On today’s lunch with Norm, find out why traffic is more important than conversion! In this episode, Steven explains why PPC costs have increased 35% in 2021. We learn what Steven’s go-to traffic strategy is in 2022, and if Amazon Indexes A+ content? Steven is the founder of My Amazon Guy. Steven has more than 850 tutorial videos on YouTube showing how to handle ANY problem faced on Amazon. Steven also hosts a podcast with interviews from other Amazon experts.
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Lunch With Norm, Rise of the MicroBrands
Episode: 251
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Steven Pope – My Amazon Guy founder
Subtitle: “Why Traffic is More Important than Conversion”
Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsrf4W7ZL4Q
Back on Lunch with Norm…
Why is Traffic more important than conversion? Find out what Steven’s go-to traffic strategy is in 2022, and if Amazon Indexes A+ content all on today’s show! Steven is the founder of My Amazon Guy. When Steven isn’t helping Amazon Sellers he hosts a podcast with interviews from other Amazon experts.
In this episode, we discuss:
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Norman Farrar 0:01
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm. The Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast. Alright, we got a great topic. Today, we’re going to be talking about why building traffic on your Amazon listing is more important than conversion. Our guest is the founder of my Amazon guy, and has over 80 employees working in his agency. He also has this crazy about 850 Plus tutorial videos on YouTube, showing you how to handle almost any problem on Amazon. So our guest today is a repeat guest Steven Pope. And before we get to Steven, we have a quick word from our sponsor. Thank you solarize for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm solarize is your comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. Everything you need to grow and scale your Amazon business is just one click away. For more information contact Dimon and his team over at solarize.com and remember solarize is with one R, it’s just one R, right Kels?
Kelsey 1:23
That’s right. Yes. Oh, right. Welcome, everyone. Happy Monday. Let us know if you’re watching where you’re watching from. And also, if you’re new to the show, we started off by smashing those like buttons giving us those thumbs up and sharing it out to anyone in the Amazon and E commerce community. So before we get started, if you’re new, you have no idea who we are, head on over to our Facebook group lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and ecommerce collective. We go live every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 12pm. Eastern. And the fun thing about this podcast is that we do a giveaway every single episode. So stick around for more information about that. I can see we already have Kelsey thrown in there. So welcome Marina and Steve. We got Manny and Sarfraz. It’s great to see everyone. I’m over here in Toronto, Canada, it was about minus 31 this weekend, so I got to play some hockey on the lake. But what did you do this weekend? Let us know in the comment sections. And we can just jump into it.
Norman Farrar 2:30
Alright, fantastic. Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t checked out Kelsey tick tock it is. It’s called Lunch with Norm. But there’s really no norm. It’s all just Kelsey doing his thing as a tick tock person. But anyways, it’s pretty funny. So if you haven’t had a chance to check it out. Alright, so if you do have any questions for us today, make sure you just or comments, make sure you send them over to the comment section. And we can sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. Enjoy the show. Welcome, Steven.
Steven Pope 3:01
Hey, thanks for having me back on. Hey, it’s always a pleasure. We’re gonna have to update the BIOS. So because I was at 80 employees, like over a year ago, we’re now at 145. Whoa, yeah. It’s like I don’t want an agency. I run an HR company. As far as I’m concerned.
Norman Farrar 3:18
That’s crazy. 45 people. Now, are there any where are you located?
Steven Pope 3:25
Atlanta, no. Presence though everybody’s remote. So we have anybody 10 countries represented? All you know, Canada, Mexico, and all the good North American. We also have Brazil, and we have Romania and Turkey and and of course, the classic Philippines. Few others, kind of thrown in there as well.
Norman Farrar 3:45
Okay, I’m gonna throw a curveball here, because I didn’t know that. And when you get up to 145 people, and if they’re mostly remote, you’re right, you’re running a HR firm. So how do you handle that?
