If you’re like most Amazon sellers, you’re always looking for new ways to drive traffic to your listings. And while paid ads are a great way to get your products in front of potential customers, there are a number of other things you can do to bring traffic to your Amazon store. In this episode, we have Norman Farrar AKA The Beard Guy, to show how to unlevel the playing field and what are the prerequisites in driving external traffic. With a little effort, you can soon see a significant increase in the amount of external traffic coming to your site. Don’t rely solely on PPC – explore other options and see what works best for you.
Topics Covered in This Episode
- About Norman Farrar
- How to Create the Ultimate Traffic Blitz
- Prerequisites to Driving External Traffic
- The Types of External Traffic
- How to Unlevel the Playing Field
- External Traffic Best PRactices
- Question & Answer
Watch on YouTube
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Podcast Transcription
[00:00:00] Do you want your product seen by more buyers on Amazon, Etsy and other marketplaces? Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen, converting and profiting fast. With your host, former top 50 seller on all of Amazon
[00:00:29] the Professor Howard Thai, this is the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked. Hello everyone, thank you for joining today. Today, we have Norm with us. Thank you so much Norm for joining us today. Hey, it’s my pleasure. Awesome. And thank you Howard for being there always. I’m always here. All right. Awesome. So Norm, we would love to have a small introduction of your side.
[00:01:02] Like, how did you get into this eCommerce space and then Amazon space? Oh, I’ve been in the eCommerce space since the nineties and it was a complete fluke. I, I was doing some promotions for a Fortune 500 company. And they wanted to get into the ECom space. They wanted to do some, co-op have their logo match their distributors.
[00:01:24] So they asked us if I could do it and had knew nothing about it said yes. And all of a sudden, I’m thrown into the game. And all other Fortune 500 companies or other companies were seeing what was up there. And they asked if I could help them out. So that’s what happened. And that led me to a bunch of other things, which ended up, led me.
[00:01:44] My father actually asking me if I would help with a promotion of a new product in his company, which led to opening up two factories in Taiwan, which was a whole new experience. Then we came back to the US and opened up
[00:02:00] a variety of different facilities. But all of this led to understanding Amazon. And being able to go to a conference back in 2013 or 14, and just trying to get my head around it, understanding Ecom at that, that at the end, understanding manufacturing and fulfillment and all that other stuff, but then applying it over to Amazon.
[00:02:22] So it was a, it was a fairly easy transition for me, but it, I mean, it’s tough if you’re not already in the game, to just understand it because there’s so many elements that you need and you can’t be an expert in everything. Let me go over what we kind of me, Zeeshan and Norm were talking about before we went live.
[00:02:46] Actually the reason why we have here, we have like Signalytics and EcomFleet is because Zeeshan represents us in the Pakistan side. So he has a big audience. He’s a big influencer. He’s actually a teacher over there. He used to teach a lot of the community in Pakistan. So he has a lot of students that are actually part of the, the top, you know sellers, uh, or, you know, we call it like virtual assistant, but I like to call ’em like, you know, executive assistant, but then, also like, also those freelancers and stuff, he trains up from the bottom up.
[00:03:20] So, uh, that’s, that’s a reason why we, some, some people might not know that that’s the reason why you see both of us on here. So for my side, the audience is probably more on the Western side. But so the top three, if you guys, a lot of our audience here might have saw Marketplace Pulse says that the top three sellers actually worldwide Pakistans right now currently rank number three.
[00:03:44] So it’s something that is very interesting because we’ve been doing this for a while now, and it’s getting more and more popular on our Pakistan side that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s good. Good, good to look into how it is actually like the move that we’re making is actually paying off. Cause we are actually based in Pakistan and office in Pakistan and we do the RPO recruitment process outsourcing.
[00:04:09] So what we do is actually we go in to Pakistan and we find the best, the most elite talent in Pakistan, and we hire them and they stay at our office. So it’s part of the team. And then we just make sure we train them as well as we outsource it. You know, clients comes in and we get actually them to, you know, hire them through us and they just, how we train them and we make sure that everything’s all right.
[00:04:35] If any of the clients is like, you know, employee that they hire through us leaves, we actually would supplement them with another employee right off the bat and with all the training and stuff. So it’s not like they leave and they have to retrain and stuff like that, things like that. We try to accommodate.
[00:04:51] And that’s, that’s why we have us here on the podcast together as well as that’s the reason why we we’re in Pakistan. And we talk about Pakistan so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Howard, for, for, for the awesome introduction. So basically, we have been doing this for almost one year now and we have like successful talent coming in and we have been training them and we are making them super, super talented.
[00:05:22] So that’s what lead goes within us. And now back to the topic Norm. Oh, I was supposed to bring a topic yeah. Okay. Alright. I did create a presentation if you wanted me to present that. And I just, if I could share my screen yeah, for sure. Or I could just talk to it either way. Yeah. The, the slides would be a lot better.
[00:05:48] Okay. So if I’m, I’m just gonna share my screen. Yeah. Just gimme two seconds. I’ve just gotta set it up on my other monitor. So today I, I, I wanted to talk about external traffic. I, I don’t know why. But a lot of Amazon sellers E-com sellers are afraid of external traffic. I, I have no idea why people don’t do it.
[00:06:11] Very few people actually do it. And very few people do it well. So I’m gonna show you just different types of external traffic and what to do and how to do it. Now, first of all, it’s the basics. We’ve already gone through that. So I’m gonna tell you about the prerequisites, the types of external traffic, how to unveil unlevel, the playing field, and then kind of the best practices as they go through this.
[00:06:36] One of the first things that you have to do, and you might roll your eyes when you hear this, but you have to understand your audience and then you have to build out a persona and persona, all I mean is if you’re stuck in an elevator or walking down the street with somebody and somebody starts talking, you have to know who this person is.
[00:06:58] And in this case, this is Isabel. And we can go through, you know, her goals, the Demora, the demographic, she’s female, she’s 33. She has pretty high skills. We talk about her, her motivations. We talk about a variety of different things, her backgrounds, her frustrations. And one way, Howard, I don’t know if you’ve, you know, this or I just found out about this.
[00:07:26] There’s an app that you can get for LinkedIn called Krystal with a K. And if you subscribe to that, it will tell you all this when you’re talking to your customers and there’s another app out there that can help you out called Sparktoro. But anyways, this is so important. And if you can do this and you can nail these people, it’s, it’s not just one persona.
