[Music]
hey guys ryan here thank you for joining
me for another video
in this one i want to talk about how you
can check
if your keywords meaning your brand your
title
your bullets or your description if they
contain
bad words if they contain trigger words
words that will get your submission to
amazon merch
reject it this is all in an attempt to
keep your account
safe because if you get enough
rejections
your account will get suspended and it's
usually permanently
so you want to stay away from rejections
altogether if possible now
i'm also going to close the video by
showing you a tool
that will do automated trademark
protections because if you didn't know
you can have a listing that's been live
over a period of time
and didn't infringe on anybody's
intellectual property
and then a trademark can go live let's
just
say two years after you first sold the
product
and all of a sudden your products all of
them that include that set of keywords
that just got trademarked will get
pulled down and you'll receive
strikes against your account for it so
keeping your account safe
it's no small task and it's a challenge
that all print-on-demand sellers face
so in this video i'm gonna number one
show you how you can do
research for your new product listings
to make sure that they're going to be
safe and then part two i'm just going to
show you how you can do some maintenance
to keep your account safe
as it grows and scales over time so i'm
going to jump on my computer and we'll
get started
guys i don't know how this is working
but somehow i have a green shirt on in
front of a green screen
and there's no issues so knock on wood
that
there's not going to be any problems for
the rest of this video alright this is
part 5 of my amazon merch mini series
i'm going to show you if it's
safe or not to use specific keywords and
designs
in your amazon merch submissions because
when you submit your design if it goes
to under review
it's typically not a good thing or i
mean they all go to under review but if
it stays there
for more than a few minutes not a good
indicator unless
you're in tier 10 in which case i'm
pretty sure they all stay in under view
for a while just to make sure
that you um know the ropes and you're
not infringing or anything like that
because i think it happens a lot more
commonly in the tent here
real quick for the new listeners i'm
ryan hogue i've sold over 1.6 million
dollars on amazon including 250 000
through merch by amazon if you want to
follow the links in the description i've
got a free seven-day amazon merch mini
course
you get it gets delivered via email um
every day for over seven days
i've also got an amazon merch facebook
community i'd love to have you there we
got an active discussion going on
every day lots of discussions also i
publish passive income reports on the
first or second day of each month i'm
planning on trying to drop mine tomorrow
on july 1st for the month of june you
can follow my progress
as a amazon merch seller fba seller kdp
seller etc
each month by hitting subscribe or
joining my email list
last but not least i wrote a full amazon
merch course it's
over well it's almost 60 lectures and
it's a full knowledge transfer of
everything i've learned
over three and a half years on the
platform in tier 20 000 currently
all right let's jump back into things so
are your keywords safe to use this means
in your brand your title your bullets
your description they all get
scrutinized by the merch algorithm and
if they determine that something
is up with what you submitted it may go
to under review or may get an instant
rejection so
we want to avoid that and there's a
couple things we can do
to try to prevent any problems although
for the record short answer the only way
to really know is to hit the submit
button but we don't want to do that
blindly because our merch accounts are
valuable
and we don't want to put them at risk
all right so the first
thing i want to recommend i wrote a free
tool i call it my search merch tool now
i do want to clean up the web page
just saying that i'm planning on doing
that sometime in the near future because
it's a little bit busier than it needs
to be
essentially the search merch tool which
is completely free to use public on my
blog i'll put a link in the description
all you do is you type in your keywords
into the search bar and then you click
the button for the product type you want
to search in doing so
and by the way the niche i'm going to
use is i've gotten this question a lot
over the last month because this has
been the top selling print on demand
niche and actually this is going to
serve a really good example for this
video
i don't want to spoil anything but bear
with me so people have asked is black
lives matter
as a print-on-demand niche or as
keywords is that trademarked is it
protected is it safe so i went ahead i
typed in the keywords i clicked
search t-shirts and we got results but
what does this really mean is it safe is
it not safe it's still not telling us
much
by the way when you use my search merch
tool instead of just searching on amazon
it
filters out non-amazon merch listings
now since we're
attempting to sell through amazon merch
and we go through additional scrutiny
selling through merch than we would
selling through seller central or on
other platforms
this makes a lot of sense you know
filter out non-amazon merch listings and
