My Interview With The Elevated Ecommerce Podcast Guys

I was on fire in this interview with Ben Cummings and Trian Turcu from the Elevated Ecommerce Podcast. Here’s a segment of the podcast. If you want to learn some awesome things on the subject of E-commerce and Amazon you should subscribe to their podcast. Just search for Elevated Ecommerce Podcast on iTunes or on the android podcast stores. Send me a message with any questions here: www.m.me/theninjamarketer 

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Podcast File

My Interview With The Elevated E-commerce Podcast Guys

Podcast Transcription

Ben: Our guest today is Manuel Suarez. He is a fast track student. He uses our AMZ Launchpad software and he has become my go-to guy, in my mind, the top e-commerce Facebook expert in the world and I’ve got to know him quite well over the last 3 years. And actually, Traian and Manuel know each other also because everyone’s kind of orbiting around planet Ben here. Here are some crazy but true facts about Manuel. He’s currently spending over half a million a month in Facebook Ads for e-commerce products. Half a million a month, yeah, like some of the eyeballs went like you know, wooohhh! He’s generating 7 million in sales. He’s currently doing 1.5 million a month on Amazon and prior to this he build and sold his first Amazon business. I can never remember the number, I think you built it to a $5 million to your business, something like that.  

Manuel: I was doing 6 million by the second year.

Ben: 6 million by the second year. So, Manuel’s a slacker, you can tell, right? Real quick, tell us where you’re from, what you got going on so that our listener can get to know you a little bit better.

Manuel: Well, Ben and Traian, thanks for having me first of all, I really appreciate the invitation. I am born and raised in Puerto Rico and I moved to the United States back in 2006 actually and I’ve been here ever since. I started going to the world of actual like products and Amazon. Basically, it all started with you, Ben. That’s the reality. You’re the responsible one man. So it was back in I’m going to say 2011 or so, 2012 that I was introduced through ASM free, and it was not really ASM, it was really you guys that I actually got your training and I started learning. Once I did some of your training I just never looked back. So that’s how it all started. So, it’s funny how this whole thing works, right? Because you get influenced by one individual and then that one individual turns around and influences several thousand and then it just keeps going like crazy. So I think that I’m going to blame you for putting me on this intense world of marketing that I have gotten myself into which you already know my areas of specialty which my area is obviously on the Facebook, Messenger, Instagram world. And I’ve built my businesses around those. Like I’m a big Amazon guy. I’m a super big Amazon fan and I’ve been pushing on it for years but I’ve concentrated and I became really good dominating traffic which is I think is an area that right now people are like lacking and need more help with.

Ben: Yeah, well you know, I will gladly take the blame for that.

Manuel: Oh men, you do have. Ever since I’ve learned from you Ben, I keep saying over and over men. I’ve done presentations with your crowd. Sometimes, I can tell you for real still, it’s one of those surreal fact that I actually am, the other day I was doing a seminar with your crowd and there was like a couple of hundred people in there and I was like, “Wait for a second, I’m talking here to Ben’s crowd?” So it’s a little surreal because I used to listen to you for hours. A funny fact that I can tell you guys is that Jorge, who’s my brother in law that works for me full time, we were looking at pictures from where we started. You know? Just going back to the origins of this whole like a whirlwind of evolution into what I am today which is quite incredible. I remember like, just going off the subject a little bit, I remember growing up and dreaming about maybe one day making $10,000 a month when I’m an old man and just being rich. And right now, I just look at that and I’m like, what I’ve been able to accomplish in the last couple of years, 5 generations of entrepreneurs in this family have not accomplished in lifetimes. So it’s incredible. But I remember just to finish the story, Ben, you did a seminar. It was really, really, really good just like you always do. I mean, you always like knock it out of the park, you always like over deliver, it’s like one of your signatures, right? I did that seminar. There were like 600 people on that seminar, a lot of people. And then you gave us some great data. I remember back in that era, this is 2012, 2013 or so, more or less, I used to update my Amazon Seller App every 10 minutes and during the day, if I had a great day, I will get to 7 units in 1 single day and it was exciting. Wow, it’s 7. I precisely remember updating the app that day where you were on the conference and I have done 7 sales and I was so excited about doing that. Right now man, if I get 7 sales, I start panicking. But the point is that I did a line. You finished your presentation, you killed it man like you always do. I did a 20-minute line to get a picture with you man. And I still have that picture. I’ve got to send that picture over to you man. You’ve got to see it. At that point, you still look the same cause you’re pretty sharp but I look very different. I was just a dreamer at that point. I didn’t have any humongous hopes of being somebody that influences the world like I’m doing right now. And I did a 20-minute line, man, to take a picture with a celebrity, an entrepreneur celebrity Mr. Ben Cummings and I still have that picture today, man. I’ve got to show you.

