Two hacks to getting rich the easy way are

one, figure out what you can sell middle-aged woman. Ladies just

My other way to like test a product is what is the most profitable product

It's the current supplement company that I'm working with and it's because she

sources all the ingredients from America. Supplements, a

lot of these things can be custom manufactured in the US.

It saves you so much headache. It's also super profitable because

it's consumable and people need to keep taking it. A lot of

the results that I get for clients, it really is more of a reflection

of how good their product is. I can set it up. We're going to get in

front of your target client at the perfect time. And that's really what

you can do with Facebook ads. All you got to do is just clearly explain

Do you think AI is going to take over Facebook ads or your role?

Do you see that happening? I'm Matthew Fraser and

this is Amazon Ecom Secrets. I'll be

sharing with you the secrets that helped me go from millions in

debt to an eight-figure entrepreneur. If

you're ready to escape the nine-to-five and live life on your

terms, let me show you the way. On today's episode,

we have a Facebook ads expert with almost a decade's

worth of experience in creating successful campaigns for

e-commerce brands. Derek Vidal is the owner of

Social Bamboo where he helps other business owners run

profitable meta ads and has achieved incredible results

for his clients like increasing their ROAS to over

a 9X. He has significant experience

on the Amazon platform and in this episode, we

cover some of the most crucial aspects to keep in mind when

considering Facebook advertising on your e-commerce

brand. Derek also dropped some gold information about

how to validate your product before you even manufacture, which

could possibly save you thousands. So let's

jump in. Derek, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I want to jump straight into

it. You've been a veteran of doing e-commerce and

Facebook ads for six years and basically

you're like a, I would say, a money machine for people. Would that be

Excellent. And would you say now the first thing that comes to mind is can

yes it it really comes down to how

good your product is like it's actually a lot more simple to run ads

nowadays than it used to be in the past if you were selling a

digital offer you had to do a free webinar with

a free guide if you stay to the end of the webinar you get a this

free guide and then you do a long email series with

the countdown timer and if you were doing e-commerce,

you needed fancier video editing and

then that would lead them to like an upsell funnel and

all these bells and whistles and basically all of that enabled

people with not that good of products. Okay products,

maybe they were like the fidget spinners, like the trendy products.

But they were able to make it seem cool and now Everyone

has bought something online that they wish they didn't buy and

they have everyone's BS detector works really well

nowadays So my ad strategy is so much

more just based around full clarity Saying

the first the main points

about the product and really just saying that, just focusing on

the main points that are gonna sell it and not being confusing

at all, not even being fancy with copywriting, not being fancy

with graphic design. So yeah, a lot of

the results that I get for clients, it really is more of a reflection of

how good their product is. I can set it up where We're

going to get in front of your target client at the perfect time. And

that's really what you can do with Facebook ads. So if you

can't do that, then yeah, there's some things that we'll go

over on today's episode on how to get in front of the right people at the

right time. And then after that, all you got to do is

just clearly explain your offer. And if it doesn't work, it's

the product. So there is a lot of money to make

in Facebook ads when you just have a great offer

and then you let the product do the work. Otherwise, if

it's not working there, it's probably not gonna work on a

lot of other areas. I know on Amazon, I sell a lot of products on

Amazon too. I've done that since six years ago as

well. That was the first thing that I did actually was Amazon PPC before I

got into Facebook ads. And there are products that can sell on Amazon

that don't sell on Facebook and vice versa. But for

the most part, if you've got an offer that works, Facebook's algorithm

is so good at getting in front of people, in

front of your ideal audience, even if you have the most niche product. So if

your product is good enough to get sales appearing

Would you say then, Derek, that the trick might be A lot of

people say, for example, they launch on Amazon first because there's probably low

barriers to entry, they can send in low MOQs. If

it's a great product to sell on Amazon, would you

say therefore it's going to be also a great product to sell through

Not necessarily. The commodities do

better on Amazon than they do on Facebook ads. I have a soap company

and they do really well on Amazon. And

on Facebook, I can get sales, but because it's soap, it

also has such a low margin in general that

it can be difficult to do. It's usually gonna cost, lowest

I ever see is like five to $10 to get a sale on something. And

for a lot of e-com products that might already be

all of your profit. So you want to

have at least 30 to 40 bucks profit and also the ability

Right, right. So what in your experience then, what has been a sort of a great

example of something that has a product that you can sell with

Anything that improves people's appearance

sells great. So any kind of skin care, hair

growth stuff, acne reducing, anti-aging,

really anything that is around people

It solves a problem and it solves a universal problem that

Wow, that's amazing. So, one of the questions that comes up all the time

to me is, if I have an Amazon listing, should

I run Facebook ads or Google ads or anything directly

Probably not. It's not the worst idea if you just

want to test to see how it would work, but you

never know if the sale came from Facebook ads because you can't put

a pixel on your Amazon website. So something

that people do is they put a landing page in between

that they'll grab the email and then they'll send them a coupon

code and then they have to use that coupon code on Amazon. And then

you can see, all right, they use the code that would have came from

the Facebook ad. So that's great. You

are already losing 15% to Amazon by sending them there. So

you usually want to do this on your own website because your margins are

thin enough that you usually don't want to forfeit that. I've

also done, for a long time, my original

claim to fame with Facebook ads was running large scale

social media giveaways where you'd run Facebook ads to a

giveaway for the exact product you're looking to sell so that the

only people who enter it are interested in that specific product. And

then after it would say, you've got one entry, thanks for

your email. If you want more entries, you can follow us on Instagram. You can like

