Norm Farrar 3:42
was a complete fluke that I got into it. But anyways, I won’t bore you with the details of the opportunity getting into it. But I was working with a fortune 500 company. And they wanted to know whether I could do this thing on the web, which I never even heard of before. Luckily, I knew some people that could. And they helped me produce a website that it was for Co Op. So you put a fortune 500 logo on with the dealer network. And that was a mugs and keychains and all that stuff. So nobody else was doing it. That was the very first corporate site I ever saw. I mean, there was no AFCD now was out there, but nothing like this. And then because of that other people were coming to me saying hey, can you do what you just did for this company? And then we started our own. And back in the 90s. I think we were one of the first probably first five anyways, companies that were doing print on demand. So you we would do corporate identity, people would send us their logos and we would create or send us their information, we would create the logo, and that’s how it started and then it kind of expanded. I got into some on some of the manufacturing side of things fulfillment side of things, my family opened up two businesses in Taiwan. So I was involved with that. And a friend of mine talked to me about Amazon. It was AMA, it was, as Sam’s first program beta program, had no interest in it. And then about ASM three, my buddy came back and he said, Why don’t we go in to Vegas and take a look at Amazon again? And we did and we got involved.
Josh Hadley 5:26
Awesome. Yeah. And then the rest from there, I guess, how did you transition from what you were doing then into Amazon, because obviously, you’ve, you’ve now kind of solidified your your spot in the Amazon ecosystem. And, you know, what, what? What transpired during that transition of like, doubling down on Amazon,
Norm Farrar 5:46
but it was so easy, at the time, because I had already done everything from packaging, to manufacturing, sourcing, bringing in containers, so the whole supply chain management thing, right up to the Facebook ads, and any any type of external traffic there was, so I could help people out. And at one event, I heard this Irish doctor talking about, he was not even talking, I could tell he was a deer in the headlights. But he was surrounded by a group of people. And they were talking about just not being able to do and he wish he could just specialize in doing what he did. And you know, he would if, if he found somebody that could beat standards and poor, the s&p that he would be happy to give it away. And I interrupted the conversation, I said, I can do that. And he over about a two week period, he just trusted me, gave me some money. He didn’t know what I was going to create for him. I gave him a list of about five to 10 things he picked out one that we ended up with two different things, completely different categories. And then I started working right in Amazon. And I really, at that point, didn’t have a successful product. I just heard about this knew I could do it, and said, Yeah, I can do this no problem. And we did it. No, no problem. It’s a lot more difficult. Now.
Josh Hadley 7:06
It is it is. Well, it sounds like an amazing journey. So when I think a lot of people did start through the ASM program, you know, I didn’t listen to the ASM or programs I did one of the other ones. I don’t even remember who it was at the time. But they gave me all the best of us all kind of went through some Buddies program, at some point getting into all of this stuff. But I mean, normally what I think is fascinating about your experiences that Amazon was actually very easy for you when you when the opportunity came about it. Because you’re already doing a lot of the heavy lifting, right, like you mentioned, like you already had the supply chain and importing and bringing stuff in overseas, but also driving external traffic and actually marketing products. And how do you help them succeed? When you’re the one who’s responsible for driving the traffic instead of Amazon bringing the traffic to you, and, and then obviously, not having to fulfill any of those products yourself, takes a huge load off your shoulders as well. So I think no, no, no wonder you’ve had so much success in the Amazon space. Because I think that not many people in the E commerce space right now have a lot of that experience of driving external traffic, and, you know, years of supply chain experience as well, on top of that. So, you know, normally talked prior to hitting the record button. And I think there’s there’s a lot of golden nuggets we’ll be able to share with the listeners today. But I think you’re so experienced, and I want to ask this question for our, our listeners, what would be your advice and recommendation for a seven figure seller that wants to grow to eight figures and beyond? What is it that they should be focused on in in their business right now.
Norm Farrar 8:58
And one thing I didn’t tell you, which I think is probably pretty important, is being resilient. There’s so many times Amazon just shuts the door on us. And we just got to keep picking ourselves up and moving forward. So I didn’t tell you this either. You can’t be that one legged stool. You know, if you’re only focusing on Amazon, that’s probably not the right business model right now. Because they’re in control of you. They decide to suspend you you’re out of the game. I would definitely be trying to find like a multi channel omni channel approach to this. But what we were talking about is grow anything to scale to get over the chasm, I think it’s called the book is called Crossing the Chasm. It’s you’ve got to have systems in place you’ve got to be able to grow scale your business and make it as automated as possible in you as the seller in a eight figure business or you know, so seven figure business, you’ve got to be able to work on your business, build your business, on what counts, you can’t be writing the feedback or, you know, working out spreadsheets or data entry, you’ve got to be able to be able to grow. And the toughest part is at first, you know, how do you find those people. So it’s the hiring process, you’ve got to take time to figure it out, you’re probably have to work more than eight hours, you know, to get this done, because this is a lot of night work I found. But once the system is in place, and you’ve got that hiring process, and you’ve got your SOP started, and you train people properly to train people, then you can really grow your business. But up until that point, you’ll work 25 hours a day, you’ll be deep into crisis management, because it’s always going to be there. And until you can really settle that down, you’ll never be able to grow
Josh Hadley 10:48
ever. Yeah, I think that’s very true. I think a lot of sellers that, you know, kind of stumble upon success, right? Yeah. And then the skills that of just finding a product on Amazon, and being able to source it and, and succeed on Amazon and, and get to seven figures is well and good, right? That that is a good business. But then if you want to scale, right, and actually build out a team and build out a real brand, it requires kind of taking things to the next level, in terms of your own, you know, career progression, so to speak, right? Your own skill set, you need to start wearing different hats. No longer are you the one, you know, doing the data entry, communicating with suppliers and all of that, like, you’ve got to hire and train a team and trust that they’re going to go make the same decisions that you would write or better decisions ideally, than you would which requires a whole other set of skills. So Norm, is that something that you advise people on? And how do you help people kind of navigate that path?
