Ecommerce Roundup: Amazon, Shopify, Marketing, Advertising, Growth, Strategy

AZ Marketers | Ecommerce Growth Marketing & Strategy
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AZ Marketers – Ecommerce Growth Marketing & Strategy | Amazon | Shopify | Marketing | Advertising

  1. 01/12/2018

    ER 021: Facebook Algorithm Changes, Amazon Unverified Review Changes

    ER 021: Facebook Algorithm Changes, Amazon Unverified Review Changes Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing Want to join an ecommerce mastermind? Sign up: http://azmarketers.com/mastermind Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 21, today is January 12, 2018, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week –   But, before we get started, I just want to apologize for not publishing a podcast in nearly 2 months! Crazy how the time flew buy. I don’t want to make excuses but I will. I was gone for Thanksgiving, and then for Christmas and New Years, plus 4th Quarter is always crazy, and then I’ve got a lot going on right now with my ecommerce business plus consulting, and to be honest, this podcast isn’t my first priority, so it does fall by the wayside when other things come up. That being said I really like doing this podcast, so I am going to try to continue to do it weekly, so please stay with me!   Anyway, enough of that. I’m sure you’re not hear to listen to me get personal. Let’s get into today’s podcast, which is going to be a bit short, but it’s also very important. ___________   Facebook announced that it’s changing its algorithm again Amazon is cleaning up reviews, and not letting buyers leave unverified reviews Wall Street Segment   Facebook changing its algorithm again   Facebook announced this week that it’s changing its algorithm so that people see more content from their friends and family. Basically Facebook is concerned that the user experience is bad because people are seeing too much in the news feed related to brands and ads.   On the surface this sounds bad for us as ecommerce businesses, right? And I’d agree with you if you think so.   Facebook is facing an issue of people not using it as much as they used to. And of course this is a major problem for them. If there aren’t users on the platform then Facebook goes away. End of story. It’s critical that they find a way to keep people on Facebook and to keep people coming back.   What’s interesting is that lately there have been reports coming out about how bad Facebook is for your own psychological and emotional health. And I fully agree with this. There’s nothing that can take you from a great mood to a terrible mood as fast as seeing your ex living an amazing life on Facebook. Or seeing your childhood friend vacationing in Tahiti while you slave away at the office. Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook too. It’s great for staying in touch with family. But it’s a double edged sword. And it seems mainstream society is waking up to this fact.   So Facebook has to communicate to people that using it is a healthy way to spend your time, and they have to keep people entertained and engaged on it so that they don’t leave. This is hard.   So what are they going to do? Clean up the news feed and prevent you from seeing things you don’t want to see.   This change might hurt your business. This change might hurt brands. Just as it hurt brands when Facebook changed their algorithm to prevent organic reach and it became pay to play.   But the reality is that Facebook is still the best place to advertise, and we have to play by their rules. So keep playing by their rules until a better place to advertise shows up.   My advice to you is don’t panic. Just adapt to it. See what will happen.   When Amazon increases their fees the Amazon world collectively loses their minds for a week. And then we all just go about our business as usual. Why? Because Amazon is still the best place to sell. So all in all, I wouldn’t lose sleep over this. Business is full of challenges and this is just one more to add to the list.   Now, what to do practically about this right now? Double down on ads that are working.   Build up your pixel list so you can make custom audiences. If Facebook makes it harder to reach people your lists are going to become even more valuable.   But, to be honest, this isn’t great advice, because if you had ads that were working, you’d already be doubling down on them, right?   If not, you should be.   I don’t think Facebook is going to drive away advertisers. They need us. But they also need their users. They’re in a tough position so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and see what happens.   Amazon cleaning up reviews and not letting buyers leave unverified reviews   So this is a big deal.   I’m seeing Amazon reviews removed from products across the board.   The reviews being removed are unverified reviews, so clearly Amazon is going through a clean up phase right now.   Whenever Amazon does this, it’s always nerve wracking.   Why does this matter?   Because it’s making getting reviews for your listings even harder than it already was.   When Amazon took away incentivized reviews, getting reviews got much harder. Now it’ll be even harder.   Even though incentivized reviews have been gone for awhile, you could still have people leave reviews for your products when they bought the product at a discount, or even when they got it for free, or even if they never even ordered it. None of this was against Amazon Terms of Service as long as they didn’t leave a review because they got a free or discounted product. Leaving a review was always the prerogative of a buyer, no matter what.   Now, buyers can’t leave reviews for products that they recieve at a discount or that they don’t buy at all. Amazon doesn’t even give them the option.   I’m hearing reports now that unless a buyer buys the product for at least 80% of the price, then Amazon doesn’t let them leave a product review.   This is a big change.   It’s also a big change for services like Viral Launch or Zon Blast, because even though those services were never review services and they never advertised as review services, if you used one of those services you were still going to get reviews. Now if you use Zon Blast or Viral Launch you’ll probably get zero reviews. And using those services is now way less valuable than it once was.   So what do you do? What’s the solution here?   You have to up your marketing game.   You need to build your own launch list. You need to build an email list. You need to build a list of people who love you and who will review your product even when they purchased the product at full price.   I’m not going to cover how to do this on this podcast because it’s a huge topic and I’ve touched on it briefly on past podcasts. If you want to know how I do this, email me at info@azmarketers.com and we can speak about it.   But, just know that everyone now is struggling to get reviews. If you’re struggling you’re not alone.   This is also upsetting because this is creating a rich get richer situation on Amazon. Meaning the products with thousands of reviews will just get more reviews because they’re selling so much. It’s becoming much much much harder to launch a new product or new brand on Amazon. I hope Amazon does something in the near future to help new products and brands get some exposure.   This topic is also related to Facebook changing their algorithm, because we use Facebook ads to build our outside list of buyers. So with the Facebook changes I know that things look uncertain now, and this podcast hasn’t been good news, but now that you know about these changes you can be prepared and start making adjustments.   I hope the fall out from the Facebook algorithm changes and the Amazon product review cleanup is short lived and we can all go back to 2017, but I’m not sure that’s going to happen.   So stay up to date and stay in the game. There’s still plenty of success to be had using Facebook Ads and selling on Amazon. So don’t get discouraged.   I’ll update you as I learn more and come up with new ideas to adjust to the changes.   Wall Street Segment   Alright, and now our wall street segment.   The stock market is booming. It’s really amazing. Facebook stock is down because of their algorithm changes announcement. I think it’s a buy. Facebook is a great company and they make the right moves all the time. Remember when they bought Instagram for 1 billion and people thought they were insane. Or when they bought WhatsApp for tens of billions and people thought they were insane? Those were good moves. In Zuck we trust.   In 2018, I still like ecommerce, online payments, tech, and cryptocurrencies. I dislike retail although Target is doing well.   I’m predicting the Democrats will win the House in 2018, and the stock market will see at least a 5% fall.   I’m predicting Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space will come under intense government scrutiny around the world. If you play in the cryptocurrency space, just make sure you don’t put in more than you can afford to lose.   And last, invest in yourself. The best investment you can make in 2018 is the investment in your business and in your personal growth. This is not a woo woo podcast so I’m not going there, but I’m a big believer in this. Maybe someday I’ll get sensitive and let you guys in. But not today. ___________   So that’s it for today. Thanks for listening.   Hit subscribe now so you can be notified of new podcasts coming.   Also, I want to offer you a free 15 minute ecommerce strategy session with me. We can talk about whatever you want. Amazon, Facebook ads, Wall Street, you name it. All you have to do is leave this podcast a review. Then, take a screenshot of your review and email it to info@azmarketers.com. So leave a review right now, and email me a screenshot of the review to info@azmarketers.com and then we’ll schedule a time to speak.   Also, I’m putting together a mastermind of experienced ecommerce business

