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I completely agree with that. The way that I frame the conversation to my clients a lot is that Amazon is just one sales channel within your broader business. And Amazon, again, like we said before, it has so many people searching to it, it's great for brand awareness and brand discovery.

But now the key needs to be how do you get these people to your website, and then how do you capture their information, their emails, whatever it may be. Because now you have the ability to email market to them, you know, retarget them with advertising, target people that are similar to your audience through platforms like Facebook and Lookalike Audiences. Yeah, there's a lot of value there in actually building some type of community or some type of email list or some type of information about your audience so you can retarget and you can find people that are similar in the future.

I mean, that is really where you're going to be building your brand and scaling over time. I mean, the Amazon, whatever your sales channel is, retail, whatever it is, all of that is just sales. That's not really building the brand over time and getting it more well known, making sure that it's something that people are going back to buy.

Or if they're going to a physical store, there's no doubt of what product they're going to buy when it's inventory next to their other clients on the shelf or other competitors on the shelf.

Ready to leverage these strategies to help make it easy for customers to find and buy your products wherever they shop? Let's start the show.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get started. Welcome. One of the key learnings from last year is that COVID exploited the need to have your brand available wherever your customers shop, including online.

More importantly, it's critically important to your success that you have a thriving community outside of traditional retail. Throughout this podcast, we talk about ways or strategies that you can leverage to not only grow sales in traditional retail, but online as well. And it all begins with understanding your customer.

And it all begins with making it easier for your customer to find and buy your product wherever they shop. And that's exactly what today's show is about. Sadly, in this industry, a lot of brands put all their eggs in one basket, if you pardon the pun.

Meaning, that they focus on one retail channel strategy without thinking about how their customer shopped their product or how they use their product when they get home. This is a huge mistake and in this episode today, we talk about how you can leverage the strategies from one channel to help support your sales and another channel and so on. Before I go any further, I want to remind you that this show is about units for you.

If you like this show, do me a huge favor and help me share it with the industry, help me raise the bar in the industry, share it with a friend and subscribe so you'll be the first to get new brand building insights as soon as they become available. At the end of every podcast episode, I'll always include one easy to download, quick to digest strategy that you can instantly leverage to grow sales and compete more effectively with. This week's free download is actually my 30 days of prosperity challenge.

You can learn more about it at the end of the podcast episode. Now here's Mike with AMZ Advisors. So Mike, hi, thank you for coming on today

Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to how you got to where you're at today?

Dan, thanks for having me here. And yes, I'd be glad to share that with you. You know, myself, I run a digital agency called AMZ Advisors.

And what we do is we help brands on the Amazon platform, essentially sell more on the platform. It was a long road to get here. I will say that.

You know, I started out of college in consulting, working for Deloitte, the big four, went into real estate development after that for Sears on the retail side. And then beyond that, I started seeing the writing on the wall with e-commerce coming and retail starting to struggle. That it was the time for me to make the shift in the e-commerce.

I started building my own brands, selling them on the platform. And it eventually just led into creating an agency for other companies that were looking to do the same thing.

Now, on your background, doesn't it say that you actually worked for Amazon for a while?

No, I worked for Sears for a while.

But you're certified as an Amazon expert.

Yes, I have all my advertising certifications from Amazon.

So what does that mean?

Essentially, it just means that I'm aware of all the different advertising tools that Amazon has. On the platform, there's a variety of different tools, including sponsored products, sponsored brands, and sponsored display, apart from the DSP platform. So I know how to use all of this.

Well, and that's always good to know, because if I'm a brand and I don't know what I don't know, then the mistakes that most brands make, let's put it that way, the mistakes that most brands make, those compound over time, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression. So let's back up. So you worked for Deloitte.

What did you do for them?

I worked in real estate consulting. So that's kind of actually how I transitioned into it. It was a client facing role.

I was doing a lot of actual evaluations and things, nothing related to marketing. And then I just took that knowledge, went to Sears, and used what I learned there in the Sears job.

Gotcha. But I guess where I'm going with that is location, location, location. Why that matters and then understanding the evaluation.

So I'm a brand. I've got a problem. I want to try to get in distribution.

I want to try to sell it. But where do I start?

Well, it depends, I guess, on what your capabilities are, where you're located, where your warehousing is, where your manufacturing is. In my opinion right now, in the e-commerce space, there's nowhere better to be than Amazon. I mean, obviously, I work with the platform.