Norm Farrar 11:53
Yeah, if anybody ever reached out, I can help people in different areas. But if people did reach out, and they wanted to talk about SOPs, I’ve been doing SOPs, I had a hypergrowth company back in 1995. And I was going crazy. And I still talk about this book. It’s called the E Myth. It’s called the E Myth revisited. It’s kind of like EOS. But it’s, that’s the thing that started back then there wasn’t the EOS system. But that’s what got me going, I started to understand process started to understand how to build brand culture, or corporate culture, and performance based culture, which if you don’t understand that, you can’t grow a team, because your team’s got to buy in. It can’t be from you down, you know, you dictating what people have as a culture, they’ve got to buy into it and accelerate that. So that book was really great. I went through the academy that Michael Gerber had, so I learned how to do it at a different level than just at the book. But I can help people with that. I could advise them on where to go and find alternatives to what they’re probably doing. And also on the hiring process. We’ve hired a lot of people throughout the years. And, you know, we have systems in place that we work with, and actually showing people how to tie that all in to a project management tool, where if somebody doesn’t know what to do, there’s a template. So it’s just copy, paste, and somebody doesn’t know where to do it. All their SOPs, training and templates are one area. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 13:28
Well, sounds like you have some experience there, which is great. So Norm, what are what are the services that you do provide? When When sellers do come to you, right? What are all the many things that you do and when it comes to consulting and advising clients, because I know it’s a lot, but let’s dive into some of those. And then we’ll dive even deeper into some of those, you know, things that you’re doing and what’s working best right now, in the ecommerce world.
Norm Farrar 13:56
I do a lot of things, but it’s not just me. A lot of the times I find something I find a good person to run the company. We have staff meetings, but for the most part I’m building so that’s what that’s what I do. But
Josh Hadley 14:12
will tell me tell me more about that. I’m curious about that. You know, you talked about your your building, you have other people more operating the businesses. Correct. Tell me more about that. Because I think many of the listeners are like you and I were we are the builders, the visionaries, and we need the other people, the integrator so to speak, that can run the day to day operations. So would you mind elaborating a little more on that?
Norm Farrar 14:39
Sure. So I believe in vertical integration, so there’s multiple parts of the business or businesses and you know, it just creates a stronger business in the end. One of them, for example, would have been sourcing. I teamed up with an incredible sourcing agent at the time but he was also an Amazon expert. And he was a design engineer. So this, the guy that I’m talking about is Apalagi, eurocon. And when Amazon was going from Amazon to Amazon FBA, they actually brought him in as a consultant, at one point, a very smart guy. Anyways, he approached me, we looked at, you know, seeing if we could do some sourcing together, then it turned into some Supply Chain Management, fulfillment center that we have in Pennsylvania, and then product innovation. And we’ve kind of expanded into these areas for that part of the company. We have a meeting once or we had a meeting this morning, and we had it with our team, we might have a second meeting, depending on how things are going through the week. But for the most part, he runs it, he has total control of the business, he might ask my What do I think about this person or that person, if we’re hiring, or if we’re, we have to let them go. But it’s pretty much him running that. And I can go out, and I can see how we can fit into other areas or build out. So anyways, he does his thing. I do what I do best. And it’s interesting how it’s evolving, because he’s getting more and more known on the on the podcast circuit, and more and more people are coming to the service because they’ve seen him on a podcast, which is great, then I don’t have to do as much work. As you know, I could go out to these events and just, you know, try to drive traffic over to him that way.
Josh Hadley 16:38
I love that. Did it take you time building up that relationship with him to where you you did trust him? You know, because he’s running. He’s running the show. Now, you know, did it take time?
Norm Farrar 16:50
It didn’t take as much time as I thought I first of all, I had no interest in an apple lobby, if you’re listening, I’m sorry. But I was in sourcing, I was sourcing in Taiwan, and in China back in the 1990s. And I think he was born in the night. But anyway, I heard from a friend that you got to talk to this guy. He’s in sourcing. And because she was a friend, I said, sure I’ll meet with him. I didn’t really didn’t expect that I’d do anything with him because I thought I knew enough about sourcing first call. He said, Sir, I’d like to talk to you about seven ways, seven things, your sourcing agent would never tell you that seven secrets uses. So I said, Okay, Lay it on me. And sure enough, there was three, four things that he told me that I had no clue on. And I started talking with them. Then probably about a month later, we joined and we got in into business together. And it was funny. It was only and that was back in 2019. I only met him last year in Mexico for the first time will really and I only met him in Toronto last week for the second time. So we’ve only met we’ve done all this business together for years. And we’ve never met. Interesting. Yeah, and I trust them like, you know, it’s it takes a lot to build up trust. Yep. But anyways, yeah, he’s a great guy.
Josh Hadley 18:19
That’s awesome. Well, I appreciate that was a side tangent, but I think important for people to understand that it does require building out a team and establishing trust with other people. And that can be done remotely. And that’s what I love. Hearing from your experience. My entire team is also 100% remote. Most of it like 90% of our team members I’ve never met in person. And so it can be done, which is great. So normal, let’s go back to you know, what are the different services then that you know, that people come to you for?