[00:07:54] You might have five personas or 10, but if you nail down that one or two and you do it really well, that’s the very first thing. Also, you don’t wanna waste your time if you don’t have the listing. I know we’re not here to talk about, you know, a proper optimization of your listing, but this is, this goes well beyond just having the images, the title, the bullets, the backend, the meta tags and the, all of that stuff.
[00:08:26] This goes on to, you know, testing out your pricing coupons, how to get frequently bought together, adding your question, Q and As, having reviews. And it’s also testing out Amazon’s internal tools to make sure that it is optimized the most optimized listing as possible. And for example, under inventory, you can go to improve listing quality, and it’s gonna show you a dropdown of how you can improve your listing.
[00:08:58] And you can just walk through it. Actually, if you go to the far right, it’s gonna have a dropdown and there’ll, there’ll be a, I, I think it could be one to five different suggestions. Some are terrible, but a lot of them, oh, okay, if I just tweaked this, it’ll be great. Inventory planning. So managing your inventory health.
[00:09:20] That’s also will pay a big part in this, that you have high quality health, also just your overall health performance. Those are important things. One of the other areas is Managing Product Documents. That’s back in the inventory module. Very few sellers are doing this. And I don’t know why, because this allows you to upload instructions or guides or text backs, all these different things that we were trying to send out to people with our, you know, email sequence, at least back in the day, we used to do three emails.
[00:09:55] Now, you know, if you customize it, they’re saying don’t send out a PDF. Well, this allows you to give all of that information on your listing. And one of my favorites is growth opportunities. So you’ll see a growth tab, click Growth Opportunities. And in the bottom left of this slide, I wanted to show this because what this is showing is that if I added A+ content to this, it could increase my sales by over $10,000 a month.
[00:10:25] So there’s sometimes you’ll see $400 or a thousand. I went into a, a new client and I checked out just by, just by working with this, we could improve their, their overall sales by about $30,000 a month. So just playing around with it, some things are obvious and some, some things aren’t, but then Brand Analytics.
[00:10:50] So now let’s just move on. I wanted just to make sure that you do do this and you have your listing as optimized as possible. So you don’t waste money. But now for traffic and Howard’s gonna, you know, he, he can probably the amount I’ve talked about it. He could probably do this spiel, but my favorite tool.
[00:11:09] Above all right now is Google Business Profile. Google business profile could be found at business.google.com and it allows us to instantly index for, for keywords or for your shoppable brand links. I’ll get into it in a second. One thing I, one thing I wanna say is usually when I talk about Google My Business, which is now called Google Business Profile, I get lots of comments coming back saying, no, you’re wrong.
[00:11:42] You can’t do it. This is only for a brick and mortar, and I have to keep going back and forth and saying, no, you have to open up a brand account over at Google. It’s very similar. In fact, it is pretty much the same thing, but a brand you don’t have to. I mean, it, it looks the same. But it’s typically like it’s for brands.
[00:12:04] You don’t have to, you don’t have to have an address. You can just unclick the address button and it will ask you to put in your brand and your images and it will rank them. I’m gonna talk a little bit more about this on the next page. So when you, when you do, or when you create a Google business account, one of the big things that I like is that it, it will add a full three swipe.
[00:12:33] What am I trying to say? It will show you three swipes before you get to number two, you cannot be number, number two, three or four on, on a search page. If you have a relevant listing, you can only be number one. And I don’t know about you, but if I take up three pages of real. I think that that’s a winner, you know?
[00:12:56] So anyways, this is one thing that you could look at it. Also, people are familiar with Google My Business or Profile over on a desktop. It’s always over on the right hand side. And there’s so much information that you can add. And like I was saying, adding brands is one thing, you can add the categories, you can add the images.
[00:13:18] Now, listen, this is crazy. You don’t have to have an image with your keyword going just over to your product listing. You can create one that goes over and ranks over to your shopping page or your Amazon shop. Or you can have it over Walmart, or you can have it over to a Shopify page. So all of these images are shoppable and will get indexed under Google images.
[00:13:45] And if it’s relevant and you’re starting to sell. Then what’s happening is that you will be able to be found and Google loves everything that you publish. So you’re not only going to be able to put post or, or pictures up there. You’re gonna be able to post and you can add as much information or as little information as you want.
[00:14:13] It’s all gonna be in this dashboard. The dashboard can look a little intimidating, but it’s not. It’ll be on the left hand side. I just didn’t have room to put it, but it’ll tell you. Here’s your profile. Add this, add that, add a post. And all you do is just follow it, fill in the blanks. And the more, the more you put in the better it becomes, you’ll also have an optimization chart to show how far you’ve done.
[00:14:40] If you’re a hundred percent in this case, our, our business profile was only 65%. This is what they look like. If you go out there, these are a couple of posts that we put out and it’ll look like this. It’ll come out, it’ll show across the top and you can either order online. And this is a post, okay, this is one of the images and you can order online and you can just be indexed immediately.
[00:15:14] We’ve all seen them. It’s across the carousel, across the top. It’s really great. And then underneath it, it’ll say more about, and then you drop down and it’ll have all that information about your products. Google will also reward you with clickless searches. So a lot of us in the SEO game, I’ve been in SEO since the nineties.
[00:15:35] And, you know, we work hard to build up and get, drive traffic to a keyword. Well, Google’s more, more, they’re looking for relevance. It’s not so much the keyword, but if it’s relevant. If you’re writing a, an article, or if you’re putting out a post that’s a relevant source, Google will see it and start giving you clickless searches.
[00:16:01] So in this case, a Damascus knife, they might see that it’s a Damascus sushi knife or carving knife, or eight-inch knife or layered steel or hammered. And all of a sudden you’re ranking for stuff that you had no idea, and you would’ve paid thousands of dollars to rank for. And it’s just, it, it could be endless content.
[00:16:23] So you can go in here and you can add photo after photo after photo. If you’re getting user generated content back from influencers, you can post it the second you post it, it is going to be it, it will be ranked. It’ll be indexed. You can add special offers. The what’s new could be a product launch, or it could just be a regular post.
