Alina Vlaic 4:35
Okay, where do I start? Yeah, let’s start with product launches. I know everybody’s, a lot of people in the Amazon space, say that. Even if you have a great product, sometimes it’s not enough. You have to also do a great launch in order to be successful on that product. And oftentimes, unfortunately, I see a A lot of great products for launches. And I’m saying that in, in the position where I’ve been in I’ve this happened to me as well with our first brand that we’ve ever launched on Amazon.com. In 2018, it was the same thing. I’m not sure if it was a great product, though. But for sure it was an awful launch. And that happens, because you know, a lot, there’s a lot of factors on that I’m not going to go into them all. What I can say about now, the current Amazon state, let’s say, and what we’ve seen in our campaigns and the brands we work with and our tests is, or are a few things I would like to mention here. First of all, whenever we do a product launch, two main two of the main things are keyword research and listing optimization. And I think in this order, first you need to look at your keywords. And then you do you do your business, you do our listing in terms of keyword research. Something that I’ve seen more and more these days is that the Amazon data, the data that Amazon provides, within brand analytics, and especially product opportunity explorer has been more and more accurate. I know that, for example, for your own brand, you can look at your own data, right? You have — inside you have a lot of a lot of data inside your brand analytics dashboard. But for example, if you under-launch a new product, you don’t have that data, right. And you go to all those tools, you go to Helium 10, data, Jungle Scout, whatever, whoever’s out there, and you tried to get the best data there is? Well, we’ve done. I think we’re close to 6,000 launches. Right now. Yeah, I know, it’s a lot. And in the last more than six months, I would say product opportunity explore data, and especially those top 25 keywords that we’re seeing right now are what they need to be in the beginnings, it wasn’t like that. I’ve we’ve had a lot of like, I don’t know, not errors, I think I would say that just like inconsistent data from Amazon. But now they’re getting their head together, because we’re on a podcast. And I cannot say that words, right. They’re getting everything together, and they’re giving us good data. So I would very much put that if you’re not doing that already, I would very much put that into your strategy, looking at product opportunities for for example, if even if we’re doing a relaunch an old product, the product that went out of stock or had whatever issues was shut down by Amazon, the best results we’ve had the best success we’ve had one was on the ranking on the keywords and relaunching on those keywords. And that means focusing on PPC with the strategy that each seller or each brand chooses. And if they chose to work with us as well, with those with a new way of doing giveaways that we’re applying right now, those keywords also work very well. And fast.
Josh Hadley 8:30
Interesting, where do you — so if you go through your keyword research through, you know, opportunity explorer, where are you finding the biggest bang for your buck? Are you saying that those keywords need to be in your title? Or bullets or description? Or is all of the above like how are you recommending people incorporate those keywords into their listings.
Alina Vlaic 8:53
So what I’ve seen that works best and I very much like this because I see it as a very efficient way is to take that list of 20 to 25 keywords and put it together and see how many keywords you can combine like keywords into keywords. So for example if your main keyword is garlic press and your second main is garlic place. garlic press stainless steel, I would use garlic press down list the stainless steel and —
Josh Hadley 9:26
Kill two birds with one stone.
Alina Vlaic 9:28
Exactly, and maybe try to kill five or six birds with one stone for that matter, so that would be the first thing I would do and then depending on how many of those words we have, how many of those long longtail keywords but with root keywords inside of course first place is the title. Second place would be the description and third place to place would be the bullet points. Now in the last few months a plus premium has also been very important. And that made a date meta data that we are allowed to put in into the premium A plus has been proven to work very well. So I would not ignore that.
Josh Hadley 10:14
Would you recommend duplicating keywords? Let’s say I already have keywords in the title, would you put them in the metadata for a plus content as well?
Alina Vlaic 10:25
Yes, I wouldn’t put them in the title and in the bullets or in the title and in the description, but I would put them in the title and in the metadata, or I would put them in the title and in all those fields in the flat file that nobody fills in. Subject matter is, and I don’t know if I mean, I’m sure you know, but maybe some of your listeners don’t know that. Even just working on that flat file on the Excel file, you can still add that column that says subject matter. And sometimes I don’t I, I don’t know to say, a percent or an exact percentage, how much does it work, but it still works. If you add the column, you can literally get your subject matter back right back on your listing and fill that up with keywords.
Josh Hadley 11:10
Fascinating. Interesting. That’s a great hack. I love that. It’s so Alina, you also briefly touched on PPC, how important is PPC then when you’re launching?