Norm Farrar 18:55
Well, my people will come to me for Amazon, but when I look at what they’re doing, they’re working bass ackwards. So, I go back to them and I say, you know, do you do you have a brand? And do you have a social media account set up? Do you have a website like a simple page setup? Or SEO these are all things that the one company takes care of for people but a lot of people just never even think of oh, why would I need social media? Why would I need a website and they think that it’s gonna be really expensive when it doesn’t it’s just gonna be somebody’s going to Amazon looking for your product you’re a micro brand just like my cup says whereas the micro brand swaps that’s about the right cup. I thought it was but anyways, what ends up happening is on I lost my train of thought because of this was a girl brands, micro brands, but before that
Josh Hadley 19:57
and and having your own website I suppose you Media
Norm Farrar 20:01
websites. Thank God I have a younger guy on here. So anyways, it’s all about being authority. So if you go on to, onto Amazon, what do you what’s the first thing you’re gonna do? It’s a micro brand, you can’t trust them, you go to Google. And if there’s no presence there, or if there’s no way of showing that you’re an authority, then you’re not going to gain the trust, and you’re not going to have the sale, people will click off. So how do you do that social media website may be doing a press release or building out some content on your site. So people will see that know that you’re an authority, you know, you, you speak with authority. So that’s one area, the other areas of pretty much all the Amazon side of things. And this is also with Walmart now. But we’ll build out the e commerce stores, we’ll build out and work on finding a product for somebody, or doing the research and giving them opportunities, probably one of the bigger things is packaging. So a lot of people don’t really understand packaging, or how to get perceived value out of packaging. And then we’ll do the product listings if people want. We’re very good with graphics. So you know, the URL designs with graphics. So we can put the whole listing together if people want. And then we can move it on to Walmart, or we could drive external traffic to it, it’s pretty much the whole gamut. My goal when I set this up, was It’s A to Z. And that’s what we’ve established, it’s A to Z. So if people do come and they want, we’ve, if it’s not me, as an expert, we definitely have somebody in the company that is an expert on Facebook ads, or Google ads, or whatever it is.
Josh Hadley 21:43
Awesome. And I think that’s one thing that you had mentioned, prior to this podcast, we had talked a lot about, you know, one of the things that you would advise a lot of sellers to start focusing on is external traffic. Tell me more about that. Why is external traffic so important, especially if people want to be growing to eight figures and beyond?
Norm Farrar 22:07
Well, first of all, Amazon’s rewarding us, right, so they’ve got the brand referral program that’s been in existence for about, what, six, eight months, and they’re giving a 10% credit back. So drive traffic over to Amazon, they’re saying it’s that important that we’re gonna give you 10% credit. Okay, super. So it’s new traffic that may not have ever heard of your brand. From what I understand, I can’t tell you 100%, nobody can, but from what I understand, they weigh external traffic differently. And if it converts, even better, so what ended up happening is you get that little bump, so your prices actually end up going down, because your conversion is better. So your PPC costs go down. So this is what I’ve heard multiple people, multiple people in the industry say, again, I’m not 100% Sure it’s true, but it looks to be, but driving external traffic over to your listing is not only good over to Amazon, but it’s so easy to do with any of your other like, if you’re doing it to Shopify, to build a list to make that customer yours. And that is, by the way, something we never talked about. And that is owning the client, right or, or sorry, owning the customer. So that by putting the proper inserts in by using dynamic URLs, so you can change it to the seasons, by having a really great add on or something of value that people that could be registered warranty or could be whatever it is, I know we work with a knife company that gives away a 52 week meal, a meal plan. And people love it. And the recipe book and they get email addresses quite a few email addresses, because of this very simple thing to do. And they change it up on the season. So these are little things that you can do that you can now drive external traffic from wherever you want. You can add email campaigns, but it’s your traffic. So anyways, I’m going down 1000 Different rabbit holes here, but I can’t tell you how important it is. Then even if you’re driving the traffic from like, simple posts, okay, you can take those posts and repurpose those posts in your Amazon posts the side of things, so use it two ways.
Josh Hadley 24:34
Yeah, that’s a that’s a great idea. So there’s there’s a lot I think maybe overall, are you saying that brands need to become more kind of omni channel and Omni presence so to speak that instead of just leaning into, hey, I’m just an Amazon brand and all I do is just focus all my attention on Amazon. Are you saying that people need to start focusing more of things off of Amazon then
Norm Farrar 25:00
Yeah, they have to say their business, not an Amazon brand, or I sell on Amazon, one of the first things that businesses do is create a business plan. And if you don’t have a business plan, you’re not a business, because you have to have a map of where you’re going. And if you don’t have that map, and you don’t have those numbers, and if you don’t have a strategy, then how the hell are you going to get to where you want to go? So that’s the first thing is make sure that you have the model where you don’t have
Josh Hadley 25:31
to depend on Amazon. Yeah, well, I mean, you have a lot of experience yourself selling outside of Amazon, prior to Amazon. And so I think like for you that that comes more natural than many other people are, it’s like they only know how to sell on Amazon. So if a brand is primarily on Amazon right now, right, that you could consider them an Amazon brand, what are some of the first steps that you would recommend that they should start taking? Because as you shared, there’s a lot that people can be doing driving external traffic, you know, inserts, and then email lists, there is a lot, right? Do you have kind of a maybe a roadmap or a path that you would recommend to people to say, Alright, you’re here on Amazon. But here are some of the next steps we should be taking to get your brand more omnipresent. And to create a real business plan. Yeah,
Norm Farrar 26:28
probably, it’s the insert that starts everything. If you’re on Amazon, so create a QR code, put it on your insert, and have it a dynamic, not a static QR code. So it’s got to, you got got to be able to go in and change that URL. And you can leave that over to a funnel page, or you can lead it over to your Shopify page. But at the end of the day, you want to have a area for you to get that email address, and or your phone number, or the phone number, or both. And the better the deal, the more of a chance you’re gonna get that. So just think of yourself. So if you’re going to some person’s landing page that you’ve never known before, you don’t know them from anybody, or you don’t trust them. But how, why are you going to give them your email address, so you’ve got to have something of value to give, or it’s just not going to work. So if you just, you know, if you’re just going to send some white papers, some research or some document PDF file, probably, people are just going to click off of it, they’re not going to be interested. And so it’s not going to be successful. So that would be my very first step, then the next step is to do an email campaign. I’ve got friends over at post purchase Pro, and they do that they’ll take care of that for you. And what they say is that you’re going to losing 40% of revenue, if you’re not doing follow up emails are touching your repeat customers. repeat customers are easy, they like your brand. Okay. Another thing I should say is that I, for me, anyways, I try not to do brands that I can’t do recurring revenue. So let’s say I sell soap I do sell, so there’ll be a few cents over on Amazon. But when they come over to my page, there’s going to be a lot more soaps that they can’t buy on Amazon, there might be a soap dish that I give them. But this is all recurring income. So if I get them to come over, and they buy one package of three pack, I know that it’s going to probably take two, two and a half months, they’re going to come back and they’re going to buy more so so it’s it’s a plan. If it was, you know, if it was something that they use once a nail, boom, okay, that’s all they’re gonna do. So I that’s one of the things I try to do is always recurring, getting them over to that that page, but it could be as funnel two, it doesn’t have to be Shopify, you can do a simple funnel, where you can just tell people what your offer is, you can show the benefits, you can show testimonials or social sharing it and you go like just build out a normal funnel and at the end of it, there’s the offer scarcity and your guarantee. Pretty simple. And you’ll probably find that you can offer some sort of value. So it might be let’s say it’s a multipurpose knife, but you’re gonna give away a $20 honing rod that cost you three bucks, you know, something like that but something of value to get the person to order to give you that email address.
