. Oh wow, seventy two hundred, seventy eight hundred, I can’t remember. They thought we were going to ten thousand the next year and they rented the Coliseum in San Diego instead of the hotels. And then, of course, covid yeah, and it was just a you know, two or three years we had sold just prior to that. So have we not have sold that first year of COVID? I think was probably around a five million dollar loss, but they had clear and had insurance for it, fortunately. So I don’t think they. I don’t. I don’t know the exact damage, but I know it would have probably wiped us out and we’ve been because we had a refund. Tickets with In the venue would not have soft to hook and I was a big bunch of crap when it comes to running conferences.
Kevin King:
I mean, I do my billion dollar solar summit. You do your events now, like you do. You’ve done the couple AI summits, you’ve done the Perry’s weird event or whatever. You do quite a different things. You have the Whatever, whatever, whatever. You done like three of those which are fascinating. You do, you know, you have the driven mastermind and you’re involved with digital market and our space. There’s a ton of people it’s almost gotten through Events for Amazon sellers, like everybody. Everybody in their dog wants to have an event and the vast majority of them suck. There’s like seven people there they can’t sell tickets that are losing their shirt. Very few of them actually make money. What is the key actually, if you want to do an event or you’re thinking about that to actually making these things work, is it the long term play you gotta have? The upsell is at the.
Perry:
Well, events, events are very, very much an uphill battle. That’s the reason. When you go to sell one, they have a lot of value. If you go to, if you build an event to a thousand, two thousand people, it has a lot of value in the exit market because once an event hits a certain inflection point, they’re insanely profitable. So you’re so, like digital market, we lost money On TNC for probably the first four years that we did it. But the way we made up for it, we filmed all of the sessions and we sold them as individual products. So we built all of our. We had a thing that really made that thing magical, because every session had to be good enough to sell as a product. So it made the event itself, you know, great because you had to have executable do this, do this, do this, do this. It couldn’t just be a fluffy talk, right. Every talk had to be good enough to sell as a product when Ryan and I were doing them. So for the first three or four years we didn’t make hardly any money, but we generated a lot of product out of that. We sold throughout the year. So we, you know, we did make money a couple million dollars a year From the product sales and then over time, as the attendance goes up, the ticket prices tend to go up. You start at really low ticket prices and you ratchet ticket prices up as the event gets bigger and bigger, bigger, and you start taking on sponsors and we basically got to the point by the time that we sold. You don’t really want to sell right, because the sponsors were paying for 80 90% of the cost to put on the event. Tickets were you then over a thousand dollars a ticket? We were selling 7000 tickets. You didn’t really need to sell, you know, because you the event was paid for by the sponsors. The ticket sales money was just free money. And then whatever you do at the event, you know in sales is even more free money. But when you look at companies like Clary on the by these things, they don’t care about the product creation, they don’t care about selling at the event, they only care about tickets and they make a lot of money on hotel rooms. So they so in when, when they’re promoting they got a lot of cash, so they’ll buy all the hotel rooms in downtown San Diego a year before we, right before we, now we announced the dates, they buy all the rooms and then when you’re buying your room from bookingcom or American Express or whatever, you’re actually buying that ticket from Clary on, because Clary on in a lot of cases bought all the rooms in the city for $120 a night and then a year later you’re paying 350 on AmEx and they just pay AmEx a commission, a 20% commission.
Kevin King:
That’s different than the way when I do like for a billion dollar so much in order to not have to pay you know, $3,000 to turn the Internet on in the ballroom, or to have to per day, or from not having to pay for the ballrooms or this or that. We have to do guarantees. Rather than buying the rooms up front, we have to guarantee that we’re going to put 50 butts in the in these beds or whatever. If we don’t, we get penalized, you know, yeah, right.
Perry:
We did a little bit different model. Yeah, we did, we did too. You still have room blocks, you know, and the killer and the killer in the convention businesses contract negotiation and room blocks. You know, if you can get room blocks down, we did one recently at the ARIA and I didn’t have a room block anywhere because the ARIA surrounded by like eight hotels within walking distance, so there’s no reason to book a room block. Everybody could stay where they wanted within that complex and the room blocks Everybody could stay where they wanted within that complex. And then we got together and it didn’t. It didn’t create the problem, but you know they get you. Would they charge you more for F&B? So they, they’re going to get you right. So I’ve got my own event center now I’ve got a 50 person event center. I think we’re going to expand to 100 people and and I really prefer having smaller workshops anyway, they’re they’re more intimate, they’re more effective and if you’re going to sell something else to the attendees, the smaller the room, the higher your conversion rates will always be if you’re offering something to the attendees.
Kevin King:
That’s true, yeah, so then you took it from there to the mastermind you did the war room for a long time and I know my buddies, Manny and Guillermo, at Helium 10. They joined the war room about two years into working on helium 10. They said that was the number one life changing thing that they did.
Perry:
They killed it to that.
Kevin King:
I don’t know the numbers, but I know it’s. I see what he’s spending and what he’s doing, so I’m like it’s some serious numbers. But they they attribute that to war room, because there was some. Y’all did one event and I think it was in Austin, actually around 2018 ish, and it was all about system. Whatever the talk was on that one, because they’re quarterly, they were quarterly deals. I think it was all about systemizing and getting out your way and like cutting all the riffraff. I don’t, but they said that was. It was game changing for them and made them tens of millions of dollars. So, but to join a war room was what 30 grand, I know driven was what you have now which I’ve been driven 30 grand.
Perry:
Yeah, I’ve been to.