our Facebook page. You can subscribe to our YouTube. You can share it with a friend for

extra entries. And then at the very end, we'd say, here's

the one winner for the 5,000 of you who lost. You

get a consolation prize of 20% off that ends this week.

And you could send that to Amazon instead.

And that worked a little bit better. So you could get

a really quality audience from Facebook, and then

you could sell to them and send them to Amazon. The

reason why you'd want to is because you're trying to boost

your Amazon ranking, right? So I don't know if this trick

still works or if you've heard about it. I heard about it in

the early days of me doing Amazon and I've used it a lot

but what you do is you go on Amazon you type in

the key phrase that you want people or that you want to rank on

so you type that in and then you click on your listing and

then if you grab the URL it will be a very long URL

that says search equals and then whatever

they typed in and if you use that link if you send

them there the idea is that Amazon

registers it as they searched whatever you typed

in and then they got to that product and then they bought it so that

you can actually gain ranking. Because if you just send them to the listing

without that, then it doesn't really help you rank because it's

all about certain keywords and keyphrases that you're ranking on. It's not just like,

is your product ranking or not ranking, right? It's, is it ranking on

certain keyphrases? So if you did it that way, where

you would send them to the URL that was linked

to the search to the keyphrase you're trying to rank on, then that

would be a good way to do it. Yeah, have you heard of that before?

I've never heard of that, Derek. That's like a little secret bit of gold nugget

I know, right? I don't see how it couldn't in

a way. Amazon would really be trying to patch that up. But

yeah, it's really cool. You'll see if you'll go to the URL

and it will have what the keyword search

was that brought them there. So it's just a way that if you could send an

email to 5,000 people to go buy from this Amazon listing and 100 buy,

it looks like they just typed in that exact same phrase and then bought it.

So then you can actually gain the ranking. Yeah, so can I

On your own website, yeah, yeah. So just going back into your

history, you mentioned there that you were selling on Amazon, and so are you

Yeah, different products though. So my original invention

that started my whole online entrepreneurship endeavor was

the aquarium smart feeder, a way to feed your

fish tank with an app or with the Amazon Alexa.

You could just say feed the fish basically and it would do it. And we built

it and it took two and a half years and we never sold a single one because it turns

out you can buy a little $4 feeder block that I knew about.

I just didn't understand that if it doesn't solve a problem, you

can't sell it. But it sounded cool. It

was a cool thing and everyone I tell it to is like, that's so cool. And

it's so funny because usually the story's the opposite. Everyone told

me it wouldn't work and then I made it and it was the opposite. Everyone

told me it would work and I couldn't sell a single one. So

it was kind of a funny business because it just seems like one of those things

like, that doesn't exist. That should totally exist. But if

you don't feed your fish for three days, they're probably fine. So it

doesn't even solve a problem. Like they don't need to spend $100 on this

thing that they have to attach onto their aquarium

and then download an app and then sync it and then... There's

bugs that it could run into, so it just

It didn't solve a problem, but I meet a lot of

people who are inventors. They created this product. So

you've spent years developing this product. How much money

You know, I, I wish I put more money and less time into it.

It was more of a time cost in the end, but. I

grew that Instagram to 50,000 followers because this was

in 2018 where you could just hashtag correctly and

go viral. So I would repost other

people's viral aquarium content and hashtag it really well. And

I built a. Good community. So we

we came out with all of these other products so I never sold that on Amazon, but

we bought a bunch of fishnets and TDS meters

and all these other random little things in the aquarium market and

I got really good at selling those on Amazon and I got good at building

an Instagram following and then I started a podcast on growing on Instagram

and then I Yeah, it's all evolved from there. So

it was a really necessary part of my journey. But yeah, it

was two and a half years. And really, it was

probably under $10,000 that we put into it.

But I wish I put a lot of money into ads to

tell me that it wasn't going to work in two weeks, rather

OK, so that's interesting. So what you're suggesting, then, is someone could actually come

up with an idea. And before they spend years of their

life developing it, thinking it's going to be completely amazing. Can

you explain that? How would they then sort of, I guess, validate that

Yeah, I'm one who vouches

for get a sale before you even buy the LLC.