Josh Hadley 29:48
Interesting. I love that so no harm as we back it up. I think you did. You did a great job of laying out a clear path of like, here’s some steps people should be taking. If they want to become more omnipresent, so to speak in the omni channel and start a real brand. The first thing was kind of focusing in on that the product insert, right or product label, whatever it is, and you’re enticing people to, you know, give you their email address. So Norm, I wanted to ask, you know, what are some of the best practices that you see with that? And maybe do you have any case studies, or maybe some examples that you might be able to share with us, just to kind of spark some ideas in people’s mind of the various opportunities that do lie in, you know, building your own audience off of Amazon, from those insert cards?
Norm Farrar 30:41
Well, it’s a good and bad story. But I know we were working with a beauty company, but built an email list up to 280,000 emails. Wow. But he would not. He never. He thought it was inconvenient. It would inconvenience people. If he sent them emails, that doesn’t make sense. 280,000 emails? So yeah, that that that wasn’t, that wasn’t a smart move. But
Josh Hadley 31:13
I was tracking. I mean, how did he attract 280,000 people to give him their email address, right? Like, do you know what the offer was?
Norm Farrar 31:22
Yeah, well, different beauty products. So what it would be is you could go, you could go to the Insert, or go to a landing page, a landing page would offer them one of his other products. So if you had the shampoo conditioner, you could have the what’s called keratin treatment, or you could have there was some serums, and stuff like that. But you were offered a free product. Oh,
Josh Hadley 31:51
$10 in the insert card, it on the insert card, it says hey, claim your free product, I assume then,
Norm Farrar 31:58
okay. Yep. So all it did was sent, he got the email address and the address because he had to send the product. So he had he had it all. And he did not and would not send out a single email.
Josh Hadley 32:14
Fascinating. Yeah. Which is, you know, going back, you kind of shared that stat that you think that people are missing out on 40% of revenue, just by not implementing, you know, additional ads.
Norm Farrar 32:28
Right, you sell a million bucks, you’re missing on a 400,000.
Josh Hadley 32:31
Fascinating. Yeah. Any other stories or examples of like insert cards or, you know, ways that work to get people to provide their email address?
Norm Farrar 32:41
Well, there’s always the extended warranty. So that is something again, going back to the knife company. extended warranty. So it’s a lifetime warranty. Okay, great. That’s a lifetime warranty anyway, basically, but you know, it’s a lifetime warranty. Another one was just like I was talking to you about before a knife with the hunting rod. Okay, great. Another one that worked for that company was the meal plan and cookbook, so you can either download and get a weekly email. So what’s in that weekly email with the weekly plan? Well, there’s some sort of promotion. It wasn’t all the time, but there was either to some recipe. So this is something that we did as well, we went out. And we talked to chefs, and we talked to culinary schools, and we gave them very expensive knife. So the deal was, we’ll supply the whole class with these very expensive knives, if they provide us with a recipe and spread it out on their social media, or tag us on their social media. So we got a ton of user generated content. And we got a ton of recipes. So what do we do on Amazon posts, provided recipes. So that started at a very unique following. And then, because of that, we ended up getting all this really cool stuff that we could put onto this other page fill in to the newsletter. And when people got their newsletter, they got recipes, which ended up being two full, really incredible recipe books. So now we give away the recipe books, but we could peel off one recipe at a time, which people enjoyed, you know, and we didn’t do it, but you could have even segmented it further. If the person was vegan, you could just send them vegan recipes or vegetarian or, you know, whatever it was, you could you could drill down and even build a better profile. So now you’re targeting really specific things, you know, depending on what you’re selling later on.
Josh Hadley 34:46
That is super smart. And honestly, I think I had a mindset shift as you were talking about, you know, leveraging those recipes into Amazon posts as well. So I think that’s a brilliant start. IG, right? Like with the. So to sum things up, people would buy this knife set, right? They would get and they had the car that’s like, hey, get, you know, 52 weeks worth of free recipes sent to your email inbox, right? They opt in, they give you their email address. And then you got really well like, you didn’t just go to Google and be like, Oh, no, I need a recipe and just scrape something off of Google. You got them from professional, you know, culinary students, right? And then you have exceptional recipes, you’re sending them out via email on a weekly basis, right? So you’re providing value to the customer, right? Or your potential lead, and so that they don’t feel like they’re just being marketed to right. I think when people think about, oh, I can generate 40,000 or 40%, more revenue from email, I just need to send sales emails like no, that’s not the way that the email game works. But I like the fact that like, you’re providing value, and then you repurpose that content, from your emails into Amazon posts. That’s a big mindset shift. Because I think for people like, yes, you may still be focusing on Amazon. But as you open up this new, you know, email channel, like, you’re still serving Amazon, at the end of the day, and you can repurpose some of that. So I like that idea. I think we’re gonna start taking some of that away, like even our own newsletters, like what content should we just be sharing on Amazon posts, like it’s its own social media channel?
Norm Farrar 36:37
Right? We went one step further with the culinary students and chefs hasn’t started. It should be this week or next. But we have a cooking show now on Amazon live,
Josh Hadley 36:50
really? So are you yet? Well, tell me more about that. I have a lot of questions about that.