    18 min

  2. 11/17/2017

    ER 020: Digital Coupons, Social Media Promo Codes, Backlinks, Facebook Ads

    ER 020: Digital Coupons, Social Media Promo Codes, Backlinks, Facebook Ads Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing Want to join an ecommerce mastermind? Sign up: http://azmarketers.com/mastermind Links: Digital Coupons – Viral Launch Blog Post Amazon Private Label Sportswear Amazon Augmented Reality Check out how many products Amazon sells here – cool data Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 20, today is November 17, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   Run through the news Digital Coupons in Seller Central Social Media Promo Codes in Seller Central Backlinks to Amazon listings Facebook conversion events for getting email signups Wall Street Segment   A quick run through the news you should know   First, Amazon Australia will launch by Black Friday. This is huge in terms of Amazon’s global expansion. And in general I’m very supportive of this. I hope to be selling on Amazon myself and I look forward to helping clients and students sell in Australia.   However, let’s not get carried away. Australia has a population of about 24 million. Canada has a population of about 36 million. So for a rough estimate take your Canadian sales and subtract a third to get your estimated sales for Australia. I have heard though that Aussies love to shop online, so I might be wrong and Australia could be even better than Canada. My only point is don’t get distracted from what’s most valuable to your business so you can open up shop in Australia. If you have time for it, then great, do it. If not, then wait until you do. There’s still more Amazon gold in the US and EU than there is in Australia even though it’s brand new.   Second, this probably belongs in the Wall Street Segment, but it applies to you as an ecommerce business owner so I’ll say it now. I saw an article on CNBC quoting an analyst projecting that Amazon will have a record breaking holiday season and will own almost half of all online sales. Think about that for a second. Half of online sales. Isn’t that unbelievable? The message here is to keep working on your Amazon listings, keep running ads, and to keep doing what you’re doing.   Digital Coupons in Seller Central are here   Under the Advertising tab in Seller Central, you will now see a Coupons page. You can now create digital coupons in Seller Central and offer discounts on a single product or set of products. These coupon codes will show up in search results among other places which is a big deal. There’s a lot to unpack here and I could have a whole podcast episode on just this, so I’m actually doing to direct you to Viral Launch’s blog post on this topic for a full explanation, and I think they do a good analysis about this new feature too. Coupons have been available to vendors for a long time, so I’m not sure this is going to change much, although we have to see the implementation of it. I encourage you to read the blog post, I’m going to link to it in the show notes. After you read it I would immediately test this feature out. I know I am.  – https://viral-launch.com/amazon-blog/news-updates/amazon-news-updates/coupons-in-amazon-seller-central/   Social Media Promo Codes in Seller Central   Check out within your promotions tab within Advertising. Sellers can make a temporary promotion page with a unique URL and decide who you want to share it with. Amazon says – This is a targeted promotion type; these promo codes are not shared with all customers on Amazon’s deals page or product pages. Sellers can tell customers through social media or e-mail and drive traffic to their products on Amazon. Simply direct customers to the unique promotion page and the discount automatically applies when they add an eligible item to cart. No extra fee for this. Must be in Brand Registry to do this. The discount must be at least 15% off site price and can be a maximum of 80% off. Promo codes can start four hours after they are created and can run up to 30 days. This feature is currently available in US only.   So my take here is number one, get into Brand Registry if you’re not already, because Amazon keeps rolling out new features for those within Brand Registry. Second, this is Amazon’s take on a landing page. This could be very valuable for driving traffic to your products. However, sellers already do this with Super URLs. And the reason they use super URLs is because apparently super URLs still help you rank. This isn’t just hearsay. Pretty much everyone I speak with uses super URLs and I see big brands on Amazon using super URLs. Therefore, I’m not sure there’s enough value here for sellers to ditch using super URLs to drive traffic to Amazon and instead use this feature. It’s nice that the discount is already added when a shopper adds the item to their cart, but again I’m not sure about this. I’m going to test it out because I haven’t yet. You should test it too. Try using it by emailing your list or running Facebook ads.   Backlinks to Amazon listings   A powerful way for you to sell more on Amazon without doing more on Amazon is doing blogger outreach. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because this is what normal online businesses do, but then I saw an article on it recently that claimed when you do this, it has an outsized effect on your Amazon performance.   The idea is you want to get backlinks to your product on Amazon. This helps your product get more exposure and more sales. Most effective are backlinks from Amazon affiliate websites because these are websites that are directly generating sales on Amazon. If you do this right it’s like free advertising for you.   So how do you do this? Easy. Go to Google, and search your competitor’s name. Also use keywords like review, unboxing, and verses, in your search. Then look through the first 10 pages of search results, and contact anyone relevant to your product to tell them about your product. Offer to send your product for free so they can review it. Also send them the link to your product on Amazon.   If you don’t have competitors, then use your niche as a keyword for searching on Google. This sort of activity you should be doing anyway for your main website. The key difference here is to pay attention to Amazon affiliate websites and ask them if they’ll list your product too.   This will also work with YouTubers. You can go to YouTube and search for relevant YouTubers to review your product. Ask them to make a video and review your product and to drop a link to your product in the video’s description. This is standard influencer marketing so it’s something that you should be doing anyway. It’s best if the reviewer can link to your ecommerce store and to your product on Amazon.   This is a nice little hack that will separate you from your competition. This is also an ongoing task that should never end. Blogger, influencer, and YouTuber outreach is a key task for any business these days.   Side note, YouTube is the best platform for these besides blogs because YouTube videos come up in Google search results. Other social media platforms are fleeting, or don’t show up in results, or are private. So focus on blogs and YouTube.   Facebook conversion events for getting email signups   Facebook has a new optimization feature where you have a Facebook conversion ad that optimizes for link clicks until enough conversion events start kicking in so that the algorithm can start to learn who to serve your ad to for getting more conversions. This feature has been around for a few months, and Digital Marketer tried it out a while back and said that it was more expensive for them to use but I recommend trying it in your campaigns now for getting email addresses from Facebook ads.   Basically it works like this. Say you want to build your email list with Facebook ads. You then run conversion ads with a conversion event of a complete registration, or an email address. Well Facebook needs about 25-50 conversion events to optimize your ad, and if you aren’t getting 25-50 email sign ups per week then this type of campaign won’t work. In the early stages of your ad this is a big problem. So Facebook has a solution where in the beginning of your ad’s lifetime they’ll optimize for link clinks, and then once they get enough data to learn who will convert then they’ll switch the optimization to your conversion event. In theory this is an amazing feature so try it out. You’ll find the option in the ad set level at the bottom as your making your ads. It’s a little radio button that you toggle on. If you don’t get results from this because you aren’t getting enough sign ups, then make your conversion event one step from the real event you want. Say instead of making your conversion event email sign ups, make it for when people land on your landing page. This way you’ll get your magic minimum 25 conversions per week so Facebook’s algorithm can take over. Or if you don’t want to do this then just increase your ad spend so you get to the minimum 25 conversions per week. Just don’t lose all your money in the process if you go this route of upping the ad spend.   Wall Street Segment   According to CNBC an analyst at Morgan Stanley thinks Amazon is going to be worth $1 trillion within a year. And I agree. That means Amazon needs a share price of about $2,000. I haven’t done the math on that so don’t quote me on an exact share price. Amazon is taking over the world. They are becoming the global mall, plus with AWS they’re a massive cloud computing company. But if Amazon becomes worth over a trillion then Google and Apple will also certainly be worth over a trillion too. The message is to buy tech stocks and forget about the rest.   Amazon is c