You know, it's like that's a

step that comes before it. So in this case, I

could have set up just the basic Instagram, make it

look like we're an actual company, and then run

an ad that would be Some

people do like name and email to get on the wishlist for this product. That

is actually not product proof though, because I ran

surveys to about 150 people from

my Instagram following, filled it out on if they would buy

the aquarium smart feeder. And I think every single person said they would,

like maybe three or four didn't. And

they said, that's gotta be worth like a hundred bucks. And

survey data lies because these people think they would buy it.

But then if you say, okay, cool, debit or credit, they're like, well, I

don't need it right now. So you only wanna run

a test that is taking payment info. So you

could run a pre-order that says this product is gonna come

out at this time. And you just try to wait for like

one or two sales. You actually don't need a lot. If

someone outside of your friends and family bought it at all, they're

So to you, that's validation enough there, just one or two sales. That's

incredible. I've got a client right now who's got this amazing product.

And of course, he did the same thing that you did. And this product helps

in the waste management area. And he

came to me and said, Matthew, everybody loves this product. I've

spoken to all my friends and family. And he's invested a

couple hundred grand in this product. And I

said, right. And he came to me much later down the track. He's

now taken this to market and I said, now go back to all your

friends and family and make sure that they buy this product from

you because they all said they would. And I only spoke to him literally yesterday

and one person from his family so far has purchased his product.

So I think your trick of validating a

product like that by trying to get a sale outside of your friends and

family is so, so powerful because it could save you basically

bankruptcy in some cases, because some people are all in on

Amazing. Yeah. And that sale to a friend or family member doesn't even

Yeah, yeah, because they're going to do it through love, are

they? In this day and age, Derek, we hear we've got Instagram,

we've got Facebook, we've got TikTok, we've got Google. From

your experience, well, first of all, do you even cover all of those bases

or do you specialize specifically in, you know, Facebook and Instagram, for

example? And if so, have you used the other ones or do you recommend

Yes, I have done quite a bit with Google ads.

I haven't done TikTok ads, but I've been into the platform and

messed around and I am a

user on there looking at it as an advertiser. I

understand that pretty much anyone could do well on

TikTok ads in the product. world, there

just has to be something cool about it

to create cool content. Or even if it is like

a skincare product, and you're just showing results or talking

about how clear your skin is, then that

should be fine. If you're selling a basic commodity

product, like paper towels probably won't work well on

there, but they work great on Amazon. So there's not

much opportunity for paper towels on Amazon anymore, though,

where all those commodities are pretty much saturated.

But yes, so I understand them

pretty well. But yeah, Facebook ads is the only one I'm a real expert on.

Google ads, I don't know how

a lot of businesses make it work unless you are a

local high ticket service. Because for

products, I mean, it's pretty rare to get a click that

costs you less than $2 if you're lucky, but

a lot of them are $3, $4, $5, $6, and it

might take 5 to 10 clicks minimum before you get a sale,

and that's like $50. So it's

pretty difficult to make it work with e-commerce, I've found.

Derek, your agency is called Social Bamboo, right? If

someone comes to you and they're thinking, hey, I need someone to do Facebook ads

for me, is it yourself that's

running the show personally? Or do you outsource it

to a team? And who

Yeah, so I'm more of a consulting firm

than an agency actually. Right now I

have four clients that

I'm doing their ads for them. And then I have like 10 that

I'm teaching them how to run their own ads. So

I found that in

order for me to charge what I'm worth per hour or

whatever when I'm running ads for someone, it's gotta be

a good amount. And for a lot of companies, especially if you're

just getting started and you don't know how well your product's gonna

work and your pricing's all over the place, you don't know what your offer is,

you shouldn't be spending $1,500 a month on an agency

where you have the time. Pretty much anyone who has the time

and also the bandwidth to learn it, they want to

learn it. If you get into Facebook Ads Manager and you

hate it, then you probably shouldn't

even be an online entrepreneur if you just hate things

like that because that's going to be pretty much everything you

do marketing wise. But

apart from the businesses that have absolutely no time

and their product already sells, like

I recently took on a company that did like a

million last year and then they were just like switching agencies like

that that's more where I like to take over and then what I do is a

performance based deal I just charge a percentage of the sales

that I bring you so in order for me to do that I

need to make sure the company has. enough

proof that I know they're going to get sales. I don't do this for people

that are testing an offer because like I said before, I

can only run ads as good as the product is. If people don't

want to buy your product, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can't,

you can't get into people's brains and change their desires is

what a common misconception is in advertising. So

I'm very clear about this with people so they know if their product doesn't sell it's