But when we talk about the number of people that are searching for a product on that platform, there's about 69% of all online product searches start on Amazon in the US. So when it comes to thinking of distribution channels of how to get your product to the actual end customer, there's really not much better than Amazon right now.

Exactly. So why Amazon versus my own site versus some other site? How would you counsel a brand that is trying to figure out where to start first?

And by the way, my belief is that you've got to be available anywhere your customer shops. And as a part of that, starting in traditional retail is really expensive. So my belief is that if you start online, you get more bandwidth, you get more brand recognition, etc.

And then you can leverage that wherever you grow your brand, traditional retail, your site, etc. But launching on a platform like an Amazon to me makes a lot of sense. So I'm a brand, I don't know where to start.

What are some of the first questions I should be asking you?

Yeah, I think you actually outlined the process very well there, to be honest with you. I mean, the first thing is if we're thinking about building your own website versus going where the customers already are going, so Amazon, for example, just the cost to acquire that traffic to your own website, whether it's through doing SEO, whether it's through paid advertising, is going to add up over time. There's a different trust factor between consumers purchasing a product from Amazon versus buying it through your own website.

Conversion rates on Amazon are going to be significantly higher than they are going to be on your own website. That's another reason to start with that platform. The reach you can get, brand awareness wise, on the Amazon platform is incredible.

You can get a lot of people that have high buying intent. Like I said, they have trust in the platform, so they're going to purchase the product. Starting with Amazon, showing that you're building sales over time, there's obvious demand for your product, is a great way to go to other platforms like Walmart or Target if you're trying to get retail distribution and say, hey, I'm doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a month of this product on Amazon.

Maybe this is a good fit for your store. There's a lot of good data points that you can get through the Amazon platform. It's a really good way to kind of leverage e-commerce to start building your physical presence as well.

So let's unpack all that and kind of go through it piece by piece. Brand awareness, location, location, location. The notion that I can get my product on Amazon, well, I can do that

I don't need you. So what I wanted you to specify here is why would I want to have someone like you, an Amazon expert? And where I'm going with here, Mike, is that I don't know the tips and the tricks and the techniques to make my product searchable, to make it findable, to make sure I'm addressing all the specific questions.

So yeah, I can get it up there on my own, but it's not going to be optimized. I'm not going to be able to take advantage of any additional traffic. And then I won't get in.

And later I want to be able to get into the upsell piece, you know, where Amazon says, well, with this product, we recommend this product. So let's talk about first getting a placement on Amazon. What's required there?

So the actual setup for Amazon is pretty straightforward. Like you said, I mean, you can more or less do it yourself. You sign up for a professional seller account.

You have a business to do it. You know, you enter in your business information. It costs about $40 a month.

So the expense to get started isn't that much. Once you get your products uploaded, you know, the one thing you're going to need there is a UPC barcode primarily. So if you don't have UPC barcode, you have to buy it from GS1.

It costs about $300 for a 10-pack, I think. So it's not an incredibly expensive thing to get going. Anyway, you list your product, and now you're ready to start selling.

So what's the actual process there? First, it starts with creating just a very good-looking listing. So, I mean, I think we've all been to Amazon listings in the past.

If we shop on the platform and we've seen something that just looks like garbage, you leave the page immediately because you're not going to buy it. And where you need to focus there is you need to start with your SEO content, first of all, to get the product ranked on the Amazon platform, to index for whatever keywords you're trying to rank for. And then you need to make the listing just look good.

Taking advantage of your product images is one of the areas where most companies fall short. Customers are drawn to the visual side of it. The text doesn't matter as much.

So make sure that you're calling out all your product features in the product imagery is extremely important. And focusing on how the product actually benefits the consumer versus just whatever feature it has is more important to help them actually improve their buying experience. So those are the primary starting points.

And then from there, it's a matter of obviously getting more social proof in the form of reviews so other people know your product is good quality. And then beyond that, using all the Amazon marketing tools through sponsored products, sponsored ads, sponsored display, and DSP, all of those advertising tools as well as promotional tools to really get the sales going.

And this is exactly what I've been talking about in my 30 Days of Prosperity series that I launched. So when I talk about the images, you mentioned that. I see exactly what you mean.

A lot of people don't have really high quality images. And they don't have all of the images, all the different sides of the package, and you can't turn it around and so on and so forth. And they lose a lot, miss a lot of real estate.