Kevin King:
I’ve been to driven. I went to the one back in July which was excellent out in LA and and I love going to these. Those of you are listening. You know this is not an Amazon conference. A lot of us go to Amazon conferences, but I think the best conferences for me are actually the non Amazon conferences, because I go into something like a driven where there’s yeah, there’s a handful of Amazon people there, but there’s also a bunch of Facebook people. There’s also a bunch of domain people, there’s SEO people, there’s people that you know just have some sort of a shop in Baltimore that you know do internet marketing and you, you meet this range of people and for me it’s brainstorming sessions. I’m uninterrupted. You know if I’m watching stuff online, even the recording of that, you know I got phone calls coming in, the dogs barking. You know wife’s nagging, whatever it may be. You’re interrupted. But you’re sitting in a room from nine to five, obviously not in the room. You’re sitting in a room From nine to five listening to people, these people talking a lot of it. You might already know, some of it may be new to you, but you’re just in there. One guy says something, perry says something, and then Kazim says something, and then Jason says something, and whoever else the speaker says something, you start going. If I put all these things together and I can do this for my business, holy shit, this is freaking incredible. And so that’s. These people look at me. And why the heck would I pay 25 or 30 grand to be in some sort of event? And if in the Amazon space, I personally wouldn’t, because I’m going to be the one delivering most of the value in a lot of cases. And so why would I pay to join something? They should be paying me to come to it. But when you go to something where it’s a cross section of people in the marketing world that all think like you but they do different things, I think that’s the most valuable thing, would you? Would you agree?
Perry:
I think honestly, I think in a good mastermind and that there’s that good being in parenthesis and a good mastermind. I don’t think you can lose money. I think it’s almost impossible. I’ve made money in every mastermind I’ve ever been in you just, I like the idea of the diversity, right. I might learn something from a guy in the funeral industry that can be applied to somebody that’s selling weight loss, right. You never know. And you know my benefit. I guess I’ve been around a long time, like you, kevin, I’ve been around the block a bunch and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses Pretty intimately in the, in the, the war room and now driven setting, and you know I get to see what’s working and what’s not working from like a 10,000 foot view inside all these businesses. So for me personally it’s a great benefit that I get to learn something from really diverse. You know I learned the other day I was talking to a friend of mine, a client, that that they’re in the, they sell online, that you book an appointment, you know they call you in, whatever, and they’re in an industry that I have no interest in, no knowledge of, right. But they figured out that if they once somebody’s booked an appointment, if they put a zoom, a live zoom, on the thank you page with somebody sitting there going hey, kevin, so glad you booked your appointment. By the way, jimmy can take you right now if you want, right. That one thing those, those people are coming in that way, or converting nine times higher than the people who book a normal sales call. And the beautiful thing now is.
Kevin King:
You can do that with AI. There’s tools with AI where you could actually, when they fill in that form I’m registered, I’m Kevin air dot AI and all that yeah, several and one that you could actually and you could put in you upload a spreadsheet or tie it into. You know, through an API to your, your cell system, that Jenny is available and it can actually, as I’m typing in, kevin King it’s in the background recording a video with with Perry saying hey, hi, kevin, this is Perry. I glad you just signed up. Jenny’s available right now. It’s all automated and all like holy cow how to help her is just sitting around it and you know the conversions on that go through the roof.
Perry:
Oh, they’re nutty and but that’s something I learned from a person who’s in the like the the trauma they. They serve trauma psychiatrists, that’s their market and I’m like I would never know that in a million years. Right, but but how many other businesses or clients of mine could that one tactic be applicable to? The answers? A lot, right, so you. So, when you go into those rooms where you know to be in driven, you got to be doing at least a million a year, but I think our average is around seven million a year gross and, and some you know up to, you know there’s there’s some hundred million dollar Folks and big players in there. There’s some big players there, but you but nobody’s stupid, right? You’re in a room full of really, really smart people when they’re basically telling you what they’re doing. I joke about. I get paid for people to tell me. I get paid for really smart people to tell me what they’re doing. That’s really working and what I right, what a great gig I got right. But, yeah, we’ve been doing it for a really long time there. Those groups masterminds are hard to keep together and Keep happy and all that there because they are, because they’re intimate, people share a lot of details and sometimes you have personality, kind of little things. This is crazy nutty stuff. That happens that you, the only problem with those things are just, they’re a, they’re a bit to, they’re a bit to manage and you know that, as far as the 30 grand goes, or 50 grand, or 70. I know a lot of people charge. I know a buddy mine charge is 70,000 a year. You know we act like that’s a lot of money but everybody’s got an idiot on their payroll that there’s a more than 30 grand to, I promise you. Everybody does. Everybody has a dodo on their payroll that they should have fired a long time ago but he brings the doughnuts or something and you don’t farm that. Would you rather have that dodo licking stamps four hours a day or would you rather, you know, have access to some of the smartest people and your peers and you know really Really that? Keep you accountable, keep you on your toes and keep you up to date, because we do a call every week along with the meeting. So I I’m not pitching it down, I don’t. This is sound like I’m hey, go buy my thing, but no matter what the industry you’re in, get into a mastermind group. If you can, it’ll one that you can afford.
Kevin King:
You know ours is out of reach for most people because they’re they’re not because it’s they can afford it, because they just don’t meet the minimum sales, like you said, like you know, if you’re at a one million and you said the average is around seven, you know, for 30 grand a year, all you need is one, one little idea, one thing, just you, just the ROI could be immense on just one thing.
Perry:
I’ve heard a hundred times and I got all my value for the year within the first two hours. The first meeting yeah, you know, I’ve heard that so many times because this Kevin King gets up and talks and says something really smart and you go. Well, that was worth it, right, I got. I learned a thing that I didn’t know and and, like you said, when you’re doing, the beauty is the reason we don’t take people that aren’t doing a lot of money yet. It’s hard to ROI. But if you’re already doing let’s say you’re doing seven million a year and you get an idea that gives you a 5% bump, right, let’s 350 grand, yeah for an idea. And you, you know, you’re in for a year. You’re in for 52 calls and four live meetings and Intensives and networks and private calls and all kinds of stuff. It’s you know and I’m not saying for us, just for any man mind if you get a good mastermind, you can’t lose money if you, if you have a good enough business already that you can ROI.