Ben: That’s funny. Well, you’re too kind and I remember, you were always such a passive influence in that crowd and I knew you guys are just going to crush it. By the way, but before we get in to the Facebook stuff, you tell me something really funny, I hope you really don’t mind sharing this. You said that your mom, she couldn’t believe like your transformation. And she’s skeptical, she thought maybe you’re like a drug dealer or something, right?

Manuel: You mean about me becoming an entrepreneur, right?

Ben: Yeah. And she’s like, “Wait a minute, how did you make this money?”

Manuel: I think she still is doubting where I get all these energy, man. Because I come from a family of 4. When you talk about self-made, I am self-made because I do have a business with my dad. I have helped him blow up. I mean that business went from $1 million in a small island and losing money every year to now over $40 million in 2017. So I built it for him. So when I say self-made, I mean it, you know? It might look light, wait a second, daddy gave him a business. Of course not, absolutely not. I built it for him. But the reality is obviously with his great content because he had great content, he’s a master at producing information and structures and stuff like that. But when it comes to marketing, that became my thing. But since I don’t have a certificate on the wall, I mean, I do have now Ben, and I think I’ve shared that with you the other day. I have 2 certificates now that are on my wall. Those are the only 2 ones which is Facebook Certified Buying Professional and also, I’m a Facebook Certified Planning Professional. That’s it. Those ones that I earned through my certification on the Facebook Training but other than that, I didn’t graduate in college, I did a one and a half year because I was really good at tennis, Ben, which is something that you and I are familiar with. I grew up watching Pete Sampras win Wimbledons and Andre Agassi and all that stuff, and even back in the days of Boris Becker. I’ve got to see a little of Jimmy Connors and stuff like that. So I grew up with that and I was really good at tennis, but I was really bad at school because I hated it so much. So the funny story that I told you Ben was that when I graduated high school, I was a cool kid, I mean people like me a lot because I was a social guy. I got friends and I got girls, I got people that like me. Even the teachers, I actually graduated because I had this unique ability to actually gain affinity by my teachers, you know? So, the way that I graduated, it was the art and science of manipulation of human beings. I don’t think that sounds right. Like we like to manipulate rankings on Amazon and other things. But in my case, I used my ability to get away with things like I was a D’s and F’s student, C’s. And if I got a B, I don’t know, probably like doing the gym training and things like that, I was doing good on that. But other than that, I was not interested in it very much. But I had a teacher that has given me an F and I had somehow threw the art and science of relationship, handled all the other teachers. So this last one, she hated me so much and I knew I was not going to be able to pull through. So I actually went to my principal and I actually went to her and I wrote her a letter thanking her for the years of dedication and for helping me become a better man and bla bla bla. And then I went straight for the close. I said, “Look Director, I want you to help me graduate because I want to actually be able to be seen by my family graduating. I mean it’s embarrassing. I mean everybody graduates and I don’t have the grades for that.” And she asked me what I needed and said I need this teacher to give me a C. What do I need to do? And then she actually went and handled the teacher for me. And I don’t know what she did. I cannot imagine that conversation but the teacher gave me a C. It was not something that she wanted to do and then because of that C I was able to march on the actual graduation and when I graduated people gave me a standing ovation and then my mom, she felt like she was so proud, this guys is so awesome, I love my son. Amazing, right? Amazing! What she didn’t understand was that I was receiving a standing ovation because it was impossible that I graduated and they couldn’t even understand how I was graduating because I never showed up to school, it was just not my thing. So it just comes to tell you the story of like how coming from nothing, not being a student, not being interested in school, not going to university, not having a Bachelor’s Degree, or a Master’s in any shape or form it doesn’t matter where you are at. I became a believer. So by doing that, I just turned around Ben and Traian and I started doing seminars all over helping people wake up because I was born and I was raised with the idea that the only way that I can be successful was paying attention in school. And it turns out that I make way more money than all of the people that graduated with me. Out of 120 students in my school, I can guarantee you that none of them make more money than me. And all of them have Doctorates and certificates hanging on the walls, and they’re really proud people. So the reality is that the future, I just realized along the way, is something that you create and it doesn’t depend on the structures of the organization, of the governments, or the people, or countries. So that’s kind of like the backbone of my story Ben and how my mom to this day doesn’t believe it that my other 2 siblings, one of them is a Doctorate student on molecular biology. I think he’s not going to listen to this podcast, but I actually paid for his cellphone and I pay for some of his bills. And my other brother who is a computer expert, he does a decent living, but I’m still the one that he looks up to when he needs to find out how to make more money.