Can you talk a little bit about how do you help a brand identify how to optimize the image to stop someone from scrolling?

Yeah, well, there's two things there. I think the first one that I'll touch on is, people are moving more and more to mobile shopping. And when you're using the Amazon platform, the first thing you see, or the Amazon app, excuse me, the first thing you see on mobile is the title and then the imagery.

You don't see the bullet points, you don't see the other features, whatever text you wrote, it doesn't matter. So that's why the images are so important to capture attention immediately, because people are just going to start scrolling, see what it says about your product, see what the features are, what the benefits are to them, and then they're making the decision pretty much there. They're not going to the rest of the listing.

So that's one reason that the images are so extremely important. But primarily, like you said, most people aren't taking advantage of it. You get up to about, I think, 10 images that you can use.

Most consumers probably aren't going past the first four or five while they're scrolling and making the decision then. So what we focus on is obviously the primary image needs to have a white background, it needs to be a clear product of what image of what the product actually is. The second, third, fourth and fifth images, those all need to be lifestyle images or photos of people using the product or more close up images of what the product looks like with text overlays on them, calling out exactly what the benefits are so they can see it right there.

They don't have to keep searching through it, read more text. You have to be able to highlight what that is in less than a sentence, maybe 10 words at max. You need to call out what that benefit is so the consumer knows while they're shopping.

And I'm always talking about how consumers look beyond the four corners of your package. The idea being that if I'm in a store, a physical store, most consumers will pick up the package, spin it around, look at it, and a lot of consumers will go online to figure out what people think about it and how it's rated, etc. And so what you're talking about is how do I build that into my strategy on Amazon so that when I first launch my product, everything is there for the consumer to consume.

And then how do I get them to understand everything I want them to know about the product, the benefits. So I love that. As far as the image quality, a lot of people don't really understand why that matters.

And I try to make the analogy, Mike, that if you're walking down an aisle and you've got a thousand products to look at, you really don't notice most of them. So how do you stand out on the crowded shelves? Same strategies as online.

And by the way, consistency. I want to make sure my product is represented the same way every place it's available. In fact, I think that is probably the biggest mistake that I see brands make.

In one platform, it looks like this, in a store, it looks like that. In terms of the branding, in terms of the messaging and stuff like that. So can you talk about how you help someone with the imagery and how do you help build that consistency everywhere they sell their brand?

I think that's another very good point is consistent branding across all your platforms helps build that customer trust. That's another area where a lot of companies fall short on Amazon and in retail in general. The way we start with every client is we obviously ask for whatever assets they have on their own and whether they have any branding guidelines.

If a client doesn't have branding guidelines, we'll help them create branding guidelines for their business so they can use it going forward. But our entire goal with that is to make sure that every product listing for however many products they have within their catalog have those same colors, similar call outs on the features, similar imagery. So everyone has the same feeling when they're going from product to product to product within their brand.

And then using that branding guide outside of Amazon on their own websites, their social media, whatever it may be, is really important to give that feeling of, hey, this is actually someone that, number one, puts effort into their brand, which gives a good impression of it. But it makes them believe that this is a better product, better quality because of that effort as well.

Thank you. So branding guidelines, love that because this is exactly something that I think brands need to have KPIs around, key performance indicators. A lot of brands assume everyone understands everything about their brand and the way it should be, merchandise, et cetera, and they don't.

Those are the guardrails that you use or have in place for your broker, for your agencies, for your sales force, for the retailers, for anyone who touches your product. The point being is that, like you said, consistency. How do you manage that in such a way where someone can expect, so you can guarantee the same experience anywhere someone shops.

So when you're talking about the KPIs, you're talking about the consumer experience, and you're talking about how you leverage that, one of the things that I suggest to a lot of brands, let me get your thoughts on this, is that I always believe you should build a connected community outside of traditional retail. Meaning, that if I come to your site, you should have a way to capture my email address, invite me into your tribe, and give me a reason to stay into it. Give me a reason to invite other people.

Maybe some incremental, something I can't get somewhere else. Coupons, whatever. It's a great strategy for trade marketing.

We'll get into that later. But the point being, is I can leverage my tribe to help me clarify my branding, my messaging and everything else. And then I could leverage that, that already proven, this is what people are looking for, and then put it on an Amazon platform.

Your thoughts?