[00:16:46] You could do posts on your products for me, with my podcast, I put out a regular event. And when, when Google sees it an event, it ranks it. I, I don’t know why, but it loves events and it’ll rank you sooner and faster. So let’s say that you are doing more external content. Let’s say you might, maybe you’re doing a podcast or you’re doing a live stream.
[00:17:11] You can put it here at it and it will publish it for you and index it immediately. And you’ll have it ranked Google my business. If you’re not doing it or Google business profile, check it out. And the good news about this is it’s free. And if anybody tells me it doesn’t work, I’ve got case study after case study of after case study.
[00:17:31] That will tell you you’re wrong. Now talking about just simple things, Howard, don’t roll your eyes. Inserts. Inserts is still a huge way to gain external traffic if you’re just driving people back because you want them to join your loyalty club. Okay. That’s fine. You know, there’s different ways to get more traffic or, or, or more signups.
[00:18:00] It might be, you know, for us, for example, when we put in this, we’ll put in a dynamic QR code, which we can change to the season, which that way it looks like we’re targeting the audience a little bit more, a little bit better. We can add a sample or, or not. We can add a free product and extended warranty giveaways.
[00:18:20] You can also do partnerships with strategic partners. So I sell soap. I might do something with it. It might be with an essential oil company, something along those lines. But what you can do with that is now you have the power to drive traffic over to the people that sign up. But then create a referral program to get people to push your product and you’ll give them a point.
[00:18:48] And after that we have, we provide a large gift or a large contest where it could be, what are they called? Air max pros. They cost about $300 here in Canada. We’ll, we’ll give that away with something else. And all of a sudden, now we’re getting more and more people. Now, if we, we find that you have to be careful here because you’ll get people who have no loyalty to your brand, or they don’t want to have a bar of soap.
[00:19:17] They just want to enter for the, the, the pro the max pro. So you can change that around and offer a gift set within your product range. Like it could be your brand products. It could be a collaboration of strategic partners, but something that’s worth a lot that you think people within that, that you’re going to email will start driving traffic back over. This works.
[00:19:41] It’s really effective. We’ve been able to get, this might not seem a lot, but just with our pod podcast, we’ve been able to do this, get thousands of entries. And I think the last time we had, or sorry, we had 7,000 people see it 720 people fit our demographic and they entered. So we got 700 new listeners. Social media.
[00:20:09] I don’t know about the both of you, but creative copy and engagement cannot be one person. I think you can get two out of three, but I’ve never found a person that could be all three. And if you do Howard, I mean, you know, you know, tons of people, Zeeshan, if you know anybody, let me know,
[00:20:30] cuz I’ll hire them immediately, but I’ve never found anybody that can do both or all three it’s engagement that is, that will get you everything here for us.
[00:20:42] What we do is we provide value. We go to groups, we listen to the tone of the group. We start finding out who’s like, who’s the influencers within the group will respond and go back and forth with these people. And as we’re adding and as we’re growing, now these people are seeing, oh wow. Who’s, you know, who’s this new person in the group and they’ll come and like our page.
[00:21:10] And then we can start targeting them on, on like, if we’re doing any other types of campaigns. But once they like our page, they’re coming over to our group. They’re participating in our group, even within our page or, sorry, I’m talking about our group. So let’s say we have a group that drives over some traffic.
[00:21:29] Once we trap them onto our page, then it’s still value. We have multiple layers of different quality or quantity and content types that go onto our Facebook page. And it’s similar over on the group. Like we might add a full post or a press release or something, but it’s never promotional. Even when I, I start out a Facebook page, I have it where I’m putting a lot of content.
[00:21:57] 10, 20 high quality pieces of content before I’ll even launch the page. I want people to look at like, it’s consistent that the, the, the, the posts are new, they’re not old. And that it’s something that they wanna be part of, just think of what you would wanna be. Part of this could be the single biggest thread for your traffic, and to find people who can eventually buy your product, be repeat customers, become influencers and be brand ambassadors.
[00:22:32] And I’m gonna get into that a little bit later on because it’s another great way to do this. One of the reasons I try to get involved with social media is that I can be an authority and there’s a variety of different ways. I’m a micro brand. I, no matter what you do on Amazon, you’re a micro brand.
[00:22:54] People don’t know you or you’re driving traffic over to your, your Amazon listing. And people have no idea who they are. How do they trust you? They’re gonna find the first red flag and not buy from you because they already don’t trust you. Once they go onto the internet and they see that you have consistency, like a nice brand, it’s consistent.
[00:23:18] It doesn’t look like it’s scammy. Then that builds trust. If you’re doing it for a longer period of time, you’ll see that it builds authority. And you have to understand this audience because it’ll save you so much money. One of the things I want to talk about too, is when you go onto social media, many sellers forget about their brand.
[00:23:41] You wanna be brand consistent. You wanna post with your colors, you have a certain font. You might have templates for different types of content. And this helps people just look like you’re a higher perceived value. It’s not a process that can just be rushed. You can go out there. If you want a hundred thousand likes or a hundred thousand followers, I can get them for you, but they’re gonna be cheap, crappy likes, or follows.
[00:24:07] And it’s gonna be people that don’t engage. We want engagement. And to give you an example, we, we, I’ve just launched a mindfulness product, like a spiritual product, and we’ve been building and building and building content for a long time. But within the last three months, we have 5,000 likes. And these are people that are engaged.
[00:24:29] People who like our product, which is so key. If they, if you build it, they will come. And that is true. Now, right now, video is probably the most popular form, followed by an image, followed by copy or just, you know, straight copy. Now 480 times more effective than a photo. Believe it or not. That’s why TikTok and Reels are the number one and two social media platforms to work with right now.
[00:24:59] So TikTok is very, depending on your audience is, is great. Reels is great. They’re both video. They rely heavy on video, but the others, like in Facebook or in, in the straight Instagram, I mean, you don’t have to stop there. But you don’t wanna stretch yourself out where you’ve got Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest. Find the one or two that really fit your audience.
[00:25:28] And then start working that one you’ll you’ll you’ll end up becoming an expert in that rather than becoming an expert in none. And I still, although a lot of people are kind of moving away from Facebook advertising and going over to more Google or over to TikTok. I still have huge groups in Facebook that I love and we engage with.