    24 min

  3. 11/03/2017

    ER 019: Facebook Ads – Cold Traffic, Acquisition Cost, Strategy

    ER 019: Facebook Ads – Cold Traffic, Acquisition Cost, Strategy Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 19, today is November 3, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   Facebook ads for ecommerce Wall Street Segment   Facebook ads for ecommerce   Obviously if you’re in ecommerce, you have to be running ads. The first ads you must run are Amazon ads.   I do think people way over complicate advertising on Amazon. It’s pretty straightforward. There really are no tricks and silver bullets. And with the ability to use software tools like Seller Labs’ Ignite, it’s much easier to manage them. Gone are the days when you had to spend hours in Excel to optimize your ads. AMS ads still take a bit longer to work with than Sponsored Products, but eventually you’ll hit a point where you’re doing what you can with Amazon ads and keeping your campaigns in maintenance mode doesn’t take much time. What do you do then?   Go off Amazon. And go to Facebook.   In my opinion, Facebook is the best ads platform right now. The reason is because of the targeting options they allow you to do. Making custom audiences, lookalike audiences, and being able to pixel someone and then get your message right back in front of them is very powerful.   I have to admit that Google, and with that YouTube, also has retargeting and gives you the ability to build audiences, but it’s not nearly as easy to use as Facebook, and that’s another reason I like Facebook. When I log into my adwords account I’m just confused about what to do. Facebook is intuitive and easy to learn. Please Google if you’re listening to this make adwords easier to use.   Also, we know people are spending a lot of time on Facebook. I don’t think people are hanging out on Google like they are on Facebook. On Google you find what you’re looking for and move on. Facebook is where you go to find people hanging out.   As a side note, YouTube is also a place where people go to hang out. I think that after Facebook, the second best place to advertise right now is YouTube. YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world after Google, and the targeting options with YouTube are awesome. However, I’m not going to talk about YouTube right now.   My advice is to first master Facebook Ads, and then go to YouTube next once you’re comfortable on Facebook.   So now let’s talk about Facebook ads.   This topic came up this week because I know a bunch of ecommerce entrepreneurs who have hired Facebook ad consultants to run their Facebook ads for them.   And their results have been less than stellar to say the least.   However, in defence of these Facebook ad consultants, I think these ecommerce business owners had misplaced expectations.   They assumed that they’d be able to get sales from cold traffic at a profitable price, and I think a lot of that is just wishful thinking.   So my message to you today is to stop thinking Facebook ads operate like Amazon ads. They don’t. Amazon ads do make money immediately. Facebook ads don’t. And I think that should be your mindset.   Now, let me qualify what I’m saying here, because of course some Facebook ads do make money immediately.   Which make money? Facebook ads that target or retarget hot and warm leads do make money. Dynamic product ads do make money.   The problem is that for most people those lists are relatively small unless you’re a big company. Even if you get 100,000 visitors to your website pixeled every month and you have customer lists in the thousands, those lists are not big for Facebook. You’re going to wear out those list fasts if you run ads to them everyday.   Also, I just have to mention lookalike audiences here. The ability to build lookalike audiences on Facebook is awesome and powerful, but they are still primarily cold audiences. Lookalikes should never be treated like hot and warm leads, and you shouldn’t think that they will perform like leads.   But, here’s the bottom line with Facebook ads –   You can make money from your Facebook ads from cold traffic if the lifetime value of your customer justifies it.   Let’s do a couple mental experiments to spell this out.   The best internet information marketers typically get Facebook leads from cold audiences, which are usually webinar registrations, for somewhere between $5-$10 per signup.   Now, while signing up and watching a webinar for an hour is a lot of time to give up, giving an email address over is pretty easy and not much to give. It’s a lot easier to give an email address than to give your credit card to buy something. For someone to actually buy something, even if it’s a little bit amount of money, it still way more to ask than just asking for an email address. So let’s double the cost and assume that in the best case scenario you can get cold traffic to buy your products for $10-20. Let’s call this best case.   Let’s do a second exercise.   A great ecommerce site converts 3% of people to a sale.   Let’s say you are getting clicks for $1 on Facebook, which could happen but it’s likely it’ll cost you more, but let’s stay with $1 per click for now.   If you get 100 clicks, then that’s $100 in ad spend. But if only 3% of visitors buy, or 3 people. How much money will you make? If you’re average sale is $20, then you’re getting $60 in revenue for your $100 ad spend. That’s not great. And in this scenario, you’re getting a sale for about $33. Let’s call this a realistic conservative case.   Now, what if your conversion rate is 2% and your cost per click is $2? Then all of a sudden you’re getting a sale for about $50 in ad spend. Yikes. Let’s call this worst case.   So, we can make a rough estimate that best case you could get one sale from ads with cold traffic at $10 in ad spend and worst case you can get one sale with cold traffic at $50 in ad spend.   But, there are many variables involved here so of course this is an incomplete analysis. Yes, your Facebook audience targeting makes a huge difference. Yes, your ad creative makes a huge difference, and your results may vary. You might have found an amazing audience that resonates with the message in your ad and you could be killing it. If you are congratulations, and keep doing what you’re doing.   For the rest of us, let’s be realistic. Let’s make a very rough estimate and say that you can acquire a customer from cold traffic on Facebook from anywhere between $10-$50. Admittedly, this is a huge range, but it helps to paint the target.   Is your customer lifetime value worth more than what it costs to acquire a customer with cold Facebook traffic?   This is a question that only you can figure out with the numbers related to your business.   If ads to cold traffic makes financial sense for your business, then by all means run them.   However, I like to go upstream instead.   Don’t go for the sale, go for the easiest lowest hanging fruit. Go for the email address. And build the relationship with your potential customers through email first, then ask them to buy.   With this method you can simultaneously build your brand, your audience, your influence, and your customer base. You can also use collected emails to build more Facebook custom audiences faster. It’s far cheaper to get email signups instead of a purchase from cold traffic.   Will you lose out on immediate sales if you do this? Maybe.   But if that’s a concern send an automated email with a link to your product after they sign up. Or on the email thank you page show your product off with a special offer so they can get it right away.   It’s conventional wisdom that a company sometimes needs multiple touch points with a potential customer before getting a sale. So play that long game of getting touch points and building the relationship instead of going in for the kill right away.   The odds of someone scrolling through their Facebook feed, then seeing your ad, resonating with it, and realizing they need it right now which will then make them go buy it immediately are small.   One other thing. When you get someone on your email list you can make Facebook custom audiences to advertise directly to that person. So when you send out an email to them you can also send them a Facebook ad at the same time and get them twice, or at least increase the chances that they’ll at least see something from you.   So if you’re thinking about running Facebook ads to cold traffic I’d encourage you to examine if this is the right move for you.   If you have the capacity, you should be testing all sorts of ads and offers on Facebook. You should be running ads to cold traffic to see if you get any conversions. But you should also be running ads designed to collect email addresses so you can see if those are better for your business.   Don’t expect a Facebook ads consultant to come in and magically give you money. If anyone makes any guarantees to you then run from them.   All great ads professionals are great scientists. They are constantly creatively experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn’t so they can improve and adjust for next time.   If you’re new to this podcast I’ll tell you right now that my favorite thing to do is run giveaways and drive traffic to them with Facebook ads. Anyone can run a giveaway, not matter what you’re selling.   If you’re a consultant you can give away free consulting. If you’re selling homes you can give away a free estimate.   Be creative and don’t be spoiled because of how easy Amazon ads have been up until this point. With Facebook ads you’re playing a different game. And I think the game

