E210: Top 10 Podcast Episodes of 2018

Time flies so fast and before you know it, another year gone!

As 2018 comes to an end, we decided to look back into the year and round up our 10 most downloaded podcast episodes:

10. E169: Building Your Facebook Audience with Dave Huss
9. E158: Using Amazon PPC and Giveaways to Create an Effective Launch Strategy
8. E198: The First Steps in Ecommerce Marketing (Under the Hood with Colin Grice)
7. E159: 3 Key Email Marketing Sequences for Your Ecommerce Business
6. E205: Advanced Amazon PPC Strategies with Dave Bryant
5. E155: Where to Start with Building a Product Brand – Under the Hood with Richard Phillips
4. E206: A Rundown of the Best Amazon Tools
3. E147: Amazon PPC Strategy – Step-by-Step Guide on Saving Thousands of Dollars
2. E129: How to Pick the Perfect Product to Sell in eCommerce
1. E167: Overcoming Serious Beginner Mistakes – Under the Hood with James Treloar

Let us know what you think, and if you have topics you'd like us to discuss on the podcast, feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for being with us this past year and may we all have an amazing 2019!

Full Audio Transcript

Mike: This is Mike and welcome to the final EcomCrew Podcast of 2018. This is episode number 210. We've met our goal of doing 100 of these podcasts in 2018. It has been one hell of a ride. I honestly have not decided if we're going to keep up the same cadence in 2019 yet or not. But I can tell you that through January we're planning on it. We have January's calendar already planned out. So, so far, so good on doing two a week. It's interesting. I asked a survey how many should we be doing every week? One person responded do one every day. I love the podcast. One person responded honestly, and said, stop doing this thing. It sucks.

So, we’ll see what happens in 2019. But so far, man, I tell you what, it's been a hell of a year for the podcast. We made the top 100 business podcast list on iTunes. I didn't even know that that happens. Someone else in the industry asked me how we did it. And we haven't done anything. I don't even know how the heck that even SEO for iTunes. If someone out there in the audience knows how to do that, let me know. I'd love to know how to get us further up the rankings. But it's kind of like this black hole. I've done some research on how to rank on iTunes and I haven't really been able to find anything all that useful other than making sure that you have all of your metadata filled out and things of that nature. But I want to thank you guys.

Without you, we would never obviously been able to do that. It's pretty amazing, pretty humbling to be in the company of the people that are on the top 100 list on iTunes, and so many others that are putting on amazing content in e-commerce and it's something I think about all the time just how lucky we've been to be able to be a part of this community, to have met a lot of the other people that are influencers in the space, to be able to meet Premium members, other people like at conferences that listen to the podcast. I feel like they've known me for years because they listen to this. It's just been an amazing experience.

So go to EcomCrew.com/210, leave a note over there. Let me know how the EcomCrew podcast has affected you in your business, in your life. That type of stuff motivates me to continue doing this stuff because sometimes it does feel like a grind. But most the time it's been awesome. Today I have something special. We have never done anything like this before. But we're going to do the top 10 podcast of 2018. And when I first thought of this concept, I was like, you know what, this is such a cop out because it's not a real episode. But that's not true. It's going to take just as much time to record as any other. In fact, I had to put some extra effort into doing some research for this.

And the reality is that I do believe if you're thinking about it, that an episode like this will actually be quite helpful because you guys don't know what episodes are the ones that are producing the most listens. And that's how we're going to rank this, the number of downloads that we got in 2018, ranking these 10 through one. And it's interesting because there is one common theme here; the three of the top 10, I'll give you a little bit of a heads up we're about Amazon PPC. But a couple of the other ones here were interesting. They were more beginner, a couple of things were advanced.

So, it's interesting where things fall. It seems like we hit a wide audience of people that are listening to the podcast which is neat and also crazy and frustrating over time because it's hard to know what you guys want to hear about. So again, EcomCrew.com, let us know how the podcast has affected you, how it's helped you and what you want to hear about, because a couple of the things that are on this top 10 list were listener questions, things that came in. That stuff is super helpful. We almost always try to get those done because we appreciate the people who take the time to ask us the questions. All right guys, so right after the intro, we're going to get into the top 10 podcasts for 2018.

All right guys; let's get into our 2018 top 10 list. We're going to start at number 10 and work away to number one. Again, these are ranked by the number of downloads in 2018. It's interesting, all of the podcasts that are on this list all came from 2018. I would have expected something from 2017 to be beyond the list. What it tells me is that our content must be getting better because the more recent stuff seems to be getting listened to more, which makes me happy. I put a lot of effort into this podcast, so does Dave. I'm an overachiever. I'm never happy with where things are. I always think they can be better. I never feel like I'm doing a good enough job.