 

Ben: Well, I want to get you back on track on Facebook here. So, are you just another Facebook guy? There’s like a million of these Facebook guys. In other words, are you actually doing Facebook? Or are you just teaching Facebook?

Manuel: Oh no. I’m a doer. I mean I just did a video that I posted yesterday on my personal profile and my page also that I talked about this particularly because it’s a common issue that you see. Like you see people that are practitioners like you and me, Ben, like Traian, we are practitioners. We are doing stuff and then teaching it. I actually told you this once, I don’t know if you remember but in one of our conferences that I attended with you, I actually spoke for you and with your crowd, I told you like, “Look, the thing that’s special about people like you and me is that we actually can learn something, apply it, get results, go back and teach it to everybody else. And that’s what a good teacher does. I’m actually a doer man. I actually don’t go and teach something ever, ever as a firm policy unless I have seen the results myself and I have seen it in action, like going around. For example, traffic to Amazon, traffic to landing pages, conversions, new strategies, retargeting, all those things. I never get it out into the world unless I’ve actually tested it thoroughly to make sure that it actually works and is actually producing results and my brand, my name is not going to be affected. So, I’m not just a regular Facebook guy, because a lot of these guys out there, Ben, are teaching you how to do certain ads, right? In my case, I’m a big strategist, I tell you what’s working right now and what’s not working. I’m trying to find out how the market is accepting the messages, what is the thing that you need to put out the most and get it at the lowest cost. So I am actually doing all these things nonstop every single day. I actually have an agency Ben, that you know that in which I handle right now, as of today, we have about 42 different accounts. Some of them bigger ones, some of the smaller ones. So I’m actually doing it. And when we talk about the 500,000 actually, right now, we’re on track to do like $650,000 in ad spend in the month of March. So it’s insane numbers. I get to see incredible Analytics data when it comes to everything that we’re doing because we’re running everything from conversions to traffic to messages, we’re blowing up Messenger channels, we’re sending traffic directly to our listings, I mean we’re doing all kinds of stuff and I can tell you that I know what’s working and what’s not working today because of high volume on numbers.

Traian: Hi Manuel. Sorry for interrupting you. I just have a quick question related to what you’ve just said. So, when we met it was at the AMZ Launchpad event and you spoke there and I was really impressed on not just what you shared but the way you were able to share everything. I thought that you have this presence on stage and just people seem to be mesmerized when you speak. So, I’m curious on how you combine. So you have this expertise in Facebook and I feel that you’re also a great educator, a great speaker. So, I’m curious if when you teach things related to Facebook, does that help you clarify things for yourself so that thing can educate or help you improve your Facebook game, or does it go the other way around like you really get good at Facebook and then just becomes really easy to teach other people about this?