Norm Farrar 36:56
Okay, so we got the chef’s to come on. And they’re going to be doing like it’s going to be a cooking show. And we didn’t know if we were going to have it in a studio that we would prep for. That would just be our studio, but we decided not to do it that way. It’s just going to be it is in a culinary school. So we’ve got everything at our fingertips. And the tip is they’re going to be going and showing us how they prepped it. And then at the end, there’ll be a dish that’s already made, and people will see it. So it’s going to be some live content, using the product because one of the things that Amazon wants to show you say wants to show is the product as a deal. And they want to show the product being in use. So it’s, it’s selling, its promotional, but it’s also useful information. So I think that’s gonna generate like, the average person spends eight minutes on an Amazon live, well, I can extend that out. That’ll be even better. And I think we’re gonna get a lot of followers for them.
Josh Hadley 38:02
I think that that is a brilliant strategy. So to sum that up, Norm, the product you guys are promoting, so to speak, is it knifes their same thing?
Norm Farrar 38:12
Yeah, it’s a whole selection of kitchen utensils proprietary.
Josh Hadley 38:17
Okay, so kitchen utensils. So they’re going to be using multiple utensils throughout that, you know, cooking process then, right? Okay. So yeah, they are featuring different utensils, but rather than just, hey, I want to show you this new spatula. And look how nice this spatula is. And how long do you want to listen to a talking head just talking about a spatula, right? You’re providing actionable and valuable content, like you’re going above and beyond. And I think that’s a brilliant strategy, that thinking people need to start thinking outside the box more that way,
Norm Farrar 38:53
looking for video. And don’t forget when you do this, if you have a YouTube channel, or this is something that we don’t talk about it a lot, but this is a strategy that you can use for content, contents, everything right now on Amazon outside of Amazon, but if you have a video, even if you go to a company like below, and they’ll put together a video for you for me around 100 bucks, well, you can take that video very well done, and then you can start taking screen captures. And now instead of having just a video well you’ve got 10 images, and you’ve got the video and if you do that with five different influencers, then you can mix it up so it doesn’t look like it’s the same one that you’re using or 10 Even what’s 1000 bucks when you’re you know when you if you can get 10 different 10 different influencers and you get 10 different shots from each influencer. And then you could even mix up and you can start adding like just like splice it together and editing. You got countless amounts of inventory in it. dintorni buy content that you can put on your website, repurpose on all social media into YouTube. And just like this, you can actually take your Amazon live, download segments of it and put it onto YouTube. And wherever else you want to show it. But now you’ve got multiple, multiple, multiple uses for your content, you can repurpose it all over.
Josh Hadley 40:24
That’s brilliant. No, I love that. What was the name of that software? You said below? Is it bi L L?
Norm Farrar 40:31
O bi? l l o? Okay. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 40:36
What is it? Tell us more about that. Okay, so
Norm Farrar 40:38
very simple. You go, you there’s a packages, they’ve got a one pack five pack. 10 Pack says how many videos you want, okay, and they range they say 59. But I seem to think that it was at $9, just over 100 bucks, depending on if you want certain things being said. And you can pick from a unboxing or a review, a testimonial, a demo, whatever you want. And you have you put it out to bid, then not to bid but to review people will see they’ll say oh, I want a knife, I want a knife or I want some so they come back and you select out of the group which ones you want. And then they produce it and it’s very high quality. Now, this is not an influencer network, you’re not gonna get into posted on their influencer sites. Okay, it’s something that looks like very high quality, you completely usable. And if you don’t like it, you can go back and get a revision.
Josh Hadley 41:43
Fascinating. Very cool. I’m gonna have to take a look at that one. I have not heard about that software. Oh, my gosh, so good. That sounds like an amazing service. And you shared a great strategy of how you could then repurpose that content multiple times, on on Amazon, and everywhere, you know, you’re on social media. That’s where we were talking about the more omnipresent right? Having your own social channels and website and all of that. Now, that’s kind of where we kind of got down this rabbit hole here is we originally talking about building your own audience, right? We talked about getting people from the Insert cards, and then creating that email list. And then we ultimately started directing some traffic to Shopify. At what point do brands start focusing more on driving traffic to their own DTC store than trying to direct external traffic to Amazon? Yeah, have any recommendation,
Norm Farrar 42:42
it just depends on the brand, you can do it at any time. If it is more of an Amazon brand, if you want that captivated audience and it’s going to cost you let’s say you have a lower dollar product, right? Like soap, if there’s something we learned were from selling one bar of soap, I’m going to die on Facebook, I’ll never make a penny. If I bundle it, I will. So it depends. If you’re, you know, in that lower dollar category, it’s going to be tough to drive traffic over you D and C until until you establish that list, you know later on where you can now target people build loyalty programs, a referral program. So this is something my son does, he’ll go out and he’ll build a referral program. And it’s a contest. You know, you get a point or five points for every person you refer to and then you can get something usually nonrelated. So we’ve given away air pod pros or whatever they are wireless things. And, you know, you’ll get tons and tons of new followers one of the things that we did, by the way, which this is for some jewelry, so $55 jewelry, okay, we started out we were just talking about it last night. And anyways, it’s some nice jewelry, we spent money on photography, lots of money on photography, but I’m getting followers, we as of now have 12,000 followers, all organic followers, who love the concept of the jewelry, that we provide non promotional information to them, and then those 12,000 people and those 12,000 people ended up costing us less than $1,000 to get my 1000 people so 24,000 100,000 You know, like on my soap I’ve got over 100,000 followers. How hard is it when you have a new bar of soap to say hey, you know check this out if you like Hawaiian scents if you like this sent Yeah, take 10% off that’s where you can you know really build out and if you can build out your social media, while you can you can do the DTC anytime.
Josh Hadley 44:58
How do you build out that on As the then so cheaply and so effectively.