not like you're not good at ads like that's never going to be the case. Is

that the default setting for people Derek? If a sale doesn't happen,

Do you get that a lot though Derek? Do people come back to you and say my

I haven't really. If that would happen, that

would be an issue of me pre-framing it wrong to

begin with and saying, oh yeah, we're going to crush it. I

can tell you if a product's going to work pretty quickly now. But for

a long time, I didn't know actually. So yeah,

I've got a better idea of if it's going to work or

not now just because I've worked with like probably

like three to four hundred different companies I've done ads for

or with. But I would rather teach people to do it so that they don't

need to pay fifteen hundred bucks a month. So I can

charge half that in order to teach it to someone. I

can complete an ad campaign with someone in four

calls. And then if they want to continue working with me

on other campaigns, they can. Otherwise, the goal is to

Yeah, well that's amazing because a lot of courses out there would be an automated course

that people have to go into, but they can actually come to you, get your six years

plus of e-com Facebook experience and

It really is the only way I'd recommend it. I'm really

big on don't buy a Facebook ads course because right

now the buttons are changing on a weekly basis. They are adding

a lot of new features. It looks different in every person's ad

account as well. So when I log into someone

in Australia's ad account, it looks different than the U.S. and

the U.K. versus an ad account that's been

around for five years versus a brand new one. Everyone has

different buttons and sometimes they're buggy and

sometimes they're not. So sometimes, like every call I

do with someone is different because I've

got someone who's doing like dental conferences right now.

I have a medium selling medium sessions to people

to connect with lost loved ones and then I've got your more standard supplement

companies and such like that, but I get the most I have an immigration lawyer

right now like I get very like crazy niche businesses and

a lot of agencies like the common tip is

niche down. But the thing is is there's a lot of random

businesses out there I'm never going to be I'm the marketing agency

for mediums. Like, it's really rare,

right? So, because my method of client acquisition is

I just post on YouTube and then I take free calls from whoever calls

me, I can't be niched down. But

it's made me have to get really good at understanding concepts

of marketing and advertising in order to say, no matter what

company you are, even if I've never heard of it, I can

Dissect your brand and get into the mind of your customer and

then figure out how to run ads for you Specifically and

then we're gonna set that up But if you take a general Facebook

ads course, you're gonna learn some good stuff on like what buttons to press

But instead of having a course and then my YouTube and

then I do the offer I just have the YouTube and I give

away pretty much everything and on my youtube and then all

you're buying from me is is just more access because a

lot of times people still need it i try to give examples for all

these random companies but you're never gonna get the examples for you

that is also based around are you working another job right now

Because if you're working a nine to five, then you, I

probably can't be running a call funnel for you because you

only have so many call slots, like things like that, how much money they

have, how much time they have, are they good on the phone? Do

they want to do phone calls with people? Do they like graphic design? I

base my ad strategy, not just around what's working, but

around what their skillset is, what their budget is and

Hey guys, I just want to break away from the episode for just one moment and let you

know that I've just launched the Amazon Launchpad mini course. Now,

this is designed for people who want to get started on Amazon really,

really fast. But guess what? I can get you launched your first product on

Amazon with just five hours. You just have to click on the link below, join

my community, and the course is absolutely free. All right, thanks

guys, and back to the episode. Yeah, well, The

offer that you've got there to actually come and work with you I think is the most incredible thing because

of exactly that and I've got a lot of clients myself and we're at that

where I'm sort of steering them into, should they go and do their own Facebook ads?

I always teach, though, not to do their own

Facebook ads. Because I think most of my clients have already got existing products, so

they want to scale up quickly. And learning it themselves might take them a

lot longer. Whereas if they could delve into or dive into someone like

yourself who's got all the skills, they're going to get results quicker and, I guess, make

Yes, that is the general philosophy. the

unfortunate reality is there's a lot of agencies out

there that aren't that good at what they're doing every time

i take A client from

another agency and get in there and see all the ads they are doing I

think it usually is an absolute mess I think that a

recent client too was paying $5,000 a

month And I I am just charging them percentage based

like you'll never lose money working with me because it will only

be a percentage of what I can

sell for you and I think that's the only way to

Ethically charge for Facebook ads services because

otherwise it's one of you gets screwed every month You

know the first couple months where they pay you a flat rate and you're working

super hard because you want to show them you know what you're doing and you put in all this work

and then if you're flat rate It doesn't matter who

you are, you're going to start working less and less. So, I don't

like that. I don't even have fun with it if I'm just getting, if

Because you've got an incentive obviously, Derek, to do well. You've got an

incentive to do well for the client because you're going to make more money too. That's a

And then what I do is I say, I also will take over

your full backend. So I modify their website as

well because the ads is just half of it. The backend is the other half. So

I take over their Shopify store and figure out

which way we need to be packaging it or selling it

because that really is the other part of the equation here. is

how can you figure out package selling? Because once you're like,

we're getting orders, now it's all about average order value. And whether it

needs to be an upsell after they buy that says you

have 10 minutes to add this on, or quantity discounts at

one, three, five, seven, you have certain breaks, or

it's mix and match on the website, pick any five products for 20% off,

it's completely different answer for every company. So this

is why like a Facebook ads course, you're gonna learn stuff,

you're not gonna get results. Because what I

teach people specific for their business is just

so specific to them that it could never be a course.