Kevin King:
One of the things that you do that’s really cool too is, like you said. You know, with digital market and I agree that you know you’re recording it, turning it into content you do that now. Well, you’ll do a Like that, the weird event you you straight up say, hey, come out to this thing. Yeah, it’s gonna be a hundred of you here, but I’m recording this. I’m gonna turn this into a product. Yeah, you turn it into six products. You know, and I didn’t with my billion dollar seller summit. I didn’t used to record those, but now that’s half the prop. That’s where the actual the profit is. It’s actually in recording it and then selling it to the people that didn’t come. But one of the cool things that you do, like it driven and some of your other events your AI event you did this. I think you do it. Probably pretty much everyone I’ve ever been to is at the end you say get the kick the cameras out of the room, turn everything off. Let’s grab a bottle of wine. You sit up with the stage. You might bring a couple other your partners or the couple other speakers and it’s just two hours, three hours. They’re just shooting the shit of Q&A and, yeah, stuff that comes out of that Alone pays for the entire event.
Perry:
Yeah, the unplugged we’ve we’ve been doing unplugged forever because at the end of most events, you know, you still have unanswered questions and I don’t want people to have unanswered questions. But also some people just don’t want to talk about, they don’t feel comfortable talking about the particulars of their business on camera. Yeah, so you know, if they because you know, sometimes a lot of my students are also Gurus, right, and you know how gurus are they don’t want to tell you that. Well, they don’t want to tell you that they’re having a hard time making the lease payment on Because they’re pretty ill, hurt their image, right, I talk about all of my screw ups and Almost going to jail and going broke and all it, because you know it’s real, that’s the real of people. But but a lot of the guru guy, well, I can’t say that because it was just destroying my image. So I like doing unplugged sessions a lot of times because they people feel a little more comfortable talking about their challenges and Without feeling like it changes their position. And I think sometimes, just, you know, people don’t want to ask their question on a microphone in front of a thousand people for fear of embarrassment. And what if my questions? A dumb question. So when you’re just sitting down Slugging back a beer and you know chatting they feel more comfortable asking the questions. They probably should be asking it we I’ve done that as a policy for a really long time. We do wicked smart and we do unplugged, and those are the two. You know we always ask for the best idea in the room, and that that was a funny story.
Wicked smart was invented the first year that Ryan and I did Traffin conversion summit. We programmed three days worth of content for a three-day event and At 11 o’clock on the third day we were out. We’d have anything else to talk about. We actually we had miscalculated our time and we have anything else to talk about. So we went to lunch and we said man, we got to fill all afternoon. What are we gonna do? And and and I don’t know if Ryan or I are together, I think we pretty much together we came up with the idea let’s just challenge people to come up and tell us the smartest thing They’ve learned in the last six months and how it affected their business, and let’s give whoever gives the best idea. And I think the first person that came up, ryan or I won Jeff Mulligan’s, a good friend of ours and he’s from as a former boss tonight lives in New Hampshire and he always says wicked smart, that’s wicked smart, you know. And yeah, and the first person came up and they did their thing was whoo, that’s wicked smart and that’s stuck. And that’s how wicked smart got started. But we never did unplugged. I used to do unplugged with Andy Jenkins at Stompernet years ago when I would. I used to go speak for them every now and then and one of the things that I did was really, really cool was called unplugged and we just Andy and I, would sit down on the edge of the stage. I don’t, andy was brilliant. I don’t know if you ever knew him or not. He was absolutely a really really brilliant guy and he and I would sit on the edge of the stage and talk to people for hours. You know it was a lot of fun. So I kind of picked that up from Andy.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I do that at the billion dollar source. I’m not do a hat contest, so the last day, what well? I do two things. I incentivize the speakers to bring it, so I put a cash prize on the speakers. So, because I don’t want them doing the same presentation they just did it three other conferences or same thing they talked about on podcast I want them to bring their a game, so I put a five thousand dollar cash prize on the first and twenty five hundred on second. It’s voted on the last day. I’m ineligible. I always speak last, so I’m ineligible.
But all the other speakers that I invite after the last one spoke, everybody votes On who they thought was the best speaker, deliver the best value, and then that person gets five grand. So it’s become like an honor to do that and then, as a result, everybody is bringing next level stuff that they normally wouldn’t talk about. Because, and then I publish the list of the and you know, if there’s 15 speakers I Public, I start at number 10. I don’t show number 11 through 15. I want to embarrass somebody totally, but I start at number 10 and go backwards and announce them up like it’s. You know, like it’s a billboard top 100 or something, casey casem or whatever and it works really really well because Everybody’s. If you’re not in the top 10 of a speaker, you’re like you know you didn’t do so well, you didn’t resonate, and then you’re not coming back if you need a spelling of my name for the check. You’ve been involved in AI for like seven years before. It was the cool thing to do, I think probably six yeah, probably six years.
Perry:
I got. I spoke on AI at the largest TNC, that one before COVID. I spoke on AI and showed Jarvis and Well said labs and a bunch of those before Anybody or anything, and and everybody in the room was just blown away by it and I feel certain they didn’t do anything at all when the dog, you know. But I was using it for copywriting and we were building services For and like this AI bot that were it’ll be after this Heirs, but but this AI bot, you know, we’re really concentrating more on the business models that you can apply AI to. So the first AI bot summit was all about Opening people’s minds up to it, so they understood what it was, understanding how to use the tools and and really just grasping this. One thought of If you had 10,000 really smart people willing to work for you 24 hours a day for free, what would you have them do? That’s always my question, because with AI and a little bit of robotics, that’s what you have. You have an unlimited amount of Robotic slaves to do your bidding right, whatever you want, and they don’t take breaks and they don’t break up with a boyfriend and they don’t sue you for, you know, workplace compliance issues and all that stuff and, and you’re gonna see, I think it’s already happening. It’s just people aren’t exposed to it in mainstream yet, but Corporate is projecting like huge profits over the next few years as they Diminish the amount of workers, physical workers they haven’t replaced with AI Elon Musk whether you like him or not, you know, cut the workforce at Twitter by 90% and arguably, the experience for the end user hasn’t changed.