Alina Vlaic 11:23
Well, um, first of all, let me say I don’t like PPC. I actually hate it. So I’m not an expert by no means. So what I would, what I say and what we recommend to people, brands, our clients is do not stop your PPC while you’re doing a different type of launch. Because oftentimes some do. So PPC has to be there for those keywords that we’re working on those keywords that you are the most relevant on needs, needs to be there in your PPC campaigns. I don’t want to go deeper into that. But, one thing that I can say would be that the the most relevant keywords even if they’re not your main ones, so the smallest longtail keywords that are exactly what the people are searching for the exact definition of your product should be placed in an important place, let’s say in your PPC campaigns, not just left there, among other 50 keywords in I don’t know whatever broad campaign. So those type of campaigns where those very relevant longtail keywords get a little bit more bids on, there’s been more attention in the PPC have proven to work very well during launches, and even re launches, too. Because Amazon likes that Amazon likes to see that you’re paying for something more than just the main one, just the main keywords where everybody’s fighting on and Amazon, you know, needs to adjust the bids for those more keywords, it’s a lot easier, and they get their money and we get the ranking. So it’s the way it has to be.
Josh Hadley 13:13
Makes sense. So it sounds like you don’t love PPC, you’re saying that it needs to be on. But you’re saying that you have a separate launching strategy. That’s not entirely dependent on PPC. Is that true?
Alina Vlaic 13:28
Correct, yes.
Josh Hadley 13:29
What is that, so let’s dive into that now.
Alina Vlaic 13:33
So it has three components. One of them is PPC. As I explained before, I’m not going to repeat that. So PPC has to be there in the amounts and budgets that everybody considers appropriate. That’s one thing. Second thing is the redefined giveaways or the surveys that we do right now. Kind of a market research combined with the purchase that gives you also some feedback about your listing and about your product at the end of the day. So basically, we still do them in a different way. And third, so this would be the second component and third component, a little bit of external traffic. Even if you don’t have a TikTok Shop, even if you don’t have the budget to do a press article or I don’t know, something crazy like that. I mean, not crazy, but a little bit more expensive. Just make a YouTube channel maker make a few TikTok posts come to us we can help with that. Just make a few TikTok posts and then find some people that can go through those posts to your Amazon and purchase either through us or your friends and family or whatever. Just give Amazon some feedback and some data that some traffic is coming from external and the funny thing is that even I know a lot of your listeners and a lot of people out there saying this is like, you know, cheating and fooling the system. Yes, I know, my two comments on this would be one. I don’t think there is. I don’t think there is anybody doing seven or eight figures who didn’t check the system just a little tiny bit. That’s one thing. And second thing. If you just start it start and do it like very, very moderate, don’t go crazy, like people used to do it in days or like Chinese, some Chinese seller still do. If you don’t go crazy like that, it will add up, it will be the snowball effect. And then in a matter of days, or maybe weeks, organics will come in and you won’t have to do that.
Josh Hadley 15:49
Awesome. I love that. So Alina, I think that, you know, I also love to, you know, let’s quash the notion of you know, Oh, these are black hat tactics? In my opinion, right? I don’t think these are black hat tactics, or even gray hat tactics. If you really think about it, think about a well known brand, right? Let’s say it’s Kraft Foods. Mondelez. Right? They come out with a new Oreo cookie. And let’s say they’re the first channel it’s going to become available on Amazon, they have an email list when they run ads on TV. If their first channel was to direct people to Amazon, what do you think they’re going to do? They’re going to run TikTok ads, they’re going to run TV ads, they’re going to run radio ads, they’re going to do all of this. And they’re going to say, come find our new Halloween Oreo, or whatever it is. It’s the new springtime Oreo, the new Fourth of July Oreo, right? Whatever it is, they’re basically telling, you know, hey, search for this, you know, your final Oreo will find it and come learn about our product, right? So you’re not doing anything that I think is like, Oh, this is illegal. This is against ToS. It’s like the big word.
Alina Vlaic 17:06
Sorry for interrupting. If you ever do this, whoever’s listening, if ever do this. Just stop there. Don’t go further with the reviews. Yes, that’s crossing the line. And we don’t do that we don’t recommend doing that. And we highly recommend staying away from that.
Josh Hadley 17:23
I would say you stay away from reviews with a nine foot pole. Which means you just don’t even talk about them. You don’t even you know, obviously they’re important. But you I think the Amazon’s done a decent job as of late that, you know, just getting customers to leave reviews. And I don’t think you need the hacks to get reviews. And guess what, if you have bad reviews, then guess what probably means your product sucks. So that means you need to get you need to work on a better product, it doesn’t matter, you know, you having a friend or two or 10 that go and leave your reviews are not worth your account held overall. So I love that.