[00:25:52] And if I wanna launch a product, I mean, I can automatically launch a product without even thinking. So constant posting is also the thing, if you’re gonna post for during your launch and never post again, first of all, people are gonna look at it. I don’t know about you, but when I’m posting or if I’m looking at a group and I see that there’s no post, I’m not too interested in being part of that group.
[00:26:16] And I just click on or don’t get, I don’t accept the invite. This will impress you. I think we have to find, I don’t wanna call it bait, but we have to find something to bring people back and build up your followers. You have to do that. You have to have a hook and most people just give you motivational quotes that nobody cares about.
[00:26:41] And. You know, or questions and people will, or polls. Okay, that’s fine. But think outside the box, go to somebody who is creative, you know, let them use their thought process rather than if you’ve never done this, trying to do it on your own. This is not the time to do this. I’m gonna show you something that is incredible right here.
[00:27:06] Meowingtens, meowingtens, ha even before they had a product to sell, they were building followers on their Instagram count. And what their hook was is that they were giving out and illustration a day and people were loving it and they it’s all cat crazy. Now they have products that they sell.
[00:27:26] They’ve built out a product, a product on Amazon, Shopify over on Etsy. And look it if you’ve got a 720,000 followers, you think it would be tough to say, Hey, we’re selling a cat calendar. You know, would you like it? This we, and it features Milton the cat. So there’s Milton, Milton, the cat, the everybody who signs up on their newsletter gets a cat one, one cartoon a day.
[00:27:58] They have a artist that creates one cartoon every day. And people love it to the extent that you might have seen Milton. Milton is the most downloadable gift on well, it’s the most long, most downloadable gift. And it’s done over 3 billion downloads right now. You’ve probably recognize ’em, but you didn’t know it was Milton, Milton, the cat.
[00:28:24] So that’s something that, you know, was built out even prior to the launch. The other thing is you have to have like with your brand. So, I put this in here, just to show you the far other side of this. I know the guy who came up with Die epic. He had no idea that his clothing, it it’s more urban style clothing.
[00:28:48] He’s an MMA fighter, but he had no idea that hundreds, if not, thousands of people would start tattooing die epic on their body. Now that’s a loyal brand. You know, nobody’s gonna sway away from your brand if they’re willing to do this. So this is crazy. Like I’m not, I, I love the guy. I’m not gonna put die epic on my body, but he’s able to do it.
[00:29:13] So this is something that generates traffic, social media ads right now with Google or with Facebook ads, you know, we’ve got a few issues with it. If you have an audience that’s already built, or if you, if you build a lookalike audience, it’s much easier to target and to use Facebook ads. Very interesting.
[00:29:41] We had a, a Facebook ad expert on, and he was talking about setting up lookalike audiences and he was saying that he’s no longer having to really narrow it down and drill it down. He does much more of a, a broad audience and he’s getting great results because Facebook’s picking it up, algorithms picking it up and kind of fine tuning.
[00:30:03] I’ve never heard of this, except for about three days ago when I interviewed the guy, I that’s what he was saying. I’ve never experimented with that. I still narrow it down. I know exactly who my audiences are. And one thing, and I, I don’t know if you guys could back me up on this, but if I have a small budget and I’m split testing it, and one ad’s working, that’s great.
[00:30:26] I don’t throw huge money at it. I build it around 20% every week, maybe just to make sure that, you know, we’re grabbing it, that there’s not just that there’s just not a high frequency of the ad being seen and you’re just wasting your money. So I usually build it out, build it out, build it out again. You know, it’s not a, just a fast, you know, one time, oh, this ads working.
[00:30:51] Let’s try it out. And it’s always testing, testing, testing. Toss another favorite. We’re doing a lot of TikTok ads right now. Their ad platform is a spark ads. We work with influencers, the influencers give us the authorization code that we can use their ads. And then while they’re promoting it, if we ask them to, we can also promote it on our site, very easy.
[00:31:16] They have the TikTok creator app and it allows you to go find the influencers and just get them to start working with you. They range from free all the way up. Couple of other platforms that people aren’t dealing with too much. We’ve talked about it for years as Pinterest. And I think you’re gonna hear more and more about it in the coming years, but your average do your, the, it has the highest average order value.
[00:31:47] So on Pinterest, it outperforms every one of the other social media platforms for order value. And it also has a very specific demographic and that for the most part it’s it’s, if you’ve got something that’s more artsy craft worthy and it targets women, Pinterest is your account. And that could be changing any day.
[00:32:11] And Reddit’s also another one. I know Reddit is a great ad platform. I’ve never used it. I wanted to mention it because I’ve heard so many people in the industry that are using red Reddit and getting great returns or that oh yeah. Okay. And then the bonus is Sparktoro, check it out. You’ll be able to dive into your competitors, find out who their influencers and the demographics are.
[00:32:39] So it makes finding that audience really easy. There’s a training video. It’s six minutes long by Rand Fishkin. you’ll be an expert after you watch the video. So six minutes outta your life, you’ll learn how to do this, and you’ll be able to target traffic a lot easier. So there is, I still Google, Google ads, Bing, I haven’t been doing Yahoo, but Yahoo is definitely an, an, a platform that you should be looking out at.
[00:33:07] They have their own sites that they’re working with and they’re getting some big traffic. And I don’t know if this is a hundred percent, but I believe WhatsApp, the advertisements that are seen on WhatsApp are also through Yahoo. I, I believe that’s what I heard. But as for Google, Google is the easiest one and they’ve make it super easy now to, to work with.
[00:33:31] And they’re coming out with a new form of ad, which should be coming out within the month. That is gonna make it, even from what I heard, your ads are gonna perform, if the number was correct, 30% better. It’s a, it’s a performance, it’s a new performance ad. And then Bing takes up about 20% of sales if you want to target them.
[00:33:55] So I’ll talk very briefly on this, but if you’re not doing gift guides, you’re missing out on huge business. We had one product that is on wire wire cutter, and we never know when they run their promotion, but when they do run their promotion, each, this is an eight figure brand. But every time they run it, our sales go up on Amazon a hundred thousand dollars for the month, just because they, we have no idea what they’re running the ad.
[00:34:21] And all of a sudden it’s there. We get a hundred grand. We say, thank you. And it was free. And then like gift guides, people get mixed up on gift guides. A lot of them, you can just either enter contact them. Some are, many of them are free. They’re either. Like just think of any of your TV networks. It could be that it could be Oprah.