Manuel: Trian, that is a fantastic question, man because it’s absolutely true. The first way that you explained it is the right way. Usually, and I think that it happens both ways. Sometimes I discover things by chance. So when I’m testing something else new and then, I just blow it up. Let me give you one particular practical example. When Facebook launched this whole messages objective, you guys know that on the Ads Manager when you are selecting your objectives right now, there’s like video views, there’s like traffic objectives, there’s like different options. One of them came out, this was a couple of months ago, not that far long, that one was called Messages. Facebook was supposedly optimizing to get messages sent to you. And when I tested this out, I didn’t teach it yet, but when I tested this out, it didn’t give me a result. Actually, traffic was giving me a much lower cost. I was paying about, I don’t know, in the United States, maybe paying about ¢10-15 per subscriber for an ecommerce brand that I was generating lots and lots of actual names. Because this is the cool thing, I actually use Messenger to feed my other channels, get phone numbers, get emails and all those things. I connect them all into this big ecosystem but I actually tested it out and it wasn’t successful and then I waited for a couple of months because I figured, you know what? Facebook is still figuring out itself. It’s such a new company. This is what people don’t understand. It’s a monster of a company, right? It’s one of the top 5 market capitalization companies in the planet together with Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. It’s right there with the big guys. But it’s been around for 11 years. That’s it. So they’re still figuring these things out. So usually, what I see time and time again Traian is that they rolled something out and if you start with it right off the bat and try to test it out, you’re not going to get the results, you’re going to be disappointed. But then what I did is I waited a couple of months and I thought, you know, “Wait for a second, Facebook, I’m sure is going to figure this out and they’re going to figure this out correctly.” So then, I tested the campaign again. You know what I’m doing right now? This is a tip for you and your crowd, I’m getting ¢1 subscribers, ¢2 subscribers on the Messenger using the Messenger Replies Objectives. So again, they fixed the systems along the way. So now that I learned it, I now turn around and teach it but it works both ways Traian because sometimes I’m doing actually a training right now which is like a step by step incredible like based on all the knowledge that I have which is like it’s a lot of knowledge form the things that I’ve experienced for the last several years. And along the way, I’ve discovered a lot of things. And when I’ve discovered those things what I do first Traian before I teach it is I test it out. I always test things out myself before I actually talk about them because if I actually start just teaching it to the world and then they try it out and they don’t see results, I think it’s really counterproductive and it hurts my own brand because everybody starts saying, “I did what Manuel said and it didn’t work at all. So you know what? I’m just going to go ahead and quit and forget Manuel. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” So in order for me to actually teach something Traian, whatever you hear me talk about it’s 100% tested and I have already seen results with it but I do discover things along the way. I’m sure that you guys do a lot too. Ben has come up with so much content and some education, so much ninja, incredible stuff for years that I bet you that some of those things he just discovers through the actual expectation of having to learn new things consistently to teach us. Because the people that can actually teach the other ones are minority. I would say that we are less than 1%. So for every 100 human beings out there, I think there’s actually less than 1 real teacher that can grab a piece of information and teach it correctly in a way that can actually be assimilated and actually applied and seen results with. That’s my opinion. So I think that it works both ways Traian. You learn as you actually teach people and then you also vice versa along the way find things out and then you teach them once you’ve proven them out that they are successful.

Ben: Let me get this back on the Facebook thing that you’ve mentioned. So you said the single best thing that you’re seeing right now working is the Messenger Replies Objective. What’s the second and third best thing right now on Facebook that’s just crashing it for you?

Manuel: Okay, so right now there’s not even a second place, alright Ben? This is like killing it. Like when I have an account right now that’s a physical commerce, any commerce product, brand, I’m going all out on this. Just like everything else guys, the dust is going to settle. I’m sure you guys have heard everything that’s going on right now, scandals with Facebook and stuff like that, that’s going to pass, along the way it’s definitely going to calm itself and it’s going to go back to normal. But the 2018 era is a Messenger era right now. So you have this opportunity of building massive lists for cents on the dollar like close to nothing, right? I’ve been running list building for years and for me, paying anything above like a dollar, ¢75 a dollar and 50 has been a good, good deal. That for me has been great. So when you tell me right now, today that I’m generating emails, phone numbers, and Messenger subscribers in some cases with the right strategy for under ¢5, I’m going all in.

Ben: Yeah, that’s crazy. Is this Spanish language? Or this is also for English?

Manuel: No, no. I’m doing this on English. Now on the Spanish market, I’m doing like less than ¢1. I don’t know if you even know that that was possible but I have some video views campaigns like for Latin America. If some of you guys here, listeners, are Latin, realize that that’s a gold mine. Like the United States has $50 million people, there’s like 250 million Latin people active on Facebook every single month. There’s a lot of people active on it and that’s an underutilized market. And, there are campaigns that we run that we pay ¢.00001 per view. Can you imagine that? I mean, it’s like pretty outrageous, right?

Ben: That’s crazy.