Alina Vlaic 18:05
Now, they just rolled out the new vine program where they they even offered two or three for free and then we’re for like a very tiny amount which is which is good.
Josh Hadley 18:17
I mean, yeah, yeah. And find program. It’s super easy. And yes, you can get some reviews to get your get your product started. Alina, I want to learn more about you know, kind of like steps two and three, you talked about, you know, it’s not search, find buy, but it is, you know, surveys tell us more about what those are and how that works.
Alina Vlaic 18:37
Okay, so um, everything is related to the first one of the first things I mentioned here, and that was the keyword research. And not necessarily the research itself, but the way you’re choosing your keywords for your product, and not necessarily for your launch, but for your product overall. And what we’ve seen in so many hundreds of thousands of thousands of launches, and in so many products that we see every day is that going from day one on the main keywords, I know everybody wants to be there, and we should be there at one point, but going straight forward to those keywords. And I mean, PPC listing several places, different places in the listing, and that may be giveaways and stuff like that. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily bad, but it’s taking a longer time and it cost it’s gonna cost you more if you’re focusing on this very relevant keywords which are longer tails which which sometimes don’t even have a search volume detected detected by the tools, but finding 10 or 20 keywords of that kind all of those keywords containing inside your root main keywords, main second, main third make and making like a bowl of those keywords and implementing them into your listing and into your launch strategies, including PPC, including giveaways. That has been, I think, maybe I would say not 100%. But let’s say 99.9% of the situation’s success for us focus, I mean, start, start with the low hanging fruit and then climb to the top, it’s gonna cost you less way less, you have no idea. Just an example, if you’re doing giveaways, and I know a lot of people do, even if they don’t admit, they do that, if you were to do 1000 units on your two main keywords in a very competitive niche, like supplements, or sports, or fitness, or whatever, and get those loans launched and get those not launch ranked in top five, if you would go with 10 or 20 of these keywords that I’m talking about, and group them and try to, you know, build like, like a sentence from them. Like everything to make sense. At the end. We’ve had cases where we got those two keywords rank and a bunch of others with 200, maybe, wow, same results, just a different approach. And I know it’s for some sellers, and for some brands, it’s very hard to digest, because their niches and their categories are extremely competitive. And wherever they tried this before, they would have done like thousands. I’m not saying it’s, it works all the time with this ratio, like 200 to 1,000. But always, it’s less, it’s always less. Because the simple fact being behind it that maybe I mean, we all know this as Amazon sellers, but maybe you know, in the speed of everything we’re not aware is that Amazon likes relevance, it’s more than velocity. First thing is relevance and be after that come all the other conversion rate, velocity bits and everything. First thing is relevance.
Josh Hadley 22:11
Makes a lot of sense. How are you reaching out to these customers then do? Do brands need to have their own customer email list? Or are you running ads on Facebook, or where’s this coming from?
Alina Vlaic 22:23
We’re not running ads on Facebook. Customers don’t need to have their own list, we have our own people. And there are a lot of people, we have their own, we have our own audiences. Sometimes we do designated campaigns on specific audiences if people want to, we’re developing right now. Another thing, which I think is going to be very good, it’s like a poll service. But not like the polls that we know of is like more of a breakdown of everything that you want to know about your existing product, or about your competitor, a competitor product. And that’s how we kind of structured or divided our audience into focused audiences. If you need a baby, we’re gonna go to moms and new moms and toddler moms or whatever, if you want to go to fitness, you’re gonna go to people doing fitness and so on. So that’s one thing, but main thing we have our own people, it’s everything is taken care about. It’s taken care of by us, and it’s going good. Very good.
Josh Hadley 23:31
Actually, are people doing full purchase pies? Or are you giving them promotion codes to use at all?
Alina Vlaic 23:39
For purchase usually works for purchase price usually works best. Now. If you have a $200 item, sometimes it’s easier to add a coupon or a discount codes depending on how you strategize your launch. Some people just want to start at 50% of their goal price and then go higher. Some people just want to start with their full price and put a coupon. What I can say is that both work coupon or no coupon but no coupon I mean full price leads you to needs to do less units than the than the coupon or discounted price.
Josh Hadley 24:21
Awesome. Makes a lot of sense. I love that. And then the last thing you talked about kind of the third step, why don’t you elaborate a little bit more about what’s involved in that third step of launching and started traffic.