    20 min

  4. 10/27/2017

    ER 018: Super URLs, Stealth Review Strategy, State of Amazon Marketplace

    ER 018: Super URLs, Stealth Review Strategy, State of Amazon Marketplace Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 18, today is October 27, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   We are now thick in the fourth quarter and this is an exciting time of the year. Expect your ads to be more expensive, and expect your conversion rates to go up. My advice to you is to ride out the wave and spend more money on ads now while the traffic exists. That being said, let’s get into the podcast this week.   Thoughts on the Amazon marketplace as a whole right now Super URLs Stealth strategy for getting product reviews Wall Street Segment   Thoughts on the Amazon marketplace as a whole right now   I know I haven’t posted a podcast in a month so I just want to give you a high level overview of where I’m seeing things now.   This is a bit of a state of the marketplace speech right here. People have been coming to me asking for help with their Amazon operations and they’re approaching the situation as though it’s 2015 still. The marketplace is maturing, and the players who have been selling in the space have mature listings, with lots of reviews, and a ton of seller history. It’s no longer good enough to just put up a product, even with great images and listing copy, then turn on PPC and expect to start taking sales. Sure, maybe this is possible in small niches, but soon those gaps will be closed too. The secret is out and everyone knows that selling on Amazon is incredibly lucrative. Entrepreneur magazine now regularly posts articles on how to get started selling on Amazon. Selling on Amazon is now mainstream. If you’re struggling with sales, and you have good images, good listing copy, good keywords, and reviews, then you’re problem is probably not doing more keyword research and using the hot new software tool that’ll boost your rank. Your problem is either your product isn’t demand, or you’re not doing enough to nurture the sales to reviews flywheel that feeds the Amazon algorithm that increases your organic rank.   If you aren’t continually running promotions for old products and launching new products, I have news for you, your competitors are. The players who have been selling for 2 or more years are now making so much money that they are dominating the ads because they can bid the highest. They also have a lot of reviews and are only getting more. It’s getting harder and harder to be seen on Amazon for a new or underperforming product.   The products that have a thousand reviews now will have two thousand reviews next year. And unless Amazon makes some sort of change there will be further consolidation and the rich products will continue to win and it will   Alright, so what do you do? Where’s the good news in this? What’s the plan of action?   Continuous promotions.   Continuous promotions should be a part of your regular marketing plan. I’m seeing the same companies do promotions on Zon Blast and Viral Launch continuously. They can afford to pay for it! And this is squeezing out the small guys. Ironically, I heard the founder of Viral Launch on a podcast say that he thinks the blasts that they sell are becoming less effective, and I agree with him, but that’s for another time. For now they still work.   If you don’t want to do these types of promotions I understand because I don’t like doing them either. Instead, run Facebook ads to a giveaway to build your email list. Then, after people sign up for your giveaway, get a Mailchimp account and send them an email follow up with a promo code to get your product at a big discount like 50-70% off. Some people will buy. Most won’t. But you’ll then be able to email these people in the future.   The truth is that everyone selling on Amazon needs to mature and become more sophisticated marketers or else they risk getting left behind. Unfortunately, it’s no longer 2015, and we’ll have to take a more holistic approach to marketing now beyond running Amazon ads.   Those who can build a brand and an audience will be the winners who will survive. If you don’t want to do this, which I understand because it takes work, then I suggest you look to sell your Amazon business and get out while you’re on top.   I know this was kinda a downer message but I think it’s important that people on Amazon come to grips with what’s happening.   Super URLs   Super URLs are still a thing and people are still using them a lot. To be honest, I’m shocked that Amazon hasn’t either banned them or prevented them from working. But I’m seeing people use them all the time so the must still be working. I’m speaking about this now because I’m just surprised to see them being used so much this past month.   I think Super URLs are a gray area. You can use them, but do so at your own risk. If you don’t know what a Super URL is, it’s a link to your product on Amazon that contains keywords so it mimics someone looking for your product on Amazon organically. The idea is that since it mimics an organic search, if someone clicks on that URL and then buys your product is as though they purchased your product from an organic search, which then gives you credit in Amazon’s algorithm for those keywords in the URL, thus boosting your organic rank for those keywords.   Where can you use super URLs? You can use them in Facebook ads, emails, giveaways, discounts, whenever you’re sending someone to Amazon.   Here’s an easy way for you to make one. Go to your seller storefront by clicking on your seller name. Then click on your storefront. You’ll know you’re there because your seller name will be to the left of the search bar.   Now enter in keywords related to your product. Now the URL that’s in your browser is your Super URL for the keywords you entered in. Copy this URL and use it wherever you want.   There are other Super URLs too but this is the easiest to make and is popular right now.   People have been saying for years that Super URLs will go away. They haven’t yet. I think it’s more likely that Amazon will figure out a way to make them ineffective rather than banning them. So give it a shot if you want.   Stealth strategy for getting product reviews   I came across a genius strategy for getting product reviews, and I’m going to tell you what it is right now.   But in order to get the whole strategy, you have to go to my website and sign up for my email list, and watch my 1 hour long webinar, so I can sell you a $1000 course on it at the end of it.   Just kidding.   Ready? Here it is.   You need an email list. I’ll assume you have one because I don’t want to get into email list building right now.   You email your list with a special offer.   This is the special offer, if they buy one of your products today, or however long you want this offer to last, you’re going to send them a second product absolutely free. All they have to do is order the product on Amazon, and then email you back the order number. Then within 2 weeks they’ll have a second product totally free.   So, when they email you back their order number, you’ll verify that they purchased the product at full price, and you have their address from the order so you’ll then create a fulfillment order and send them a second product for free.   Then, the kicker here is that you email them back to tell them that their second free product shipped. And you include a link to review your product.   This is great because it’s within Terms of Service. Your customer bought your product at full price. So it’ll be a verified review. And you know they like your product otherwise they probably wouldn’t want two of them. And you still make money because your margin covers the cost of all of this.   So there you have it. Try this strategy out. If you have a big email list of repeat buyers this could get you tons of real verified 5 star product reviews.   Wall Street Segment   Shopify –   There was a short report that came out a few weeks ago written by a company called Citron Research and the Shopify stock plummeted from the 120s to the 90s. I think that short report is nonsense, and that when Shopify was in the 90s the stock was on sale. Now it’s back in the 100s. Their earnings come out on October 31 so I’m excited to see what happens. I’m a buyer right now although a cautious one. With Shopify Capital and the dongle card reader they still have, they’re in a position to be more valuable than Square, which currently has a bigger market cap than Shopify, and is also a stock I like.   Amazon stock is up huge today after a great earnings report. I’m not surprised. Amazon is taking over the world. The stock is still a long term buy.   Amazon’s second headquarters idea is causing cities and states to give out gifts to Amazon like never heard of before for a corporation to relocate. New Jersey is offering $7 billion in tax credits if Amazon goes to Newark. That’s insane. Amazon already pays no taxes. But obviously the positive externalities that will result from an Amazon HQ in your city will pay dividends to the population for decades to come. So it’s a good idea for governments to go all out to win this award. I think Newark is a terrible idea, which is probably why Newark is offering so much. Moody’s thinks Austin Texas is going to get it, and I wouldn’t be surprised. Austin is in my top 5 guesses. But my number one guess is still Atlanta.   Amazon wine is shutting down. Amazon wine started in 2012. The issue at hand has to do with the existing laws surrounding alcohol sales, which Amazon has unsuccessfully tried to change by working with regulators. The e

