Today I am joined by 8-Figure eCommerce seller, Ryan Rigney. Ryan is a private coach with an emphasis on marketing for eCommerce, and Co-Founder of BoostRooster, an innovative suite of software tools that helps Amazon sellers market their products. In this episode, we will be discussing what led Ryan to focus on brand building and emphasize diversification of sales? How can an Amazon seller create a long term asset? And which marketing channels to focus on for building brand awareness? If you need help developing your brand, this is the episode for you!
Date: December 7, 2020
Episode: 73
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Ryan Rigney, an 8-figure eCommerce Seller, a Private Coach with an Emphasis on Marketing for eCommerce, and Co-Founder of BoostRooster.
Subtitle: How to Develop your Brand
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-73-brand-building-101-w-ryan-rigney/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Khierstyn Ross, a product launch expert that specializes in Kickstarter & other popular channels launch for physical products.
Ryan is a seller who transitioned from being a lawyer six years ago. He talked about brand building, diversification of sales and some marketing channels to focus on for building brand awareness.
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Norman 0:02
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the rise of the micro brands
Norman 0:20
All right, so on today’s show, we’re going to be introducing an eight figure eCommerce seller and private coach Ryan Rigney, can’t wait to get started. I think everybody knows that I love brands, and perception and all that good stuff. Well, he’s gonna be diving right into that today. So in today’s episode, we’re going to be diving into building your brand and what that means exactly. We’ll also discuss building brand awareness and why Ryan emphasizes diversity in sales. So before we get to Ryan, just wanted to let everybody know that we are broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn and Kelsey?
Kelsey 1:00
Hello. Happy Monday.
Norman 1:02
Happy Monday. How are you?
Kelsey 1:04
I’m doing fantastic. How are you?
Norman 1:06
Good. You’re back home.
Kelsey 1:09
I am. I thought I’d do a little visit this weekend and guess I’m staying an extra day or two.
Norman 1:15
You’re right above me right now.
Kelsey 1:16
That’s right. As it should be.
Norman 1:20
Of course. Yeah right.
Kelsey 1:21
Alright, so you guys know the drill. If you’re tuning in right now you can like and share the episode. Head on over to our Facebook group. It’s Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA & eCommerce Collective. It’s growing every day and we’re excited. We got some good engagement happening. Yeah, people are joining in on conversations, it’s great to see. So yeah, I’ll post the link shortly and if you miss an episode, if you’re new to the podcast, you don’t know how this works, you can put your questions into the comments. They’ll be answered throughout the show and if you missed the episode, it’s always on the YouTube channel. So you can just go straight over there and get the full episode and with some highlight clips and looks like we got our first comment. Rad. Welcome, Rad.
Norman 2:11
Hey, Rad. How’s it going?
Kelsey 2:14
Welcome back. Yeah. So let us know how your weekend was, what you did, what you get up to in the comment section. If you have any questions for Ryan or Norm, put them in the comment section too and I’ll address throughout the show. Yeah.
Norman 2:26
So you know what today is?
Kelsey 2:29
What’s today?
Norman 2:31
The newsletter.
Kelsey 2:33
Oh, yes.
Norman 2:34
The newsletter that doesn’t suck. Yes. Yeah. So it came out today. It’s already been approved. So if you are interested in joining and checking out this newsletter, that does not suck. That’s actually the name of it. The newsletter that doesn’t suck. I think that’s what we should change the name. So yeah, but anyways, tons of good content in there right now. It’s not just about Amazon. It’s about becoming a better online seller. So check it out either on Lunch with Norm or normanfarrar.com.
Kelsey 3:06
Yes, one more thing. We got two giveaways today. So stick around. Not sure what we’re going to do with them exactly to find a winner. But yes, we got two, very big one is I believe have a value of $1,000. So stick around we got Simon, Marina, Yarrow joining us. Marina’s finally in and yeah, let’s get started.
Norman 3:28
Okay, so just one more thing before we do get started. If you are watching this on a replay, you can just skip ahead. If you’re on my Facebook profile page, you can always go to Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy and check it out there. There’s full content. There’s full episodes, content, video, highlight clips, all that good stuff. So check it out and any questions, throw them over in the comment section and we’ll get to them ASAP. So sit back, relax, grab that cup of coffee and enjoy the show. All right. Where’s Mr. Rigney? Hey, how are you sir?
Ryan 4:03
Hey Norm. Good to see you.
Norman 4:05
How are you?
Ryan 4:06
Doing well. Got my coffee. It’s really early here.
Norman 4:08
So you’re eating breakfast, I’m eating lunch.
Ryan 4:13
That’s right. Thanks for having me.
Norman 4:15
Hey, no problem. Hey, why don’t you tell everybody just a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Ryan 4:20
Yeah, so I guess primarily I’m an online seller at this point. I started about five or six years ago, I was actually a lawyer and I transitioned into this sort of career just because I was more into selling my own products, creating my own things, scaling something past, like a salary. So that’s when I made the transition a couple years back to doing this full time and as I was growing that brand, I had people reaching out to me asking, how are you ranking products on Amazon? How are you choosing which products to launch? How are you scaling and diversifying your sales on your website, moving to Walmart, that sort of thing. So I started teaching people privately on how to do that and I built like a training to do that as well and then gradually, that just transitioned into other things like launching a software that helps people do that as well. So it’s like three fold. What I do is currently as I sell my own brands, products on my website, on Amazon, on Walmart, a couple other channels, and then I coach people privately, and then I have software. So it’s kind of like a three trifecta that kind of it’s like, synergistic together. So that’s me.