Alina Vlaic 24:32
So this is a lot — external traffic is like the word on everyone’s lips nowadays. So what we do best let’s say what we have the most experience is in what in our launches, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily launch directed, would be the press. The press articles the press release Is the listicles, for example, right now is a craziness with the you know, those black friday listicles, the top 20. You know, those help a lot, a lot. Traffic sales, brand awareness, Google ranking everything, it helps a lot. But blackFriday is just one time, once a year, right. So you cannot always have those. If you have the budget, and if you have a decent brand, if you are seven fingers, you should have a decent brand with a couple of products, at least that do well, or maybe more products. But each of them join less. But together they make a lot of a lot of sense, then I would say it would be a good idea to try this. If not If you’re just like on your first product, if only if it does seven figures. But if you have just one product, I’m not sure if that works, because the whole idea of the press, it’s not about the numbers. It’s not necessarily how many sales did I get from that article? What was my conversion rate, what was my Add to Cart rate, what was my attribution wherever it’s, it’s more about everything else, it’s more about the brand awareness, the brand recognition, people hearing your name, Google, raising that brand name in in the results and, and allocating that brand name to other keyword searches to and on top of everything is that, for example, in our case, but I think in other people. So if you write an article with us, if we do an article for you, it stays there forever. If you have an attribution link provided to us and we use that attribution link in a press article, two years from now, when you’re going to search, when you’re going to look in your attribution, that’s where you’re going to get clicks, you’re going to see clicks on that attribution link that came after the article. And that was those were for free. And sometimes they can be huge, you know, it just like I don’t know, some products just goes viral on TikTok. And everybody searches, searches that product and it’s one of yours, you know, there are all kinds of this, this type of scenarios that can happen. So it’s more about an I see like an investment, you know, in your brand, doing a press articles, we have brands that come to us and they say I don’t care about the sales, I don’t care about conversion rates, I don’t care. I just want an article in one of these publishers. And then next month, say I want another article in one of these publishers just to be there just to wrap their, their their name spoken about vendor products, of course.
Josh Hadley 27:44
Does it pay off over time? I guess is the question.
Alina Vlaic 27:48
It does it from what we’ve seen so far, we’ve only been doing this myself. So I’m just speaking from what I know, from for one year and a few months, when you’re two or three months. But I’ve been talking to other people in the industry. And they say I mean, if you have a brand that you really want to grow it and not just like sell it in six months. It’s worth it. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with selling it, but just do it now, if you’re going to sell in one year or in two years, so you can add something to your brand value. And this time, you know, if the time period is too short, then I wouldn’t do it.
Josh Hadley 28:33
So tell me how that would work. Give me a scenario with how that would work with a product launch. Let’s say we’re, we’re willing to invest in it. We want to have a successful product launch. We want to get some press for our new product as well. How much should I be budgeting? Where’s that press article typically going to come from? What type of traffic kid I expect from it? Can you share maybe some more of those details?
Alina Vlaic 28:56
Sure. So I’m not going to go too much into all the budget scenarios that we have. But usually, our best working publishers are in a $6,000 range. $6k wrench, what does that mean? You it means that you have to promise to me that you are willing, willing to spend $6,000. And then you come to me you sign off the thing and then we’re going to get this rolling for you. We’re going to discuss the publishers for example. Let’s say we’re gonna have, I don’t know, home and decor right or no, let’s say beauty, right? Something for women. We have a bunch of magazines for women, we’re gonna go talk to them. And we’re gonna come to a selection to let’s say, around five titles. We’re going to go to them and say, Okay, you’re right. Your article will most probably be in one of these five titles right. Then after that, you say Yes, and we’re starting our work and the article goes live. Well, if that articles gets 100 clicks, usually our CPC, just as an average is between two and 2.5. dollars for these articles. I know, for some people it can be this is very expensive for some people is very cheap, depending on on their categories on Amazon, and how much the bids cost, right. So let’s say $2, let’s keep it around. So for $6,000, you could get a maximum of 3,000 clicks right? Now, if you if your article only gets 100 clicks, you only pay $200 and still get the article and still have it live out there and still be able to use it however you want. For example, this is a hack for other people that are using press articles right now, you can run your own Google ads on those press articles that are already there, with your attribution links inside and just take it from there. I know everybody knows what that means. So if your article gets 100 clicks, you pay $200. If your article gets 1,000 clicks, you pay $2000. If your article gets 3,000 clicks, you pay the whole budget, if it goes extremely well, and you want to add more to your budget, you can add more. So that’s that’s how it goes, basically, how are they spent?
Josh Hadley 31:21
Yeah. How are the clicks working? Like? How are you tracking the clicks? Are you just monitoring the the referral link? And that’s like.