This is entrepreneurs in general have this feeling. And seeing some of the more recent content on this list makes me feel like we're going in the right direction which is pretty cool. I will tell you that one of the episodes is from back in March and the most recent one was actually in December, and it's already a top 10 podcast download. And it takes me off that that's one that Dave did himself. I wanted to shut him out of the top 10 but he snuck in there, so I got to give him that. I got to give him credit for that. All right guys, without further ado; let's get into the top 10 list here.

Episode 169, this was actually one of my favorite of the entire year. I think that this one should have been closer to the top five or top three. It was an amazing episode, building your Facebook audience with Dave Huss, our friend Dave Huss who is now an EcomCrew Premium member. He is also just been a great friend in the industry. I feel honored to have met this guy. He is one of these people that I instantly felt connected with, just an amazing dude. I love people, and he's just an amazing guy, super, super great personality. He lives over in Vietnam right now and he has been absolutely crushing it in his business. And he was nice enough to come on the podcast and talk about how he grew his Facebook audience from like zero to 100,000 in less than a year with very little budget. Definitely recommend checking out Episode 169.

Okay, the number nine podcast on our list is going to be episode number 158, which is using Amazon PPC for giveaways and an effective strategy. This is one of the podcasts that changed our business in 2018. It's interesting how what goes around comes around. I feel like we do everything we can to help everybody in the community and every now and then something comes back and helps change us in our business. And this was definitely one of these things because Amazon giveaways has become a big vehicle for us in the second half of 2018. This was launched in June of 2018, episode 158.

My buddy Chris who is a member of the Million Dollar Sellers group, I highly recommend checking that out as well. It's a great community of other $1 million Amazon sellers. I met him finally in person at a retreat there, just an awesome dude. I wish I got to spend more time with him. He lives up in LA area. I need to figure out a way to go spend more time with him, just a super genuine guy. He also runs a company called My PPC Pal which is an Amazon automatic PPC bidding service. Definitely recommend checking that out. But this was a great episode. I definitely recommend going back listening to this one.

Again, it was the ninth most listened to episode of 2018, just some great stuff in there, great nuggets on how to use giveaways, how to do launches the white hat way. The reason that Chris and I connected and became instant friends is because he feels the way I do. He doesn't want to be doing all the black hat stuff that you hear out there all the time. He's a white hat guy and we are a breed, and I understand that people want to flip to the dark side because you need sales and you want to see growth and all that stuff. It's very easy to be enticed by that. But he's he stayed the course just like we have and a great episode, episode 158 on Amazon PPC, but also about giveaways and an effective one strategy.

All right, continuing on here, we are at number seven, episode 198 guys. 198 came out in November 2018. This was an Under the Hood segment. I love seeing these Under the Hoods on the top 10 list. It makes me feel like all the effort that goes into those has been worthwhile, and it is a lot of work. I mean we have a lot of upfront planning to do. Hats off to Abby and Muffins back in the Philippines office. When I say we, I mean they. They're mostly the ones that are doing that stuff for us. But if you go to EcomCrew.com/UndertheHood, well this segment is for people who have never heard about it, we get podcast listeners submit that are interested in being on the Under the Hood segment. If you're selected, we do one free hour of coaching with you.

And we record that and turn that into a podcast episode. So everyone gets to hear the coaching and it's a win-win for everybody. I think that these have become an amazing segment on the EcomCrew Podcast. I'm glad that we put the effort into doing this. It's been a lot of fun. For me personally, it's been incredibly rewarding because we get emails back from these people six to 12 months later now that we've done it for a while talking about how much of a difference it's made in their lives and their business, which is what this was all about for me. It's pretty darn cool. So, this particular episode 198 which was the first steps in e-commerce marketing was Under the Hood that we did back in again, in November of 2018.

All right, moving on to the next one, episode seven on our top 10 list or seventh most listened to episode of 2018 was three key email marketing sequences for your e-commerce business. Another great friend of mine in the e-commerce space, X. I met him at Seller’s Summit. This was a guy that I've admired from afar for a very long time, finally got to meet him. Another guy that I instantly hit it off with, there's a theme here, there's a lot of great people in the e-commerce space. It's been again just so rewarding being able to meet these types of people, hang out with them. I loved doing this episode.