Kevin King:
Yeah right, yeah, it’s, it’s your event back in just to tell a quick little story. Then we’ll go into this. But your event back in April. You’re showing some business uses. You know you’re talking about the army of 10,000. You showed something about a. You know here’s a building, the payroll of this building and use AI and the payroll goes from I don’t know some crazy number of a million dollars a month to 86 dollars a month or what some exaggerate there.
Perry:
It’s the Empire State Building and the payroll. The daily payroll in the Empire State Building is about I I’m gonna paraphrase, I don’t remember the numbers, but it’s about a million dollars or more a day and the average worker output 750 words of text a day in white collar America. So if you translate that into the cost of open AI to generate the same 750 words, it’s about 42 bucks, I think yeah, it’s like you know it’s it’s in 42 I mean for all of them, not for one of all of you know 42 bucks or 92, but it wasn’t much.
Kevin King:
It was less than less than 200 dollars, I think, to generate the same amount of work product one of the things that you talked about there were newsletters and like how AI can automate a lot of newsletters and and I’m a I’m gonna disagree with you a little bit there on where you can actually have. I think at that time you may have changed your tune now I’m not sure. But you’re like let AI do all the writing, do everything. You can just put these things on autopilot and I think that’s definitely possible, but the quality sucks and for the most part, unless you’re just assembling links. But if, but, but. What you said there actually about newsletters got me thinking. It’s backed on that same thing we’re talking about earlier bringing this all together. Here is where, about going to events. It’s like you know what I used to run a newsletter in the late 90s and early 2000s that we that had 250,000 daily subscribers. We crushed it as using that as a lead magnet to sell memberships, to sell physical products, to sell everything. What, if you know? And this Amazon product space, everybody’s always trying to build audiences and they’re always like go build a Facebook group, go Create a blog post and you, as you know, the most valuable asset in any business as your customer list, your email list, your Custom list and be able to use that when you want, as you please. And you can’t do that on social media. You have no control with algorithms on Facebook, you know, have no control over how many people see your LinkedIn post or or anything. But with an email list or a customer base database, you do. I was like, wait a second, what if we took newsletters and did this with physical products and actually to build audiences? So if I’m selling a dog products and I happen to have sustainable dog products, I’m like what if I build an audience? A dog, the dog markets half of America. That’s too big. Well, if I niche that down to some people who ends dogs and sustainability, create a newsletter for them. I’m not trying to sell them anything. This is not a promotional email from my company saying, hey, look at our latest product, here’s our new things. But it’s more of a about the dogs, about dog training, dog tips, food tips, whatever. And then occasionally spreeking on some affiliate links To test things or you maybe even get a sponsorship. So make this thing self-sustaining and when you’re ready to launch a product, you have an avid, rabid, loyal fan base to launch that product to as like this is the way to actually build things. So we I started looking into it Devoured everything you you showed about newsletters. You even set up a special tele I think it was telegram Newsletter channel, devoured everything in there. I went out, devoured everything in the newsletter space for three months, like everything is like. I already know this stuff, but I want to re educate myself on the latest tools, the latest strategies, and I just launched one In August, august 14th for the Amazon space. That’s that I already have an audience there. Let me figure this out. Let me, like, figure out what are the best tools, the best systems, and then I can spread this to across multiple industries, multiple things, and that’s what we’re doing now and it’s hugely Successful so far. And and AI is a part of that. But I’m not letting AI write it. AI is more of the, the creative side. It’s how it it will rewrite something. If I’m trying to think of a headline, I’m like what’s a better way to say X, y, z? I’ll type in what’s a better way, you know, to say we’re ten ways that there are funny and catchy, in the tone of Perry Belcher, whatever it may be, to say this you know, give me all these cool ideas and then I mix and match, or sometimes it nails it, or I’ll write a. I do a six you, you talked about this and one of your things the six second video, and so the beginning of every one of my newsletters is a six second, basic six second story. It’s a personal story About me. It’s something about me meeting Michael Jordan, spending a night with him in a sweet and Atlantic City the day before the night before he first retired, and you know it’s crazy. Stories are about my divorce or about you know, so you’re a naked girl on the balcony. I know it’s, it’s edgy, crazy story. But then I tie that back into the physical products and I’ll use AI sometimes, maybe to help tweak that. Or if we got it some scientific document from Amazon about how the algorithm works, I’ll use it to read the document, summarize it and then, you know, rewrite it with a human touch and add personality to it. So that’s where using AI in other industries. I think it is brilliant. Most people aren’t getting that right now. Most people just think of it as this is a threat to my job, this is a threat to you, this is the terminators coming to kill me and take over the world.
Perry:
So what about? Everything’s a conspiracy theory.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I mean AI. I was just had just had a chat in August, so it’s my father’s 82nd birthday and I was sitting there for an hour explaining AI to you know, an 82 year old and a 79 year old in their mind was just, they’re just was blown. They’re like how do you know all this? This is, this is like science fiction movies or something, and like this is what you can do with it. And most people don’t understand that. What are your thoughts on on AI right now and how people are misunderstanding or misusing and what are the best opportunities out there?
Perry:
Well, circling back to your newsletter thing that the AI sucks for newsletters, it depends on the kind of newsletter you’re writing.
Kevin King:
That’s what I said. If it’s a link, newsletter or something, you can do it.