Alina Vlaic 31:33
So first, most of the cases, like over 90% of the cases, people use an attribution. So you have your own, which I don’t have access to. So you, as a brand, have your own way of tracking those through your attribution dashboard. That’s one thing. But we don’t charge based on that we charge based on our own software that is connected through an API, when the publishers and we try them, usually, our so if we say we had 1,000 clicks, your attribution would say 1,200 clicks. So usually, we’re less it’s, it’s around there. It’s not exact. I mean, nobody can say —
Josh Hadley 32:16
Yeah, I guess my question is, at what point do you stop, you know, having to pay for those clicks, so that it lives on in perpetuity, right?
Alina Vlaic 32:26
So when the budget and so if you reach in our example, if you reached 3,000 clicks or $6,000, and you want to stop and don’t have more than we stop, you don’t pay for anything else, and the article stays there.
Josh Hadley 32:40
And you could then run your own Google ads if you want it to. Nobody does that. Fascinating. Fascinating. Awesome. And then you also mentioned like getting on TikTok, right.
Alina Vlaic 32:54
So that’s the let’s say the expensive solution.
Josh Hadley 32:59
This is the expensive solution. Hmm. All right, yes.
Alina Vlaic 33:02
Or no, this was the expensive solution. Okay. Yeah, the cheaper ones would be TikTok. Um, what we offer right now and I know there’s a lot of ways to do go on TikTok right now from going to the influencer hub in their platform to making your own shop to I don’t know having just people random people post about your products. Well, there’s a lot of ways what I what I would like to mention here really strictly regarding product launches, if you don’t have TikTok on your bucket list or I don’t know if your maybe your product is not necessarily fit to TikTok some products just aren’t for example for TikTok so you would have no way of going to an influencer and saying hey, would you like to promote my beautiful toilet paper on TikTok? Really work but you could still have a few posts about your brand and through family or friends or through us we can help with that through some content and just build a basic brand page on TikTok it doesn’t have to be a sharp just the page but when we do the giveaways part of them we can read redirect them to TikTok through TikTok or this was just an example of TikTok because it’s the most you know is the word in everybody’s mouth right now like external traffic equals TikTok. But I love for example, I love YouTube. And all the campaign’s with it with YouTube had great results. Same thing, build a page, put some content out there To create some, some, I don’t know, some give some value regarding your product, I don’t know, some show off. So some examples of how it can be used or whatever instructions guarantee, whatever. So people can go there. And we can redirect them through that Instagram any pretty much anything. But TikTok is very valuable right now, YouTube works very well, Instagram works very well Facebook… so-so. I’s pretty much everything that still works. But the more you go be, like, far away from everything that has been common, like, you know, everybody was using Facebook ads like forever. Even Google Ads work, I’m not a specialist in Google ads. Also, either I mean, but we have, we have had some some good results with driving traffic through Google as well, and actually is one of actually is one of the strategies that we use in the ranking, combining the Amazon surveys that I’ve talked about previously, with some purchases from Google based on keywords, and all that together, make makes a good mix. So bottom line, have something some kind of page or content on any of these platforms, or all of them, and insert that into your launch or relaunch by directing some sales to Amazon, but through that.
Josh Hadley 36:36
Through those other channels, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, things, how are you? How are you creating those, those reels? Like, are you recommending that brand owners should you know, dance with their products? Or how do they? How do they get, you know, some engaging traffic? Or, you know, what type of posts are they creating?
Alina Vlaic 36:58
It’s very different depending on the product. So what we do in photo life, our UGC service, so we do genuine content, I barely encourage sellers to give any kind of any type of instructions, just the main thing, like for example, you know, these are white Don’t, don’t say they’re black or something like that, just I’m giving a foolish example. But not stay with the right things stay to the left, look at the camera or whatever, it’s not studio, it’s like genuine content. And people love that, the more genuine it is, and the more people talk from their bathroom with their shower, towel in their heads and from the toilet sometimes or whatever. People love that. As long as it’s not forced, you know, it’s like whatever people think about their product, they’re putting it out there. That type of content, I’m, I’m recommending right now. And something that I would very much encourage everyone, everyone to test is try running some Google ads, using those type of content, video or photo, you’re gonna, you’re gonna see unbelievable results compared to a white background. Stylish photo with filters and colors and everything. People seems like people don’t I mean, the buyers, you know, your audience. Don’t buy that anymore. They want to see the real thing.