just show me what i
need to see which is merch now here's
the thing you see in the top left corner
there i put a big arrow encircled
it says this is 1 through 48 of 489
results so when you see almost 500
results
to me that signifies almost always that
the niche is safe
to sell in all right but this is just
one
way of running a test all right so this
is it highlighted it again it says 1
through 48 of 489 results for black
lives matter and again we
are looking at standard t-shirts
published through amazon merch that are
live there could also be some that
aren't live
all right the other way and i would
recommend doing both of this by the way
if you're unsure then especially do both
you can go to tmsearch.uspto.gov i know
this page looks busy and it might be a
little intimidating if you've never seen
it before
but this is really where you want to
spend some time it's not even hard to
use when i say spend some time it's like
once you've done it a couple times
it takes like a minute or less just
bookmark it
so where it says search term enter your
search terms there i put black lives
matter and then i hit
submit query now uh oh that's a lot of
content here on this
on the search results page here's the
thing in that far right column right
here that i'm pointing at
you wanna check every record that's an
exact match
and that is live so
what i ended up doing and i i didn't
screenshot it here but typically what
i'll do in my web browser
if you're on windows at least i do
control f and then i type out
exactly what i searched because you can
see here that there's partial
string matches it's not just exact
matches so if you're on like amazon
advertising this would be like partial
um what they call it phrase match
there's a lot of phrase match and then
there's also some broad match that would
be included here as well we just need
the exact match
okay well also just to complicate things
a little bit more let me just put a
disclaimer out there
amazon merch's uh algorithm that
determines whether or not something is
okay or isn't okay
it's not perfect so you may be
technically on from a legal perspective
okay and it still may reject you so it's
it's a great area but for what we're
looking at here
you see uh there's five live records and
it's tough to see but
there's five that are an exact match
just black lives matter as i typed it
that have a live indicator on the right
column so i opened up
all five of those because you can't take
shortcuts you have to open up all of
them
now here's where we want to look you see
this above me here with the arrow
it says goods and services now this one
says bracelets earrings
bracelets etc etc it's basically jewelry
jewelry charms what i'm really looking
for is
t-shirts apparel something of that
nature
now this is just jewelry so what does
that mean that means we can't use it
in any jewelry all right perfect so
we're not looking to sell jewelry
anyways right now we're looking at
selling it through a amazon merch
t-shirt next record
providing information in the field of
human rights alright that doesn't say
t-shirt so we're good
next one headwear for men women and
children hooded sweatshirts for men
women adults
t-shirts for adults women men
uh oh now we've got a bit of an issue
also
i just wanted to i didn't circle it but
look at the filing date
all right i'm this is gonna be a little
bit interesting and i probably should
have swapped this slide with the
the next one but filing date june 8 2020
so people realize there's a little bit
of a gold rush here to this niche i know
it sounds bad to say
i'm not the one that's going after this
i don't sell any i don't
have any trademark attempts at this like
i'm just letting it go i'm just
reporting it to you guys right
because i know it's a little bit touchy
but june 8th someone tried to trademark
black lives matter but
the goods and services is what matters
here because clearly other people have
trademarked it as well
so we can't use it on hats i didn't put
a little cross out because
someone else it's after this okay no
this one
so here we go black lives matter filing
date june 9th
the next day all right and it says
retail clothing movies television
sticker place cards cable so
this guy is trying to also trademark it
on
even broader items but clearly we see
retail clothing that would be enough to
scare me out
also it said stickers so no stickers and
boom another one on june 8th so between
june 8th and june 9th
three attempts at trademarking it
basically on apparel this guy said
athletic apparel namely shirts
pants jackets footwear hats caps
athletic uniforms
here's the thing these are not
live like they say live but
getting a and i'm not a lawyer i do have
two in my immediate family so i know a
little bit about this plus i've been
selling print on demand for
over three years three and a half years
at this point closer to four i think
so i've been around stuff for a while
i'm not a lawyer though disclaimer
but like when you see filing date june 8
2020 and i'm recording this
on june 30th it takes quite a while to
get
trademarks live even if you are a lawyer
because it has to go through like a
period where
it's filed for opposition like people
can oppose you getting what you want to
trade market on
which clearly there's going to be a
problem because three people are trying
to get it on
t-shirts and there's also after that