Steven Pope 4:00
Put the employees before the clients, which usually catches people off guard when I say that, right. But like we have an actual pyramid. And it’s part of our core charts that we show new employees day one, and basically just stress like we fire asshole clients, and we attract competency based talent. And the best way to do that and to find the A players is to make an environment they want to be a part of right. So you got to put got to put employees at the top, we put them before clients and we tell clients the same thing. We say we put our employees before you and guess what, it’s in your best interests that we do that because when you have the best employees working your account the the clients went to, but yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s it’s a big, big initiative to hire as many people as we’re bringing into the system, right? You have to have systems built in place to operate properly so that an employee can integrate right get in there and get going. And you also have to be able to manage that amount of people, right? So, you know, we rolled out health benefits in the United States this past year, I’m super excited about that that was ridiculously difficult to accomplish. Any business owner who rolls out health benefits knows what I’m talking about. It is way harder than it should be and more expensive. So there’s, you know, there’s things like that. And then there’s, you know, this question like, how many people can one person manage? Like, what should that magic number be? I’m actually really curious before I get my answer, if anybody in the chat, how many people do you think one person can successfully manage long term? Put your put your answer in the chat here. And, and I think that that number should be less than eight. And that’s because once you hit over eight people, you’re going to have Breck breakdowns. So okay, if we got 145 people, that means 145 divided by eight, that’s the minimum number of managers that we need, right? Yep. So it’s just it’s just a lot. You got it, you have a lot of systems and processes built and SOPs for everything.
Norman Farrar 6:02
Okay, here’s another question. Agency question. So you’ve got you’re talking about managed services? Right? That’s what you do for Amazon sellers.
Steven Pope 6:15
150? People? I don’t know about that. See? What’s that? He’s, he says you could manage 150 people? No, I don’t think so.
Norman Farrar 6:25
But how many, how many people does it take? So Amazon manager, so if you’ve got a Senior Project Manager, how many Amazon accounts, can they manage
Steven Pope 6:38
our models a little bit different. So like your standard 40% agency, you’re going to tap out between six and eight accounts per account manager like the standard operating procedure. But but the way that we do is we have two two wings, right. So we’ve got the domestic account management wing that interacts with the client and keeps things project manager moving forward. And then we have the international wing where we put most of our subject matter experts or SMEs. And so while one account manager could theoretically be on anywhere between 12 and 20 accounts, which is higher than any other agency does it. The reason it works at our company is because we have 10 additional experts logging into the account assisting, right, so all of our top competitors out there, they don’t have 10 people running into the account, they usually keep a small core team two or three experts. And the reason why having 10 experts with one person who’s just juggling works more effectively, in my opinion, is because you have better expertise, when you specialize. So the more specialists we can get into the system, the better the work product, right? So so we, for example, you know, if you break down Amazon services into traffic generation, and conversion generation, on the traffic side, you have PPC and SEO. And then on the conversion side, you have design and catalog and catalog is the most underrated of the four and widely misunderstood. So whether we talk about SEO or a catalog, we might have multiple phases of SEO, and we’ll break down each of those phases into their own many chunks. So then one person’s job will be 1/10 of the entire SEO process. And then they’re just an expert on this. And they just crank it out left and right.
Norman Farrar 8:25
All right, very good. Well, I think we went off topic enough. Why don’t we get down to our topic today? And we were, which could go down many different rabbit holes. So the topic today was why building traffic on Amazon is more important than conversion. So where would you like to start with that?
Steven Pope 8:45
So I’m a wildly outspoken person on this topic. You know, every time we do a LinkedIn poll, or every time we we pull the experts, it’s always a three to one ratio. So out of four people, three will say conversion is more important than traffic. Yep. And I’m, I’m the outlier. I’m the one against the three. And I think traffic is significantly more important than conversion. And there’s a lot of reasons why I believe that.