Even if I was like, it's a course for how to run ads as a fitness coach.

That's better. It's at least niche down, but it

still is gonna be like, oh, I would need to update that course every

two to three months if I was actually giving you the most up-to-date

So let me ask you this, Derek. Someone comes to you, and you're

obviously doing the ads, but does that mean you're also doing the creative you're

coming up with, whether it's like a video, or do you do videos, or is it all

I'll edit their videos. I will create the

images, though. I'll make the infographics. I'll

work off of whatever product shots they have on

their website. Right now I've got a jewelry company and a supplement company

are my biggest two clients. They've

already hired influencers to make a bunch of videos. One of them has

550K on TikTok. So I go through her

years of videos. I grab those, I download them. She

does a lot of like five minute videos though. So I have to edit those down

to less than a minute. And I just make sure that it's like got

a really powerful intro. I'll throw like captions on it and

such, but I don't pull out the camera and record videos

Yeah, yeah, got you. Now I've got, so I told my,

my community that I was going to be doing this interview with one

of the top gurus of Facebook ads. And

I said, what questions would you have? So if you don't mind, I'm going to jump to some

specific questions that I hope you can answer. So the first

thing which you put a touch on this is do you partner with e-comm sellers

rather than a fixed base fee, which you've kind of touched on that. So, but,

but would it be, I think you've said it's not a new product is probably

If it's new, I will usually do it for a flat rate. Unless

I would be so positive that you have struggled

with your product, I would still wanna see that you've sold it outside of friends and

family at all. It's really crazy, like all you

need to do for testing is sell it to one person outside of friends and family, and you

know that your product should exist to some degree. I don't know if

you've got a 10K a month, or a 100K per month product, or a

million, but at least your product should exist online, just

one sale outside of your friends and family. Which I think is a big nugget

for today's episode as well. When should people reach

out to you? Is it before a product launch or after they

They should reach out as early as possible because

I do a free call to start and I don't care if someone's ready to

invest or not when they do that free call. I've done this long enough to

know I'll do a call with someone. I'll give them some advice.

Two years later, I'll get a call that they're ready to

go with coaching. So I'm not someone who says, yeah, you

know, this call is for people ready to start. This call

is I'm going to coach you as best as I can for free for half hour, 45 minutes.

So if you want to do that, when you are just thinking of

your product idea, I might be able to save you a couple years of

your life. So, yeah, I'd say reach out wherever

Yeah. This one you've kind of already touched on, which is this

person, they had already been with an agency before. They promised

them the world. They end up spending $15,000. So

what sort of guarantees can you put in that you're not going to

You don't even pay me anything at the beginning if we do a contract You

will be paying me off of the percentage of sales 30 days

after I start so I take all the risk I put your card on

file at the beginning. Otherwise, I don't charge it a dollar or anything I

just have it on file and I say on the first of the month I'm gonna charge X

percent of the sales that I get you and if that

is me making like $17 then there you go. So

I'm pretty picky on the clients that I take on from that but if

If you have gotten sales from another agency, if they produce like a

ROAS of like one or two or whatever, and I can see they're making

every mistake, like I always start by going into that client's ad

account and looking at it, because I can tell real quick how much was the

agency's fault versus how much is the product not meant to be.

And if I can see, yes, I can make this work, then all

I promise people is I'm going to get your product in front of people, in

front of your target audience on the right day. That's as much as I promise people. And

I'm going to... very clearly say what

your offer is and I'm going to word it really perfectly. I'm

gonna create a one to three sentence pitch of

your product that is what most business owners have been trying

to figure out for years, honestly. Because you can ask them about

their company and they've got like a five minute

answer for you. But I give people like that succinct, like this is

the perfect one, two, three sentence, you

know, caption. That that's all

I promise but then I also work on a month-to-month basis So

if you're not pleased on any month, I don't do long-term contracts with

anyone I do month-to-month for everyone because I am trying to

make it so I have to perform for me I'm putting

myself in that position because I've been in sales for over a

decade. I only want to get paid if I perform I have

no problem you know, doing a bunch of work and getting paid

For other people who are watching this now who are not familiar with Facebook ad gurus

or agencies, for example, what Derek's talking about is

really powerful, because some people, they don't have this offer. You

know, they're going to charge you the earth, and if they don't deliver, it's too

bad, so sad, and you're left with no sales,

and you've lost a lot of money. So your offer is really powerful, Derek, hence

why, obviously, you only take on, I guess, the best clients you can get. Next

question, what is the best to sell through Facebook

ads or Instagram ads for that matter? Is it digital products

It's both. It's not really either or.