I completely agree with that. The way that I frame the conversation to my clients a lot is that Amazon is just one sales channel within your broader business. And Amazon, again, like we said before, it has so many people searching to it.

It's great for brand awareness and brand discovery. But now the key needs to be, how do you get these people to your website and then how do you capture their information, their emails, whatever it may be? Because now you have the ability to email market to them, retarget them with advertising, target people that are similar to your audience through platforms like Facebook and Lookalike Audiences.

Yeah, there's a lot of value there in actually building some type of community or some type of email list or some type of information about your audience so you can retarget and you can find people that are similar in the future. I mean, that is really where you're going to be building your brand and scaling over time. I mean, the Amazon, whatever your sales channel is, retail, whatever it is, all of that is just sales.

That's not really building the brand over time and getting it more well known, making sure that it's something that people are going back to buy or if they're going to a physical store, there's no doubt of what product they're going to buy when it's inventory next to their other clients on the shelf or other competitors on the shelf.

Well said. And then, of course, there's always the concern that you don't Amazon. You don't own Amazon.

You don't own that platform. You do not own the retailer that sells your product. So I believe that a brand needs to own their own customers.

Another thing I'm baking into this series I'm talking about, 30 Days to Prosperity, the point being is that you need to take ownership for your customers and you need to make sure that you figure out a way to keep them in your ecosystem all the time. And you need to be able to understand, ideally, how they use it, how they celebrate it, how they share it after they take it home. Unfortunately, a lot of brands think the selling stops as soon as the product leaves the back warehouse.

I bet you run into that a lot, don't you?

Yes, that's pretty common. It's a continuous process beyond that. We utilize Amazon to try to get product feedback, try to get more social proof onto the product detail pages to help the customer products look better.

The customer journey continues way beyond actually sending the product to them. It continues in different forms, customer service, re-marketing in the future, building that relationship and actually nurturing it. They become one of your bigger advocates and actually recommend your product to other people.

All of that is extremely important when we're looking at it from the brand perspective instead of just, hey, this is another sale, it's more revenue in the door and that's it.

Well, and then you talked about social proof. That's so critically important. If you build your brand outside of traditional retail, then you've got that social proof.

You've got that community that you could leverage in retail. That's something I talk about all the time. What you said is I can also leverage my relationship with Amazon, meaning that if I have got a lot of five-star reviews, a lot of really solid reviews, I could then go to a retailer and say, look at how people love my brand.

This is why you need it on your shelf.

Exactly.

Go ahead, please.

No, no, exactly. I agree with that 100%. I can't even tell you how many clients we've actually helped do that, that are small brands that just launch on Amazon, end up doing really well, and then they go to for retail distribution and get into Walmart or Target because they have these sales online on the Amazon platform and people are buying their[…]

It's well known at that point.

Yeah, and once you build distribution and build awareness other places, that also helps Amazon as well, which kind of feeds the beast, wrong terminology, but it feeds the flywheel, keeps the flywheel going. So thank you for sharing that. Now, okay, I get my brand on Amazon.

I list it. I've got a fantastic image and stuff like that. How do I describe my image?

What do I do about that? How do I differentiate my brand from other brands? You were talking a little bit about SEO.

Yeah, the SEO aspects are the foundation after you have the content. I mean, it's part of the written content, not the imagery. The imagery is going to help you with conversions.

The written content is going to help you with visibility. So when we think of it from those two perspectives, you need both of them. You can't have one or the other or you're not going to be successful.

So from the SEO perspective, you're going to do a lot of keyword research, try to get an idea of what people are searching for. And then in the future, you'll get more keyword data as you start advertising. But with that keyword data, you want to start focusing on the most important keywords that you find, placing them within your product title, so everyone clearly knows what the product is, placing them in the bullet points, placing them in the product description.

And the rest of the keywords that you're not using are going to go into the back end of the listing in a section for search terms. So all of that is going to help you maximize your indexing on the platform. And now you've got the imagery, you've got the keywords, you're starting to index.

The key is to start converting on the search terms that customers are finding your product for because that's the biggest relevancy signal for Amazon showing that, hey, this product is relevant for whatever the search term is, maybe it should rank higher. So as you start building, again, like you said, it's a flywheel. As you start building the sales, the visibility increases, you get more sales, so on and so forth.

And that's how you kind of build from the SEO side.