Norman Farrar 9:14
Dig into it. Why do you believe that? So
Steven Pope 9:17
I think that it’s 10 times easier to double your traffic than it is to double your conversion rate. Okay, and that simple litmus test sets up the conversation, right? So you could throw any scenario out, you could say, Hey, I’m 100k business and my conversion rates 10% Or I’m a 50k business and my conversion rates 5%. No matter which scenario you run through here, it’s still going to be 10 times easier to double the traffic than to double the conversion. And if you double the traffic and maintain the conversion rate, which never happens, but if you could, it would still still be the same outcome versus doubling the conversion rate and maintaining the traffic. So why wouldn’t you put more resources behind traffic generation if it’s easier to grow your sales? And so when we think about traffic initiatives versus conversion initiatives, it’s a lot harder to figure out what’s going to improve a conversion rate, right, like so if we talk conversion rate for a moment, you have pricing, you have your main image, your title, your design, your photo stack, is this the item I expected when I landed on your product, asin page, when I clicked it, if yes, and I like what I see, I’m going to buy. And there’s all kinds of factors that can go into the pricing model, right? Or the buying conversion model. It’s, it’s, and you can run your A B tests, and I’m a big fan of PickFu. And I always run my AV test to try and improve my conversion rates. So what I’m not arguing today is do traffic and don’t work on conversion. That’s not what I’m saying. But what I am saying is, if you focus on traffic, with more resources, your sales will grow faster than if you focus your resources more on conversion. So you have to have all these things correct. You got to have a main image that works, you got to have a price that’s competitive, and you got to have your A plus content. But here’s case in point. For those that don’t think a plus content is index. A year ago, I went on the circuit, and I basically shadow the top of my lungs, a plus content is indexed. And people are like, No, it’s not Amazon says it’s not indexed. And I’m like, Well, here’s the proof, put Spanish keywords behind one photos, alt text, and all of a sudden, it indexes within 48 hours. There’s the proof, right? So then take that a step further. If a plus content indexes, should you decrease your conversion rate by adding a bunch of copy to it? And the answer is, yes, almost always. So if you pull out your mobile phone and go to your favorite page right now, and you’re like, but I like the big pictures, they look better on my phone, you would be correct. But if you put in 500 words of copy, and 100 characters in your search term field, on every single photo, you are more likely to index that is be found on the search engine result page in the top 300 search results than if you hadn’t have done those things. So it’s a chicken or egg question, you know, what comes first the traffic or the conversion. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have the eyeballs to begin with, then you won’t convert them. And therefore, you should put all of your resources behind traffic, or most of the resources rather. So
Norman Farrar 12:55
Yeah, well, you know, I just like being lazy and letting you talk. But now I got to do my job, I guess. So if any of the listeners I would love to hear your opinion. So comment, please, traffic? Do you traffic or conversion? That was the question Steve asked at the beginning. If you have any comments about what Steven just said, love to hear them. Let’s get this going. Let’s have some interaction here. Okay, so I got another question for you. And I really love what you were talking about, by the way about the a plus content, you know, the the chicken or the egg? Because, yeah, esthetics over indexing, right?
Steven Pope 13:39
Most companies will pick up statics by default, but not because they’re purposely doing it. They just don’t know better, right? And, and so I like to believe that my Amazon guy is the number one SEO leader in the space. And I say this boldly, and I will defend it. As one example to this. About a week ago, I broke some news in the industry, where I went on and said, every single SEO tool on the market is incorrectly telling you how to set your search true field. And there’s a difference between a byte and a character. And essentially, long story short, the search term field does not count syntax, it doesn’t count spaces, and it doesn’t count commas or other hyphenated objects against your search term field. And essentially what that means is all of these search term tools were were making you set your SEO field with 20% less space than you could actually fill in. So Helium 10, Jungle Scout, zon guru, you can name any SEO tool on the market, every single one of them told you that space is counted against you and they We’re incorrect. Now, I’m a really big fan of zon guru. I think they have an up and coming tool. They’ve already patched this. They’re the only ones that have that I’m aware of. They had this passion less than one business day. That’s how clever they are over there. Big fan of John Cillian and zon guru. But But essentially, this is another case in point example, this is a big moment, right? Like this is the biggest piece of news in the SEO space on Amazon, since I proved a plus content is index. This is another case example of how you can improve your indexing by just simply re understanding how the field actually works. So so if you haven’t gone back and counted how many bytes your search term field has today, and instead you were calculating the characters, there’s a very strong possibility that you could fit 20% More space into your search term field,
Norman Farrar 15:55
especially if you’re doing commas and space.
Steven Pope 15:59
Yes, and I believe the comma debate ended about five years ago, I think most people five years ago, were like, Hey, don’t put commas in your search term field. And as some of you may not know the why but you understand the best practice. But the Why is every phrase inside of the search term field per mutates with every other phrase inside of it. And if you add a comma, you’re telling Amazon please don’t permutate as in please don’t combine my plush toy keyword with my dog toy keyword, right? And so if you put commas in, it’s almost like you’re just doing exact match only no broad match no permutations between them. So that’s why commas are not a used technique within Amazon search term fields.
Norman Farrar 16:46
Very good. Did anybody reach out to you? I know you just said Zhan guru did but did anybody in the industry.