I say my two hacks to getting

rich the easy way are one, figure out what you

And then two... They're the ones on Instagram

They they are great for yeah, like man

this supplement company I can't even believe how much ladies just

love balling out on like the like I get thousand-dollar orders

for the supplement company just because we've packaged it like that because she

I've Made her make thousand-dollar packages, and

she was like no way they'll buy this and it's it's crazy So

I mean it's just a bunch of stuff to for improving hair improving skin Like

all of that kind of stuff works really well if you sell

someone a how to get your skin better course

and that would probably work just as well so physical

versus digital product isn't it as much as what problems work

the best to solve on Facebook and Instagram and then the

vehicle just needs to be a My other

way to like test a product is if you would buy it, then

there you go. And it's crazy how many people come up with this new

street wear clothing brand. And I asked them, how often do

you wear your own clothes? And they rarely wear it.

They're just like, it's a t-shirt that looks really cool. Right? If the founder

of the company doesn't even wear it often, like no one else is

going to wear it. So with clothing companies, all you need to do is make clothing for

yourself. All you need to do is make a product for yourself. That's

like your guidelines for inventing. That was also my guideline for

a digital product where I said, all right, all these gurus are telling me

charge 5k up front, you know, charge what you're worth for six

months of coaching. And I was just like, just what would I

have bought a few years ago? And I was like, I would buy a month

to month coaching program where it's just guided. And like, that's

how I came up with my Offer as it is now and

I'll say the pricing just for the sake of not not selling at all But

for the people listening out there that sell digital products, it is okay to charge I

charge 750 a month I could charge a bit more I

will charge more when my demand gets there, when I have enough calls where

I have to. I only raise my price when I have to. I

Let me get that right there. What you're saying is that someone can

come and see you with six years of this Facebook e-com

experience, and they can get it for $750 a

Yeah, you get four calls and unlimited messaging for $750 a

month. Wow. And if you do one month, you'll

That's amazing. That's an amazing offer. Next

question for you. What is the worst product that you've ever

Neon durable posters. What

is that? He would create durable

neon art using AI and then turn it into wall

art. Neon durable posters. So

that's the worst thing. I would say it was the most outlandish

thing. It's got

its niche audience, but I mean, that audience is just way too small.

Even the aquarium market, I found out, is too small of a market. You

would think it's really big, but it's actually, it's not that big,

or a lot of the people who have aquariums are just giving their

kids their first pet. It's a goldfish. It's a very unserious endeavor.

That leads me to the next question. Okay, the next question then obviously is the other

way, which is what has been the best and I would say further

than that, what is the most profitable product that you've seen sell

It's the current supplement company that I'm working with and it's because she

makes all of the supplements at her store and

she presses the pills and she sources all the ingredients from

America. So if you can come up

with an American-made company, it actually helps so much

for not just the working with the

supplier, but having just these short delivery

times, you're rarely out of stock. And if you are, it's not that

big of an issue, not going to incur any tariffs that

might go up in the future. And yeah, it

customs, being able to design it

yourself, and actually a lot of like skincare products or

supplements, a lot of these things can be custom manufactured

in the U.S. pretty easily. Even clothing, if

you can do clothing manufactured in the U.S., that

is going to be, it saves

you so much headache. And then it's also

super profitable because it's consumable and people need to keep

So, to get recurring revenue is a big one with that one.

Yeah. Like these ladies are buying one bottle to

try it out and then their next order. I mean, at this point

Uh, this month we'll do about 160,000 is what we're on

Wow. And where do you forecast that to go? And

the other question is, is this a new supplement company? Like they've just sort

She's been at it for three years now actually, but she's

been an herbalist and studying herbology for

So she's not someone who's just gone out and white labeled some supplements. She's

actually got a story behind her brand as well. No,

She has, she's the one with 550,000 TikTok followers. So

how do you do that? Actually know what you're talking about. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. That's an amazing story too. Now I just want

to, I want to dive into something a bit personal. In Australia,

success is kind of, in a way, frowned upon. If you've got money, it's

a bit of a tall poppy syndrome in Australia. But what we see, though, in the States is if you're

a success and you're driving around in a Ferrari or something, people applaud you.

When you came out of high school, were you thinking about, hey,

I'm going to get out there and I'm going to be a success and I'm going to make a lot of money? Or were you thinking something different?

When I was in elementary school, I was like, I'm going to Harvard or bust. And

then I changed my philosophy away from wanting

to go to an Ivy League school as much. But I've

always definitely been very ambitious. I would say I

have, quote unquote, ADHD, which I

think is a superpower in entrepreneurship. It just basically means you can't

focus on stuff that you don't want to do, but you can focus extremely well

on stuff that you do want to do. Therefore, I'm a terrible employee.