And people don't understand, and this is critically important, everyone hear this, that Amazon is a search engine, same as Google. And so when you're thinking about building your brand, putting your brand online, think about how people are going to find your brand organically and all the other things that you do to drive traffic. So whether or not you put it on Google or, I mean, put it on your website and you try to drive traffic to it through Google or Bing or whatever, then it's similar to what you're doing in Amazon, correct?

Yes, it's a similar process. I mean, the advertising that we're going to be doing is really going to help boost that SEO. But similarly with SEO in Google or Bing or, you know, search engine, the keywords are the foundation of it, making sure that you have the relevant keywords for whatever you're trying to rank for within your content or within your website.

And then you start doing what's called link building for SEO for Google. So you start getting links to your content, and those links are the relevancy signals to Google saying that, hey, this piece of content is relevant for whatever keyword you're trying to rank for. Similar concept in Amazon, except the relevancy signals are your sales and your conversion rates from the people that are getting to your page and then actually purchasing the product.

So with that in mind, you want to focus on, you know, getting as many conversions as possible, getting as many sales as possible, having a high conversion rate. And that's going to give you the better SEO rankings on the platform.

And so conversion rates, when you think about that, that's where a customer comes in the store, they're looking at the product, and if you had an opportunity to help explain to them why your product, what's unique about it, et cetera, that's how you convert them from an occasional customer to a loyal evangelist. And it's by doing all these things to nurture them, to let them know how you're solving their problem. When you're talking about indexing, that is similar to the way Google puts your product on a page.

So if you can rank the top slot on the first page, that's the holy grail. I mean, that's the best of the best of the best. So you're talking about indexing, it's similar to that, correct?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's... Conceptually, it's almost exactly the same.

I mean, if we look at Google, how many times have you Googled something and you click on the first result? The same thing on Amazon. Your goal needs to be to get to the top of page one because 70, 80% of people that are searching for whatever search term, if you're number one, they're going to your page and they're going to buy it if you have good reviews, if you have good feedback, if your images look good, it's convincing that it's a real brand, it's a real product.

You know, being in those top spots, whether it's on Google, whether it's on Amazon, whether it's any other search engine, is going to lead to so many more benefits in terms of traffic and sales over time.

And, of course, the benefit is that if you do this right from the beginning, then you can build that organic traffic. You're talking about relevancy. So as people begin to find and buy your product, that sends a signal to Amazon, same as it would send a signal to Google if you were ranked on top.

So that would help your indexing, that would help your ranking, and it would help drive additional traffic, correct?

Exactly. That is the goal of everything. There are ways to jumpstart it with advertising, start getting your sales.

One of the old tricks used to be doing something called super URLs, where you literally put the search term you want to rank for within the URL before you send it to someone to buy the product. That is the goal of everything. Get as many sales on the top search terms for your product, because that's what people are searching, that's what they're going to click on if you get to page one, and that's what they're going to buy from.

So once I've accomplished this, I've got an optimized page, I've got the indexing, I've got the copy down, etc. Then what do I do?

Now you need to start driving the sales. You need to figure out the way to get people to your page. And there are a lot of different strategies on this.

The one that makes the most sense from our perspective is advertising within the Amazon platform, because as I said before, people coming to Amazon have high buying intent. So they're almost, if we think of it in the sales funnel perspective, they're ready to buy, so they're towards the bottom of that funnel. They're ready to be a purchasing customer.

So advertising within the platform, targeting the keywords that people might be buying on, targeting the competitor products that they might be buying, getting your product as visible as possible in that perspective, is one great way to start driving sales. If you own your own email list, you have your own customers that are purchasing from your website already. Sending out an email blast, asking them to purchase from Amazon, or giving them an incentive to purchase from Amazon, is another great way to start getting those initial sales that are going to help you rank for the relevancy.

Or there's a lot of other techniques, like off-platform advertising, search engine marketing advertising, Google Ad Placements, Bing Ad Placements. All of that can help drive traffic or doing traditional SEO. So actually link building to your website, getting on, for example, blog posts that are for whatever product or reviews of whatever product you're selling and trying to get a link there and trying to get traffic through that way.

So there's a lot of different ways. Advertising on Amazon is for us the lowest hurdle. But if you have experience in other digital marketing channels, those can really help you get in the sales as well.

And Amazon, like every other platform, wants us to stay on their platform. So how does that work and how to use it to your advantage?