Josh Hadley 38:35
Fascinating. I love that. Alina, we’ve talked about so many great strategies. I would love to hear from you. Do you have any case studies that come to mind that you could just share some of the case studies of people that have implemented some of these tactics that we’ve discussed today? And how they’re working in the real world?
Alina Vlaic 38:54
Oh, um, yeah, there’s so many trying to figure out how to find something that can actually be interesting. In terms of press, we’ve had the best results I can say we’ve had with beauty items. So if you’re, if you’re into the beauty category, I would totally recommend a test. I usually tell people even people that want us that say, “Hey, I want to put like I don’t know how much money into this.” I say “no, just let’s do one. Let’s do one touches one campaign. See how that goes.” So beauty works very well impressed that I can say in terms of launches, case studies, I’m forbidden keywords for example. We’ve had a lot of good results. For example, if you’re into the CBD, and I know a lot of people are or into adult products. By the way, adult products work very well impressed. I don’t know.
Josh Hadley 40:06
Yes, no, maybe change business models is what you’re saying to people?
Alina Vlaic 40:11
Could be, yeah. So if you’re into forbidden, this type of niches like where you have forbidden keywords that you’re not allowed to do PPC on or stuff like that. We manage to get those ranked by using, for example, for CBD by using buyers and focusing traffic from states, US states where CBD was allowed. I did not believe that was a fact. But apparently it is. And it worked really well. So somehow Amazon is connected to that. I don’t know why. And how interesting. Also, geo ranking, do you believe in geo ranking?
Josh Hadley 40:57
Tell me more about it? Are you specifically talking about? Like, for example, where your inventory is and all that? Yeah. I think there’s something in Amazon’s algorithm for sure. That measures how quick can somebody get it? You know, do your products Jive more with people from the South versus people from the East Coast, etc.
Alina Vlaic 41:19
We’re working on something, I cannot say too much about it. But probably next year, it’s going to be live. And it should be very interesting for especially for more established brands in terms of directing and how to track your keywords. Sorry, but what I would say right now, definitely to test is to try to spread your inventory by yourself, not rely on Amazon, trying to spread your inventory as much as possible. I’m sorry, just my son. Spread your inventory as much as possible. Using there are a few tools out there that can help you to do that. And if you’re doing that in a launch, it’s visible, though, the way it adds up together. I don’t have anything in mind right now, like a specific example from a specific category. But we’ve seen plenty yeah, having Amazon basically makes their job easier, right because you already send that. I know it costs a bit more in the beginning to afford that shipping cost and everything to spread it around. But and yet at the end of the day, it’s going to be worth it because it just needs one carton, you just need to set to send one carton into that specific location and get some sales and whenever you get some sales that Amazon is going to replenish by themselves, the rest just you know one is the the expensive one shipped carton to a location. And for example, I use helium 10 with heat maps. They have I know probably there are others out there but that’s what I use when I look there. So they have heat maps showing you where your inventory is and where your sales are. And when you cross check those you’re gonna see some opportunities out there for example, places you get sales but no inventory imagine what happens if you’re sending more inventory into that. Places where you have inventory but no sales. Let’s try to push that a little bit and focus on that part with sales.
Josh Hadley 43:39
I love that Alina, then if I want to do that, what tools would you advise or recommend I use in order to force you know, sending to specific, you know, FBA centers.
Alina Vlaic 43:50
Oh, my favorite one is Shipment Maker Pro. I know they were out of not out of business, but they did some remodeling through on their API’s and some software stuff. But they’re back in business right now. And they’re working very well. And I’m very pleased with them. So that would be my number one. I don’t even know if there is another one. But I’m missing it right now. Um, anyway.
Josh Hadley 44:20
You remember, we’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah, so, Alina, this has been an amazing episode. You’ve shared so many great hacks and tips and strategies to rank products. And most importantly, these strategies can work for mature products and relaunching and just gaining more traffic. And these are timeless business principles, right, that drive external traffic, increase your brand awareness. And if you do all of those basic things, you know, you start to create this flywheel outside of Amazon and hopefully you become less dependent on all the Amazon hacks. If you have external press articles or external social media clips that are driving traffic.
Alina Vlaic 45:05
And what I like to say is that sometimes a lot of and myself included, I’m so much into this, we’re so looking only straight forward to this Amazon business or e-commerce business, because you know, it’s Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, whatever other platforms too, um, we forget to be creative. Sometimes it’s just so easy to get a little tiny bit of external traffic for your Amazon brand. You know, just have a coffee one day in a Starbucks and start creating a YouTube page, you never know what happens, just have it there, create a TikTok page, you don’t have time or you don’t have the knowledge to go to the pub and find influencers and whatever, all those strategies, that’s fine, but just have the page there, have some content, do yourself or ask your children or your wife or your friends or your whatever. To make some crazy stupid videos, people have had crazy sales on TikTok with content that it’s literally done on your knees like it says nothing, nothing fancy, just try, we all should try to be a little bit more like think outside the box, just a little bit more creative and stop following all those rules and what everybody else does. That’s my take. I know some people will love it. Some people would hate that. That’s just my take on that.