    18 min

  5. 09/29/2017

    ER 017: Black Friday Cyber Monday Prep, Inventory Removal, Facebook Ads Problems

    ER 017: Black Friday Cyber Monday Prep, Inventory Removal, Facebook Ads Problems Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing  Mentioned Links Top 10,000 ASINs per Category – US, Canada, Mexico Marketplaces 10 Tips For Preparing Your Amazon Ads for the Holiday Season Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 17, today is September 29, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   First, I just want to do some quick housekeeping. Last Friday, I didn’t publish a podcast and it’s because I’ve been traveling a lot this month and just have had a lot going on, so unfortunately, for now, the podcast has taken a backseat to other obligations. Also, I’ve got a lot going on over the next couple weeks, so it’s looking like I won’t get a podcast out again until mid October. I apologize for this, but I appreciate you listening now, and if you don’t see a new episode again for a couple weeks, know that I will be back in action around mid October, so please subscribe to the podcast to get notified when new podcasts are out.   Okay, now onto this week’s episode. Since I didn’t publish last week, I’ve included a few things in this episode that are related to last week but you still need to know about them so we’re going to include them today.   Black Friday & Cyber Monday on Amazon Free inventory removal on Amazon Facebook ads getting disapproved and accounts being disabled A report published by Amazon that shows you the top ASINs A document published by Amazon that tells you how to prep ads for the holidays Wall Street Segment   Black Friday & Cyber Monday on Amazon   Amazon is now letting you apply for lighting deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Unfortunately, you have to be invited to do this, but if you are, then sign up right away and get your place in line for this. We ran lightning deals over Prime Day and it was unbelievable the amount of volume we saw. Even if Black Friday and Cyber Monday is half of what we saw on Prime Day it’s still worth it. The fees are still going to be $500 if the deal runs on either day or $300 if the deal runs during the week. I think the day deals are totally worth it. I don’t know yet if the week deals are worth it. It just depends on what times they give you. But, go into your lightning deals tab and sign up today for as much as you can to get deals going during those weeks. Hopefully, Amazon will give you one of those two days or both. If you get the days. Do them! You have until October 16 to submit your deals. So turn this podcast off right now and submit your deals now! How do you increase your chances of running a deal on one of the two days? Amazon says –   Deals submitted for the Black Friday & Cyber Monday window will be reviewed against all other Deals submitted. Amazon will choose the Deals for each event day that provide the best value to the customers based on a combination of best discounted price and available quantity. The best price and quantity for your Deal can be different from what is suggested on the Lightning Deals dashboard. Deals not selected to run on Black Friday or Cyber Monday will run on other days during Black Friday & Cyber Monday Week, which can have higher customer traffic.   So, this means, make a lot of inventory available and give Amazon your very best deal. Then make sure you have enough inventory in stock to make the deal happen.   Free inventory removal for a limited time on Amazon   On October 1, monthly inventory storage fees are increasing a lot for October, November, and December. However, you can now remove inventory for free if you want to avoid these fees. If you have too much inventory for fourth quarter and you want to avoid storage fees, then act now and recall some inventory. However, I advise you be cautious with this. It’s far worse to run out of inventory rather than pay Amazon a few extra bucks for fourth quarter. Yes, it’s too bad Amazon is raising their fees. However, it is what it is, Amazon still provides amazon access to customers for most businesses. If you want to get some inventory back, then figure that out as soon as you can.   Facebook ads getting disapproved and accounts being disabled   For the past 2 months Facebook has been cracking down on ads. Many advertisers have seen ads disapproved that previously would have been approved, and also there’s been talk of accounts even being disabled.   What is happening? Facebook is getting stricter with their enforcement of ad policies.   What can you do? The best thing is to stop running ads that are generating a lot of negative feedback. What does that mean? When people see your ad, and they click on the upper right corner of it, and choose to hide the ad, that increases the negative feedback score of your ad. If you had ads running that have a lot of users hiding, it’s telling Facebook that your ad is a bad experience for Facebook’s users, and then Facebook will disable your ad or even worse disable your ad account just for serving ads with negative feedback.   You can actually check this in your ad account. Go to your Facebook ad in Ads Manager. And customize the columns that give you data so that it includes negative feedback. If you are running ads that have high negative feedback then turn them off. If you don’t want to turn them off then maybe just change the audience. One reason ads get negative feedback is because people are seeing them all the time and they get annoyed. If you have a frequency, of above 3 or 4, and you have high negative feedback, then you need to change your audience.   Just don’t keep ads running on autopilot that have high negative feedback scores. This literally threatens your entire account.   A report published by Amazon that shows you the top ASINs   I found a website published by Amazon that lets you download the top 10,000 ASINs in a category by sales velocity on Amazon. You can do this in the US, Canada, and Mexico marketplace.   I’ll link to it in the shownotes for you the check out – http://go.amazonsellerservices.com/l/229492/2017-08-23/g2j9b2   This could be a good resource for doing product research. Not really sure what else to make from this information, so check it out and let me know if you find something useful to do with it.   A document published by Amazon that tells you how to prep ads for the holidays   Amazon has a guide for preparing your advertising for this coming holiday season. It’s 10 tactics for driving sponsored products and headline search ads to your listings.   I’m not going to go through all 10 right now. Check out the link in the show notes to see this document – https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/AmazonMarketingServices/Holiday_Prep_2017_Sellers.pdf?ref=sspa_us_s_acq_sc_hdl_txt_q4prp17   I think the main takeaway is to be compliant so that your ads run, and also make sure everything is as optimized as it can be. Make your Amazon Store now so you have it. And make sure your ads are well optimized and running strong before the holiday rush starts.   Wall Street Segment   In this week’s Wall Street Segment, we’re going to keep it short. Toys R Us is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is the second largest US retail bankruptcy in history.   Now while it’s true Toys R Us is probably having a difficult time with Amazon, and with Walmart and Target also selling toys, a lot of this has to do with the debt Toys R Us is carrying.   They were purchased by a private equity company and the private equity company loaded them up with debt, and now Toys R Us has so much debt it can’t pay it off in this competitive landscape that it’s currently in.   So I don’t think this is entirely a death by Amazon case.   However, if you sell toys on Amazon or online in general then this is good news for you. With Toys R Us going away, the big toy brands are going to have less control over the toy market, and now there’s even more opportunity in toys for entrepreneurs.   If I were selling toys then I would go visit a Toys R Us as soon as possible and see what’s popular for inspiration on what products I could create to sell online. This creates a lot of upheaval in the toy market now so take advantage of it if you sell toys!   Amazon also just announced a lot of new hardware devices this week. The glaring thing about them is how cheap they are. Clearly Amazon doesn’t care about making money, and Wall Street and the investor community rewards them for this.   I recently heard that since 2008, Amazon has paid about 1.5 billion dollars in taxes, versus Walmart which has paid nearly 50 billion. So since 2008, Amazon has paid more than 48 billion dollars less in taxes than Walmart, and their stock has shot up and performed far better than Walmart. For some reason Amazon gets a free pass when it comes to Wall Street that they can just never post a profit and everything will be great. This has major repercussions for the economy and for other businesses. No business can compete with Amazon because of this reason. I think the solution here is that since Wall Street rewards Amazon for being a growth stock, other retailers should do the same. The problem is that Amazon’s mentality is one of a startup, and older retailers aren’t. So what’s going to happen? Amazon is going to continue to crush everyone.   They’re going to sell their hardware devices for cheap, and make money on the backend through Prime subscriptions, or through the many other products and services they now offer. I’m not really sure if older retailers really get this threat they currently face right now. ___________   So that’s it for today. Thanks for listing.   Hit subscribe now so you can be notified of new podcasts coming. What did you think ab