Norman 5:31
Nice. So let’s talk about brands a little bit. Why do you think it’s important to build a brand?
Ryan 5:40
Right, so I mean, don’t get me wrong, you can make 10s of millions without building a brand, if you want to take that approach and just make Amazon businesses that rank for keywords that are optimized on Amazon, you can do that. You probably have spoken with a bunch of people who have done that as well. For me, I approached it from a brand perspective, from the get go, because I’ve actually built online businesses that were very fragile in the past and I don’t like when one channel is entirely in control of my income. So if you build your entire portfolio of products, and everything on Amazon’s shoulders, if they decide the thing you’re doing they don’t like or they want to blacklist all of your accounts, or hunt you out and destroy you, like they can do that and like my history was, I used to make Google like search engine optimization stuff like micro websites, and when Google decides they’re gonna change the algorithm, and then that the tricks that I’m using, they don’t really work anymore, it’s like, the income just evaporates. So I spent a couple years looking for ways to build a real stable business that’s actually not dependent on just one, website or service or somebody like a proven what I’m doing. So the brand, the thing that really I see as important is the brand is you’re building the relationship with the customer. So regardless of where you’re selling, they’ll find you and word will get out about what you’re doing and you can’t have your brand name, like, universally blacklisted. Like, if people like you, if you build relationships with the people, and they talk about you, they’re gonna find you, even if you’re not on Amazon. So I’d be like branding, building the relationship with the customer, having them know about you rather than Oh, I’m just buying this on Amazon, because the price is there, and it looks good. It increases your chances of success on these channels, but you also have the ability to survive without these channels, too.
Norman 7:43
Well, the nice thing right now, about Amazon is it’s also looking at building that brand community. So while you’re diversifying into these other channels, you’re giving Amazon exactly what they want, a brand community and there’s so many outlets right now, like, with posts, with live, and then with their new brand story, thing that’s in beta right now, which is kind of cool.
Ryan 8:10
Yeah. I mean, they’re giving you a lot more ability to like, advertise to your customers even like remarketing to them off of Amazon, that sort of thing. But I think, at the end of the day, they do kind of view it as like their customer x, they’re not going to let you take that email address or address even and market to them outside of it. But I mean, like, don’t get me wrong, like, there’s a lot of buyers there and it’s a great way to get that initial traction, I think it’s like the easiest way to get a traction for a lot of different categories of products, if you’re gonna do that.
Norman 8:40
What’s the first thing somebody should do? They’re new to Amazon, they’re not used to building a brand, any recommendations?
Ryan 8:52
So I think, depending on what category you’re in, there’s probably somebody comparable to what you’re doing that you can kind of view as like a North Star and I pick different brands. I have a list of brands that I just follow and I see what their first product looks like. What did their second and third product look like? How did they choose subsequent products and how do those like feed into their brand message and it really just comes down to like, it’s not just a bunch of products, it’s like a problem that you’re solving for a customer. So sometimes it takes brands a little bit of time to figure out what the problem is that they’re solving and what their customers really like about them. But when you do find that, just dialing in your product strategy to fit that need and solve it with more things and also educating customers on why they need more things from you to solve that problem. That’s like the product strategy and then also just getting a community of people like you said, Amazon’s creating different ways we can communicate and have posts with our customers. But some things that are valuable to me are building relationships with influencers, even smaller influencers in the space that can talk about your product, build trust for your brand. At the end of the day, like your brand is, it’s solving a problem and then people are going to buy from you if they trust you. So you have to figure out ways to get that trust and they don’t trust you just because you’re selling on Amazon usually. You need the reviews on Amazon, that’s when they get the trust on Amazon. But when you’re on your website, you’re on other channels, you need a little bit more than that. Usually you need authority, you need people talking about you, you need websites like Chicago Tribune, BuzzFeed, things like this talking about you and you can kind of gradually get this authority and I find that easier to get these relationships with people that build the authority for your brand. Like, if you just start small, and then you use that small wind to give you authority for the next one, you just kind of build upon it and so that makes sense.
Norman 10:48
Yeah, one of the things that I found that can give you a ton of authority right off the bat. Well, we use press releases, we also do syndication, content syndication, but one of the things right now is getting into Amazon editorial listings. I think it’s 10 to 30% right off the bat, just instant sales increase just by getting into that listing. Oh, and one other thing I was going to talk about product research wise, I did this the other day, and I bought this product that was a beard shampoo. So I thought it was really great. I was just checking it out. Just I don’t sell any beard products. But I thought oh, let’s check it out.
Ryan 11:33
You could be a micro influencer.