Yeah, so obviously part of the reason, an example of that is how well Amazon controls the customer data. So with the customer data, they're not letting you see names, they're not letting you see addresses, you may be able to see zip codes and states in some instances, but it's not personally identifiable information, so it's not like you can call this person or email them or reach them directly. They kind of in a way keep you hooked, because you start building the sale velocity, and in some instances, it can become such a valuable sales channel within your business, but you can't actually leave the platform, because it might be, I have instances where 70% of our client sales come from that platform, and we're trying to help them build out their own website and get more traffic there.

The main benefit, again, is that so many people are searching there, which is great. So many more people convert on Amazon versus your own website, which is another great benefit. And one of the more advanced advertising techniques you can use is Amazon DSP, which actually allows you to retarget people that have purchased from you, target people that are similar to the people that have purchased from you.

It gives you much more targeting functionality than the advertising capabilities within Seller Central. And from there, you can send traffic on platform or off platform with DSP. So you can target people that have purchased from you on the Amazon platform with a display ad on Amazon or another website that Amazon owns.

Get them to come to your website and hopefully make the purchase there. So again, as I said, Amazon is just part of your entire e-commerce business, and it's a great way to get customers purchasing your product. And then it's your job to figure out how to get these customers to come to your website, buy from you there, and allow you to keep building and scaling as a brand.

So I could actually advertise to my competitor's customer?

You could, yes. You could advertise to people that have purchased your competitor products. The conversions may not be as well, especially if it's an established brand.

For example, if you're targeting Burt's Bees or something, everyone, that's a very familiar name in the US, you're probably not going to convert as well as people searching for Burt's Bees, but lesser known brands, it's a great opportunity to try to steal some customers there, get them to try your brand and hopefully convert them into loyal customers. So yeah, you could target competitor products if you wanted to.

And this is similar to when you go to the checkout line at a grocery store, and I used to work for Kimberly Clark, Uniliver, etc. And you get that coupon. It's from a company called Catalina, not that that's important, but it's a coupon for a competitive item.

So someone would buy Pampers diapers, they would get a coupon with their sales receipt for Huggies diapers or something like that. And that's something that they buy ahead of time that they can target any customer that's buying your competitor, right?

Interesting. That's something I actually didn't know about sales receipts. That's pretty interesting.

But yeah, I mean, that's something you could do through the Amazon platform, target people that are buying your competitor products or that have looked at products that are similar to your product. That's another good way to do some targeting there. That's more of the consideration phase if we're thinking about the sales funnel again.

These people, you want them to consider your brand over another brand. So targeting with that aspect is a good way to get them to think about it a little bit more and maybe change their mind about the product they're going to buy.

Yeah, or at the very least kind of get them to question their purchase so that next time, yeah, there are always a lot of good reasons to be able to do that or to incentivize them to keep buying more or pantry load, which is where you buy so much of it that you're not going to be buying more of, you don't take a chance of buying someone else's competitor's product down the road, the 10 for 10 sale, things like that. So that's good information. Now, one of the things you're talking about was link building.

Talk a little bit about that. How do you use that in your strategy?

So it really depends on the type of product you're selling, but link building is a traditional technique from SEO. The more links that you build to your website, the more traffic you should get from those links, the more relevancy you send to Google, for example, on how your product ranks for a certain keyword or how relevant it is for a certain keyword. A similar concept exists within Amazon.

If we're thinking about organic placements on Google, the top... I don't like going into the whole SEO side too much because it gets very confusing, but the top results on Google are typically websites that have high domain authority or they're well known. Amazon is one of the best known websites out there.

So for example, if you can build a lot of links from other websites, let's say you're selling toothbrush, let's say the keyword you're trying to rank for is like a four-pack toothbrush or whatever it is, a four-pack of toothbrushes, the more links you can get that are linked on that keyword to your product, to your Amazon page, there's a good chance that your Amazon page will actually show up for that search term within Google. So now someone's going to Google searching for a pack of toothbrush, you might be the first link because Amazon has such good domain authority. That's a good way to get traffic.

Another benefit of it is as you start building links on websites that have a lot of traffic already, a lot of product review websites are really great for this, holiday gift guides are really great for this as well, where people are going to look more about products or learn more about products, they might click directly through that link, end up on your Amazon page and purchase that way. So, in the long run, the more ways that you can send people to your website on Amazon, the more rewarded you're going to end up being on the Amazon platform.

