Show notes
In episode #459 of SSP, Steve Simonson joins us on the show to talk about artificial intelligence and which AI tools Amazon sellers should start using. Let’s discover how AI can revolutionize your Amazon FBA business as Steve shares his insights on tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and more! From automations, systems and SOPs creation, image creation, branding, marketing, and email campaigns for your Amazon brand.Make sure to listen to the very end as we explore the impact of AI in the Amazon-selling industry, learn practical tips on how to utilize this new technology, and how to train your ChatGPT by using powerful prompts. In episode 459 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Steve discuss: 02:13 – How Did Steve Get So Passionate About Artificial Intelligence? 05:00 – How Should Amazon Sellers Use AI Tools 06:15 – Text-To-Speech AI Tools 07:19 – Tier 1 Tool To Automations & Systems 12:55 – Using AI Tools For Image Creation 17:57 – AI Features For Branding And Marketing 21:00 – How AI Improves Your Email Marketing Campaigns 23:09 – How To Improve Your ChatGPT Prompts 25:48 – Common Mistakes People Make When Using AI 31:11 – Steve’s Healthy Habits & Habits Outside The Amazon Grind 32:51 – Other AI Tools That You Should Be Using 36:12 – How To Reach Out To Steve Simonson 37:07 – Steve’s 60-Second Tip 39:26 – Catch Steve And Bradley In Amazon Events ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Today we’re gonna bring one of the Amazon industry’s foremost experts on artificial intelligence. He uses so many different kinds of software, so he’s gonna give you guys all of the best AI tools that you should be using to help your Amazon business. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Bradley Sutton: Do you wanna be able to sync your listings that you create in Helium 10 to your Amazon account in one click, including being able to sync subject matter, which you’re not able to even edit. Now, in most listings on Amazon, you’re gonna want to use Helium 10 Listing Builder. Make sure to find out how to use Listing Builder by going to h10.me/listingbuilder. That’s h10.me/listingbuilder. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got somebody who’s been a serious seller for years here. Steve Simonson, back on the show. How’s it going, Steve? Steve: It’s going great. Yeah, I was just wondering. I’ve definitely put up some serious numbers, but I’m quite irreverent. So sometimes not always serious in the boardroom. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Steve: Serious numbers. But also I like to crack a joker too. Bradley Sutton: And that’s what we like. So if you we’re not gonna go too too much into Steve’s backstory, if you guys want to check that out, episode 38 is a good one to see some of Steve’s backstory. But I brought you on because I’ve been seeing you pop up a lot and you’re good at email marketing too, and you’ve been marketing to me for some webinars and stuff that you’ve been doing lately on AI and that seems to be all the rage. And I’m one of the ones who hasn’t really completely, you know, dove into it, you know, and like, let it take over my life. Like, I, I see some people, I definitely see the advantages. I see the disadvantages, you know, sometimes too with relying too much on it. So I was like, you know what, let’s bring an expert on, and let’s just talk about, I mean, first of all, like how you got passionate about it. Like what was it about cuz you know, it’s not like you’ve been doing AI for 10 years, you know, you have a lot of specialties, you know, be it sourcing and, and logistics and, and a lot of different things. What made you so giddy about, about the the AI phenomenon? I guess Steve: <Laugh>, giddy is a good word for it. Well, if you look back at my background and likely in episode 38, we talked about my fascination or love for systems. Like I’m a huge systems guy. The system runs the business. The people run the system. This is right out of the E-myth. So my thoughts are like, how do you make great systems? And for more than a decade, probably nearly 15 years, we’ve been using some levels of machine learning. This is a precursor to AI. Machine learning is like, Hey, take all of your reviews and detect the sentiment of those reviews. And then the ones that are positive, try to extrapolate some of the keyword, like make a word cloud out of the, you know, positive sentiments, or the same with negative sentiments. Steve: So you can use machine learning, and you train it to, this word is good, this word is bad, right? It’s very I would say boring and takes a long time, and it costs a lot of money. But when you have, you know, lots of call center call records, or lots of reviews or lots of, you know, inbound data that is more than a human can do, machine learning makes sense. So from my perspective, that history of, you know, how do we make the, the bots do more work? That’s always been part of my DNA. And so, frankly, in November when Open OpenAI kind of started making a bunch of noise, we said like, I don’t know if this is a beanie baby fidget spinner thing. Like, is this just some fad or is this real? And frankly, I