Norman 11:34
There we go. So anyways, it came in it was really great and then the packaging, the packaging was nice. The box it came in smelt like a cigarette. It’s stunk and then some of the other products that I saw, I mean, it wasn’t consistent with the brand. So, here was this really positive product that I purchased from Amazon and then I went and I bought it from another channel, a completely different experience. If I would have got it from the one channel, I would never have even purchased the other products. So consistency is really important and doing your research. What are your competitors doing and how are they, I don’t like using the word journey. I think it sucks that word, the customer experience, the whole customer experience from buying it to getting it, smell, feel, if need be taste, and then you can see what the competition is doing and try to one up them. Have you ever bought your competition’s product?
Ryan 12:47
Yeah, all the time. Every couple months, I’ll if I see somebody new pop up and they’re really getting traction, I’ll buy from them and like the best brands I find, usually aren’t even selling on Amazon. So if you want the best customer experience, look at who’s scaling Facebook ad traffic, who’s scaling YouTube ad traffic. Because they’re competing in a different ecosystem where it’s not just, you need like three good images and like a bunch of reviews that you can get pretty easily on Amazon. It’s like they have to have the messaging on point they have to, when people get the package, like they’re going to be sharing the website with their friends, if they have a good experience. So like they really they put more effort into it because they have to.
Norman 13:31
Right and I found, I don’t know if you’ve ever checked it out. But Etsy, if you want to have a really great user experience, check out for like, I sell a lot of beauty products. So you go to Etsy, and you’ve got these incredible artisan soap makers, right? Now, check it out, and just see what they’re doing and you’re seeing that a lot of these other people on Amazon, they’re just taking the typical talkbox and putting something into there and selling it for five bucks. You do it this way and you can sell it for 14 bucks.
Ryan 14:09
Right.
Norman 14:10
Minor emphasis on cost when when you want to upgrade, they do some specialty packaging and throw in an insert. But just the way you package something could double triple your profits.
Ryan 14:24
Right and sometimes that added benefit is hard to really reflect on the images. But when they get it, if you have like a real brand and you have many products, you have something that people are going to buy more than once or something that they’re going to want to share with other people then that’s when that really matters a lot and like for me, like I saw, like consumable so like that’s huge. There’s a lot of recurring and like repeat purchase value, people buying 15, 20, 25 times and then also just not even counting like other products that I can launch to them that solve the same problems that they’re trying to solve with that initial purchase too. So like, the experience, that’s huge, and like, people will tell me, I don’t want to spend an additional 30-40 cents on the box when I could just get like a standard box and it would look the same, but it’s like a tactile feel, the experience like opening it. A perceived quality really makes a big difference. It’s on the back end.
Norman 15:20
Yeah, absolutely and just the amount of sales. If you throw up that image, and it’s better than the last person’s image, you’re going to get those extra sales. What are your thoughts on diversification? So you’re on Amazon, you don’t want to be a one legged stool. Where do you go from there?
Ryan 15:41
Yeah, I mean, as far as ease, Walmart is very easy to add as a channel, but you have similar problems that you would have on Amazon, I think it’s going to make you more stable if you have the two that are both working. Walmart’s not gonna have anywhere near the sales volume. Really. Like 5% maybe if you’re lucky.
Norman 16:01
5%?
Ryan 16:02
What do you get?
Norman 16:03
Oh, I’m just curious, because it could be all over the board. Yeah. Wow. 5% is I thought it would have been a bit higher.
Ryan 16:08
That’s not what I’m seeing. I’ve heard people say up to 15%. But I’m just seems like it’s not quite there and a lot of categories, at least not in mine.
Norman 16:20
Yeah, that’s like me in Canada just selling amazon.ca and I can’t sell squat in Canada. Some people are selling, I’ve had one person come up and say that they’re killing it in Canada and they wouldn’t tell me they’re listening.
Ryan 16:34
Yeah. I mean, for me, like, I’ll have a product selling 150 units a day and then I can be on page one on Walmart for the same keywords and it’s getting like three to five.
Norman 16:44
One of the places that is killing it like for me right now, too and you don’t hear about a lot. Thank you. So you don’t hear a lot of people talk about it; is eBay. The new eBay is not the eBay of five years ago, or 10 years ago. I think every online seller used to sell on eBay at one point. But they went away because it sucked, like the platform just sucked.
Ryan 17:14
Yeah, what’s new about it?
Norman 17:16
Well, they’ve got the full circle, well, first of all, they have a person that will talk to you. So you’ll have a rep that will talk to you. The second part is the branding page that you have. There’s just, they’re doing a lot more to help the online seller even getting the product into the system, working with a brand rather than multiple brands. So they’ll protect your brand and to get to the Deal of the Day, because it’s new, you’re able to get listed on a Deal of the Day and you’re getting sales. I’ve got one example, I think a few people probably heard me talk about this, we had three hazmat issues that came up one after another, resolved, resolved, resolved. But three times that happened on the same product killed the ranking, just decided to throw it up on eBay and so we put three products up, not just the one and we ended up getting 150,000 in sales. Now we’ve done this with others, and we’ve got nothing close to that. But these beauty products that we listed all of a sudden got six figures in sales in a month. So, it was incredible. So we started talking to eBay a bit more and a bit more and yeah, they’re extremely helpful, which is different from a lot of other platforms, especially our favorite one there.