Manuel: But in the United States we are running physical products and this is the thing Ben. Basically, whenever you are running a campaign, there are 2 factors that you need to correct, that’s it, 2 factors. Now, anyone of those factors have many variations inside each one. One of them is audience. We talked about that over and over, right? Like if you try to sell gluten free products and somebody doesn’t give a crap about health, then you’re going to waste every single penny of it. If you are trying to sell it to somebody that is actually a health frenzy guy then they’re going to respond. It’s as simple as that. So testing audiences is the key, the biggest most important factor. The second factor is the creative. When you have those things together and you keep on testing things along the way until you improve and improve the results, then you can bring the cost down because the way it works on Facebook, Ben, is that cost is actually an indicator of the quality of your audience and your creative. So Facebook is actually rewarding people for providing the right audience, number 1, which is a relevancy and the right quality. The more relevancy and the more quality, the lower your cost is going to be. Why? Very simple. Because Facebook is a user experience platform. They want to stop people from jumping into Snapchat, jumping into YouTube. They want to keep them on their ecosystem. What is their ecosystem? Well, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook. If they can keep people in there, they keep on making money. So their job is to keep them in there. So when you as an advertiser produce content that is actually relevant for them, with the right audience, somebody that is a cook, or a woman that is like a 54 year old woman that loves cooking, loves Rachel Ray, loves a top chef, and you put your message in front of them to sell them some kind of device, some kind of like cooking gear, then people are going to respond to that better because it’s the right audience and the right message. What does Facebook do? They reward you and they lower the cost of advertising because it’s working out. So, the reason that I pay a cent or ¢2 or ¢5 to generate subscribers is because I have built an audience. And yes Ben, the second thing, just to add something else to that because you told me to give you number 2 and number 3, retargeting is the second most important factor on Facebook, in Instagram and Messenger. If you put a video out there, if you have content that is being put out there about your brand, today, it’s become easier and easier to actually create content. Would you agree on that guys? Like it’s so much easier, right? Than it used to be 5 years ago.

Ben: Yeah, yeah for sure.

Manuel: That we have tools, for example. There’s a tool that I recommend that I think you have talked about that in the past. You can do whiteboards and videoscribe, right? You can go in there and like write some texts on it and it just pits out a video. So excuses are taking away by the minute in this modern era, 2018 for producing content. One thing that I’m recommending for Amazon sellers, for Amazon brands, if you run for example your seven images, you grab your 7 images that you have on your Amazon listing and you grab them and you upload them as a presentation. You guys know what that format is? Inside the actual ads on Facebook, there’s like different formats, there’s single image, single video, carousel, collection, etc. right? There’s one of them that is called Presentation. If you upload those 7 images in there, guess what? That becomes a video and you can go ahead and you can run that, put $100 behind, whatever it is $20. And you can run it for a few days. And now, you can build an audience of people that saw 95% or more of that 7-image video because it goes ahead and it mixes those 7 pictures and it turns them into a powerpoint presentation type but it actually counts as a video. So now, when you’re actually doing retargeting, you can actually sell those people whether to come to your Messenger or a 20% discount on Amazon or whatever it is that you want to do because now you have a second point of contact. When you have a second point of contact Ben and Trian, the cost of advertising comes way down because those people are more familiar with you now. And not only that, they didn’t see three seconds of it. They saw 95% of that video or more. So that’s something that you can do inside the Ads Manager on the Audiences Tab. You can create a video and then you can create an audience of people that have seen 95% or more of that video and then you can retarget those guys a day later, 2 days later, whatever you want to set. Really cool stuff.

Traian: So going to the other extreme adjust shared with us and I think that’s amazing just the presentation tip. That’s something I think all of our listeners can apply right away. So I’m going to ask you a sort of weird question but I think it’s important to also learn from failures not just from wins. So what’s working worst right now on Facebook? What would you advice our listeners to stay away from?  