Josh Hadley 46:33
But I think it’s such good words of wisdom, I think it’s just think creatively be who you are. Get yourself out there in the world. Test new things. I love the analogy of you know, a fishing, if you go fishing, right, and you just keep using the same bait, you keep fishing in the same hole. And you’re expecting different results every single time it’s not going to happen, what you do need to do is drive to the other side of the lake, throw your pole in the water, change out your bait, put 10 different poles in the water with all types of different bait and then see what’s working, then start doubling down on that. But if you don’t, and you’re just laser focused on, this is the only way I know how to launch products. It’s the only thing that’s worked successfully for me for the last five years, and I’m not going to do anything else, then as things change, you’re going to be at the disadvantage.
Alina Vlaic 47:20
You said something very important. And I really want to double on that we’ve worked with and we have a lot of close friends and brand owners huge, huge, huge sellers that have been selling for since forever, like 2012, 13, 14, something like 10 years ago. And they’re some of them are still expecting for the same thing to happen in 2023, 2024. It’s not those days, you could do 1,000 giveaways and get 1,000 reviews on Amazon was saying thank you for that you’re going to have a great launch. Try doing that right now. It’s a different world. I remember in 2017 when I first started this and I first looked at the Amazon, PPC was so complicated back then and they only have broad Exactly. They don’t even they don’t even know how to like product, I think. And when you look at PPC right now you need to go to college, to the college of PPC to it to barely understand it. So, you know, it’s you need to if you’re if you’re in this business, you need to adapt and move with the wave.
Josh Hadley 48:34
I love it. Alina, this has been fantastic. I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are my three actionable takeaways that I’ve noted for our audience. But Alina, you let me know if you think I’m missing something here. But action item number one, I’m going to go back to the very basics, which is make sure that you’re doing your proper keyword research. And I think we also hear a lot of people that come up with a unique product idea that they’re like this is going to crush it on Amazon. But if you were to actually go do keyword research, maybe people aren’t even searching for that type of product on Amazon. And so Amazon’s not necessarily your discovery tool, right? They’re not known for innovative products, so you’re not going to succeed there. So it’s important to do comprehensive keyword research. And if you’re not leaning into the Amazon data that they are giving you with brand analytics, with opportunity explorer, with the sqp data, you’re going to be at a disadvantage. There’s so many tools, you know, data dives focused on that and what keywords you used and where you put them in your listing matters in terms of the algorithm. And so make sure you understand that I think that’s 101. You’ve got to have the right keywords in the right places. Action item number two is going to be about starting to grow your external traffic to your brand. And I would start by saying this, if you don’t have your own audience, you should start working on creating your own audience for your own brand. Whether that’s building your own audience through insert cards, right? Could be giving a warranty could be giving away a free digital download, but give something that is actually a value to a customer collect their email address. What we do for our brand is we actually collect their mobile number, because mobile numbers are much more you get higher open rates, click through rates 10 times better. But now you have a hopefully a raving fan base. And that way, when you launch a product, you can do exactly what Lena talked about what we shared the example of Mondelez and Kraft Foods, if they’re launching a new product, they’re going to reach out to their list, you can reach out to your list and say, Hey, go find our new product on Amazon, guess what they’re gonna go do, they’re gonna go search, they’re gonna find your product, and they’re going to buy your product. So you don’t have to give away any rebates. You don’t have to do any of that stuff. 100% TOS compliant, and you’re doing what is proven to work and help rank products on Amazon. Third, last but not least, I love the idea of just incorporating creativity into your business. And I think one of the lowest hanging fruits right now still, even though it’s being talked a lot about a lot right now is TikTok and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, we know that those are trending, even Google’s doubling down on that and giving love to YouTube shorts. So can you focus on that with your products, getting user generated content in there, they don’t need to be professional videos, and just put stuff out into the world. See what starts to stick right cast 10 different fishing poles out there, see what works and then keep doing what’s been working there. So Alina, anything extra that you think I missed that our listeners should use as an action item from this episode?