Ryan 18:37
So, did you use any tactic to gain awareness on eBay or you throw it up, and it just took off?
Norman 18:41
We drove traffic, that’s about it and they did allow us to have a similar to Amazon store, you can have that on eBay as well now. So it’s great. I’ve been trying to talk to eBay, they won’t return my bloody calls. But I’m trying to talk to their business development person to put together a program to let Amazon sellers know about this, but you know what? That’s an issue, but trying to contact them and get them to list your product, they’re very good at that. Yeah, but their business development team should wake up.
Ryan 19:17
Awesome. Yeah, like I said, I sell consumables and I don’t see eBay as a really viable source of traffic for that just because of the perception that eBay is like selling used items and I think that’s still kind of lingering there.
Norman 19:32
It is, unfortunately, yeah and congrats on what you’re doing. That’s a smart move. I love recurring income, having that consumable or like for me, it’s beauty products. So recurring income, and I don’t know about you, but one of the things that we try to do is we don’t care if we lose on the first sale, we will give the bloody product away or if we have to pay up to 100% PPC, go ahead, have it. Some people have heart attacks because of that. But we think that if we can get our brand in front of them, that they’re going to come back to us.
Ryan 20:12
Right. Yeah, you can go on the read on consumables and recurring stuff and the thing on Amazon is, like, most of the people you compete with, they don’t view it like that. So when they see they’re, like losing money on the front end, for weeks and weeks, they’re gonna back down and then their rank starts to drop as well. So if you kind of know, like, what the value is of the customer, you can be a lot more aggressive and really kind of, like push these people around too so, which is good on Amazon, but yeah, as far as like other channels, like really like selling on your website is where you want to have some stability there, if you’re building like a real brand and business, I think that’s where I put a lot of focus and like driving a lot of awareness to your website that’s gonna trickle over to these other platforms as well.
Norman 21:04
Any tips, tricks on external traffic to your website or to advertising on other channels?
Ryan 21:12
Right. So I mean, depending on what you sell, like, where you put your focus, it’s going to differ I think. I wouldn’t say there’s a one size fits all answer for that, like, you’re not going to run Facebook ads for every type of category products, I think. Some things do very well, like on Pinterest, some things you need to kind of look into more into YouTube probably. But for me, like I drive most of my traffic currently through Facebook ads, just because it works, and I just focus on what works and it’s a lot, you can scale products very quickly, if you know how to optimize that customer journey to get them to buy more things. Like when you’re selling on your website, you get a lot of different touch points with the customer that you don’t get on Amazon. So they go to your website, you can retarget them for weeks and weeks and weeks. You can collect their phone number and you can do text marketing to them, you collect their email, you can put them on a drip sequence that goes for months and that’s just going to keep your brand top of mind for them. So when it’s coming time to rebuy it, instead of going to Amazon to buy your competitor, like they’re seeing your emails, they’re seeing your text or seeing your ads all the time, they’re probably gonna look at you again. So that’s like the real benefit of controlling the website and then having these pixels for different ad marketplaces to retarget marketing them email indefinitely. Then whenever you run like sales for like Black Friday, for example, you’ve got a list of all these emails, all these texts built up, and you could just blast them, send them to your website, and it’s gonna be a lot easier than say, like running a lightning deal on Amazon. If that’s your only like promotion mechanism for big sales, you’re kind of at a disadvantage now, if you’re really competing against brands that are doing this sort of thing.
Norman 23:00
Do you do a lot of email marketing?
Ryan 23:03
Yeah. Anytime there’s like a quarterly sale or something like that, I’ll do a blast. Then I have like drip sequences depending on what they buy. So if they buy like a small version of my product, I’ll educate them more about the product, and then I’ll introduce the larger sizes, and then I’ll cross promote things that I launched specifically, because I knew that the customers that were buying that were also interested in the other ones and then if you can, just like on your website, it’s like, you just have like one product that’s profitable that can fuel like the traffic and awareness for all the other ones on your site too and like a lot of the big eCommerce brands, they don’t drive traffic to all the products on their website, it’s like one product that really is profitable, and stands out that they’re sending a lot of awareness to, and then that fuels a lot of other things.
Norman 23:52
I’ve noticed that maybe the odd seller is doing email marketing, I could give them a list and it’ll sit there and nothing will happen and even less than that, or doing any form of text marketing.
Ryan 24:12
Yeah, so like, I just recently did text, like dabbled into it. But the easiest like text marketing thing you could implement if you have any traffic to your website at all is like a cart abandonment sequence. I actually posted a video about this recently, but what you can do is before somebody checks out just require they enter their phone number, use this software on Shopify called SMS bump and just set it so it automatically sends them a text after an hour. It says, you’ve left your cart there, come back and buy and then you’re more likely to convert on that person that abandon the cart and then also you’ve collected that text and whenever you have like a sale or a new product launch, you have this list of all these people that abandon their carts and you just blast them to it.
Norman 24:57
Nice. So Hey Kels? Do we have questions?
Kelsey 25:00
We do have a couple of questions. But before we get to that, should we announce our little giveaway to them?
Norman 25:07
Sure.