Perry:
If it’s a, if it’s an aggregated or what you call a link newsletter, what I call a curated newsletter, they add as a really good job at writing basically a tweet and then linking to the article, and you do that like eight or nine times and you got a newsletter. But did you see the one?
Kevin King:
the hustle, I think it’s. They did a study. Like people are saying that. I don’t know if you saw this from the hustle, but the hustle actually hired a guy, he went out and he did Let me see if I can fully automate a newsletter 100% AI so they had their programmers do some stuff and they put it out. It was about the nineties. So they would take today. You know, if today is, you know, April 6th, no, august 6th 2023, they would do August 6th 1993. What happened on that day? You know? Jurassic.
Perry:
Park, the whole movie.
Kevin King:
But the thing is it was repeating itself. The way it was writing was like all it was just you got to have, you got to have ins that.
Perry:
Do a final review. I mean you got to have a human still, do a final review. Yeah, we’ve got a system. So Chad, my partner Chad, built a software system we’re about to launch actually it’s called Letterman and it we manage 18 newsletters a day through it and we do it with three outsourcers.
Kevin King:
And the way that we do it is we hand out the we handpick what we’re going to talk about.
Perry:
So basically, we have a bunch of API feeds that tell us these are the stories that are trending about this subject today, and then our guys can go in and just hit, click, click, yes, yes, yes, no, yes, yes, no, delay, delay, delay. So maybe for a future issue, and then it’s going to pull together those links and drop them into our software and then the software reads the article and then writes a like a tweet, that tells them to go, that compels them to go read this article. The call to action is compelling them to read the article. Right?
Kevin King:
So that’s SDO, then something really. It’s a. Or is it a newsletter? It’s a newsletter.
Perry:
So this all goes into a newsletter and basically like, for instance, financials, a great example. The capitalists is ours and we want them to be able to get the gist of, like the Wall Street Journal and three thumbs swipes. And even though we’re only writing, there might be 10 links in here. Right, we’re writing like 140 characters on each link, compelling you to go click the link, and AI is writing that.
Kevin King:
Okay.
Perry:
And then they’re going over and reading the actual article on the original source, right, okay, so so it’s expanded.
Kevin King:
It’s an expanded judge report or something. It’s exactly what it is.
Perry:
It’s not. It’s not even kind of like it. It’s exactly what it is Now the opposite. That’s only really useful if you have a news worthy topic. Yeah. News or financial or something that’s not for entertainment, financial entertainment, sports, politics things that change every single day. But if you’re in the Amazon space, you got to think about it more like a, a magazine.
Kevin King:
That’s what I do, yeah.
Perry:
So what we’ll do there is find a feature article or three features. Three feature articles is even better. So we’ll, let’s say, for instance, my things on Amazon, and I’m talking about optimizing the perfect Amazon listing, right? I don’t know whatever, but I’d go find three, the three best articles I could possibly find on that subject anywhere in the world, feed them into the AI, have them read all three and then write me a new article. And oftentimes the way we keep it interesting, we have characters, ghost writers created that right in the style of whomever right. So, but I mean really detailed. But one of the things that we found, Kevin, that’s killing right now that you might find is our email list. I’m on a mission to get my email list to never send a promotion ever.
Kevin King:
That’s what I’m on to. I’m on to yeah.
Perry:
So the way I do it is by sending out content, so like Perry might send out an email. You’re doing it every day right now.
Kevin King:
I get an email from you every day on copywriting Big, long email right. Yeah, big long. No, I save them. They’re valuable. I mean, some of them go into my swap file.
Perry:
It’s a subtle.
Kevin King:
It’s a subtle like you’re staying top of mind. You’re doing it. Dan Kennedy does it right now and there’s a couple others. He’s doing that with Russell, but I and they’re valuable. You can just read that and never do another thing. But it’s you’re staying top of mind and then you’ll put in something OPS, remember the AI summits coming or whatever that stuff works.
Perry:
But what’s about to happen with those lists and we’re doing another list right now is, once you open that thing about headline writing right, I can fire off a straight up promotion to you.
Kevin King:
Yeah, you’re segmenting based on what I click and what I do open and read Instantly.
Perry:
So you’re opening reading my article, right? So you just read my article about headlines and then the. Then you close that article down close that email. The next email in your queue is from me going hey, fibs, copywriting course is 50% off today. Great deal, and you’re already so pre-framed to that. The open, the open rate on that second email is like 70 to 80%. Yeah, yeah, we’re doing that.
Kevin King:
We’re going to do that in the product space, where we will watch what people click and if they’re always looking on the docs and story, we’ll start feeding them more docs. And there’s a tool out there, there’s a what. There’s a tool that does this for the AMA right now, that that does newsletters, where it automated it watches everything and automatically get basically creates a personalized feed in a newsletter we want to Instagram.
Perry:
We basically want to Instagram the newsletter business. So if you’re only opening dots and stuff, then we want to deliver dots and stuff to you. If you’re only delivering lip plumper articles, then we want to deliver a lip plumper off offers to you and and make the newsletter more lip related.
Kevin King:
If that’s your thing you’re into in a makeup space, we’re talking about it for newsletters, for you know Amazon sellers, but you can do this for physical products. You can do this for any industry and then leverage off of that. You see that they’re always by clicking on the docs and ads. Then you start driving them to your print on demand docs and t-shirts, or you start driving them to Amazon to buy docs and bowls or whatever it’s there’s a guy that sells drones on Amazon.
Perry:
You should have a drone newsletter. You know. You absolutely should have a drone newsletter. We say when, when Perry and I are talking about newsletters there’s a big misconception in my mind.
Kevin King:
Maybe you have a little bit different take on it, but so many people have what they call a newsletter. You go to their website you know the drone maker, sign up for our newsletter and the newsletter is nothing but a promotional email. It’s like hey, we just announced two new parts. We just announced this to me. That’s not a newsletter. That’s a good one. That’s not a newsletter.