Great. And by the way, the reason I asked that question is kind of go back to the, to get the five-star review. That's just another one of those factors.

Although this time, we're getting other people to link to us, other websites, et cetera, to build another way to build that authority, which is that Know, Like and Trust concept. One of the things that you mentioned a minute ago, I was talking to someone actually who works for Amazon, and a lot of people don't understand how powerful their search engine is. They can target someone so specifically.

So for example, the example they gave me is, let's say that a woman under, you know, at a certain age is single, is getting ready to go for a run in San Francisco, but it starts to rain. They can actually target her with the understanding that she might be spending time on her computer since she can't go out running. I mean, that level of targeting and that level of understanding how your customers buys and shops and stuff like that, that's incredible.

Any other thoughts or stories about that?

It's just funny. I laughed a little bit there because I actually used to sell umbrellas, and the days it rained, umbrella sales were through the roof, ironically, because it's too late at that point, but that's a side note. Anyway, the amount of data that Amazon has on us as consumers is insane.

I mean, when you think about it, they've seen everything you purchase, the time of day you purchase, the day of week you purchase, the product categories you're in, and then they're constantly testing new layouts, new A-B tests within the platform to see what's converting best or how they can incrementally improve their conversion rates. So, I mean, you might go to Amazon and search something, search one keyword. I might search the same keyword.

We might see completely different results based on our previous purchases. We might see completely different ad placements based on our previous purchases. So, yeah, I mean, Amazon has a lot of data on us.

Well, I'll leave it at that. And they're using that to their advantage to try to get people to buy as much as possible.

And then to circle back to what we were talking about a minute ago, if they recommend your product, if you scroll down a little bit, people bought this, bought this plus this, that is ideal. And so all of the stuff we're talking about helps you build that incremental traffic, helps you build that awareness. And it's all about solving a specific problem, making it extremely clear and easy for someone to follow those breadcrumbs back to your brand.

So thank you for sharing that. What else have we not talked about that we should include in this conversation?

I think there's so much that we could talk about within the Amazon platform to really get it going. I mean, I think we've hit a lot of the main points. But the one thing we haven't really talked about is advertising itself.

I mean, I mentioned that there are so many different targeting and strategies within the Amazon platform. I mean, there are at least over 100 different advertising strategies that you could use just on Amazon ads to try to reach new customers. And it all starts with finding complimentary products, finding supplement products, finding keywords that customers are searching for, targeting products that have worst review ratings or a lower number of reviews or a higher price point than yours.

There's almost an unlimited number of ways to start advertising on the platform and find what works best for your brand. Obviously, everybody wants to rank number one for a keyword like toothbrush because there's thousands of searches a day, if not millions. But starting with longer tail things, just starting to build those sales over time and getting advertising sales is a great way to kind of indirectly start ranking for those keywords.

And then once you are at a certain point, you're ready to really invest and push and try to get to that top of page one is really when you want to dive in, focus on that specific keyword, and then just start pouring money into it to start getting more and more sales, more and more visibility, and hopefully get yourself to the top of page one.

Do you have a checklist that someone could follow if they first as they're first trying to figure out how to get on the platform?

I don't, but I can certainly make one. No, I think that'd be a very good asset. We help our clients understand a lot of it, and we are always willing to take strategy calls with them to walk them through the process.

But, yeah, I mean, getting through there, getting started, getting the content done, that's all aspects we can help with, and then implementing the advertising strategy is something we can help with as well. But a lot of times it just takes testing on your end to kind of figure out what works best for your brand.

I'd like to create a link and be able to provide that to people if that's okay. The idea being is that if we can help them through this journey, that's where we need to start this conversation. Because, like I said, I don't know what I don't know when I launch my brand.

And I hear so many mistakes. People not getting the brand on that ride or not optimizing it right or the price point isn't right. They're not going into it on a regular basis and making sure that everything is working properly.

On that note, do you do a lot of testing and retesting and how does that work?

Yes, we do. We are constantly testing new things on the platform. There's always new advertising tools that are being rolled out by Amazon.

What we try to do is we try to adapt them as quick as possible. Because in a way, Amazon in the long term is always looking to monetize the features within their website. Being able to take advantage of things early before they get to that monetization point is an easy way for you to test things for free, see how they work for your brand, and then if it works in the long run, then once they monetize it, you know that it's worth continuing to invest into it.