Kelsey 25:08
Okay, so Ryan, can you explain the two giveaways that you have?
Ryan 25:13
Yeah. So I do a couple different things like the consulting and software space, I have a software called Boost Rooster that does product launches on Amazon, specifically with rebates and chat bots. You guys have heard about Boost Rooster we have, like 600 ish users pretty active. One of the things I thought I could give is just a year free membership for Boost Rooster for anybody that wants to do like a chatbot launch in the next year, like you can just have a free account. So that’s $49 a month typically, and just give you 12 months for free for that and just like a quick pitch on what Boost Rooster is like, you can set up the entire chat bot like launch process in like a couple minutes and you just type in a few pieces of information, upload your image, and the entire chat bot flow is automatically built for you. So you don’t actually have to edit anything in ManyChat at all, you can just start running the ad and it’s already pre built and we’ve tested it. It makes things a lot easier. You don’t have to pay somebody $500 to build out a custom chatbot flow, like just use what works here and it’s already built for you with software. So that’s what that does and then the other thing I was gonna offer as well is a 30 minute consultation for anyone who is trying to build their brand awareness like outside of Amazon, say you’re already like a six or seven figure seller on Amazon and you’re trying to get some traction or awareness on your website. You just don’t know what to do and maybe you have some questions you want to bounce off me. I can help for like 30 minutes if you guys want to do that, since I’ve been through that.
Norman 26:46
Alright.
Kelsey 26:47
Great. So I think the way we should do this, so people don’t, because they’re both two different things. We’ll do the chatbot giveaway with a hashtag. So if you guys are interested in Ryan’s giveaway, you can go ahead and put hashtag say, #chatbotRyan and I’ll put them into the draw and at the end of the show, we’ll get that going and for the consultation, you’ll have to stick around to the very end of the show and we’ll do a quick giveaway, the first person to do a certain hashtag will win. Okay, so #chatbotRyan to be entered into a year subscription, and wait till the end of the show and we’ll do the consultation giveaway.
Norman 27:36
At the end of the day, that’s about $1,000 giveaway.
Kelsey 27:40
Yeah, huge. Okay, so yeah, we did have a couple questions that came in. Let’s see. One was, how do we get into editorial listings?
Ryan 27:52
That’s a question for Norman.
Norman 27:54
Alright, so editorial listings, there’s a bunch of different companies or a few different companies that are doing that. It’s very hard to do it on your own. Because you pretty much have to have some sort of relationship with the Amazon articles or magazines. But if you deal with it, there’s a company called HPW out there. That’s the main one. We do it because I own a press release company and a public relations company. We have relationships with them as well. But yeah, HPW is very good, they can get you in and with our service, you don’t have to pay until you get published. But anyways, yeah, if anybody’s interested, throw it into the group chat and I’ll answer it there, not promoting any of my services.
Ryan 28:47
I’m curious about that one, too.
Norman 28:49
Okay. Yeah. I’ll just give you some generic information. If anybody wants to talk further, just let me know.
Kelsey 28:56
Okay, let’s see. Just trying to search through. Okay, Yarrow has one. Have you tried any offline marketing? Like maybe sending postcards or catalogs. Did it work?
Ryan 29:08
That’s a question for me. I haven’t done that. I’ve just been solely online. So I do Facebook ads, Google Shopping, Google ads, YouTube, Video display ads. Those are my primary channels really. I’m dabbling a little bit in TikTok, like influencer stuff. I had an account on TikTok. I haven’t had any results yet though. So I don’t want to talk too much about it. But I had some crazy viral awareness thing going on on TikTok. So I’ve been really looking more into it lately, because I’ve seen people on TikTok are actually buying, which isn’t what I expected so much. But there was some kind of viral like challenge thing that went on with a category product I sell and it made the sales spike by like 20 fold over the course of a couple days. So I was like, I was trying to figure out where it came from and I went on TikTok and I was like, all these kids are like really, really into this. Like, it’s pretty crazy.
Norman 30:05
Like when that happens.
Ryan 30:08
I’m 32 but I feel like I’m too old for TikTok, but it’s a great marketing tool.
Norman 30:15
We’ll have you and me dancing on there somewhere.
Kelsey 30:21
Okay, we have one from Shawn. Are you running into any issues with Facebook shutting down ad accounts on Boost Rooster?
Ryan 30:28
Yeah. So pretty much anyone running Facebook ads is running into issues with Facebook shutting down ad accounts. So even if you’re not doing, like, I’m in all these Facebook ad buyer groups and it’s just like, if you pay for ads, and you’re taking risks on Facebook, like you’re gonna get an ad account shut down. But you can always like, the real problem is if the business manager gets shut down. Usually, if you appeal, you’ll get your ad account back after a couple days. Facebook support is notorious for being terrible. So I’m not really related specifically to what we’re doing no Facebook issues. But people do get ad accounts shut down occasionally.
Norman 31:11
Oh, I wanted to go back to who was it that was asking about offline marketing?
Kelsey 31:18
I believe that was Rad. Oh Yarrow, sorry.