like it has to go through the us
patented trademark office
it just takes time it takes a little bit
of time so it's gonna be interesting to
see what happens here
but in summary this is not safe to use
and those
489 live listings on amazon merch
whenever one of these if if
slash when any of these records get like
truly live
they're gonna get pulled down so it's
gonna be it's gonna just go like that
it's gonna disappear overnight
all right so you know whoever owns this
best seller here with 73 reviews
uh yeah that's gonna that's gonna be a
bad day you know because they're raking
it in right now
all right just wanted to also make you
guys aware that you can use merch
informers
trademark alerts so a lot of you guys
are already on merchant former this is
the most popular niche research tool for
really amazon merch specifically but
amazon merch to me is representative of
the world's largest ecommerce
marketplace so
it's like if it's selling well on merch
if it's a good niche on merch
it's probably a good niche on redbubble
etsy wherever else you want to sell so i
for me personally i always prioritized
my niche research process
on what was selling on amazon i'm not
saying you have to have merchant form by
the way i'm just saying that like if you
have it
there's also something called trademark
alerts and the way this works it's so
easy to use
you just copy paste your or type in your
uh phrase keywords whatever that you
want it to automatically search for
when you hit save it'll add it to a list
now i only added one term here but you
can add i think like up to a thousand
if not more and it'll check them every
single day against
the trademark database because like i
said you might be that guy from
four slides back selling the best seller
black lives matter t-shirt and all of a
sudden your
best seller's just wiped out and that's
a strike against his account as well but
if he
has this alert he may get alerted hey
you need to delete that shirt
immediately because
that algorithmic sweep that amazon does
is eventually going to catch it alright
last but not least i wanted to wrap this
video by just touching on international
trademarks
as of recording this video uh you cannot
publish still to the us markets it's
still frozen due to the cerveza sickness
gotta dodge the sensors but the uk and
german markets are open
so you still got to do your due
diligence with trademarks over there
because they they will still reject your
submissions if you violate them with a
weird keyword
you know i've had it happen i've had it
happen in random designs like
super random um not gonna go into what
they were but
it's like you translate it and then all
of a sudden like uk's good us is good
german market rejected you know who
knows why
all right so uh if you go to the
resource
on amazon merch by the way that's where
i took this screenshot they
link you to a couple different places
you can do trademark checks for
united states uk germany i just wanted
to show you that if you go to the uk if
you're publishing to uk
click that link um i believe i clicked
the first one uk ipo
and then click services search for
trademark then go to right here above me
keyword phrase or image
from the next screen this is basically
the equivalent of that landing page for
the uspto
tmsearch.uspto.gov that i showed you
earlier for the united states
but where it says search words type in
your words
hit enter boom it returns very similar
results although their website's
definitely better in my opinion
um german okay so the
this link uh you may just i'll put it in
the description i guess because
i had to do some digging to get this
link the links on the merch resource
were not helpful and i had to kind of
click around for two
three four minutes just to find this
tool which is
actually what i needed and with this you
can just type in what you're searching
for
and it will return if there is anything
um again it's gonna be in german by the
way so
if you search in english there's a
chance it could be trademarked
in english but most likely no like the
way i searched was i typed in the
english word funny
because i figured that was the highest
likelihood of getting some results and i
did see some
but most of them are going to be in
german so make sure you translate
and then also i believe this is european
european union
and i think it might be a separate i'm
not i'm not a legal expert especially
not international trademarks but
this tm view you'll notice that if you
went back to the merch resource
uk and germany both had links to this so
i think this is
uh maybe a separate database worth
checking if you want to be super safe
just type in your keywords hit search
boom super easy to use super quick i'll
put a link in the
description for you actually i mean it's
also in the merch resource but
all right next time guys part six i'm
gonna go through some product design
best practices this is straight out of
the merch resources again because
we only need to go through it once after
that we know it but
it's definitely worth paying attention
to because if you can like
lock in really good best practices from
the start
like really good habits from the start
you're gonna thrive long term so we're
gonna go over the
product design best practices all right
thank you so much for watching till the
end all that i ask
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[Music]
you