I love email marketing, 52% of our revenue for ColorIt.com comes from email. And X is way more articulate than I am talking about this stuff. And if you don't want to spend the time to do it yourself, you can listen to the episode and find out how to contact him. He does this, he'll do it directly for you. So you don't have to worry about taking the time to figure all this stuff out yourself. Hire X and Essence of Email I think is off top my head is what his company is. All that'll be in the show notes obviously and you can listen to episode 159 to find out more about that. But that was our seventh most listened to episode of 2018.

All right, moving to number six, this was my buddy Dave Bryant. As I was saying, he made the top 10 list here recording an episode solo which was a nice help for me. That particular week I was busy and alleviated having to do an episode that week. This thing just came out two weeks ago. It's already on the top 10 list. Realistically, it's going to be number one if you let it go for a couple more months. I haven't had a chance to listen to this episode yet myself. But now that I'm recording this and seeing this, this will be the next thing I listen to on my podcast list. I'm curious to see what Dave had to say here.

And it's interesting. I will foreshadow. I did an episode similar to this, which is also higher up here on the top 10 list. So I want to compare notes of what he was doing versus what I was doing. And Amazon PPC is an ever evolving thing. There's some new functionality that's out and I'm sure that he covered some of that here in episode 205. Advanced Amazon PPC strategy is what the title that episode is. That's episode 205. Again, it's already within just a couple of weeks cracking into the top 10 list. I'm sure when we go back and look at this a few months later; it’s probably going to be our number one episode, which is really cool to see when we do these types of topics how well they respond.

It probably is another lesson in that we need to do another Amazon PPC episode sometime in early 2019. So we'll put that on our list. We listen to what we see here in the stats. It's hard to ignore. So go check out episode 205 where Dave Bryant talks about Amazon advanced PPC strategies. That was number six for 2018.

All right guys, we are cracking into the top five now getting exciting. The numbers here are ramping up even more. It's interesting how the top ones are outliers and have so many more downloads than others. Number five is going to be another Under the Hood. This one is back from June of 2018, where to start selling, and building a product brand. This is another Under the Hood, again, EcomCrew.com/UndertheHood. I know I just mentioned it. But if you want to get a free hour of consulting from Dave and I, we record that and turn that into a podcast episode. It's one of the ways that we give back to the community. There is no charge, and they turn into awesome podcast episodes.

I love seeing the fact that at least two well, for sure there's actually three. There's another one up here as another Under the Hood. And this one is where to start with building a product and a brand, something that we're really passionate about. This is a module in EcomCrew Premium. We have a module about how to start a seven figure brand. It talks a whole bunch about not just launching individual products on Amazon, but how to launch a brand, how to have a cohesive look and feel to everything and have products that work well together and people are passionate about them, and a whole bunch of other things. And so this whole episode is like a free hour of that and I'm glad to see that make the top five list. So, episode 155 back from June of 2018, where to start building a product brand.

All right, top four now, episode 206, a rundown of the best Amazon tools. This is crazy to me that this is on the top list, something that we're going to take a lesson in and probably do other tools or other things top lists like this in 2019. Again, this is something that we just recorded a couple of days ago, it was one of our most recent episodes, and it's shot right to the top of the list. It's crazy to me that this is number four. This is cumulative folks, the number of downloads I'm taking here is for the entire year. So other episodes on this list have had a whole year to have people download and people that just find the podcast go back and listen to.

This thing has only been out for a number of days and it's already in the top list. So I have a feeling this and Dave's episode on PPC are going to be the top two as we go in the Q1 next year. Again, lessons learned, go over to EcomCrew.com/210. Tell us what you want to hear about. We want to hear from you. We've done other listener questions on the podcast, other listener recommendations for episodes. By the time you record 210 episodes, the hardest thing becomes coming up with new ideas and things to talk about. Things that I think are completely trivial in my business maybe really important to you.

This comes up all the time. Dave mentions this all the time, because I’ll mention something in passing casually that we've been doing. And he's like, oh my god, how come you haven't said anything about that before or mentioned on the podcast? And to me, it's just something that we're doing in the course of our business and it's hard to know what are those things for everybody else. So go over to EcomCrew.com/210, leave a comment on the show notes for this episode. We’d love to hear from you, and we'll make those comments episodes in 2019.

In the meantime, if you're interested in selling on Amazon, if you do sell on Amazon, episode 206 was a rundown of a whole bunch of tools that Abby and Muffins back in the Philippine office rounded up and we did a podcast episode about those. We have different categories from marketing, to accounting to landing pages and all kinds of stuff. I think it was if I remember correctly, 26 different Amazon tools that we ran down. There's no affiliate links in any of that. We weren't paid by anybody. It was just honest stuff that we talked about there, which is how we are with everything on the EcomCrew podcast. If you notice, we do not have sponsorships on here. We aren't doing this for the money. This is something that we do to give back to the community.