I would not do well at a company. I'm like, unless you

give me full control over the marketing, this isn't going

to work out well. So it made me have to

be an entrepreneur. As far as like to that

original thing that you were saying I would still say there's a

lot of people out here who kind of demonize wealth

Because every movie has trained us to do so

right like the person who's evil is always rich so

there is a bit of that still going on

here, but maybe not as much it certainly

is a You know, we, we love ambition

and we love chasing success, but humans in general, aren't

very good at supporting people who are doing better than them. Even some

of your best friends, something entrepreneurship teaches you is you

start to do better than your friends and you

realize they weren't actually that good of friends all along because

Yeah, that's so true. When you're starting out and you're, I'm going

to do an Amazon course. Oh, good on you, Matt. Yeah, get going. I

hope you do well. And then when you actually do well, oh,

I should have done that. No, it's unfair. And you were lucky, or something

like that. But really, it's probably like yourself. You've had years and

years of getting to where you are now. It didn't just happen overnight. And

you've obviously had things that didn't work out, like the aquarium product,

for example. A lot of people would have quit after that, Derek. But you obviously

just kept going. You would have just pivot. Find something new and

keep selling. Derek, what's something that people

As far as Facebook ads go? No, outside of Facebook ads. We know you do Facebook ads.

I'm still thinking entrepreneurship. I mean, other

than that, man, I've just hopped around hobbies. I'm not

even like the guy who does the same thing every weekend. I went through

a phase of like, I loved fantasy football. Now I don't do that anymore. um

yeah i'm really big on dubstep even though i don't really go to edm shows

anymore i went to a ton for 10 years i was like a big part of my life

and now i've i've fizzled out of that a bit um

so all more say on the topic that we were just

on for like Not quitting that's

really the one thing that I've always had is like I don't even consider quitting

and that saves you a lot of time that every hiccup that you run into you

don't have to debate going back to your old career or

not like I just have to figure it out, but Yeah,

I I had to sell my house to keep going in

entrepreneurship and go back to renting I won a

Rolex watch at my last sales job and Because

it was like the something that you could win for high performance and

I had to sell that so I could keep going when I got broke in

my business, so Most people are not willing

to to pay those kind of prices I had to move back in with my

parents for a bit too Just cuz I'm like I gotta I gotta invest this money in

the company So I I'd never think I would do that again, you

know when I moved out at 18 But you have to humble yourself like you're

gonna Yeah, I did not want to sell that

house, sell that Rolex, any of that. But I was like, what am I going to do? Quit?

That's powerful. Powerful, Derek, because there's something in America

that they say, you know, if someone hasn't basically been broke before, you should never

partner with them because they don't know what it's like to have their back up against the

wall and turn things around. So, Derek, as

we wrap things up, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. And where can

Yeah, on Instagram, it's my name, Derek Vidal. And

then on YouTube, it's my name, Derek Vidal. So whatever I

got going on will be in my Instagram bio, but the best value.

And we'll put links to everything in the show notes as well, so people can

find you. And I certainly recommend that people do, because you've got some fantastic information

that you're just giving away for free. From someone who's done this for six years, you

certainly know your stuff. So Derek, one question that comes up, what

is the most common mistakes that you see people doing when they're doing

Yeah, I'm glad you asked this. So the biggest one

is trying to do targeting like we had to do

in the past. So when you get to the ad set phase, and by

the way, you should only ever create ads in ads manager, never boost

a post. Boosting a post will just find people with no disposable income.

But yeah, you have to do an ads manager and run a sales campaign. You're

not doing an engagement campaign. You're not doing a leads. Never do anything

besides a sales campaign if you are selling a product. You

don't have to do awareness marketing and then you keep going down the

funnel. It's just you're trying to just sell to someone who's ready to buy is

how you're writing the ad to. You're selling sunglasses. You're not

trying to convince people that they want sunglasses. You're trying to find

someone who's already in the market for sunglasses and show up on

the day that they're looking, because that's what the algorithm is all about, is

just showing to people, ready to buy right now. So, the

targeting, in the past, if you're selling sunglasses, you get to that ad set

phase, and you put in the interest, you're like, oh, interest, they're

interested in running, right? Those people like sunglasses, or

they, I'll put in sunglasses, oh, that's something, oh, Ray-Bans, I'll put

Ray-Bans in there. Put nothing. Never put anything

for interest. And no matter what you do, it

can get in front of your right customer because the targeting is

now done how you write your caption. So all

you need to do is write a clear as day caption. Are

new sunglasses out now? 25% off like just

say the word sunglasses in there just make it abundantly clear in

the caption that you're trying to sell sunglasses and then put nothing in

the interest-based targeting and it's really crazy because even

I was doing ads for a bunch of wedding photographers for a

bit and I was running ads where

you can put in engaged you could say oh only run to

people who are engaged like that should be the perfect person to sell a

engagement sessions too, right? Someone who has listed their

relationship status as engaged. That performed significantly worse

than putting nothing there, and then just writing a caption that

says, congrats on your engagement. Because

it knows. The targeting is based around listening

to people's conversations. So your phone is constantly

listening to your conversation, and it's listening to all your customers. So it's

creepy, but the good thing is, we're the advertisers, so it's

great. So yeah, if that person talked about, I'm

engaged, blah, blah, blah, on their phone with their friends, they're gonna see the ad. And

not everyone goes and changes their Facebook relationship status right away

anymore. So put nothing, that's the major thing.