[00:34:42] It could be a niche magazine like field and stream or any niche magazine, like cosmopolitan or bizarre or any of those wired. And you can also, like, I, I took a look over here at the pet image. I took that from a, a pet gift guide and there there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And they’re all easy to find.
[00:35:08] You just have to go into Google type in whatever the gift guide name is or gift guides for Christmas gift guides for the holidays, gift guides for pets, for dogs, for a specific breed of dog, and some are global. Some are national, some are state, local, general, specific niche. Get into gift guides. They can generate a lot of business.
[00:35:32] They don’t guarantee anything and some you have to pay for, but it’s, it’s a great way to get some extra exposure and traffic. All right. So I, I, I like press releases. I like them so much. I bought a press release company. I wanted to show this. I did a, a presentation for Kevin King on August 13th, 2019 in helium 10 elite.
[00:35:57] And I wanted to show that press releases not only are effective, but they, they can lo they can last, depending on the quality of what you’re talking about, the content and the service that you’re using. As of today, I looked and guess what? As of yesterday, that bully stick, press release is number three.
[00:36:26] And there’s multiple, there’s still multiple different listings for that press release from different companies on. And now that’s, that was June 11th, 2018. It was published August 13th. I wanted to prove a point and August, uh, or sorry in June this year, 2022. It’s still on page one. So the other thing is I talked about, you know, the different types.
[00:36:57] Now this was a good press release with fairly good distribution. There’s three types online press releases, which are usually cheap. And we’ll get you very little exposure. Social media press releases usually have their online. They go to many online media outlet to usually pay for what you get. It could be a $40.
[00:37:16] It could be a $300 press release. They go out to different media outlets, search engines. It could be out to different influencers or reporters, but it’s also a lot of social sharing. Then you have the traditional press release and I would take that probably from a 500 to a $3,000 press release and the press release.
[00:37:42] If you’re looking at launching a business or at something that’s really important, this is the one that I would choose. If I’m launching a product, I would do multiple social media press releases. If I’m doing something that I want people’s attention to gain authority, I use a traditional press release because it could go out to as many as 5,000 different outlets.
[00:38:03] It goes to periodicals. It goes to trade magazines. You can, you can focus in on a very specific area or region, but they usually get the best results. And they usually have a much wider influencer or blogger network, usually a proprietary network that they use and it’s expensive. But again, if you’ve got a great brand, why wouldn’t you want to use something expensive to get that, that authority?
[00:38:32] And I’m imagine this we’re talking for a global press release. You like for social media, press releases, you know, anywhere a good one between a hundred or three hundred, same thing over here. What would you pay for a global press release, a traditional press release. Let’s say it’s $1,500. That’s gonna stick around. It’s gonna show that you have authority.
[00:38:58] I it’s nothing really to pay. If you’ve got a, a half good brand, like I’m talking about, if you’ve got sales of maybe 20,000 or more, you can see the difference and it sticks. Now, why bother? Well, they’re nationally syndicated. They’re inexpensive. They have incredible reach authority. And if you have communities of 350,000 or less, you publish a press release.
[00:39:26] And all of a sudden you become number one on not one, but any word keyword combination, pretty much overnight that you want in a geo targeted area. It’s so easy. If you take a look at your Amazon sales and find out where they’re coming from, then you’ll know where to target and you can start doing press releases over there.
[00:39:51] It, it’s not that people won’t see them in other parts of the country, but it will target. And you’ll get just a quick ranking, very quick ranking. It’s almost too easy. So this is something that I, I I’ve used a number of times. This is my listing. I number one, number two, this is another one. Okay. Look at this 2016, the press release is still there.
[00:40:17] Then another press release. And then we’ve got Amazon, the three, like number five, six, and seven are images of my product, the number eight and nine USA today. Not shabby. There’s Pinterest, Facebook, American Christian store. I don’t know how they got that. Maybe it’s a press release, KSW, dog scape and Pinterest.
[00:40:39] Those are all mine. Can you imagine by building up authority, uh, to, to specific keywords, you can do this and now circle back and use Google my business and link all of this. So you have a link. It’s your anchor, it’s your anchor URL. And that’s how you get to do this. You have Google reindex it, and now you have a page that looks like this.
[00:41:05] I’m gonna go through this very quickly, but the anatomy, you have to know what the anatomy of a press release is. So the very first thing is you have to have a very specific title that’s newsworthy, and that can fill in Google’s gonna, Google is going to index your title and they’re gonna do every mix, max that you can think of.
[00:41:26] I could end up with, you know, 300, 400 different combinations. So writing the title is very important. The summary, this is what all the writers on Twitter will pick up on. Or if you using HARO, help a reporter out, that’s what they’re gonna look at. And, and that’s what they’re gonna see if they’re interested in for us, we use video, but a lot of people don’t use video, but then we have our links.
[00:41:53] We don’t do a lot of anchor links at all anymore, except for learn about neuroscience. And then we have a raw link that we put in there. So, okay. There’s the links. And then we have the logo. You wanna fill all this in? We’ve had people that have come to us that didn’t want to be identified, or they didn’t want to add their email.
[00:42:15] What the heck are you using this for? If you don’t wanna be identified, like this is how you get the sales, then you have all your, your social media, and this is your YouTube channel. One of the bonuses here is create a video. It could be a talking head about what you’re talking about here in plain English and add that in and that’ll get extra exposure too, and then you can add usually about four images and you don’t wanna put anything that has a social or discount code.
[00:42:47] So for the one that we just recently did. This was, this was in a 24 hour period. We had 216 keywords ranked on Google. 180 were ranked on the page first page and 121 were ranked number one. Now I have to tell you that most of these were horrible, ugly long tail keywords, but we had some really good ones too, that were two or three words long
[00:43:17] That made complete sense. But you’re doing this not. I’m trying to, I’m trying to just get exposure out there. So for this, for example, here’s some stats that we got back and we had 300 and 300 around 3 30, 300 people visit our site from this combination, which, not bad. We had a potential reach of 124 million, and we had 110 pickups on this one.
[00:43:46] This was one of our smaller PRs. We got a list of the influencers, where they were and how many hits we got per page. And then here’s everything that we had for this one. So this was for a PC ad company. This was actually a lot more, I think they had 1200 hits on this one that were ranked in 72 hours on Google.