Perry:
That’s a good one. You’re not going to get deliverability on it either I mean a newsletter provides value.
Kevin King:
It’s like 95% value, 5% promotional. It’s valued, something you want to get it to where people look forward to getting it, not, oh God dang. I just got another freaking email from drones. Or us Delete, delete, delete. They like I got to open this because they may have some cool tactic in there on how to fly my drone, you know, or in heavy winds, or whatever. Whatever it may be. That’s where you got to be thinking when you’re doing this, and AI is a great tool. And I always remember something you said when just as a quick aside here, it’s a quote I often re-quote you on this and credit to you but you always said, when it comes to selling products on Amazon, people don’t buy products on Amazon. They buy photos, absolutely, and so can you talk about just for the Amazon people.
Perry:
Nobody can buy a picture. Nobody can buy anything on the internet. It’s impossible. All you can do is buy a picture or something that’s. Or if you’re writing copy, you’re creating a mental picture of a thing, right? So yeah, I’m a big believer in product photography being a giant piece of what you do and making something that’s demonstrable. If you can actually show how it works in a 30 second video clip, I think that’s different than anything. You know that works more powerfully than anything, because you’ve got to, and design I think you’re seeing now is becoming more and more important the quality of your design, because we don’t have any way to trust companies, right? You don’t really have a way. It used to be the old Dan Kennedy world and Dan at the time was right. You know, ugly sells and pretty doesn’t, right? The truth is today, pretty outsells ugly, and that’s just. We’ve proved it eight times, eight times over. Pretty outsells ugly, and especially if you’re selling a physical good, right? So don’t skimp on the amount of money you spend on photography and photo editing and all those things. I was in was in Kevin interesting thing I was in Guangzhou, China, and I went to this illustration company. They do illustrations, you know. Have you been to? You’ve been to Yiwu before? Yeah, I’ve been able. Ok, so you know, upstairs in Yiwu, like on the fourth and fifth floor, it’s all service companies, web companies, and I found a company up there and they were doing watches so they would take a watch. You can’t take a good enough photograph of a watch for that photograph to actually work in a magazine. It’s an impossibility. So what they do is they take a picture of the watch and they pull it into an illustration computer and then there’s a program just for jewelry that has all of these textures and paint brushes and all that and they actually build the watch on top of the photo. They build an illustration of the watch and if you ever pick up a magazine and really look at, get a magnifying glass and look at the picture of the Rolex on the back right, you can see where there’s an illustration piece cut here or there. You don’t see any of the photo. They completely overlay it. But sometimes it takes these guys two weeks to set on illustrator and replace every little pixel dot. Everything is a vector and then they send that off and that.
Kevin King:
But now AI can do a lot of that.
Perry:
Yeah, I don’t know how much I would trust it to do that, but yeah, it probably can. It can certainly enhance the photos a lot. You’re seeing AI photo enhancement become a really big deal. Have you seen that thing that takes? I mentioned it at AIBotson. I’m trying to think of the name of it now Topaz.
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Perry:
Topazai. Well, you can take your old video footage and it’ll turn it into 4K footage. It looks pretty doggone good. I mean, you take an old piece of footage that you shot 10 years ago and you run it through there and it’ll give you a whole face lift and make it really appear to be a 4K footage.
Kevin King:
Yeah, as Remini does that for photos, you can have some old photo or even something you downloaded, some stock image you downloaded online. It’s kind of low res because they want you to go pay for the high res. Just download the low res, run it through Remini and it’ll upscale it. And upscaleio is another one. There’s a bunch of them and some of it’s like holy cow. This is amazing stuff.
Perry:
Another year from now, probably most of the things that we’re using services for now will be you know you don’t have to. We’re making a lot of money right now in the Philippines by our outsource company uses AI to do things for people. So if you wanted an illustration of a product or whatever, you could send it to man. We’re going to charge X for that, but we’re actually going to use tools that cut our labor time down by 80, 90%. We haven’t got it to where we can cut it all the way out yet and we still hire art directors. You know, really, but it allows you to, instead of hiring 30 B minus designers and you know an art director, you use AI and you get three or three or so, three or four really high level art directors and you don’t need all the carpenters anymore. Right, and if you’ve seen the way they’re building houses now, with the brick laying machines and all that all the carpenters, all the framers that won’t be a profession in another 24 months.
Kevin King:
Well, that’s the scare I think that general public has when it comes to AI is like, well, it’s going to take my job and so I don’t want that, but look what happened in the industrial revolution, look what happened when the wheel wasn’t been it. People will adapt and if you don’t adapt, you’re going to get left behind. And I think right now, one of the biggest skills if you’re listening to this and you’re, you know, in high school or college or you’re young and still trying to figure you need to learn how to do prompting Prompting. I think good prompting versus okay prompting can make a world of difference with AI. As this gets more sophisticated, being good at prompting is going to be a major skill set that’s high in demand. Would you agree with that?
0:55:51 – Perry:
I think so. It’s funny though, you know. Now you can go to open AI and say write me a mid-journey prompt. Yeah you know this and use this camera lens and this but you don’t want the camera lens.
Kevin King:
That’s where photographers and artists right now are.
Perry:
You kind of don’t. You can actually have open AI right the mid-journey prompt for you. It’s crazy and a lot of people are doing that and I think that’s. I think prompting is going to become easier and easier, but it’s still going to require imagination.
Kevin King:
You know.