Obviously, the way that we get paid back is by meeting lots of cool people, meeting a lot of industry players. And obviously we do have EcomCrew Premium which is our premium service that we launch every couple of months. And that is in an indirect way that we make money. But besides that, the podcast is sponsorship free. It’s something that we've dug our heels and we might change our mind in the future but in 2019, we're going to stick with that. You don't want to be hearing commercials, you're here to learn. And I think that sponsorships devalue things in some ways and also sways you. No matter how hard you try not to be swayed, someone paying you money to represent their product or service, you're probably going to have a different opinion about than if you aren't paid.

So we've been sticking to that for almost since the beginning. We did have Stamped.io, which I appreciate them being a sponsor of the podcast. And it's interesting because if it wasn't for them sponsoring, I never would have used their service and we continue to use it and love it. So, sometimes it does work out. I do still recommend Stamped.io. They were an awesome sponsor, an awesome product but it still did sway me because I probably wouldn’t have tried it otherwise. That did work out for the best. But you never know how that'll change in the future. So we keep this sponsorship free.

All right, episode 147, this is my PPC strategy guide step by step on how to set up PPC. This is something we've been doing throughout 2018. Laurd who is someone back in our Philippines office who helps us with all kinds of stuff over there has been helping implement all this for us in 2018. We have lowered our average cost of sale, ACOS, from something like 32% to 25%. And in fact, in December, it's been 21%. I don't know if that was an anomaly, because things tend to do better in December. But our average cost of sale continues to go down. The amount of sales we're getting goes up; our overall sales are going up. So it's just like money in the bank. I recommend going back and listening to episode 147.

And for the meantime I can gloat that my episode is ranking above Dave’s even though obviously, the writing is on the wall that Dave’s episode 205 is going to catch up. But listen to both of them, and compare notes and see what you think. And then go back and let us know what you think on the show notes for those episodes.

All right, guys, we are down to the top two. No more PPC, the next one here is actually the oldest podcast on the list. This was something I would have before looking at this list would have expected to see more of. I would have expected to see more podcasts from earlier in the year or even 2017 continuing to stay on the list. But it's cool seeing an oldie but goodie on here, March of 2018, episode 129, how to pick the perfect product. And in a lot of ways this is a module right out of our building a seven figure brand course out of EcomCrew Premium, or maybe the how to import from China module. This is a course or an episode of the podcast I recorded before even doing any of the courses for EcomCrew Premium.

This is something I think that if I can help teach anybody anything, this is probably an episode to go back and listen to over and over again. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, a lot of mistakes in e-commerce after selling now 10s of millions of dollars of the stuff cumulatively through e-commerce. You learn a lot about the types of products, the types of things that you want to be doing that puts you in the best position for success, products that have consumability, that don't have a long shelf life, that aren't easily broken in transit, that don't weigh a whole lot and not like super oversized, where it's expensive to ship, at least that's under 70 pounds so you can use something like UPS or FedEx, an audience of people that are passionate. There's a direct interest group on Facebook, all kinds of things like that are discussed in this episode.

Episode 129 of the EcomCrew podcast was the second most downloaded podcast in 2018. I can understand why this was and doesn't surprise me. I think that if I had to pat myself on the shoulder or the back, or whatever, for a really good episode, I think that this is one of them. And again, I'm pretty critical of myself. But I think that there's a lot to learn here. And people keep on falling in the same traps of trying to create a market for a product. That's something that people don't even know that they want. Or you have to convince them that they want it and they aren't searching for it and other types of mistakes like that or trying to sell a product that people aren't passionate about, or that has a short shelf life, low margin, all these different mistakes that people make that I see come through, especially with Premium members.

And it breaks my heart because it's so easy to avoid. You can get — there's people making tons of money off of products like that. And I'm somewhat of a hypocrite because our biggest business is a boring industry that I wouldn't even get into these days, which is the ice pack stuff. I wouldn't recommend getting into that. Now, does it make us money? Yes, but does it put us in the best chance of success moving forward or if I was to start over from scratch on day one with a business like that? Probably not because it isn't consumable, and it's not something people are passionate about. It's not something that I can do any Facebook advertising for. There aren't any repeat purchases.