[00:44:13] I don’t know it was a crazy amount on page one, but they got it all. And as you can see, not all of these are really good. So content marketing, I’m almost done this content marketing can also be a huge, it’s all content marketing, everything I’ve told you so far, but most people think of it just blog articles.
[00:44:34] Well, blog articles, you just don’t write. Neil Patel always says, if you can’t write the best, don’t put it out there. Because nobody’s interested, they’re looking for the best. So you can use artificial intelligence like Jasper or phrase or word, but I still use a human touch. I just don’t publish some people do.
[00:44:54] I don’t publish it. I want it to make sure that I, I, I use that little bit of human interaction. I generate a ton. Oh. And by the way, when I’m doing blog articles there, it’s just not a blog article. I make sure I have a subheading. I make sure I have a, a summary up top. I make sure I have a table of contents.
[00:45:16] I write the body. I, I don’t put long paragraphs. I usually have two to three sentences. I fill it up with images. Every, every few lines down or every few paragraphs down. I have a, usually if I can make a very inexpensive free video, uh, on YouTube. I’ll link it in there. And I make sure that the, the links that I’m using, I don’t even usually add a link.
[00:45:42] The only links that I’m using are the resources that I might be mentioning in the blog article. And they are 1500 to 2000 words. And I come back about every three months and add another 250 words user generated and content influencers, you know, or in your insert, ask people to tag you and you could get them into a contest or just ask them to tag you.
[00:46:06] People wanna, you know, show that they’re using your product. We get lots of content that way live streaming. That’s really popular. We’re working with a pet content or pet product company right now. They go live talking about different pet benefits. Just talking about pets, talking to pet owners. People love it, they follow it.
[00:46:27] And we’ve, I think there’s. I think they have about 180,000 emails and followers now just from doing this video content is the best. So wherever you can just do a 30 second video, it doesn’t have to be Hollywood production people. Don’t like, I don’t think people like or engage as much with Hollywood productions.
[00:46:50] Just go live and, or have somebody, you know, your influencer, go live. Talk about it with an iPhone. People love it. Have a podcast. Sorry, got a bit of a cough. The podcast is just a quick audio, you know, or if you have a video, just record the audio and publish that you can guest blog. That’s a way I was able to link.
[00:47:14] And I got a link from Dr. Phil and I saw our traffic triple, almost overnight because we got onto, we had a link into the referral directory or something like that. And it linked back to us a curated content. Very easy to do. I could go outside for a few minutes, come back with a month word of curated content using something like buffer or social sprout, or post planner, very easy eBooks and surveys and contests.
[00:47:47] Perfect. If you’ve got something suitable for a newsletter, use an app like paperli. So it’s PA, paper.li, li I believe. And you can curate the newsletters in about five minutes. It’s so easy. Presentations when you post them and you, when you post them either through Google My Business, or if you have the link in your presentation, it’ll be indexed to Google My Business and you’ll get indexed right away.
[00:48:19] Reviews are always helpful. You can, you can. We use, we’ve used an app in the past called Bonjour, and we’ve also used handwritten notes that people love. So we get more people still three years after we launch or four years after we launch a product, talking about our, what a nice touch about the, the, the, the notes.
[00:48:43] Well, we get them done 20,000 at a time in China, and they’re just generic. And then we add the person’s name. So it’s very inexpensive social posts, memes search is big and case studies. Everything that I just told you is hundreds of thousands of different ways to repurpose. You can take one thing and repurpose it a hundred different ways.
[00:49:06] Take a blog article. And as you go down and, and you have a question or you have bullet points, you could just take that snippet and repurpose that. And if you do it right, you could take a blog article and repurpose it just, just the one article, hundreds and hundreds of different ways. So it’s super easy to do.
[00:49:27] I’ve got an example over here. This is just something that we use for, this is a client of ours and he’s a, a neuroscientist anyways. Okay. We, we put it on Facebook. We put it on YouTube. We put it on Twitter. We put it. This is only three that we put it on. And then the secret sauce, the secret sauce is doing exactly that with repurposing, but you’re doing it with first creating a good quality blog article.
[00:49:58] You’re creating a video and embedding it into the blog article. You publish it, just not onto your website, syndicate it. So it goes out to a hundred different sites or, you know, 500 different sites. Once it’s published, write a press release. Within the press release. You might have a like five reasons. Why is your, your blog article?
[00:50:23] Although I don’t use a lot of that type of titling, but like something that would be more of a blog article title and something more newsworthy, you know, grass fed, bully sticks are a proven way to, I don’t know, a proven way to provide healthy digestion in elderly dogs, something along those lines.
[00:50:46] Anyways, within the body of the press release, you can link over to your blog article and you’re linking the, the one raw link I was talking about over to your Amazon listing. You’re also doing that in your blog article. So now you’ve got the power of both working the press releases, going out to either a hundred or 5,000 news outlets.
[00:51:12] And you’re kind of driving all that traffic. And as I showed you depending like some, some, when I do a product launch with a social media press release, I don’t expect traffic. I expect authority. When I am doing a high end $1,500 press release, I’m expecting some traffic mixed with that authority. So getting 3000 extra clicks onto my site, that would’ve been nice.
[00:51:36] So I link to the blog article and then I can add a video, explaining the press release, and then I publish and syndicate. So then I take it and these are all optional. I can create an audio recording from the video. I can create a video of the PR, but make it into a script. So transcribe it. There’s so many things that you can do and you can create literally hundreds of
[00:52:00] snippets out of one press release and blog. Help a reporter out is if you’re, if you’re not familiar with it, hopefully most of you are, is there are tons of people out there looking for content, and I can pretty much guarantee anybody selling anything on Amazon.
[00:52:18] There is an influencer, a blogger, a reporter, looking for content. And this is the easiest way to start building out your external traffic, because you’re going on to like, let’s say the New York times or Oprah. Okay. So you’ve got that magazine, they pick something up and they write, you know, I, I know I got something with entrepreneur once and that’s huge.
[00:52:46] They’ve got way more traffic than I could ever imagine. And I’m gonna have links coming back to whatever I want them to come back to. Now, influencer marketing. This is a whole power on its own. All I’m gonna tell you about this are some very simple things you should look for. First of all the audience, are you a TikTok audience?