That's just one example of it. When it comes to advertising, we are literally testing every single day, testing what keywords work, what bids work. We're constantly adjusting bids to see how that improves our placements, how it improves our conversion rates, our return on ad spend.

Yeah, I mean, there's an unlimited number of testing, an unlimited amount of testing that can go on within the Amazon platform, including A-B testing your images, A-B testing the A-plus content, A-B testing the copy to see how it improves your organic searches. I mean, yeah, there's an unlimited number of it. It gets overwhelming to manage.

Which is why we have an expert like you on, so thank you. Yeah, I mean, because it is a lot to think about, but I mean, similar to if I put my product in a store, well, which shelf should it be on? How do I help the retailer grow sales by leveraging the strength of the unique consumer my product drives into the store?

And at the end of the day, a lot of brands are thought that, you know, believe that they need to provide canned top line reports. But at the end of the day, the retailer wants those kinds of insights that we're talking about here. Who buys my product?

How do they buy my product? When they buy my product, what things they buy? And then helping a retailer, traditional retailer, get a competitive advantage, keep traffic coming in their store, and then give them a reasonable profit, which is really the same thing that Amazon wants.

Just they have the AI or the tools to be able to do that on a much larger scale. So thank you for all of that. Anything else?

Yeah. No, I was going to add, if you have a brand, you have a trademark, you can actually go into the brand registry program as well. And that provides additional insight into how sales are doing on the Amazon platform.

So you get access to a few other reports, such as a market basket, to see what people are buying with your product. Alternative purchase, see what products customers are buying after they visit your page. And there's another one, keyword, see what products people are buying once they search a specific search term.

So then you can figure out how to make changes within your own listing, target those listings, incorporate the strengths into your listing. And yeah, I mean, that's a lot of valuable insight that traditional retailers could use as well as well as you could use to launch new product lines and start building your own presence outside of Amazon.

And to buy that stuff, those insights in traditional retail, horribly expensive, not very accurate, a lot of issues behind it. I mean, there's some companies that do it and do it well, but for a small company to get access to that, it's really difficult. That's why I keep saying build a connected community, ask your customers and people in your community, your tribe, what they're buying.

That's the cheap and easy way to do it. But to be able to get a hold of those insights, that's gold. And it's far more valuable than a bunch of canned top line reports, that same reports all your competitors are using.

I didn't know you could do that, I assumed, but I did not actually talk to anyone about that. So that is actually really cool. Well, I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much. Any parting thoughts, anything else? And then of course, how do we get a hold of you?

And then how would you start with someone?

I think I've reiterated a lot throughout our talk today, but Amazon is the brand awareness tool. If people are shopping online, they're going to Amazon, your product needs to be there. But Amazon is just one part of your overall e-commerce strategy.

Use Amazon to get more customers, to get people towards your brand, and then figure out how to start converting them outside of Amazon, how to get them to your website, how to add them to an e-mail list, social media, whatever it may be. That needs to be the bigger focus. Don't get so dialed in to any one sales channel, whether it's physical retail, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Walmart.

Diversify, have different sales channels, have different ways to support your business, and just use them to your advantage to start growing your brand overall. That would be the general advice that I would recommend to every seller, every brand out there. Obviously, it sounds a little overwhelming, but that's why companies like mine exist.

If you want to get in touch with us to learn more about how this works, you can reach us directly on our website, amzadvisors.com. Or if you have any questions, you can email me directly. My email is mike at amzadvisors.com.

So glad to help where we can.

Thank you for sharing that. And the reason that matters just kind of put a little fine point on it is a lot of the brands that were only sold in traditional retail during when the pandemic hit, they're gone. Unfortunately, if they had an Amazon presence, if they had presence in other different distribution channels, then they'd be able to survive or weather the storm until we can go back into stores, but go to restaurants and stuff like that.

So critically important. Thank you, Mike, for your time. I appreciate it.

And I look forward to our next conversation.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Dan. I really appreciate it. You know, you asked some very insightful questions.

So I hope everything was valuable to your audience.

Yeah, no, it was great. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you. Have a great day.

Thanks. I want to thank Mike for coming on today, for sharing his wisdom and his insights. What an important episode.

These are strategies that you need to use to be able to sell your brand and compete more effectively no matter where your customers shop. I'll be certain to put a link to AMZ Advisors on the podcast show page. This week's free weekly download is my 30-day data prosperity workbook.