Norman 31:22
Yarrow, one of the things that you can look at too that Amazon sellers typically don’t look at is trying to get earned media. So you can go out or content marketing because now, like it was before, Google announced that first of all, content is king, right? Content is king again and also, news is weighted higher than content. So if you do and people, I’ve talked about this before on this podcast, but put out a really high quality blog article about your product, maybe a bit of video and then once it’s published, and you syndicate it, don’t just put it on your website, syndicate it, then go and get a press release done. Take that video that you put, embed it into the press release, where they allow you to do that, link your press release back to your Amazon listing, now you’re getting authorized links going back to Amazon, or over to Facebook, and you’ve got the two talking. So Amazon loves it because of the authority external traffic. Google loves it because of that, because of the content, don’t cheap out, it’s got to be good content and the other part of this is, if you can get in, like we talked about editorial recommendations, but also, so many Amazon sellers just don’t think of earned media and that’s where it’s at, that’s next level, it’s not for the beginner, but medium to larger sellers. You gotta do it, they say that with earned media, you’ll get 50 to 100% ROI over time.
Ryan 33:08
Yep. So you mentioned having good content. Yeah. Are you suggesting, like do research on keywords that people are searching for before and then writing content around that? Or what does your content strategy look like for that?
Norman 33:20
Yeah, you can do that and that’s exactly what we’ll do is, we’ll take a look at what people are looking for for a particular product. Right about the keywords, also, we’ll try to target different tables, different questions, so we can get into the answer box. So it’s not just Oh, five reasons why it’s different. As we go 1500 to 2500 words, we’re adding different tables. The other thing we’re doing is every quarter, we’re adding another 250 to 500 words to your content, and it’s constantly being fresh, and it’s constantly being updated.
Ryan 34:07
So, having like the separate tables, that just makes it so there’s like on Google, it populates as like a drop down or something like that?
Norman 34:14
Yeah and the other thing that’s awesome, guys, I don’t promote anything, like, unless it’s really cool, but I don’t take any affiliates. But you gotta check out this app called Frase, F R A S E, I don’t know if it’s frase.io. Or it’s just Frase, you gotta get it. So with our writers now, we have told them that they have to use Frase to do their research. So what it’ll do is it’ll take the top 20, you put in the keyword, it’ll take the top 20 articles that come up with that keyword. You write the article, you put it into draft, you take the URL, it’ll tell you the 10-20 things that you have to do or that you’ve done correctly to be on page one and if you remember Ask the Public, which is like a mind map of what you can ask somebody or write about. This one does that, but it’s on steroids. It takes it and it shows you the number one article that you can check out and then you take a look at that. Now, you can do related articles on it, but your writers, if you’re hiring somebody, this just allows them to just, it’s very easy to find the content.
Ryan 35:33
Okay, so F R A S E?
Norman 35:35
Yeah, F R A S E.
Kelsey 35:39
We did have a couple of questions that came in. So Simon is asking, what’s the best practice for brand marketing with YouTube?
Ryan 35:51
Yeah, I mean, on YouTube, I’ve had the most results organically, really like working out deals for content with people that have existing audiences and large or semi large subscriber bases. So I would find people that were talking about, like, things similar to what I’m selling, and that already had videos out there and had 10,000 subscribers plus, and I would just send them an item for free and say, try it out, if you like it, let me know, we’ll work out some kind of deal maybe that we can pay you to make some content and I’ve done that and I’ve had them, like, make content around keywords that people are searching on YouTube, because YouTube’s like a search engine too. There’s existing keyword search demand and you can kind of get an idea of what that is by using like the Google Keyword Tool. It doesn’t correlate like one to one. But it can give you a good structure for what people are searching for and if you optimize for Google, you also get the YouTube video to show on a Google search results as well, which gives you more traffic and more awareness on YouTube too. So working out deals with people that already have people watching a lot of minutes on their channel. So when they make a video for you there, the video is more likely to appear for whatever keywords they optimize for. I’ve had the most results with that. You can also use that content on your website, on your ads if you get rights to it, too. So that’s been really, really great for me.
Norman 37:15
I guess you have to ask for those rights before they do the production?
Ryan 37:21
Yeah. So I’ll just say like, I’m going to compensate you for the video and I’ll just send him like a one page contract that says we get a license to use the content for marketing purposes and that’s in exchange for the compensation that we’re paying you.
Norman 37:33
You know who’s an incredible YouTube marketer? It’s Rob Stanley.
Ryan 37:39
Rob Stanley. Yeah, I’ve talked with him quite a bit.
Norman 37:42
I mean, he blew me away with his knowledge on YouTube. Trying to get them on.
Ryan 37:49
I had an hour long interview with him for my students in my program, talking about how to optimize videos on YouTube. Yeah, he’s a smart guy.
Norman 37:59
He is.
Norman 38:01
Okay, Kels?
Kelsey 38:03
Okay. We got a couple more minutes left in the show. But, let’s see, we got, I have a product that sells on both Amazon and my website. Should I price it similarly? Thanks.