Steven Pope 16:53
None of the other SEO tools. did. You know there there are some really good leaders like I’m a big fan of seller tools and what they’re up to. But But no, nobody. Well, I mean, I’ll take that back Bradley Sutton to join me in the comment section on Helium 10. He had a clarifying comment, but he didn’t really address the feedback in my opinion. And nothing from Jungle Scout yet. So I did tag all the you know, I tagged all the guys. I’m actually really surprised it didn’t make more headlines. I’ll be honest, I think this was such a big news drop that just like people are like, Yeah, that’s cool. And then they went, they went on with their day. And like, I’m telling you guys like 20% more SEO Jews do this one hack, right, huge deal. So I would expect I expect that to pick up a little bit more and more. The same thing happened when I talked about a post content indexing, it took a full year for the industry to adopt the best practice. I think this one will go faster, because I have a track record now. And I’m like, Hey, guys, this industry needs to shift. We’ll see. I’m not I’m not 100%. It’s kind of like, you know, selling sliced bread 10 years before everybody knew what sliced bread was sometimes. So likely, it’s the difference between a product that you have to generate demand for versus a product that you know, your co opting demand. So I have a product demand generator right here. And sometimes I have to tell people, I’m solving a problem, they don’t even know they exist.
Norman Farrar 18:15
Yeah, and you know, you’re attracting more and more and more attention. So all of a sudden, you start to say something, and you become that authority figure that trust figure people start to jump more and more and more. So I remember when you brought up that eight plus context, eight plus content, and you changed my mind on that, because I didn’t think you could do that I was with the Amazon site. And then you said that, and we started doing that. And we started seeing those results.
Steven Pope 18:43
And they were instantaneous. It was instant.
Norman Farrar 18:45
It was instant. Yep. And the the other thing is, I saw when you you sent out this video the other day, and I thought, wow, you know, this, that’s, that could be 20%, more a 20% thing, it’s a big number.
Steven Pope 19:02
And it doesn’t even take more than like five minutes of effort to realize right? It’s just it’s just that the whole industry was counting characters instead of bytes. Now, there are a few it technical people out there that have clarified that technically a space is a byte according to some JavaScript definition or something other than outside of Amazon but I but I was able to show the Amazon help file as Amazon is defining a bite. A space is not counted. And and so if you are trying to put in German language where you got or Spanish with teal days, or what do they call the A with the double dot above it in German, I forget what
Norman Farrar 19:44
you’re asking a guy that lives in Canada. Come on now. I don’t know. Manny. Manny knows she’s in. She’s in Germany, she’ll let us know. So
Steven Pope 19:53
So if if you have a character that has multiple touch points on it I don’t even know if I’m describing this correctly, but a teal day like you got, you got an N and until they over it, that counts is two bytes or a Chinese field, that would count as three or potentially even four bytes for one character. And so let’s let’s go to the comment section and ooh, Mullah. Yeah, that was the one that everybody’s learning. They’re going back to AP English in high school right now. And they’re like, Oh, why did I join this podcast?
Norman Farrar 20:24
There we go. Yeah, I do want to go back to what you’re talking about with a plus indexing, and just firm up what you were talking about. So let’s go through it step by step, you go in, you go into your A plus content, you hit edit, you hit like, if you’re, if there’s an image there, you hit the image that had the edit on the image, and then you’ll be able to add, it doesn’t say alt tag, right, it says keyword. What does it say? Keyword?
Steven Pope 20:57
I’ll just pull it up on my site of staff.