Norm Farrar 45:04
So it depends, like I think my my other friend of my old business partner, Wilfred light heart, I can tell you the story there where he’s reached millions of people on $10. And he but he just, he knows how to do it. He knows the vote, like he uses all different techniques to build communities. And I know, we had built a community of 5 million Republicans, which got shut down by Facebook, and 3 million Democrats, which never did. And anyways, what you could do with that is leverage, like building up these communities on very low cost using Facebook posts or boosts or, like for him, he was just boosting with viral content about the subject. And anyways, then he split it off into, you know, what Republicans like, what Democrats like, what kind of dogs do they like, what kind of pets do they like, and then you can start marketing to them. So it was really quite powerful. And because it wasn’t brand specific, you could market multiple brands into that. Or you could even create your own affiliate and market other people’s brands into those communities. But it’s not hard to build a community as long as you’re consistent. And you’re not promoting, promoting, promoting. Yeah, like he always says, You got to get engaged before you get married. So I fully agree with that
Josh Hadley 46:27
makes a lot of sense. I think that’s, that’s some great advice. Now, we’re coming up on time here Norm, but I would love for you to share with some people, some easy optimization tactics that they can be making to their listings that typically get overlooked.
Norm Farrar 46:45
Oh, yeah, there’s, there’s so many things right now. So one of the things that I like to do is, I don’t like to use the retail packaging that I normally would have the, let’s say, the soap in or whatever product that can be the knives, I want to bring up the selling points. Or if it’s like, you know, a supplement bottle is very crammed with all sorts of information. Supplement info on the one side, the directions and all the ingredients, and then you got lots of stuff front, I get rid of all that. So I’ll just do a 3d rendering that’s important that we never talked about that. But 3d renderings are so much so important when you’re using cardstock boxes, or especially cylinder type bottles. So you can just clean it up. So it says the name, the product you can bring out if it’s the count that’s important. Or if there’s any benefits that are important, you can put it there, nobody’s going to complain, if they don’t get the exact same bottle as what was on the listing. If they are, they’re an idiot, you know, they’re just troublemaker, but any end, you give them the refund like they want. And but nobody’s going to do that. So that’s one thing. The other thing I’m going to skip Title Bullets back end stuff I’m going to accept. And this is Vanessa on so if you ever get a chance to listen to her, she talks about flat files, and using every field in your flat file, and making sure that every field is taken up, and that you is called contributors right? And that you upload these on a regular basis, just so Amazon can see its contributors rights. And if they see a change, all of a sudden, like all of a sudden a category change to adults or images they can be it can be shown that it’s still you’re the contributor and not this other person. And the chances of you getting that repaired very quickly. It’s it’s that’s important. So that’s something I didn’t tell you about. The other is is frequently bought together, get a few people to buy your products for me. So sense. I might have a one pack three pack and dish soap dish, or I might have different scents. But why do I want my competitors to be on there frequently bought together? And it might only take one purchase or two purchases to have everything together. So that’s another area in 33% of all sales are done through frequently bought together. Another
Josh Hadley 49:17
key area on that if you don’t mind me interrupting on that. How do you kind of influence that? Is that just something that you maybe create a promotion to your email list or social media to Yeah, tell people to do that or any recommendations there?
Norm Farrar 49:31
Yeah, you could, you could do something like that you can do. You could just do a virtual bundle if you wanted. Or you could do a Facebook ad. And you could just say that you’re having a 50% off sale or something along those lines. Just to show that they’re, they’re done together but a virtual bundle and you promote that virtual bundle. That’ll do her but you only need a couple of sales that’s, you know that and when you see all these other people that have very Virtual like frequently bought together, and there’s competitors on there, all you have to do is buy it once or twice, you’ll probably beat out the competitor. Now supplements might be a little bit different, but most categories, all it is is your competitors buy your product. And that’s a strategy to if you’ve got an added, let’s say, I’m a knife company, and I don’t have a polishing stone, or if I don’t have a honing rod, well team up with somebody who has a honing rod, and now you’re on the listing or if somebody else has more sales than you go and buy their product.
Josh Hadley 50:34
Yeah. Great idea.
Norm Farrar 50:37
That’s that’s one and then the final one, which is quite obvious. Well, actually, there’s two, there’s the questions and answers, which you get people to ask quite doesn’t matter who it is, it could be you. It could be, you know, your hamster, anybody can answer a put in a question with a keyword? And then you answer it with that keyword. And that’ll get indexed, that those are indexed. One, and
Josh Hadley 51:05
I’ve heard that I’ve heard that’s also a really good way, if there’s like brand related terms, right, that you can’t necessarily include in your listing. But you could say, Is this similar to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, you know, iron or something like
Norm Farrar 51:21
that? Or service? Because it’s a question that came in from somebody. So yeah, so I don’t think that’s a problem. And then the other one I didn’t tell you about is related video. So under related video, you can upload a Comparison or Review video to your competitors, with their product, and you just don’t trash your product, but you make your product a little bit more enticing. Or we go to a company like a video production company, and we get them to do maybe a two minute video. But within the two minutes, we say, Okay, make us you know, try to do 10 videos that we can somehow assemble, you know, maybe it’s an unboxing video, it’s instructions, it’s whatever it is, but you can do 10 videos out of this two minutes. And then we’ll get somebody to do a thumbnail, how to, you know, the brand, you know, and then unboxing, blah, blah, blah, the brand. And then I upload every single one. And it looks like it’s more of a tutorial section. Yeah. Nobody’s doing that.
Josh Hadley 52:30
That is a really, really good idea. All right. So I want to break that one down. Because I feel like that is a that is a golden nugget that I think nobody’s talking about. So this sits above the review section, right? And there’s a bunch of it just says related videos. Right? Right. And if you don’t upload your own videos, then typically what’s going to show up are just like, competitors, videos, anything that’s related to your product that Amazon feels as related, we’ll just, there’s a video, they’ll put it there. And right now, there’s a lot of unoccupied real estate, to be honest with you there. So Norm, you’re able to then upload your own videos then correct. Like it builds your own brand. You can upload related videos, where does that go? Like that? Where do you upload it?
Norm Farrar 53:22
Oh, there’s a, it’s so crazy. But just look in the section, it’ll probably be blank, or you’ll have your competitors fields there. But right there it says add video,
Josh Hadley 53:32
click it, upload your video. That’s it. And it’s not against TOS like you’re the brand you can be logged into your brand account, and you upload your own brand videos across the board. And these can be even 10 second clips, you know, from a two minute video and you just chop them up correct.