[00:53:08] You know, you go through what I talked about at the beginning. I work for the, my, for the majority of the time with nano and micro influencers, micro influencers technically are under a hundred thousand people Nano are under 10,000, but even smaller, like people that have 500 or people that have even less, they usually want your product for free and they send it out.
[00:53:33] And those 250 people really know the person. So all of a sudden, you’ve got somebody working with you. I am adding, if you have the brand referral program, I’m giving them the 10%. So they’re making some money. So not only some will ask you for a fee, I might end up negotiating a flat fee and I’ll give them an ongoing commission to continue to promote the product.
[00:53:58] Now they can do this with images and videos, but I like it when they put it onto their blog. If I can find an influencer with a really great blog, or if they have a really great network, I can provide them with product. Let’s say 10 products that they can give as a contest. So these are things that you can do using influencer marketing.
[00:54:20] It doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be very simple sometimes depending on the email that you send them can, it can be tough getting them to respond. So you’ve gotta kind of figure out, you know, the personality and the way to word those emails to get them to respond. I have, I know Joe Martin is a guy that has Boxycharm.
[00:54:43] He skipped the micro and the macro. He went right to the celebrity. He went to the Kardashians and he paid the big box and he got other big influencers and. His box boxycharm went through the roof. It recently sold for $500 million to etsy. And, you know, he had the money though that he could go, I don’t know about you.
[00:55:06] I don’t have that kind of money that I can, you know, throw the dice once he had to do it multiple times and everything I’m telling you is it’s all about touchpoints. You can do one type of marketing or, you know, and just keep doing that and become an expert at it. As long as you have multiple touchpoints.
[00:55:25] And that means at least people can see it seven times so they can start recognizing your name. This one, a lot of people don’t think about. And I think this is my last one is your small, medium size businesses. The retail market, retail’s not dead. It just smells funny. You know, a lot of mom and pop stores are out there and they are truly the heartbeat of America.
[00:55:49] They’re the ones that are buying up a case at a time. They’re paying you by credit card and you, you have to pay them a wholesale. They’ll buy wholesale, but they buy case lots. It’s all up front cash. You don’t wait for anything. You have your inserts in the case, in the product. And now you’ve driven a ton.
[00:56:09] It could be hundreds, it could be thousands. It could be tens of thousands of new customers to your doorstep because of this forgotten marketplace. And it’s a huge marketplace. Now, the last thing is you could take any one or two or take 10 of these and it will not work unless you put it all together.
[00:56:36] Number one, you have to, I, I call it grooming your customer, but you have to create excellent customer service. If they’re contacting you, you’ll be on them. You get a, get on them, send them out a little bonus thing once in a while, like for us with soap, I might send out a bonus sample, you know, just it’s unexpected.
[00:56:55] Or if you’re shipping them in order, give them something they’re not expecting. For us, it might be a bottle of shampoo, like a small sample bottle. I might call around to nice my strategic partners and say, Hey, you have any samples that we could put into these orders. This one. We do this with soap artisans, and we’ll give them a different type of soap, but they’re not expecting, then we definitely wanna build that email list.
[00:57:21] We wanna work with SMS. We, if you can, you know, direct mail is also something that’s come back and you can have that VIP club. It’s not dead. It’s just, how do you work it? And you have to make sure it’s just not a dead VIP club. At the end of the day, it comes down to engagement and I call this Blitz marketing.
[00:57:43] If you can create blitz marketing, then you can create a huge external traffic blitz. So I think that’s it. There we go. Whoa. So this is a 10 of like huge information, tons of information there. So let’s take some questions. Oh, what is this? I’m an old. So what does that say? Is it a good idea to drive just external traffic on your storefront, your Amazon storefront, or your direct listing without worrying about conversion?
[00:58:21] So he’s asking to drive traffic to storefront or direct listing page. Well, it, it, it really does depend. I had a, a client who didn’t tell me that they were driving traffic with their very large six digit mailing list. And what happened, it really hurt the conversion rates. They drove 180,000 emails over to their Amazon listing and it had very low conversion.
[00:58:47] And the reason why is because they kept this, the, the, the products on their site with an added value bracelet. And so people went over there and bought instead of Amazon. So all of a sudden they ended up below a 1% conversion rate, which hurt them. You can drive it over to your store and it different people.
[00:59:10] Like I I’ve talked to Kevin King about this and he says he likes driving people over to the store. The reason for me is I I’m selling soap. I can give them the full experience of our brand. And then I might even get an order that I didn’t expect, but you can drive them over. Now, if you’re expecting a lot of tire kickers, one of the things that I would do is get a very simple landing page and you have them over you, you, you have another test quite, you’re gonna lose a lot of traffic this way, but you’re not gonna have the tire kickers.
[00:59:43] so you can ask a question or just give them more information about your product. And then if they’re interested, you could make it really difficult. Get them to add their, add their email, get a double opt in, get them to get a
[01:00:00] code that way and go over to Amazon. And this is very similar to posts. So have you guys noticed that with post it’s very hard to buy a product and the reason for Amazon post, they do the same sort of, I think it’s the same process.
[01:00:14] You see a post, you have the option, click on the logo, click on the image. When you click on the image, it goes to a carousel with all your competitors, then you click on it again, and now you can drop it down to a shoppable image. You hit the shoppable image. It goes over to the product listing where you can buy it.
[01:00:32] So that’s five times eCommerce sellers know every time you click, it’s 50% drop off at least. But what happens at the end is you have very, very high conversion rates. And that’s why you, if it’s, if it’s a smaller campaign, I don’t have a problem sending them over to my listing or storefront. If it’s a larger, I like to have that middle ground where I make it a bit more difficult for the person to buy from me.
[01:01:04] Yeah. So, so one other thing you can do, like having a landing page and just putting the buy with prime, so, right. Everyone knows if you are, if you are buying, then you are going to get it from Amazon. So this is another, another way. That’s true. Yep. What would be the best email to use for Google business profile?
[01:01:25] For example, our domain name or just the Gmail one? Yeah, they’re gonna, you have to have a Gmail name, either G suite or a Gmail name, right. I would recommend, it has to be something from, from, I believe it has to be a Gmail email. So for me, with my soap, I have Norm@, and that is the email that I’m using or, or orders at or something like that.