Ryan 38:20
Yeah. It’s kind of a tough question. So like, if you’re driving traffic to your website, you want to have big enough margins that you can earn enough to get, see your positive ROI, you’re actually making money when you’re running the ads on Amazon, you don’t need as larger margins to make the adspend work, I guess. At the same time, you want some kind of like consistency across the platforms, you don’t want somebody to go to your website and see that on Amazon, it’s like $10 cheaper than there, it’s going to screw up all your customer retention and getting people to get in the habit of buying on your website. So I like to make the website offer comparable to the Amazon offer. But that can kind of impact your Amazon conversion rate if you have to charge a lot more than your competitors too. That’s kind of a tough question. But like on my website, I want people to get in the habit of buying it there and have as good of an experience on the website as they do on Amazon. So the shipping has to be comparable. So I work with a 3PL that does two day and next day shipping options, which is deliver that was pretty helpful for getting people to keep buying on the website because before I did that, they would say, I’m just gonna buy it on Amazon next time. I can get it in two days and you’ll just lose all your customers back to Amazon and then your website doesn’t grow. You want repeat purchases on your website if you’re doing that sort of thing. So making the offer and the customer experience as good as Amazon is something that you should focus on. That starts with price too.
Norman 39:51
One of the things for us when we’re driving traffic over to the site is if it is going to be a different price, have something that they can’t have on Amazon, it can be the same product. But maybe have another product available. Like for us, let’s say it’s soap, have a scent that’s available, or have a sample bar or I use the example, shampoo with a small bottle of conditioner and it might cost you next to nothing, but you can increase your price. So it’s not looking, like it’s not comparable.
Ryan 40:26
Right. Yeah, that’s good. Also, like, more bulk discounts, which you can do on your site, then you can really promote effectively on Amazon. So like, I’ll make the price cheaper on my website, if they buy like six or if they subscribe, I’ll make a bigger discount incentive if they subscribe on the site versus Amazon, too.
Norman 40:42
Right.
Kelsey 40:44
We got two more quick questions, and then we’ll get to the contest. So Rad, if I have a problem with your brand listing, whom should I contact? So I think that’s for you, Norm.
Norman 40:57
If you have a problem with your brand listing, who should I contact? Are you talking about Brand Registry?
Kelsey 41:08
Well, if he replies I’ll post it up and then our last question is from Nathan, how can brands hold off Chinese competition?
Ryan 41:21
Well, how do you hold them off? So the real advantage they have is price. That’s it right? They’re not inherently better at anything, they just have access to the manufacturers, which give them lower prices. So focus on the branding and building the relationship with the customer. That’s where they don’t spend a lot of their time because they don’t have to. In general, that’s what I would say, I just think like the packaging experience, like the aesthetics of your product, you can do a lot more work in that area than they typically do. If you work with the Chinese manufacturers, you’ll probably notice if you really want a high quality, like packaging experience, you usually have to get packaging from somewhere else. They’re not doing it in house. But if they’re competing with you, they’re doing everything in house usually just to save money. So try to launch products that aren’t just dependent on price entirely and find ways to make your product experience better. Build the relationship with the customer, build communities where you’re talking with your customers, whereas they’re not doing that a lot of the time. So one way that I build relationships with customers is I build Facebook groups of around topics and when you control the Facebook group, you control which information they’re seeing and if your brand is like always at the top. It’s like just being top of mind and being trusted. Getting them to buy from you again and again, that’s like the best way to do it for my experience.
Norman 42:50
Yeah, I can give you a like you’ve nailed it. There’s so many people that are fearful of Chinese sellers, or whatever country sellers are selling for cheap. Well, that’s what it is, cheap and if they want to have product cannibalization and get pennies on the dollar, go for it. If you have perceived value, if you’ve got incredible customer service that typically doesn’t happen with Chinese suppliers. If the images, if they are not willing to do that, if the copy and the overall experience isn’t there, then they can fight with each other. I have a product that I’ve talked about before, which is a kitchen utility that we bought at 16. That was out at 49. We repackaged it, we stepped it up to 97. Then came up to 124. Then we repackaged it again, under a different listing, same product and it’s selling at 224 right now and the extra packaging was $3. That’s a $16 item, now selling it at 224 and all that you can go through I can show you the Chinese sellers that are trying to do this at 24 bucks, under $30. Go for it. Yeah. I mean, that’s fine.
Ryan 44:18
Yeah and if you’re viewing it from a mindset of competing on price, it’s going to be hard to drive any sales to your website anyway, like people that are driving paid media to their website that usually have bigger margins. So, Yep, you have to find a way to charge more anyway and that just packaging is like a component of that too.
Norman 44:38
Yeah. Okay, it looks like Rad has something.
Kelsey 44:41
Yeah. Okay, so before the contest. No, I’ve already had my brand registered and my products also have my brand but getting error messages. So that sounds like a tech problem maybe?
Norman 44:53
Yeah, it sounds like you’ll probably have to open up a case for Brand Registry and see what that issue is. It could be, Rad if you’re doing, it’s got to match exactly. So if you’ve got upper and lower or all lower, and your trademark was actually in all caps, you want to make sure that you’re showing your exact brand. I don’t know the issue exactly. But if you are getting that error, probably the best thing is to open up a case for Brand Registry. What do you think Ryan?