Perry:
No, no artificial intelligence engines ever going to be able to replace imagination. You know it’s not going to happen. So I think that we’re we’re we’re fine for, you know, a good long while. I don’t see it being a problem, but there’s good money to be made right now with just arbitrage. You know how it is, kevin. You’ve been around this business long enough. When, anytime, a market is inefficient, that’s when all the money’s made, right, and right now you got people who need things done. Nobody wants to work, right? So you know AI is just filling the slot perfectly, so we can offer services. Now that used to be. You know, like. We’ll do unlimited video editing for $2,000 a month, right? Well, we’re doing 90% of that video editing with AI. If we were doing it by hand, we’d have searched $10,000 a month, right, and the end of the day, the customer doesn’t care. The customer’s getting the desired product delivered within a timeline. They don’t really care if you did it yourself or if a robot did it. And if they do care, well, it’s probably not your kind of customer, right? So all the stuff that you guys go through of writing product descriptions and all your SEO, your keyword loading and your product photo enhancement and all the stuff that you do, I’d say within a year, probably. Right now, if you’re studious you can do 90% of it?
Kevin King:
Yeah, you can, but within a year. I mean, it’s been a big thing. I just was in another mastermind with a big Chinese seller. He does $50 million a year or something. He’s based in China and sells into the US and he said that AI has been a leveling ground for the Chinese sellers.
Perry:
Yeah, of course.
Kevin King:
Because now they used to, you’d have all that broken English and stuff on listings or they couldn’t understand the culture to write it in the right way. And he said with AI, that advantage is gone for Westerners, so you got to step up your game and now it’s in. Still, you have an advantage in branding or innovation or some other areas, but it’s leveling the playing field for a lot of people.
Perry:
Yeah, we found it. We found with Mid Journey packaging design.
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Perry:
It’s been. Packaging design mockups have been amazing. We’ve come up with some really great packaging ideas that we wouldn’t have come up with and for the most part you can send those over to your factories in China and get a reasonable.
Kevin King:
When people are doing that for product. Now they’ll come up with a product idea like, hey, I want to make a I don’t know a new dog bowl. You’ll have the AI create. You know, they’ll give it some parameters. It needs to be this, it needs to be slow the dog down from eating or not slip on the floor, whatever Right and have the AI create a hundred different models of it. Just boom, boom, boom. Use 3D illustrations, put that into a tool like PickFu, let people vote on it and then, you know, have the top couple. You know, go to molding and make prototypes and then do some additional testing. You couldn’t do that. That’s just what you can do. Now is just some of the times, sometimes almost mind boggling.
Perry:
And robotics have really taken down molding costs.
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Perry:
Back when you and I started, you know I want to custom mold for this. Well, it’ll be $100,000. Now you know, six grand you know, whatever it lasts, you know, depending on what you’re molding, but it’s crazy how cheap molding costs have gotten.
Kevin King:
So we’re almost out of time here. Actually we’ve gone over, but just real quick before we wrap up. What are? What would you say are three things out there that you’re seeing right now that either hot opportunities that people need to be paying attention to, or three big, or maybe even three big mistakes that people are making when it comes to trying to sell physical products to people.
Perry:
Well, big opportunity and big mistake is trying to sell all your products on the Shopify store rather than a. You know, if you’re outside Amazon, going outside the Amazon world, for a minute, we can’t get anything to convert on Shopify as well as we can get it converted into funnel on a straight up landing page with an upsell we make way more money. I’ve tried it every which way from from a Sunday. So I think from a physical standpoint, building single item product funnels is something most people don’t do. They send people to store storefront. Here’s multiple.
Kevin King:
You can confuse them with multiple things. Yeah.
Perry:
We’ve not. We’ve not done well with that. We’ve not even done well selling a single item on the Shopify store. We always, with any other, go high level click funnels. Any of them could just kick the snot out of Shopify for a single item stuff. Shopify is great for a multi item put it in your cart and check out experience but not for what we do. I think that right now, ai presents the greatest opportunity in maybe ever. So I said before it may be bigger than the advent of the internet. I think it might actually be. That probably sounds crazy to most people, but because the internet’s just a communications device, right? This is actually hacking intelligence, which is a whole different animal, and with quantum computing coming online, it’s only going to become much more powerful. I think that you know the big opportunities that I’ve just I talk about all the time with my people. Number one is you know, create a service that you can provide with the aid of AI so that you can get your economies of scale. My outsource services. I used to make 15% margin on all my outsources. I got 325 outsources. I’d make about a 15% margin. Now that they’re all AI enabled, they put out two to three times as much work. Product for the client. So the client loves it and we’re making 30 and 40% margins. So I think that everybody needs something done. Done for you Services are really really, really easy to sell. So you know, create an online, create some sort of a done for you service that you can get economies of scale with AI. Do that. Number two, I think product design, both in print, on demand and just general product design. You know everybody’s a designer. Now, you know, with a mid journey or with a stable diffusion, whatever, everyone’s a designer. Third is rapid software development. You know you can do so much software development with AI now that the time and investment to create a software application has probably been reduced by at least 80%, 80 to 90%. The challenge I’m fortunate I have a business partner who’s a software architect right, the challenge with software is the architecture. You still have to architect the software, in other words, draw a great plan of what you want to accomplish, but the coding part can largely be done with AI. Probably. I think they I read a thing the other day 70% of all code written in the world right now is being written with AI.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I just did something with bubble Just recently, just no time. It’s amazing yeah really cool stuff on bubble.
Perry:
And then finally, publishing. You know, book publishing, audio publishing, newsletter publishing, any kind of publishing. It won’t be replaced. We’re not going to be reading AI generated books on Amazon. Those are going to be flat as a biscuit. But like a lot of times I write, now I’ll write something and I’ll say, hey, rewrite this in the style of Perry Belcher. And it actually characterizes it. It makes a caricature out of me, right? It exaggerates a bit my Hokiness and my Kentucky country boy. Simple thing. And some of it’s over the top, Some of it I like, but it gives me, it’s like having a writing partner.
Kevin King:
Someone to bounce stuff off.