[01:01:55] The name of the, the name of this store, you should like, if it’s your brand, you, you can name the store, your, that you’re gonna have to verify all your information. So if they ask you for your address, don’t be afraid to put in your address. There’s, there is a button there that you can uncheck, but if you tell them to go to a post office box, or if it’s a UPS store or FedEx, you’ll get rejected.
[01:02:23] And I always have them mail me the information. So I know I didn’t answer the question, but yes, use, use whatever email that you’re gonna be using to correspond with people in your account, in your Gmail. And by the way, I don’t know if you know this, but if you put your URL or if you put your post, like whenever you post in Google, it could be a Facebook post.
[01:02:48] It could be whatever, you’ll get a link. If you create a short link and put it into the, the signature, like let’s say I post once a week, I put it in my signature. Every time I send out of my Gmail account, it, Amazon will be able to index it. So it’ll index. Every time I send something like it’ll, it’ll see activity, a lot of people don’t realize, but Google can read that link in your Gmail signature. How and where we post that press release.
[01:03:21] Okay. So Rana, the best way to do this is you find, you can do it yourself. You can go and you can spend a lot of time, money and energy going and trying to find out all of these distribution points or influencers or bloggers best way to do it is go to a company that has a distribution network.
[01:03:45] There’s a bunch out there. So you’ve got Precision, the, the Bigboy they have PR newswire. Another my company, my company’s called netfluence. We have a, a large, uh, we have those two types of press releases. There’s what’s there. There’s a lot. If you take, take a look at under PR distribution companies, you’ll be able to find them.
[01:04:10] There’s a lot of them, but make sure you don’t go for the lowest one. The lowest one will give you exactly what you pay for. I have a question really quick. I have a question. So is Google my business. I’m not really familiar with it. Is it where, when you search, like my business name and then on the right side, there’s like this company description.
[01:04:32] Yep. And all that information. I had it where my company actually moved in the, in California. And then I’m trying to edit that, that particular information. But then for some reason they won’t let me edit and they’re send postcards to verify the address yeah. To claim that, that, that, that account or editing it somehow.
[01:04:52] But then I, I couldn’t no one’s at that address, I’m not able to get that postcard or anything like that. How else would I be able to modify that or be able to be like the author already for that particular business? So you are like, you’re talking about a brand, right? You want to just have it under a brand and not like virtual. It it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s a, it’s a company.
[01:05:15] It’s a company. Okay. So it is bricks and mortar. There’s gotta be some way or somebody there that can either forward you that card, when it comes in, somebody’s gotta, it’s gonna be a code and you’re gonna punch in the code and then they’re gonna be able to transfer the ownership over to that company or change the address.
[01:05:37] It’s only that way, the postal thing. Is there any other way? when you first do it, you have an option of there was phone, I don’t even know during COVID they pretty much shut down that department. I don’t know if they’ve got it back up and running, but if you can verify over the phone, what they’ll do is they’ll they’ll, they’ll ask you something.
[01:05:58] I forget how they did it, cuz I don’t do, I only get it sent to me, but they used to have a way where you could just easily verify over the phone, but now it takes forever. Understand. Okay. Thanks. Yep. Okay. So one last question. Sure. Can we share product direct link on social media platforms like Facebook page and Insta.
[01:06:21] And do you think if there are no convergence, our product will not de-rank or on Amazon? Can we share a direct link? So you’re talking about your, your, your product link right on social media. Yeah. Yeah. So posting the direct link, like the, the Amazon product link on social media and when the traffic comes and, but there are no conversions that is going to De-rank on Amazon or not.
[01:06:50] So that is the question. I don’t, yeah. I don’t think there is a big myth out there, you know, with the conversion side. I think what you can do is if you do, if you’re part of the attribution and you start to see that as not converting, that maybe, you don’t put the, maybe what you’ll do is put in some more engaging images with that link and then see how it’s gonna convert.
[01:07:17] One of the things that you might wanna do also to see if it, to help you convert might be using the Google My Business. And you can put that link into a post that you’re doing. And then it’ll index that twice. So it’ll be on Facebook and it’ll be on through Google. Anytime that I get lots of traffic going over and it’s not converting, I don’t like that.
[01:07:42] I, I, I wanna make sure that the audience that I’m sending the traffic from is my audience. And if I don’t know that audience, that’s where I’ll put it over to a landing page, then figure it out and then drive them over. So you’ll get lots of, you’ll get a lot more traffic. I don’t know, Howard, if, if you agree on this, but you’ll get a lot more traffic.
[01:08:07] But if you’re not converting and your conversion percentage goes down. Yeah. That, that could, I don’t know if it’ll hurt your rank at all, but it can hurt you when you go to do any PPC campaigns. You’ll be paying more. So from what, on my side, I don’t think external traffic will hurt your conversion rate.
[01:08:28] As in lowering down the ranking, conversion, conversion are, are two different things. Where in, in, in, on Amazon and off Amazon, off Amazon, external traffic, they don’t really care and they don’t penalize you for that. Right. And you’re looking at, within Amazon, it’s all about conversion share.
[01:08:49] Whoever gets the most sales, right? That’s what it is. That’s why you have the, our brand analytics click share and conversion share. They all care about you, the sales, but in the very beginning, when you’re on the honeymoon and everything like that, of course, it’s, it really matters among the conversion rate.
[01:09:04] To get you up there at the velocity of sales that you’re getting up and everything like that, but it, it comes down and at the end of the day, it’s come down up. How much orders can you get in on your conversion share. All right. All right. So I believe that’s it. So thank you so much Norm for, for taking your time and joining us today.
[01:09:29] Oh, you’re welcome. Glad to be here. Thank you so much. Okay guys. Thank you so much for all of you to, to be there and stay with us at the end. And thank you, Howard. Take care. Bye. All right. See you later. Thank you. Bye. Do you want your product seen by more buyers on Amazon Etsy and other marketplaces?[01:09:56] Do you want to get more traffic, make more sales and scale your brand? Welcome to the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked, where we discuss what signals are needed to send to your customers, to the algorithms, to the ad platforms in order to get your product seen, converting and profiting fast. With your host, former top 50 seller on all of Amazon, the Professor Howard Thai, this is the Signalytics Podcast – Signal Code Unlocked.