Norm Farrar 53:50
If you want to make it a little bit bigger, so you got a really nice thumbnail, don’t make it look cheesy. Or it’ll just be you know, one of the frames in the video but make it look educational, and make it look enticing and then have a little one second or one and a half second intro and it could be like something you have for everyone. So it’s consistent everything about brands consistency. So you have this one and a half second, your logo or you know, and then the benefit, you know what that video is about and then the next one, then the next one. And then you can take a review video that you’ve done, you’ve bought three or four products and you can have, you can test it out, you can just very simply show the product. Now one of the things that I have and it’s right over there is a very inexpensive photo studio. So that went through school for photography, film and photography. However, I never was a photographer. So for 30 years later I got myself a light box, but it’s called Full deal. Okay, all do is awesome. It’s not exciting. So it has LED lights you might want to buy, it’s called the 360 smart table. And all of a sudden, you’ve got this thing that can do rotating. And I’m talking about with your finger you like you could rotate the images around, you can put your competitors stuff on. Maybe you have dollar lights, you know, then what’s on yours. So yours always comes up brighter and looks better. But there’s all sorts of ways to do it very inexpensively without having to go out to a photography studio, because it’s supposed to look like an iPhone, his shot it, you know, so it looks homemade. And you can just go through email for different points on each one. So for us, like when we do Facebook Live, we want to make sure that, how’s the brand, how’s the unboxing, how’s the perceived value, and how’s the overall customer experience, you could just use those four points on the four products. And of course, yours is always the better, yeah, and then you can put it on all four of those competitors. So and you can then
Josh Hadley 56:01
you go to your competitors listing, and you go to related videos, right, the related video section, and you just go ahead and upload that and upload
Norm Farrar 56:09
and guess what you can, you can put all your videos up there if you want it. But, you know, I wouldn’t recommend that, I would probably put yours without the thumbnail on it. Okay, so you know, it doesn’t look the same. But you can you can start putting yours up there. And what you want to do is make sure that you fill out your, your carousel, because you don’t want your competitors to, you know, kind of was there to find out what you’re doing.
Josh Hadley 56:35
Genius. This gets me really excited Norm, that’s an amazing little hack there. I love that. But all TOS compliant very white hat. This isn’t like anything shady, but a lot of real estate that just simply isn’t being taken advantage of. And Amazon is definitely leaning more into video with your experience norm kind of another question I wanted to ask, you know, you went to school for photography, videography, you’re kind of your own little home studio now. Any recommendations that you would provide to people when it comes to product photography or videos, because I think most people look at that. And it’s like, this is a daunting task for myself.
Norm Farrar 57:19
Now, this is a, you have to go and do competitive analysis. So if you’re finding that your competitors are more higher end, it might be okay to do a lower end video. But in some cases, you know, I think supplements and they spend a bit of money on their videos. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to. And I know I’m speaking in circles here, but there might be an argument to say that it might be different enough, if you do a low end video, and people might find it more refreshing to see a lower end video than some highly polished video. I don’t spend a lot of money on videos, and I’ll even do videos with that light table over there. Just rotating. And don’t forget, Amazon’s got their own video templates now. So if you, you know, if you put your product in the one side, and you’ve got a little like you showed spinning around on a table, or if you’ve got a gift that you want him to or GIF, whatever you want to say. But you know, you want to just put multiple images in there. And then whatever your bullet points are, like the headings for them, they’ll produce a very inexpensive video and at least you’ve got it and it’s free.
Josh Hadley 58:37
Where are those video templates? What’s that? Where are those video templates?
Norm Farrar 58:41
Video templates are when you go to upload a video, you’ll be able to see where you can get a video template. Okay, yeah, and they’re, they’re, you know, they’re free they’re, there’s nothing that you have paid. I mean, it’s you you just load them up and you’ve got something that you can use. Now there are other video apps out lots of video apps out there but Animoto was one that I used in the past they don’t anymore what some others what is it video Lee? I forget but Animoto is the one but you can go to companies that do this video telepathy is a good company, high quality videos. What’s the agency that was just approached us? They made one for us anyways, video telepathy is really great when it comes to product and demo videos.
Josh Hadley 59:36
Awesome. I love that. Well, you’ve shared a lot of valuable feedback and so new arm as we wrap things up here today, I would love to, you know ask you my few final questions that I like to ask everybody. But before we get to that point, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are the three takeaways that I noted nor and let me know if you think I’m missing something. So number one, I think the basic thing that people need to do if they haven’t done this yet, is actually take time out of your schedule to create a business plan and a business strategy. If you have not created your three to five year plan for your business, and how you’re going to grow from where you’re at, to where you want to be in the future, and the different levers that you need to pull when and where then you need to, you need to start working on your business. Because there’s a lot of great tactics that we talked about today. And honestly, that’s been one of the mistakes that I’ve made. In the past, when I was new into E commerce was just whenever I heard something new, and it was a cool, shiny object, you know, or new marketing hack, I would just go dive into it without seeing how that fits into the overall business plan and strategy that we are pursuing. So that’s first and foremost, number two, would be an actionable takeaway is that if you are not actively, you know, collecting your own audience off of Amazon, right, whether it be through insert cards, or through warranties, or whatever, that they start doing that, or if you are like the other seller that we talked about that 280,000 People already on their list, but not utilizing their that email channel, then that would be a next step. I think, you know, if people are Amazon brand, primarily right now, I think email genuinely is kind of your next stage, before you start getting distracted in, you know, maybe big Shopify stores or, you know, Click Funnels or anything like that utilize email. And then third, last but not least, you shared a lot of actionable strategies, with some optimization tips that people could, could go back and listen to, but anything from product images, to the question and answer fields to related videos, take one of those optimization tactics that we talked about, especially as it relates to content and start repurposing your content throughout Amazon. So those are kind of, I think, three actionable takeaways from this episode, Norm, anything else you think I missed that we should add in there?