    18 min

  6. 09/15/2017

    ER 016: Amazon Tricked, New Performance Reporting, Vine and Video, Product Reviews

    ER 016: Amazon Tricked, New Performance Reporting, Vine and Video, Product Reviews Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing  Mentioned Links Fake law firm tricks Amazon and seller gets banned New inventory performance dashboard Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 16, today is September 15, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   Amazon tricked by a fake law firm and removed a listing New inventory performance reporting Video and Vine for FBA sellers A quick talk about product reviews Wall Street Segment   Amazon was tricked by a fake law firm and removed a listing   This is a very disturbing story I just saw this week.   An Amazon merchant said his hottest product was kicked off Amazon because of a complaint made by a fake law firm.   The merchant owns a store called Brushes4Less, and he was suspended for his best selling product, a toothbrush head replacement, because of an intellectual property violation. In order to resolve the matter and get the product reinstated, the owner would have to contact the law firm that filed the complaint.   But the law firm didn’t exist. And this was right before Prime Day this summer. The seller said that the matter was resolved in 2 months but that he also lost at least $200,000 in sales.   This is incredibly disconcerting for all sellers. Everyone needs to face it, there are bad actors out there and you might be a victim even if you’re following all the rules. Then if this happens to you, what are you going to do?   Amazon really doesn’t have a good way to address this right now, and with Amazon, you are guilty until proven innocent. So, I’d recommend being aware that you might get a competitor coming after you and filing a false claim that takes your business down. And if that happens, get a lawyer. I’m including a link in the show notes to this article, and in it you’ll find 2 people who help sellers resolve these issues. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/07/amazon-was-tricked-by-fake-law-firm-into-removing-toothbrush-head.html   I hope Amazon will clean this up for its sellers very quickly. Until then, keep your guard up and follow Terms of Service. Also always reply to messages from Seller Performance and other issues you have with Seller Support. You want your account to be clean and annotated that you are a seller in good standing.   New inventory performance dashboard just added   In Amazon’s own words – “The Inventory Performance dashboard is the hub for optimizing your FBA business. From this page you can identify opportunities to grow your sales, reduce costs, track your KPIs, and compare your performance to other sellers.”   Amazon uses the Inventory Performance Index to gage your seller performance, and they refer to it as your IPI score.   Currently you’re judged on three metrics – In stock rate, Excess inventory, and stranded inventory. Amazon has a little bar to also tell you how to stack up in comparison to other sellers.   I’m including a link in the show notes for you to review what this is, and it’s worth the five minute read – https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/202174810   If you don’t have this yet in your account, you probably will soon.   Video and Vine are coming to Seller Central   This is great that Amazon is giving Vendor tools to FBA sellers. To take advantage of this you need to be brand registered. If you haven’t started this process yet then start today. You need a trademark and that can take months. So start now.   Second, you’ll need to set up enhanced brand content for this. Then within EBC, you’ll be able to upload a video. This is slowly rolling out to FBA sellers.   I wouldn’t worry about making a video until you get this feature because you don’t know how long it’s going to take until you get it, and your time is better spent doing other things. But if you do have access to this feature, then you’ll want to make a professional looking video that’s both entertaining and educational that helps your product and brand stand out from the competition. I won’t go into making a video right now but hopefully we can do it in a later podcast.   Vine is also open now for FBA sellers. This is also slowly rolling out. It’s going to cost $1,000 per ASIN, and you’ll be giving away your product for free for reviews. You can also get these reviews before you launch your product so it’s incredibly valuable to have these reviews right away so you can hit the ground running.   Unfortunately, this is an extremely expensive program and the rich sellers will be able to use this to their advantage and it’s going to be harder to launch for small sellers. I don’t like this price tag. I wonder if Amazon is deliberately trying to get smaller sellers off of the platform with programs like this.   Although, if you think about a product making over $100,000 in it’s lifetime or even more, then spending $1,000 to do the vine program isn’t such a huge cost long term. I guess it just depends on your product, your market, and your business if you decide to do this.   A quick talk about product reviews   Given that we just spoke about Vine coming to FBA sellers, and that getting reviews these days is so hard, I just wanted to go over a few things on the latest strategies to get reviews.   Building your own email list, using giveaways and Facebook ads is still the best way to build your own internal launch list and build a relationship with your customers so you can get reviews on demand. This takes a long time, but it’s worth working on right now. Ultimately this is your best long term strategy. Scott from the Amazon Seller has a whole webinar on this and it’s a good lesson if you haven’t seen it yet. I do things a bit differently but the gist is the same. So number 1 is to build your own email list, now.   If you can’t wait for your email list, and if you’re brand registered then do the early reviewer program. It’s $60 but worth it to get early reviews. The first are the most critical. If you have access to Vine then calculate your expected cost per review. Maybe it’ll be about $15-20 per review and that would be worth it to you.   Okay, but what about if you’re not brand registered yet, and don’t have an email list?   What about launch services like Viral Launch and Zon Blast? Those places don’t ask their buyers to leave reviews anymore. So you can expect less than 5% of people buying your product there to leave reviews. I get less than 5% from speaking with people who use those services.   What else can you do? Email reviewers directly.   Many buyers still list their email address on their Amazon reviewer profile. You can find products with many reviews, go through the reviews, and look for the email addresses of reviewers.   Then email them directly. Ask them if they want to try your product for a discount or for free. Just do not ask them for a review at all. If you do you’re breaking terms of service. But, you’re allowed to give away product for free to influencers. And let’s face it Amazon reviewers are influencers. As long as it’s unconditional and no review is expected then I can’t see why it’s against Terms of Service. If you do this then a certain percentage of them probably will leave reviews because people like leaving reviews. Just never pester them about reviews and don’t expect it. If it happens that’s up to them, and it has nothing to do with you giving them free or discounted product. I’ve gone over the rules with people I know and thought about this a lot, and I don’t think you’re breaking any Amazon rule by doing this. This is the best way to get quick reviews in my opinion.   Also, I know people use Vipon.com to find deals for Amazon, so list your product there. Buyers do use Snag Shout and Jump Send but many more people use Vipon. Vipon is more expensive but it’s probably worth it due to the volume.   Also, I know there are still Facebook review groups out there. I also know that some sellers will make deals with reviewers so that the reviewers buy the product at full price, write a review, and then the seller reimburses them over PayPal or something like that. This is totally against terms of service and I recommend you never do this although you probably will not get caught. It’s just not worth the risk. The small chance of being caught for this will get you banned and it’s not worth it.   Are there sellers out there breaking the rules? Yes, absolutely. But I don’t recommend you do it. It’s just not worth it.   Wall Street Segment   In this week’s Wall Street segment, let’s talk about Amazon first.   Amazon is building a giant new warehouse in India so they are investing heavily there. This is awesome news for everyone selling on Amazon. India is a country with over 1 billion people. And because of their democracy and openness and because English being an official language there I think it’ll be easier to sell on Amazon India than it will be to sell on Amazon China for quite some time. Amazon going big into India will open up a giant market for Amazon sellers around the world.   Amazon is also building a mega warehouse in Mexico near Mexico City to be completed next year. It’s going to triple Amazon’s distribution space in Mexico, which has over 100 million people. This is also great news for Amazon sellers. I’ve personally been very disappointed in Amazon Mexico up until now so to see them invest in Mexico to build out the marketplace and their distribution capability is good news.   Hillary Clinton came out with a book about why she lost the 2016 presidential election and Amazon has been removing hundreds of 1 star reviews of the book. If you check out t