Manuel: Direct selling with providing a good offer, it’s working less and less and the reason for that Traian is because there’s so much more content out there. Do you guys know that in 2017 alone more content was created with cellphone devices and cameras and televisions and everything than in the entire history of humanity combined? It’s crazy to think about that because in 2018 the same effect is going to happen. Why? Because now all of us have devices on our pockets, all of us are machine content creators now. There’s so much content out there that the competition for content creation has gotten more and more. So I think that there’s a number that came out the other day, they did some studies and you know Facebook loves doing studies and they did something they call it the Ad Recall Lift Study. It’s a really advanced study with millions of people and it’s something that they do as part of their data science project and they discovered that people are not giving their credit cards, they’re not providing money to you unless they have seen your face or your brand atleast 7 times. Imagine that? So that means that if you just go hard core on selling and you don’t nurture your audiences Traian, you are going to probably have a difficult time having success on Facebook because there’s so much going on. But you can get away with that. For example for us, Amazon sellers, or for us that have ecommerce brands, ecommerce shop, Shopify, if you have an offer that is enticing enough, you can drive traffic like crazy and you can accomplish all kinds of results with that traffic but it needs to be the right audience. And that’s where I see people failing over and over again. And I know Ben teaches about finding the right audience, I teach about that a lot but it’s a process. It’s just like you go to a university to try to discover your real skills and how you’re going to be able to apply that in life. Well, Understanding what your audience is Traian is actually a really, really important factor that you cannot abandon. What I say to people who actually go to my seminars is, I’m sure you guys have heard about this before, the worst possible video content in the world, horrendous quality with bad audio is going to respond and produce some results to the perfect audience. But it doesn’t work vice versa. In the other way around, the best possible content, $100,000 video, let’s say for example Rogue. For me, I have a head full of hair, right? If they promote to me, they’re going to waste every single penny of it. So having the right content is only important if you have the right audience. Otherwise, I say to people just create content. I see that this is one of the people’s weaknesses and they’re going to this thing that they call analysis paralysis, right? I just don’t know how to produce content, it’s not my thing, I don’t feel comfortable behind the camera, I just don’t know, don’t know, right? And the answer is tom simply just do, just go ahead and do because there are only 4 ways that you can produce content, right? You can have images, we all have them on Facebook, on Amazon. We have videos. We know how to produce some videos atleast Facebook Lives. We can do some shots with our cellphones, iPhone 10’s, I can tell you they produce super high quality pictures these days. Then there’s like written articles. You can make articles about your actual products. You can do freebies to actually capture names on your Messenger and on your email list about whatever is related like 5 tips to cooking a healthy dinner, you know? Whatever it is. I’m just making that up out of thin air. But whatever it is that you can create some text is actual content. And then there’s podcast like you guys. You and I are here talking to the world. I have my own podcast in which I teach more tips on the Facebook Marketing world. It’s actually a form of content. So it’s one of those things that is also underutilized in this era right now like Podcast, some of us had been doing that for a long time. I’ve been doing that for about 4 months, not that long. I know Ben was doing the Facebook Lives forever and then you’re doing the Periscope events and then just putting the audio in here and we have big audiences in here. So that’s an area that any brand you can find something that you can provide content with and then by doing that Traian, you actually go in to what’s working best in second place after Messages which is retargeting. Retargeting works well when you can produce some content because now you can send those people some coupons, you can generate more buzz, it’s like what I say to people, you’re building a bucket of people, it’s like building a digital list on the modern world but instead of that, you’re doing like a Facebook digital list, there’s like a bucket of people in there. And at any point, that audience of 50% watchers, 75% watchers, people that share your content, you know for example that’s an audience. You can build an audience of people that can share your content, that’s powerful! Of people that visits your websites. You start building those buckets of people and then you can use those people to actually do more of the actions that you need, write reviews, buy products, share your things, whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish when you have those buckets of people created Traian, it works. But what doesn’t work? It doesn’t work to just go straight selling as much as it used to. You can still produce results but it’s going to be more expensive. So if you’re going to do something for way less why not go down that route?

Trian: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know I’m going to jump to the next question here. I think everyone who’s listening is getting excited about all these potentials and you’ve mentioned so many different ideas and I just feared that some of our listeners might feel like, “Oh! There are so many things that I can do on Facebook, where should I get started?” So I am curious what advice do you give to people who never advertised on Facebook before? You clearly conveyed this message that Facebook is a great opportunity but I’m curious where do you think people should start if they’ve never done Facebook before, like in terms of resources. Where should someone get started?  

Manuel: Oh man, Traian. You did a great job with the questions. It’s exactly right. Let me give you a fun fact here this is because I’m all in to numbers, man. I love numbers and I love looking at what’s going on right now and evaluating the opportunities. I did some research the other day and do you know how many existing companies we have in this planet right now? Like corporations already set up? You want to take a wild guess? Any of you guys care to take a guess?

Trian: Ben, maybe you can take a better guess than I can.

Manuel: Just think a guess. I’m not trying to put you guys in the spot.