Perry:
Yeah, and then I can do that with that six second story.
Kevin King:
I just did one recently and I wrote it myself and I put the whole thing into AI and I said I forget what I told the problem, but write this a little bit funnier. Write this and this and this. And it spit it back out and some of the lines that came out with were way better way to say what I said. It said the same thing, but it’s like it humorized. It’s like that’s freaking brilliant. So I, you know, use some of it and didn’t use the rest, but that’s like, that’s like awesome that you have a way to do that. You don’t got to show it to your buddy and what do you think he’s like? Ah, you know, if you said this in a different way, or sit there and rack your brain, it’s you know what a lot of people don’t do.
Perry:
I’ll write copy sometimes and I’ll finish a piece of copy and I’ll drop it in. I’ll say, pretend to be world class copywriter. Um, um dan S Kennedy, and critique this piece of copy.
Kevin King:
Yeah, and then it’ll give me.
Perry:
Like, give me a 10 point critique so it’ll say, okay, number one, you should do this, number two, you should do this, number three. And then I can go in and just say, okay, take suggestions number two, four, seven, nine and 10 and from from Mr. Kennedy, and rewrite the sales letter.
Kevin King:
You know that’s a good idea. Like, if you’re trying to sell products I just brainstorming here, maybe you’re doing this, but if you’re, if you’re trying to create a video script or try to create one of these, you know, landing pages for a single product you could write something and then tell it to write it in the style of Gunty Rinker, the infomercial writer, or write it in the style of a what’s the guy that that died on that big, um blue shirt all the time? Uh really famous infomercial hosts.
Oh, Billy Mays, Billy Mays, or I’ve got Billy Mays formula lock down, I’ve already got it, someone like that, but you could have the AI rewrite the whole thing, yeah.
Perry:
It’s great. And then and it really does do a I like the idea of asking it to critique it. That’s a good one too. I’ll even pull out just the bullet point section and say, okay, take these bullet points and pretend to be world-class copywriter Gary Ben-Sivinga, who’s famous for being the best bullets writer in the world. And then Gary will uh, I matter of fact, I think the newsletter you got on bullet points was written by Gary Ben-Sivinga, so I asked, ask. It says as Gary Ben-Sivinga, world-class copywriter, gary Ben-Sivinger your 10 biggest tips for writing killer bullet points.
Kevin King:
And I think that’s what that he obviously is a good one, because I can’t put in the swap. Yeah.
Perry:
He’s a good you know, he, and he was the best bullet point copywriter who ever lived. He’s still, he’s still alive, Not was, but I think I say was almost these copywriters, because I’m, I’m eventually going to be the number one copywriter in the world because everybody else is going to be dead. You know, they’re all all my, all my contemporaries. Dan’s died twice now. So you know but he came back to life. But but, yeah, a lot of my friends, Clayton Makepiece, a great copywriter, passed the last year and a year and a half ago, I guess. And, um, you know, I never got to meet Gary Halbert, unfortunately, and some of my biggest copywriting heroes I never get to meet. But it’s great cause. I can call them in and ask them to critique my stuff now and they give me a full critique of it and I’m like, oh, that’s right, I forgot. Gary always did blank, you know, to remind me. Or you know, look at the. You know, look at this headline and rewrite this headline. Give me 10 headlines in the style of Gary Halbert to replace this headline, and there’s almost always one of them that just smokes, whatever I’ve done, Well, harry, I really appreciate it.
Kevin King:
I know you’re a busy man. I really appreciate your time. We’ve uh, we could probably sit here and keep talking for the next six hours on cool stuff, but if people want to follow you or learn more about you or any of your events, or just get on your list what’s the best way for them?
Perry:
to really have a good way. I really don’t, you know, follow me on Facebook. I guess I’m like I’m the world’s worst marketer, teaching marketing. I, most of my people that you know get on my list, get there from buying a product or coming to an event or something. I don’t. I really want really people that are really into whatever I do on my list. It’s a little harder to get on the list but if you follow me on social, you see everything that I do and you know. But I’m more active on Facebook than anywhere else. I need to be more active other places.
Kevin King:
We’ll say Well, perry, I really appreciate the time today, man, it’s been awesome Uh and uh look forward to seeing you again sometime at uh another event.
Perry:
Yeah, we’re going to have fun. We’re going to do uh in a next year. Sometime next year we’re going to do uh growth hacking live, so that’s going to be kind of a much bigger event 1000 to 2000,. Maybe even 3000 people. I want to start building a big event again. So Chad, nice, and I bought growthhacking.com and we’re building a community over there and that’s that’s a lot of fun. There is a you know what? There’s a Facebook group called friends of Perry. There you go.
Kevin King:
Friends of Perry on Facebook.
Perry:
Look up that group and join the group and you’ll understand everything that we’re doing. If there’s anything that I don’t know why you’d be interested in anything I do but I but if you are, that’s where you’d find it. Kevin, you’re a gent. Thank you, appreciate it, man. See you soon.
Kevin King:
Perry and I could talk forever and geek out on marketing and all kinds of stuff, but if you haven’t, be sure to follow Perry on Facebook or go to the, the Facebook group that he mentioned. He’s one of the smartest marketers in the world today. Really good stuff. Get on his list if you can, and you’ll learn quite a few things. I hope you enjoyed that episode. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode talking about PPC. Got one of the top PPC experts in the space coming on next week. It’s going to be a good one. Before we leave today, I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom, kind of like what Perry said, where he was talking about the mistake a lot of people make by sending their traffic off Amazon to a Shopify page. And he was saying that it’s much better to actually don’t confuse them with a lot of options. Send them to a single landing page for a single product. So today’s words of wisdom are the money you leave on the table is the money you miss by not focusing on one thing. The money you leave on the table is the money you miss by not focusing on one thing. We’ll see you again next week.
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