    24 min

  7. 09/08/2017

    ER 015: Keywords in URL, New Chat Feature, Build Your Fan Base & Audience

    ER 015: Keywords in URL, New Chat Feature, Build Your Fan Base & Audience Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing  Mentioned Links Shopify Build a Business Winners Sand Cloud Towels – learn from these guys on how to build an audience Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 15, today is September 8, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   Getting your keywords in your URL for your Amazon listing A new chat feature for Amazon customers within the Q&A section How to build an awesome fan base Wall Street Segment   How to get your keywords in your Amazon listing’s URL   This isn’t new information but I just saw it recently and so I think it’s good to share. For SEO reasons, it’s a good idea to have your keywords in your URL. And as you know, Amazon is a website and so when you list products on Amazon, Amazon assigns them a URL. If you have your best keywords in your URL, then you will do better in organic search with Google and Bing, which will lead to more people finding your product on Amazon, so it’s a good idea to get your best keywords in your Amazon URL. Amazon already does great with SEO, but this just puts icing on the cake in terms of maximizing the SEO for your Amazon listing in search engines.   So how do you do this? How do you influence which keywords Amazon picks and assigns to your product’s URL?   Viral Launch came out with a PDF that I saw explaining this process. Here’s the summary. Pick your best 5 keywords. Put them in the front of your title. After your fifth word put a hyphen or colon in the title and then continue with your product’s title. Words like like, and, and the will not be used by Amazon when they make your URL. If you have fewer than five words then Amazon will take however many you have before the hyphen or colon, and then pick another word for you, so it’s best to use 5 keywords for this.   To change your URL, just update your title. Then within a few days your URL should be updated by Amazon.   This is a cool little hack. Will it change your business? No I don’t think so. This is certainly not an important task to do but it also only takes a few minutes so consider doing this. You could even test this against an old title, which is a better idea. Just make sure you save your old title first, then change it to a new title to max out the keywords in your URL, and let it run for a couple weeks. See which one works better for your business.   A new chat feature for Amazon customers within Q&A   I just came across this new feature today. So, as you know Amazon shoppers can ask questions about products at any time and these questions and answers show up on your product listing page.   It used to be that when you answered a question, that was that and then both the question and answer went on your page.   Now after answering a question this morning, I was taken to a chat page where I could chat with the person who asked the question. On the side of the site, Amazon also is trying to get you to do this chat on their mobile app, by telling you that the chat experience is better on mobile.   This blew me away because never before has Amazon allowed such close interaction with third party sellers and Amazon’s customers. Yes, you can email Amazon users but chat is a more intimate experience between a shopper and a brand. I’m sure there are many rules about what you can and can’t say to a potential customer but this is just another sign that Amazon is positioning themselves to be a global mall so to speak and is encouraging brands to interact with customers on Amazon. It’s an awesome development, and I don’t know where this is going, but it’s encouraging to know that AMazon is developing tools that allow sellers and buyers to interact in a closer way.   If you want to test this out, just answer a question on your product’s page. If you don’t get this chat box then maybe they’re rolling out this feature slowly, and just check back within a few days.   How to build an awesome fan base   So Shopify concluded their build a business competition recently, and I checked out the winners out of curiosity. I’ll link to the winners in the show notes, http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-robbins-shopify-build-a-bigger-business-winners-2017-9/#nikalene-riddle-skinnymixers-2. If you don’t know what this is, Shopify has a business competition I think every year. It’s a great idea because it allows SHopify to promote their business while sharing Shopify success stories and giving small businesses exposure. It’s a great competition and everyone wins. including you and me because then we can study the winners and try to emulate what they are doing well.   One of the winners was a towel company called Sand Cloud. They won the category for “best raving fan culture” which basically means, they have the most engaged audience. Building an audience is such a hugely important task for any ecommerce store I started to check out their website some more. I’ll link to their site in the show notes and you have to go see it, https://www.sandcloudtowels.com   They do a few things amazingly well. First, they have a clear mission, stated at the top of their website, by giving away a percentage of sales to a charity. While I believe giving money away is a wonderful thing, I want to put my marketing hat on for a second at the risk of sounding cynical. Warby Parker and Toms shoes are also social enterprises as they also give product or money away, and I thought that this was a tactic that had been played out. Do people still really care about this? Am I really more likely to buy a towel from a company because they’ll give money to marine research and conservation? I think at first the answer is no. However, these guys have a unique product. They have tie dye beach towels with cool designs that clearly appeal to millennials. Their towels are really expensive too. So they combine a premium product, with burning man style beach culture branding that unites a tribe of people around the rallying cry of “save the fishies.” I don’t think supporting a charity outright works unless it’s woven into the brand story which they do very well here. But, not only that, the charities these guys support are also their customers, which I think is the huge kicker. Warby Parker and Toms shoes give product away to people in need, but those people in need don’t buy from them. With this towel company, the companies they support are also staffed with their customers! It’s an awesome connection for them. Additionally, they have an ambassador program that emphasizes Instagram, which is the social channel of choice for creatives and millennials. I don’t want to take too long talking about this company, but if you’re building an audience or a brand, and you should be, then you should go to their site and study what they do well. For me, the clear takeaway, is unifying the story and mission. It’s all targeting the same person which is their customer. They nail their target market of people who go to the beach and who care about the beach. From there the word spreads to groups outside of beach culture. Can you support your customers either through charity or otherwise? Sometimes this is just giving them exposure on your own social channels. But, these guys at Sand Cloud Towels do it better than most. No wonder they have a raving fan base.   Wall Street Segment   In this week’s Wall Street segment, let’s talk about Amazon making news again, as they always do.   Amazon is looking for a second headquarters outside of Seattle. And they say it’ll be a full equal to the headquarters in Seattle. This is an interesting move. I don’t really understand it unless the city of Seattle isn’t supporting the infrastructure to help Amazon grow. And if that is the case, then that’s a bad move by the city and people of Seattle, because Amazon has transformed the city for the better. Lately, Seattle’s politicians have taken an anti-business stance and so this could be a reaction to that. Any city worth their weight should be doing everything they possibly can to land this gig. Amazon said they are looking for a place with metro area of more than 1 million people, and business friendly environment. I’m going on the record right now and I think they’ll move to Atlanta. Atlanta is a huge city, has tons of space, decent weather, has Georgia Tech which is a good engineering school, is in a business friendly state, and has a giant airport. It’ll be interesting to see what happens!   Kohls announced that they’re going to start selling Amazon devices like the echo in stores. What the heck is with this idea? Are they trying to accelerate their bankruptcy? I really don’t understand this move. Maybe management is just trying to juice revenue right now and sell the company before the inevitable happens. I don’t know.   Shopify stock is on a tear. Payments stocks like PayPal and Square are also doing well. It seems insane that in this current economic environment things could continue to go up as they are but they keep moving up.   Bitcoin has crashed a bit due to China cracking down on the cryptocurrency and the ecosystem around it. However, the coin bounces back. I think on these dips it’s a great buying opportunity to get more. ___________   So that’s it for today. Thanks for listing.   Hit subscribe now so you can be notified of new podcasts coming. What did you think about this podcast? Email us at info@azmarketers.com and tell us. If you’re liking this podcast please leave it a review in the iTunes store that would be awesome.   And if you need any help with your ecommerce business, we’re at azmarketers.com.   Until next time, keep selling and k

    16 min

  8. 09/01/2017

    ER 014: SEO & Content Marketing, 250 Character Search Term Limit, Playing by the rules