Ben: I know that in terms of companies you can invest in worldwide, there’s 50,000 but I have no idea how many private corporations or …

Manuel: Check this out. Check this out. You might be surprised. There’s 7.7 billion people in this planet, okay? Around the entire planet, we have a close to 300 million corporations, okay? 300 million corporations have actually submitted their paperwork to become a corporation. Now, some of us, like I’m sure Ben, like you Traian, we have several paperworks, right? Like I myself am responsible for 11 of those papers. So, there’s a bunch of us that have a lot of corporations, a lot. But this is what they’ve come up with. There’s about 10 corporations for every 100 individual or another way to explain it simpler, for every 1 corporation, there’s 10 people, something like that, more or less. Let me tell you what’s crazy about this. The greatest social media platform in the planet right now, we already know, there’s no second place, that’s Facebook. Now when we say Facebook Traian, we talk about Facebook and we think about this blue icon, right? And that’s a lot of people think about. But what you don’t understand, what most people don’t understand is that Facebook is really a monster of like brilliant people, genius minds, building incredibly smart robots that are giving us incredible tools for us to actually monetize. That’s a reality. Facebook is Instagram, it’s Messenger, it’s WhatsApp, it’s business. It’s like they’re trying to produce this money making a monster. There’s this thing called Business Manager on Facebook. That is basically like a tool that Facebook has invested several billion dollars, with a B, several billion dollars and being able to put there for you and guess what, we can all use that for free, it’s free. You know that you can run campaigns for like a Starbucks coffee a day, you know like literally, it’s like $2 or $3 a day. Some of the campaigns have a minimum budget of $2, some of them have a $5 budget. What is my point of going back to the 300 million corporations in this planet? You know what the incredible thing is? Only 5% of those 300 million companies have invested in Facebook Ads, only 5%. And when you think about 5% out of 300 million and then you also think about on that 5%, 93% claimed that they failed on Facebook Ads. It tells you how big the opportunity is. And now, let me give you a little bit of micro data. Out of that 93% of people that actually claimed that failed, over 90% of them pressed that little cute button on their page whenever they publish a post that says Boost. And when they press that, they actually thought that they’re going to reach a lot of people, but, they actually got some, actually they maybe saw some numbers and got a little excited but they are not taking advantage of the powerful objectives, the platforms, selecting audiences, building your creative. I remember Ben himself as a teacher because I was doing some of his trainings, he was talking about the curve to success. You remember that Ben how you teach that on your seminars?

Ben: The how much people think to straighten a line up but it’s really…

Manuel: Exactly, that one. People are thinking that “I’m going to join Facebook and I’m going to go straight up and explode, right? And it doesn’t work like that. You actually start, you fail, you lose money, you go back with more experience and apply some new data. You learn every single day. One of the things that I would advise listeners, anybody that wants to learn about this world is that you do not go to bed without learning something. Guys, this world that we live in is dominated with 2 things, knowledge and action. Like you can have all the knowledge in the world but if you don’t act on it then it all goes to waste. You can have all the action in the world and be super active but if you don’t have the knowledge, it’s a waste of your time, you’re producing nothing. The reality is that sometimes, you’ve got to pay for trainings, sometimes you’ve got to invest in people, sometimes you’ve got to get somebody that has done it before and tell them, “Hey, can you show me?” You guys know Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Obviously, everybody knows him today. I had a meeting with him 2 years ago because we were a big success story and on that meeting, he told us this opportunity is going to be around for a couple of years only just like everything else. Google Adwords, there, gone. Email marketing, there, not the same. Radio, there, gone, right? It has happened over and over again. It’s something that repeats itself. Every single generation we go for these opportunities. He said, just figure out what is the least take home that you guys need to survive, to pay your mortgages, your bills, whatever you need to make it alive? And every single penny that you can find go after it and put it all on Facebook and go in hard because this is going to go away very very soon. Now, fast forward 2 years later guys, he was a little bit wrong and he recognized it himself because he talks about that today. Right now, the opportunity is only bigger than it was. Why? Because they expand their channels, because they got Instagram to become like mini Facebook, because they build a Messenger Channel, because they’re getting better targeting, because now 2 weeks ago they launched something called Connected TV Ads. Guys, imagine how crazy that is? Now you can put your ads on television, on A&E, on the Rokus, on the Apple TV’s, on the Google applications online, and they’re actually figuring out new distribution methods along the way. So it’s only getting better along the way. My opinion is, guys, that we got 2 or 3 years to grab any ecommerce brand and just plant the roots like crazy. Again, I am a big fan of Amazon, a big, big fan. But what I would like to give you guys as a tip is that always go after building, grabbing that Amazon cash and using it which is so powerful, I think, where are we at? You guys probably have more data. 110 million monthly unique users on Amazon? It’s a lot of people in there.

Traian: Yeah.