Norm Farrar 1:02:19
Well, if they wanted to go one step further with optimization at checkout, Amazon’s internal tools for optimization. And one of them is called listing optimization, which is under your catalog. So when you sell and go into Seller Central, under catalog, you’ll see the listing optimization, I think that’s what it’s called now. Anyways, it’ll tell you four or five different tips, what you could do, some of them are not accurate, okay, but some of them are. The other thing is growth opportunities. So click on that, and it’ll show you different ways and the amount that you’re missing out on, in a 90 over a 90 day period, I did it with one of my clients, and they were missing out on $40,000. With a product, if we just did these little tweaks, then we did, I don’t know if it came out to that. But it’ll tell you, you need a video need a plus need this need that. And you do that, then you can go over to your brand section. And you can take a look at your search terms and see if there’s any low quality terms that are going to generate you nothing, and you can replace those terms are usually in pink, replace those terms with something that will get you some extra traffic. There’s a lot of internal tools that Amazon has has now to help you out.
Josh Hadley 1:03:36
That’s brilliant. I think that’s great advice. And I have seen those recommendations before that that’s an easy one that people should be paying attention to. But I think we also overlook, very frequently, Norm as we wrap things up, what is a book that you’ve read that has been impactful? I think you’ve maybe answered it earlier in this conversation. But what’s one of the most impactful books that you’ve read? And why?
Norm Farrar 1:04:01
It’s I’m gonna go back you miss the E Myth Revisited as what’s called now, I can’t say enough about it. It really did change the way I looked at business.
Josh Hadley 1:04:12
Awesome. I love that. What is a software tool that you’re currently utilizing, that maybe a lot of people aren’t talking about? That needs some light shed on it?
Norm Farrar 1:04:23
Oh, if you’re not using data die, you’re missing out?
Josh Hadley 1:04:27
Yep. I agree Data Dive with Brandon young, one of the best newest tools in the Amazon Seller system right now. Yep. All right. Last question here. What it who is somebody that you respect the most in the E commerce space that people need to be paying attention to and following along their content?
Norm Farrar 1:04:49
Yeah, I don’t know. He says he’s not doing podcasts anymore. But I always liked Adam hice. He was really you know, on it. I like Brandon la Brandon Young is is on it. There’s a lot of people Stephen, who you’ve had on Stephen Pope. Carlos Alvarez with wizards. You know, he’s got the unbelievable he’s got the biggest Amazon meetup in the world. 16,000 people
Josh Hadley 1:05:18
that that is a big meetup. Crazy.
Norm Farrar 1:05:21
But those are those are a few people in my partner, Apple lobby, Oregon. I mean, he he knows his stuff as well, especially with product innovation.
Josh Hadley 1:05:30
I love it. Great those that’s a great list of people that other people can go pay attention to and following.
Norm Farrar 1:05:37
I got my friend my buddy yeah, and I got a good shout out to him. He’s got the flu right now. So just get better, you know, get better, quick,
Josh Hadley 1:05:48
awesome. Well, Norm as as we depart today, I think there is a parting gift, you are going to leave our audience with a new tool kind of never before heard. This is the first time I’m hearing it as well. Norms revealing it here on our podcast. So we’re fortunate. So Norm, kind of give us the good word here.
Norm Farrar 1:06:09
Okay, it’s not so much a tool. It’s just a lot of effort. What I’m doing, and Amazon sellers alike in general don’t know how to find influencers. So they either here a couple of different ways. They don’t go about it, but different platforms have different ways of approaching them. So I’m going to be doing this tick tock daily journal on how to do it is from like day one, trying to find influencers, what platforms what to say what not to say, mistakes, bla bla bla bla. And then on the other side of it, people want to become influencers. And this is a challenge I took from my son Kelsey, saying he thought I’d be a good influencer. I said, I think I would suck at being a buying influencer, because I have no no like zero followers on that side of it. On the podcast side, yes, but on the buyer side zero. So the challenge was to create a zero to 100,000 followers as an influencer in a year. And so this is what we’re doing. We’re looking for people for products that at no charge will put them on Amazon live just like we were talking about before we we’ve done it for years years now. We’ll we’ll do a video we’ll do photos, everything that you’ll need to you’ll be on the deal site, what I’m trying to do is create this thing called Lunch with Norm deal. All we need is product. So if you get us the product will start to do all this though. I can’t tell you if it’ll be on one channel or multiple channels. But you get us the product will do this for you for absolutely free. The only time the only time that there’ll be a charge is if it’s if there’s a sale, and there’ll be 10% charge. But if you’re on Amazon, it’ll be just replaced by the credit. But that’s because of if we’re doing Facebook ads or if we’re doing Instagram or doing anything on Tik Tok, it costs us as well. So all I’m trying to do is recoup costs, do this challenge and just show how an old guy with zero followers can hit 100,000 followers in a year.
Josh Hadley 1:08:20
I love that! Norm, what it what a cool opportunity. So if people want to follow you and maybe take advantage of this opportunity, where should people be contacting you? Hey,
Norm Farrar 1:08:30
I am going to be doing all sorts of promos on Lunch with Norm Dealsdeals which is on Amazon live. But yeah, anything launch with Norm deals is probably going to be under LW N deals. We’ve just started like there’s no followers. I think I have one follower. Now. I don’t even know how I got that follower, but on Instagram, but that’s how or if you want to send me products, just Norm really simple Norm@LWNDeals.com. And I’ll respond, give you the address where to send it to. And yeah, I think it’s going to be good for the person because you’re going to be able to get influencer, they’ll be able to get live, they’ll be able to take that content and repurpose it. So they got nothing to lose. And all I want to do is I don’t want to be embarrassed after a year coming in at you know 90,999 So I need that 100,000 They hit my challenge.
Josh Hadley 1:09:31
I love it. No harm that this has been so awesome. Thanks so much for the valuable insights and strategies that you’ve shared with us today. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, it’s
Norm Farrar 1:09:41
my pleasure.
Outro 1:09:42
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