    ER 014: SEO & Content Marketing, 250 Character Search Term Limit, Playing by the rules Check out our Amazon SEO guide for optimizing your product listings: http://azmarketers.com/listing  Mentioned Links Answer The Public Quuu Promote 250 Character Search Term Limit Information Amazon Expansion  Unethical Tricks Amazon Sellers Use Show Notes This is The Ecommerce Roundup, Podcast 14, today is September 1, 2017, I’m your host Bryan, and here’s the ecommerce news roundup for this week – ___________   SEO & Content Marketing The new 250 character limit for backend search terms Playing by the rules on Amazon Wall Street Segment   SEO & Content Marketing   Lately I’ve been seeing some Shopify sites that do get a lot of traffic through their blogs and so it’s time to quickly discuss SEO and content marketing. I’ve never really been a huge fan of SEO consultants, or even an doing an explicit SEO strategy for a business. My thoughts have always been that if you do the right things, SEO emerges over time. That it’s an effect of good marketing rather than an actual task. SEO gurus say that it takes time to rank in Google, and I’ve certainly experienced this. So that’s guided my belief that SEO isn’t something you manufacture, but it’s a reward for doing legitimate marketing online.   It also seems that SEO is getting simpler as Google gets smarter. I’m seeing fewer SEO tactics being advertised out there as it’s getting harder to game the system, and now SEO is being distilled into a few basic points. It’s still not easy but it is simple.   My understanding now is this. You will organically rank in Google and Bing search results if you provide the best content most relevant to the particular search. How do the search engines know this? From legitimate links to your site and how people behave on your site.   If people spend a long time on your site and a lot of people are linking to your site, then the search engines think your site is good and they’ll reward you with good organic rank.   That’s 80% of SEO. Good content and links.   If you’re not already blogging then you should be. Organic traffic is amazing because it compounds over time. Don’t psyche yourself out by calling it SEO marketing or content marketing. Just blog and you’ll get results if you do the 80%. Results might take you 6 months or longer so stick with it too. This week I came across some good tips that make this process easier so let’s talk about it.   First step, make good content. Start with keyword research. This informs you what to write about. This is easy. What is your product? What does it do? Type that into Google. Check out Google’s auto suggestions and related searches at the bottom of the page. These are the keywords you want to use to create blog posts on your website. Until you’ve covered these auto suggestions and related searches in blog posts, don’t write about other stuff. If you’ve covered them already then you’re more advanced and you’re probably bored listening to me talk about this right now. If you haven’t done this yet, then pick a keyword and type it into Answer The Public, http://answerthepublic.com. This is a site that gives you the questions people are asking about a keyword on Google. It makes it super easy to find blog topics. I just learned about this site this week so this is what prompted me to talk about blogging on this podcast because finding topics to write about is a struggle and this makes it much easier. Pick one question to write about. Search Google for this question you selected. See what comes up, and write a blog post better than the blog posts of the top search results.   Second step, get links. I’m lazy and I don’t want to spend time doing email outreach for links. I get emails from people asking me to link to their blogs and I delete them immediately. Who’s got time to read a 2,000 word blog post and then go into their own blog to link to it? This strategy is overrated and a waste of time. Instead, run ads to your blog content. Your blog content is already great, so you should be proud of it. So instead, run Facebook ads to your blog post. This will prime the SEO pump as the search engines will see activity on your blog post. Because your blog post is awesome people will naturally share it, and over time you’ll get links and more organic traffic. While people are on your site, get them to give you their email address through some sort of amazing offer so you can hit them up again when you’ve got more things to share. Beyond that, you’ll share your blog post to your own social media channels and your own email list. One last thing, I like using a service called Quuu Promote, http://quuupromote.co. This helps spread your blog post around Twitter.   Obviously you can get way deeper into better content writing strategies and promotion strategies but this is the realm for actual SEO or content marketing people who make this their full time job.   So this is the SEO and content marketing strategy in a nutshell for lazy people like me. Focus on making money from your ecommerce site and reinvesting some of it into content marketing with Facebook ads to grow the marketing flywheel. It’ll build up over time.   The confirmed 250 character limit on backend search terms   The big news this week is that Amazon finally confirmed that there’s a 250 character limit for backend search terms for products in the United States. Keep in mind this is less than, so your real limit is actually 249 characters.   One critical point to this is that spaces do not contribute to the character limit. Also, now Amazon explicitly says do not include brand names, even your own brand name, which is a big change.   I’m going to link to an article about this in the show notes so you can read more about it. https://www.sellerlabs.com/blog/amazons-250-character-indexing-maximum-means-merchants/.   So, what does this mean for you? It means you need to adapt and adjust. You must play by Amazon’s rules (which I’ll talk about in the next section for today).   For old listings you should soon edit the backend search terms so that they’re less than 250 characters. Yes, you might be grandfathered in for a while for those olds listings, and ranking for more than 250 characters in your search terms, but who knows how long that will last?   Ultimately, this is just another indication that Amazon is pushing for relevance when it comes to search terms. You now need to be highly targeted with your keywords when writing your listing and search terms.   However, this doesn’t change the Amazon listing optimization process. It’s the same as before. You write the best listing you can after doing stellar keyword research and then pick out the best keywords that don’t appear in your listing and put those into your backend search terms up to 249 characters.   What about those other competitor brand names and keywords that don’t make it into the listing? Target them with Amazon ads.   Playing by the rules on Amazon   I’m seeing indications that Amazon is tightening up the marketplace. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Recently, I’ve seen seller accounts get suspended and shut down over minor Terms of Service infractions that were mistakes, and this is scary. Amazon’s policy has always been guilty until proven innocent. I’ve recently seen listings taken down because of competitor keywords in backend search terms, or because of technical words that relate to medical devices that require FDA approval. Clearly, Amazon is using an algorithm to scan all parts of your listings and if there’s a word in there that they think shouldn’t be your listing will be shut down and you’ll have to open a case and try to get in touch with seller performance to get it back. So, in light of this, my warning for you now is play by the rules. I’ve always been one to dislike black hat tactics and cheaters, but now more than ever I’m seeing Amazon police the marketplace. If you’re unfamiliar with Amazon’s Terms of Service then update yourself on them. Also, watch your seller performance and follow the rules related to the new 250 character backend search term update. If you don’t you do so at your own risk.   Wall Street Segment   Shopify stock has been on a tear this week. I still think Shopify’s growth is linked to Amazon’s so I think Shopify is only going to continue to grow and become a big company unless it’s acquired, which I hope it won’t be.   Amazon closed it’s Whole Foods purchase this Monday, and celebrated by lowering prices for avocados and other healthy organic foods. I went into a Whole Foods this Monday and saw them selling echo devices. Amazon is now also selling Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value products online It’s amazing how quickly these two companies have started to integrate. Amazon is aggressively investing in non North American markets and is now delivering in 50 European countries and has FBA delivery in 26 countries. I’ll include a CNBC article about this in the show notes, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/amazon-in-europe-citi-map-shows-rapid-expansion.html.   Last, I want to close with an article I found about unethical tricks Amazon sellers are using to rank fast. There’s a link in the show notes, https://selleratheart.com/amazon-seller-tricks/. Obviously I don’t endorse any of these tactics, nor do I think you should do any of them. But as an Amazon seller you need to be aware of the things bad actors are doing out there so you can protect yourself as much as possible. Unfortunately, whenever there’s money involved, and in Amazon selling there’s a lot of money involved, you’re going to get a ton of bad actors operating and trying to game the system for their own benefit.   I’m not trying to be so neg

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