Manuel: So you cannot abandon that. But what I would do as an Amazon seller is that I would grab a bunch of that money and I will build my brand outside to make sure that I have both channels along the way. And in that way I’m not building something that is on Amazon’s platform, but I’m building something on my own platform and that thing is planting roots because down the line, if I want to leave some people, generations to come, I don’t think it’s safe to leave Amazon brands to my children.

Ben: Well, Manuel we have to wrap up here. One final question for you. What is the number one mistake you are seeing Amazon sellers make when they’re setting up or using Facebook, it can be specific or general. What’s the one thing that they can either stop doing or start doing that will instantly improve their Facebook Ad Results and this is for Amazon sellers that we’re talking about.

Manuel: So I would say that for example for manipulating rankings, for obtaining results, there’s nothing better than using the Facebook platform right now. So if you have, one of the things that we want to push on is that, I think that the rule right now is that Facebook and Amazon for example, when you flow traffic from Facebook to Amazon, Amazon really likes that, number one. But also, here’s a quick question for you guys. What is something that Amazon is doing as a rule, is it over 50% coupons you can review it? Or where are we at right now with this?

Traian: What I am seeing right now is even though officially they’re saying that they might allow people who bought at a discount to leave a review. In practice, what I am seeing is that if someone did not buy full price it’s very likely that even if they get to post a review, that review is going to get removed and certainly if that discount is above 50% they’re most likely going to get an error message that they’re not allowed to post a review. So I would say it has to be mostly full price.

Manuel: Wow, okay good. So basically even if the customer is paying 80% it’s still not something that works, right?

Ben: Yeah. But that’s only for reviews that I’m talking about.

Manuel: So if you want to do reviews, you can. Let’s say that you are new and you don’t have reviews enough and you want to generate reviews, what I would do is I would run traffic at a lower price. Just tell Amazon what is my price. Let’s say for example that my regular price is going to be $24.95. I can run it for like $11.95 and just tell Amazon that’s the full price and just run ranking like for the next 5 days. And in that way, we can put them on a sequence to get reviews and the customers actually paid full price. And they paid a really low price. In Facebook’s eyes, you can actually build an ad that is driving traffic to Amazon directly with a super URL, like one of those special links that you’re running like an 8-day sprint and you’re doing depending on how much coupons you want to actually give away. There’s a lot of ninja strategies about this but it depends on that. You can do maybe $20 a day, $40 a day and you can run something that has a series of images just like I told you the presentation type or you can just do a little cool ad, video ad, or even a single image that is really attractive with some nice texts, like “Hey guys, as a special product launch, we are launching this product for a few days only at a 70% off discount. You can go ahead and claim your product right here and no coupon necessary.” And just send them straight to Amazon listing and at that price, if it is the right audience is going to give them the actual conversion is going to be working out. Even in some cases when people are not buying, my belief for testing is that this is giving the right signal to Amazon and Amazon is flowing love to you as a seller and ranking your products. That is something that you can do right away out of a million different options for sure.

Ben: Yeah, that’s great. We’ve actually come up with a term called the pulse ranker. It’s actually something Traian has figured out. I don’t want to get into it here because it won’t be fair to AMZ Launchpad users but you guys know what I’m talking about. The reason it works is exactly what you just said that Amazon would love for all of us to spend our money, sellers to help build their brand cause sales and get them customers. So absolutely. I have absolute proof and evidence and attest to this that just sending paid Facebook Ad traffic, even if nobody buys a single thing on your listing they will give you ranking the Amazon A9 algorithm. Well Manuel this is great stuff. Where can people reach you?

Manuel: Well, I have a Facebook Page that is called the Marketing Ninja and I’m putting videos there consistently, so if they want to follow me there. People can send me a message also on my Messenger which is very simple. We have a simple link which is m.me/theninjamarketer. Anybody that types it in the browser they can go and send me a message and ask me questions and engage in me whatever way. I’m actually super active helping the community with any questions that they have along the way for sure. There’s a lot of knowledge to share.

Ben: Awesome! Well you know I can talk all day about this but we have to go. Great stuff. To be able to pick your brain like this about Facebook has been great so thanks so much for being on the show. Appreciate it!

Manuel: Awesome. Let me just say one quick thing. Guys, listeners, what Ben says works. We should come out with the same sense like just do what Ben says, right? Because the reality is that I am a big success, thanks to his trainings. So it’s an honor for me to be a part of this podcast. Again, thank you Ben and thank you Traian. It’s a pleasure.