And then the second part of that, which I kind of already said, is write your

caption abundantly clear. Clarity

is all you need in marketing to do really well. Because a

lot of people think they need to be funny. And actually, I'm against

being funny in marketing at this point. I think it's a good idea for

Coca-Cola to make a commercial where they're funny in it, because as

long as the Coke logo is at the bottom left, they get it, they sell

soda, I can get it down at the gas station. So, they're in

a different phase of marketing, a brand awareness phase, and this is

why you should pretty much never model off a big company. because they're a

completely different phase of marketing as you. So, for me, if

I write an ad that says, I'm gonna teach you how to blow up your Instagram, that

doesn't do well. If I say, I'm gonna teach you how to gain 10,000 Instagram followers,

that does great. So, abundantly clear in

what the offer will do for them, none of these ambiguous terms that

you're kind of just trying to inflate the value. You also don't need to

be like, what's a trendy word? We'll

say lit because all Gen Z are saying lit right now. You

should have it where you write it in a way that Gen Z, Gen

X, Boomer, doesn't matter who sees this, everyone has complete comprehension.

So just have that be your North Star for decision making. Even

with my graphic design, I'd rather an abundantly clear

image with crappy graphic design than a

really great, cool looking image that has just

a bunch of words randomly scattered around it that

don't read nicely and the order is

not obvious what you should read them in. All the Canva templates are

actually not good to do because all of them look great and

they're so confusing to know where to read first. It's

crazy how even graphic design isn't that important to

getting results. It's kind of why I can do graphic design for everyone. I'm

not a good graphic designer. I just have a very set series of

rules that I follow. when I design graphics, but

everything is just based around clarity. Your

target customer will for sure know that this

ad was made for them, is how I'm trying to write it, how

I'm trying to design it. I'm not worried about fancy video editing,

graphic design, being funny, trying to be

super relatable, trying to take some creative

avenue. I have just a very abundantly clear

Yeah, you touched on graphic design and

AI is huge right now. Everyone's got AI on their

lips. Are you using AI in any of your ad

Yes. I don't have it make me an ad though. You

don't say chat GPT. I need an ad, a Facebook

ad for this product. Like it's going to give you a

crazy image. You're trying to just get, I'm like,

I need a plant background. Done

like, and then I get that and I put the plant background in and then I put the supplements

over it and whatever. I'm just trying to get like a random element designed

for it. But otherwise, I'm not

having it make me an entire ad. And all those softwares that

you see, have AI run your ads. Terrible idea.

We're far from that. Do you think AI is going to take over

No, because it's not black

and white like AI thinks it is. it

still needs the human component. It's a

while away. For instance, AI is like, ad

A is beating ad B. So should I turn off ad

B or reduce spending to ad B? I

want to know, I want to ask the question, why is ad A

beating ad B? So ad C, E,

A, are all doing well. What's the pattern here? Why are those

doing well and why are these ones doing bad? And then I'm gonna

look for every possible pattern of why they're doing good, why they're

doing bad, to tell me what to make next. So

AI doesn't say why is something doing good or bad and

then what does that mean that we should make next. It just looks at it

in terms of winning or losing and adjusting budget like

that. You could maybe have AI adjust your

budget, but not take over your

ad creative. So I love AI because it is

infinitely beneficial to entrepreneurs. Every other person out

there has their job. you

know, slightly at risk, even if it may be just that the

company's downsizing in that department because AI has made

it more efficient. But for me, like what you asked

before, too, of do I have other people do it? I have my

girlfriend that makes images for one company. She follows

a very set rules, and I see every

one of those images before they get published, and I pretty much mess

with them every single time. They're going to be messed with a little bit. These

agencies that are Like they're really good at selling and

then they just hire a random person that's never owned a business before to run

your ads. This is why it's like you're probably better at running your own

ads than most of these agencies anyways. Oh well, they're a seven figure a

month agency. Even more to my point, how did they get to seven figures?

Delegating this way too much. The person that you're, I'm

the one running your ads. The person on YouTube that

you learned from, like I'd be the one doing it. I'm not passing this

off to other people because it takes six years of

me to get how good I am. It doesn't matter if I take someone

under my wing and train them even for a few months. They still don't know how to think about

it as well as me to recall on

all that past experience. So I'm pretty opposed to Any

coach or consultant or agency that makes seven figures a

month is probably not good at

I would agree with that. I would totally agree with that. So Derek, thank you so much

for coming on the Amazon Ecom Secrets Podcast. You've given away so

much valuable information as being a six-year veteran

in this Facebook space. I'm going to put the details to reach

you in the show notes, and I encourage everyone to like

and subscribe to your podcast, to your YouTube channel, and of course, your Instagram

Thanks for tuning into Amazon Ecom Secrets. If

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I'm Matthew Fraser on all social media platforms. Thanks