Ryan 45:27
Yeah, I mean, you’re just gonna have to open up a ticket. Try to get him on the phone, if you can. Yeah, sometimes the brands that you have registered and the brand on your listing are mismatched. So get that straightened out with the support team on what you can do. There’s a question from Rad, I can answer it. Ii said, is it software for Amazon or for the website? That Boost Rooster software is for launching keyword ranking on Amazon.
Norman 45:53
Okay. All right. So I think that’s it for the questions.
Kelsey 45:59
I just got one more entry that came in. For today’s show, I figured, because we have a lot of users that are in the community, asking for the contest, or applying for the contest. We do have a couple people that are winning multiple times. So I decided to give everyone who hasn’t won yet two votes. So hopefully that’s okay.
Norman 46:29
There we go. Okay, that’s fair.
Kelsey 46:30
All right. So let’s get started just a second.
Norman 46:37
Oh, Ners got a good answer too.
Ryan 46:40
Oh, we got a spin wheel.
Norman 46:41
There we go.
Kelsey 46:42
Alright, so this is for the year membership. So here we go. So 321. All right. New winner. We have Via Surgey.
Ryan 47:03
We got the full name, it’s the full name.
Norman 47:05
Yeah and to get the information, Via, you’re just going to send the information over to Kelsey.
Kelsey 47:12
Yeah. So Via, just contact me through Facebook or you can email me a k@lunchwithnorm.com, and we’ll get in touch.
Norman 47:21
Hey, Nears put in something, this could be something that could help out too.
Kelsey 47:27
Okay, sometimes you can just delete and upload using a flat file. Okay.
Norman 47:31
Thanks Nears.
Kelsey 47:32
Yep. Thank you and for the 30 minute consultation. We’ll do the first one that comes in on my stream yard. So what should we make the hashtag? Any ideas?
Norman 47:48
Okay, so what do you want to say? I want Ryan. There we go. I want Ryan.
Kelsey 47:59
Okay, first one that pops up. #IwantRyan. You’re the winner.
Norman 48:04
That’s also incredible.
Kelsey 48:09
Yeah. Okay, so yeah, while we’re waiting for that, yep. Let’s begin to wrap up. Oh, hey, there we go. Okay, so Faye, contact me on Facebook. We got a couple of people coming.
Norman 48:25
We got a bunch of people.
Ryan 48:27
Alright, so Ryan, Faye sorry. You’re the winner today. You can contact me again, Facebook or just my email k@lunchwithnorm.com and thanks, guys.
Ryan 48:39
I want Ryan. That’s not me, though.
Kelsey 48:41
Ryan is coming in on the podcast, but he’s not on right now. Yeah. Okay.
Norman 48:50
So, Ryan, I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to talk about? If there’s a last comment or anything? I’ll put you on the spot.
Ryan 49:01
Yeah. Anything else I want to say? Just thanks for having me. It’s been great.
Norman 49:04
No, it’s been great. Yeah, I love talking brands.
Ryan 49:09
Yeah. Happy to do it anytime. So yeah. Thanks for having me. I don’t really have anything else to say.
Norman 49:14
All right. Hey, what about getting hold of you?
Ryan 49:17
Yeah, so if people want to get a hold of me, I have brandboostblueprint.com. So that’s like my private coaching consulting for people that are building brands and want to sell on Amazon as well as other channels. Also have boostrooster.com for the software and I have a YouTube channel. You can search my name. That’s probably the best place to get a hold of me.
Norman 49:40
Alright. Fantastic. Well, thank you again, and hopefully we can have you on soon next time.
Ryan 49:44
Thanks Norm.
Norman 49:45
All right. Okay, everybody. So that’s the end of today’s podcast and man, we’re getting some really great prizes like these two prizes that Ryan gave us today, the one was worth 1000. The other one’s priceless. If you get a half hour with Ryan and get to dig into some of his expertise is where the ton. So again, if you are looking for these whole episodes you can go over to Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy. If you want to see my mug or Kelly’s mug or Ryan’s mug, you can always go over to our video, our YouTube channel at Norman Farrar. Kelsey?
Kelsey 50:27
Yes, yeah. Thank you, everyone. So we are getting more and more users every time so yeah, for the next contest. Maybe we’ll have it so that only new engines can have it, so it can be more fair. But yeah, thanks for spending your lunch with us. It was great. You want to talk about tomorrow? Yes, we have a special Tuesday episode.
Norman 50:53
Yeah, we don’t usually run on Tuesdays. But we feel that this is a really important podcast to get out there. It actually starts today, December the 7th, where Mike Zagare has put together 12 days of nuggets, which is to help the underground railway. I’m sorry, the charity is for human trafficking, like the against human trafficking and I can’t wait to get Mike on here. He ran this operation underground railroad last year, and it exploded. He couldn’t believe everybody couldn’t believe how well it went off. This year, he’s going to be talking a bit more about how everybody can donate and support it. If you can’t donate it, there’s different ways that you can support it. The way that we can help is to get the word out there. So he’s coming on. We’re going to be talking about Operation Underground Railroad. Again, it’s to help support the fight against human trafficking. So that’s tomorrow and let’s see, I think that’s probably it for now. So join us every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time and thanks everybody for watching.