was skeptical. I’m like, how could it be? But after a couple weeks, I’m like, you know, this is not the invention of the automobile, right? And mass, you know production capabilities. This is not the pc, this is not even the advent of the internet. This is like fire man discovers fire, or man invents the wheel. That’s how pivotal this is for humanity. For better or worse, the trains on the tracks to use a historic metaphor, and we better get on board or get outta the way. Bradley Sutton: Okay. So, I’ve had a few people on here talk about, you know, some of the basic things that can be done. You know, like you mentioned it before, that was the, probably the first thing that people thought to do is, hey, let’s take Helium 10 review insights and let’s download the reviews and let’s, let’s try and get a sentiment here. And, and other people have been using it to get like, you know, maybe some different brand ideas or heard of a couple people do it for potentially even product research. But now we’re in, you know, June of 2023 what are some maybe next level things that people should do outside of just these these basics here? Steve: Well, the, the first thing is there are many ways of viewing AI. And I tend to look at it in tiers, right? So tier one is the basic tier that we all start with, which is, how do I use this tool? Right? There are many ways to use technologies. And the first is, you know, it’s like, I’ve got a nail. Where’s a hammer? Right? You don’t wanna use a screwdriver to try to hammer the nail. So find the best tool for the job. So, some of the things that I love to do and this may be fun for you, Bradley, just this past week, I calm my voice, and then we started having transcriptions of various things that I’ve written, tried to be, you know, read in my voice and the intonation. It’s not perfect just yet, but it’s so close that you’re like, oh, in six months, this is gonna be pretty amazing. Bradley Sutton: That’s crazy. Steve: Yeah. So that’s elevenlabs.io, If anybody wants to check that out. Spectacular. And by the way, they have, they’re actually so good at reading. Their bots are not like the, I won’t throw people under the bus, but there are many people who use text to speech tools that are very robotic, and they don’t read with any level of, I’ll just say humanity. Bradley Sutton: Yeah, yeah. Steve: If you go to 11 labs and you go to their podcast, it’s now, by the way, one of the top 50 on Spotify, at least in the business area. They’re having their bots read, like old out of copyright things like Alice Wonderland or old news articles from 1899, and the different voices they select are amazing. And you can then start to say, depending on your line of business, obviously for a podcaster like yourself, lots of applicability, whether it’s cloning your own voice or reading, you know, the thing in a new voice. Many fun things you can do with text to speech. Really extraordinary. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Interesting. You just mentioned one I’ve never heard of. Everybody now has heard of ChatGPT and, and MidJourney, and maybe, you know, we can probably talk a little bit about that if you have some strategies there. But what are a couple more things that, you know, have maybe flown under the radar for, for most Amazon sellers that, that you think are, are useful? Steve: Well, one of the things that excites me the most is the idea of taking that tier one tool and turning it into a an automation, right? So an automation would be, so as an example, we have the ability to create SOPs that write themselves, right? So you just go to a screen, you type in, you know, how to add an item to Amazon Seller Central, or how to create a new class in QuickBooks. You click the magic AI button, and it literally writes the SOP for you, right? So that’s a tool high use, right? If you need the hammer nail, let’s get the, get the big one out and, and it, it takes that blank screen and destroys it. Like, that’s the worst thing is the blank screen. But level two is things called Auto GPT, or Baby AGI these are types of terms you may start to hear. Steve: Lang chain is another thing where you can actually stitch together conversations, which allows more contextual referencing of the AI, and I won’t bore the details unless we get into it. Or vector databases, which allow a lot more scanning of you know, internal data sources. So imagine everything at Helium 10, all of that knowledge baked into one Vector database, whether it’s videos, audio, text, right? You could even have, you know, word and Excel whatever you wanted. And then this thing, you can just chat with it about what do I need to know about Helium 10 internal or external, or the tool, or, you know, an individual product extraordinarily powerful. So Baby AGI has now several iterations, and AutoGPT will take that tool, that hammering process and turn it into, gosh, I’ve got a little bot that’s running around doing this for me, without being a API driven, without being Zapier driven. Steve: It’s just like, Hey, go in, check this inbox, and then, you know, start to create replies. You can put in a human layer of validation if you wish, until you feel comfortable with it. But at a certain point you’ll go, yeah, this thing is just gonna go to, you know, this software, it’s gonna grab these stats, it’s gonna add ’em to this, you know, database or spreadsheet, and then it’s gonna carry on with its life. Eliminating a lot of this what I would call low value add work. And that’s that it means the people can be augmented and their capabilities extended into more value add work. Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Interesting. Now, you mentioned, you know, systems, and then you also mentioned the outset here of what you were just talking about you know, the SOPs. You know, this video you had sent me about I think it’s called, SOP Box you, you had this like kind of cool flow where I’m assuming that, hey, this is like, Hey, I’m an Amazon seller. I need to, to make sure that I’m not the only person in my company who knows how to do this. I hire, you know, staff instead of, you know, taking a full day to write out you know, some crazy PowerPoint with a million screenshots that for, for every single process that we do, you found a way that that can kind of like, make this a, a quicker process. Can you walk us through fir first of all, tell us what that program is, and maybe walk us through a sample, a sample process that we could create? Steve: Yeah. So first it is so exciting to me because like I say, I hate the blank page. And really every time I’m at an event and I talk to sellers and they talk about some problem, often it’s, you know, HR related or something broke, or some system, you know, failed. And I’m like, well, where’s it written down? Well, you know, I made a video about it, or, you know, I haven’t got there yet. Like, the original sin is the, the lack of creation, right? And so we want to, we want to eliminate that and allow people to document with simplicity, like super easy. So literally just about anything that is public facing. And, and by the way, this works on the, the ChatGPTs or even Bard to a lesser extent, Bard is not quite as sophisticated at this moment, but it’s coming for chat g B t quick. Steve: You can just type in, you know, how to add you know, an item or how to delete this or how to do, you know, whatever function you’re trying to do. And if it’s a public facing documentation, there’s a high probability the system will just give you a step by step process. We take it a step further from that documentation, and we add process, and we say, you know what? If you’re closing your books once a month, that’s a checklist of eight or 10 steps. Let’s link the, SOP what for the new people who don’t know what, how to do it, but the existing people, they just need a checklist and they need to be reminded. So we set recurring schedules that becomes, you know, so document and then process. The operationalization is where the payoff is. Now you have accountability. You’ve made life easier for everybody who works in the company because all of these processes can be shared amongst, you know, the entire company and assigned to individuals. Steve: So the payoff in management, and for founders, we, we often lose sight of this cuz we’re like, it’s in my head, I, I see how it should be done. The payoff is accountability, like reports that show, yeah, here’s what happened. Here’s how productive, here’s the variance on this task between team members or between, you know, each individual day. That is it’s a powerful thing. So systems are so necessary, especially as we head into times that are maybe uncertain financially. We gotta get tight and we gotta have our processes down. So having this kind of baseline is really important in my opinion. Bradley Sutton: What about imaging? Like, what are, you know, be it MidJourney, be it, be it something else. What can Amazon sellers do? Cause when some of these, like DALL-E first came out, you know, like, you can’t even make a human face. It was like a months, it reminded me of the goo the Goonies movie. What was his name? The, the guy, the, Hey you guys from the Goonies. You know what I’m talking about. But that’s like how, how the, you know, when it tried to create humans, that that’s how it would look. But where are we now here in the middle of 2023 with how Amazon sellers can use AI on the imaging side? Like, like, are we at the point where we can go ahead and start creating some lifestyle images or, or perhaps even parts of a plus content or, or creating Amazon post? Where, where are we at Steve: For sure? We’re not a hundred percent there, but we are, well, on our way. within a year, almost everything that you do, you can do with the AI assist, right? Obviously you need your product to be able to be, you know, some base photography that is going to then be inserted into lifestyle or, or what have you. But the complexity and the geometry that has advanced just in the past, you know, six weeks is unbelievably good. And the, the level of complexity there, there’s still errors. Let’s not kid ourselves, but sure. I’m always of the, I like to look ahead, right? What’s coming, because if that trend, and, and this is again, not a Beanie Baby…
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