ColorIt, we have a 45% repurchase rate. That's a stat that I want to see. IceWraps, I'm too embarrassed to even mention what it is. But literally 45% of our customers make a second purchase or more. It's a six stat. It's just unbelievable. When I was talking to someone about it recently, they made me take a screenshot and prove it to them because they're like that can't be possible. But it is because it's something people are passionate about advertising to the right audience. Once they have our product, they love it; they go buy more of it. There's a whole bunch of stuff about this in episode 129. Definitely go back and listen to that one. That was our second most downloaded episode for 2018.

All right, we need to get the drum roll sound effect out and talk about the number one most downloaded episode of 2018, the all star of all, all stars, episode 167. Overcoming serious beginner mistakes was another Under the Hood episode. It makes me proud to see an Under the Hood episode be the number one downloaded thing of the year. It makes me feel like doing this was all worth it. I feel like we've gotten better and better at this segment as time has gone on.

As I learn so much about our listeners and things that they're having trouble with and how to do the format of this. It's been awesome. And it makes me a little almost emotional seeing this at the top of the list because I hope that the thousands and thousands of people who have listened to this episode got just as much out of it as the person who was kind enough to come on and do this episode with us. And hopefully, obviously there's a lot of beginners probably listening to this or people that are maybe intermediate, and hopefully we were able to help navigate some of those things for them, the number one episode of 2018.

And what a year it's been folks. I've mentioned it time and time again. I want to thank you guys so much for listening to the EcomCrew Podcast. Again, we put this content out for free to give back to the community. The only way that we get any satisfaction out of this is the people that I’ve met by doing the podcast, it's open up the doors to everyone I met in the e-commerce industry. It's amazing from people like Steve Chou, Scott Voelker, and Greg Mercer who I have gone on to do 5 Minute Pitch with which has been awesome, to people like Ezra Firestone, and people like X, who was on the podcast here this year in the top 10, Chris who was in the top 10, Dave Huss who was in the top 10, people just randomly walk up to me.

Like for Dave Huss, I never would have met him if it wasn't for the podcast. He's like, oh, I listen to your podcast. And we became instant friends. Being able to speak at places like Global Sources, at Retail Global, Ecommerce Fuel Live, Ecommerce All Stars, Rhodium Weekend, all these things that have opened up the doors for me this year, it's been amazing. So I get paid back in that way. People ask us all the time, there must be some ulterior motive. And I promise you that is it. It's been amazing. That is about the best that any kid can hope for. And if you want to help repay, give us a shout out on iTunes, go leave a review. That's something you can do for free.

That helps us out more than you know. Those reviews have helped us get in the top 100 business podcasts. If it wasn't for you guys taking the time to go do that, we wouldn't be there. And the only way we can stay there is if you go take a minute, help us out here as a New Year's present, as a Christmas present, whatever you want to call it, go over to iTunes, leave a review. Whatever you got to say, I want to hear it whether it's a five stars or not. We don't get all five star reviews. The ones that aren't five stars, I take to heart and try to make better.

There's one that's funny that maybe one day I'll mention on the podcast. But we will leave that alone for today and just sign off by thanking you guys for an amazing 2018. Thank you for keeping me motivated through 100 episodes this year in 2018. We're going to hit 300 episodes in 2019, which is just a crazy milestone to be thinking about. And who knows where things are going to go in 2018 with EcomCrew, all the opportunities that have opened up for me. It's going to be interesting. I'm looking forward to sharing all that stuff and letting you guys be a part of that journey just as much as we have in 2018.

There's some really big changes coming in 2019 that I'm really excited to share. I haven't been able to talk about them quite yet, but really big changes for both EcomCrew, for Terran, for the things that we're doing here, for my wife and I, just a whole bunch of different things that are happening that are kind of developing in real time. And it's hard to talk about those things on the podcast. They kind of have to come to fruition before we can discuss them but pretty cool stuff. And again, I'm looking forward to sharing all that with you guys in 2019. If you happen to be at any event that I'm at in 2019, please come up and say hi, shake my hand. If I have time, we'll grab coffee or lunch.

If you're ever in the San Diego area, same thing goes. I almost never say no to anyone who's in the San Diego area. If there's any time on my calendar, lunch, coffee, whatever it might be. I got to meet dozens of EcomCrew listeners this year, they are people that are that are podcast listeners that happen to be either that live in the San Diego area or traveling through, lunch or coffee is always on me, it's always an honor to meet you guys.

So if you're here, please look us up, you can just email us at support@ecomcrew.com if you want to get in touch with us. We'd love to hear from you. All right guys, it's hard to sign up at the end of the year. I feel like there's so much more to say. But that's going to wrap it up. The last words of the EcomCrew Podcast as always for 2018 are going to be happy selling, and we'll talk to you soon.