Alina Vlaic 49:06
On point number one with the keywords and everything that you’ve mentioned. And I’ve talked about on top of that, I would just make a reminder, don’t forget about your flat files, and those category listing report that you can download with your whole catalog in it. Just take them one at a time. Or I don’t know there aren’t as a time or whatever and see what’s in there. I personally like to stuff all the fields that don’t make sense to my listing because you know, in every category there’s a bunch of fields that don’t make necessarily sense instead of putting an A I would put keywords where you feel like you should put an ad you should put an A but you know that if you have your entire line filled so your your whole flat file filled with keywords than is lower than 1% chance you could ever get hijacked. Yeah, with whatever kind of attacks when I say hijacking I know we were all brand owners and stuff but there have been a lot of situations with attacks on people and you know country strange contributions and wherever on people soliciting. So have all your fields filled in from the flat file na or keywords. Yep.
Josh Hadley 53:26
Great advice. And that is definitely a really important action item. For sure. Alina, I love to ask every guest the following three questions. So first off, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Alina Vlaic 53:39
Oh, that’s a hard one. So I think the one that I’m actually rereading it right now. So maybe that’s why it first came to my mind. It’s called The Buddha and the Badass by Vishen Lakhiani. I hope I’m pronouncing the name right is the founder of Mindvalley. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but I strongly recommend it. It just helps you better understand why you do the things you do and why you want the things you want and how to connect everything. For me. It’s it’s life changing book.
Josh Hadley 54:19
I love that. That is one book recommendation I haven’t heard yet. And I love getting new book recommendations. So love to hear. Why not? Will do all right, Alina. Next question. What is a new productivity or software tool that you’ve recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer?
Alina Vlaic 54:39
Actually, I just heard about this one yesterday. And it’s called Xmars. It was mentioned in MC Innovate Conference I was telling you before we started recording, my husband was attending it and it’s something that combines PPC with a I, and with a lot of human thing, I don’t even know how to talk about it that much. But just looking at their website and seeing some stuff out there and things they do and some case studies, it blew my mind. So just take a look. Fast.
Josh Hadley 55:19
XMars is it.ai.com Do you know? I think, all right, fascinating. I know I’m gonna have to go check that out. Alright, last question, Alina, what who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?
Alina Vlaic 55:36
Ah, that’s the hardest of them. I would also say I follow Vishen Lakhiani from Mindvalley. But not that closely. Maybe, maybe it’s I don’t know, it’s not that much into our industry, let’s say from Amazon. It’s a it’s a very hard one. There’s so many people out there, which I love and respect. names that come to mind right now is Carlos Alvarez. And I would say his name because of everything he does for the community. And I don’t know how that that guy does it. He’s a nine figure seller, and he still hosts meetups in live and online, three times a week, or something for the community. So that’s amazing. Bradley Sutton is an old friend, and I think is one of the person who is persons that was the most passionate about this industry and the game itself. And by the way, I’m not gonna say more, but for your listeners, if you haven’t checked his strategy about keywords that don’t get indexed or ranked. And it’s all I can, all I would say is about is that the whole thing runs around Amazon recommended yours and Helium 10. If you haven’t checked that out, you should. We’ve done some tests, and it works amazingly well. But I’m, I’m gonna let them discover whether they’re what that is. Um, yeah, I’ve already named three. So I think it’s enough, right?
Josh Hadley 57:15
I think that’s perfect. Those are some great people that you’ve recommended, and we’ve had each of them on the podcast other than the Mindvalley. Guy. So I think, Alina, this has been such a great podcast. Thanks so much for your time. If people want to learn more about you, they want to follow along with your journey. They want to even you know, utilize some of the services that you offer, where can people find more about you and any special offers you have for them.
Alina Vlaic 57:43
So, if they want to connect with me directly, I’m on all the platforms with my name, Alina Vlaic. Our main website is azrank.com. Just fill in a basic contact form and reach out. We’d love to hear from everybody just thoughts and questions or whatever. This is how we grow right by by networking with other people and learning from each other’s mistakes. And yes, from everybody, if anyone if sorry, if anybody’s interested in testing our services and what we do, just message us saying that they’re coming from your podcast, and I cannot say I’m not a fixed number, because everything that we do is very custom, but I promise they will have a beautiful discount.
Josh Hadley 58:43
Get the royal treatment with Alina when you recommend and when you reference, the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. So there you go.
Alina Vlaic 58:51
Whatever is easier, all right.
Josh Hadley 58:53
Well, Alina, thank you again, so much for your time, and for sharing all the strategies and I know our listeners will be following along in your journey.
Alina Vlaic 59:02
Thank you so much.
Outro 59:04
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