Norman Farrar 20:59
Because I do know, I’ve had questions that people say I can’t find the old tags. Well, it’s under keyword search, I think
Steven Pope 21:06
you can hit edit on the photo, and it should just be the architects. So of course, the moment I go into edit a post content Seller Central is like lagging out here. But let’s see. Okay, so I’m going to hit share screen here. And let me know if that’s appropriate or not. Yeah, no prob. Alright, so I hit Add screen, you can add me in here. So this is an actual, you know, a post content. So the first thing I’ll point out here is you see big giant images, lots of text, big giant image, lots of text. And you’ll see me repeat that three times, big giant image, lots of text, followed by product grid, product grid, my favorite module. So when you go into hit edit, let’s go ahead and edit here. And then edit on the photo. And normally, I did not talk about doing this at a time. So this is a live impromptu live, Add Image, Image keywords right here. And I think they might have changed the name of this from Yeah, next image keywords at one point. But in here, you can see you can put additional things all the same best practices apply here. But with some caveats, right, so should you double some of the words that you put into the photos that you have elsewhere? Answered? Absolutely. Case in point, I don’t sell a candle. But you better believe I want to rank for sage candle. Why? Because I have a 25% a costs on anything related to candles, I know that I convert better on candles than I do on smudge sticks. So do I want to rank for candles? Yes. Do I have the word candle in my physical texts? No, I only have it in the keyword sections. Other things, you know, like incense and sticks and negative energy, right. And this is obviously a weird product. But like I, I will use repetition in the alt text field frequently when you’re trying to do indexing, that is be found on the search results to begin with. Repetition is not what you should be chasing. So we run three phases of SEO. Right? So when we talk about traffic, we got PPC and SEO, conversion design and catalog. That’s kind of what we started on. So we are on three phases of SEO. And in phase one, it’s all about NASS indexing, you’re trying to show as many words as possible in the search result. And so like one of the one of the ways I like to evaluate, like, Hey, did I do a good job on this? What’s the number, generally speaking somewhere between 801,000 keywords index, by the end of day 30, you can say to yourself, pat yourself on the back, I did a good job. If you don’t have that sort of indexing, there’s probably a problem that you need to address. Either you don’t have enough text and your A plus content, or you set up your search term field incorrectly, or you didn’t spend enough money on ads and traffic. So some of the best practices on this are very common knowledge. Don’t repeat the same word in the Search Term field, don’t put commas, those sort of things have been around for about five years. And then the one that we’re breaking though, is 250 bytes, not 250 characters. So that’s phase one, all about indexing. When we go to phase two, we call this the pink word update. And the reason it’s called the pink word update is because inside of the brand analytics dashboard, you can see that any word that’s entered into your search term field, and is also present in your title or your bullets is in pink. Now. That means that Amazon has already indexed that word for you or counted it for indexing because they see it on the front facing copy. Yes, bullet points count towards indexing though the question of how much they impact versus say title and Search Term field is significantly less. So when we do phase two, we will remove the pink words. That is We’ll replace what’s currently on the title and in the bullets and remove it out of the search term field and replace it with additional keywords to index. So when we think of phase two, we think of this as incremental indexing. So if you do this phase correctly, your 800 or 1000, keywords will gain another 20%. So if you had 1000, you go to 1200.
Steven Pope 25:23
The reason we include the keywords from the title and the bullets in the search term as part of phase one, is because we found that helps the indexing faster. So when it comes to launching an Amazon speedy for your honeymoon period, especially is extremely important. So that’s why we don’t have that until phase two. And it’s incremental indexing, phase three, throw the rules out of all phase one and two. And this is the phase where you are going to matriculate the rankings and try and go from rank 20 through 50. And push it up to rank one through 10. So this is where you will increase repetition. And this is why I brought these these screen shares up is because when you do phase three, you absolutely want to repeat your phrases in as many locations as possible. Why? Because you’re strike zoning that you’re going to pick somewhere between five to 10 keywords that you want to move from position 20 through 50 on and put them up to position one through 10. And the best way to do that is to update your title, update your search term field, your bullet points with exact matches of the keywords you’re trying to strike on. And the alt text or the copy of your A plus content should be chock full of these phrases. If you run this face correctly, more than half of the keywords you work on will will will result in rank one through 10. Not not 100% chance on this 50% Chance typically. But if you matriculate the ranking and bring them from strike zone position 2350, that’s a really big deal. Let’s say you have a 10,000 search volume keyword that you do this with, well, in position rank 20, you might only get 2% of the traffic. But in position rank three, or two or position one, you might get 15 to 25% of the traffic or even more. So that means if you can index and matriculate a keyword to a higher rank faster, and more effectively, that leads to more traffic. And it’s easier to do this than it is to improve your conversion rate, tying it into our theme today, right? Rice techniques are super easy to follow. They’re just wildly debated and wildly misunderstood. Easy to do, highly contested. Does this strategy work versus somebody else’s strategy. But once you do that, you’re gonna be able to see the results for yourself and judge for yourself when you run those techniques. So so that’s the that’s that’s the key here. And if you want to go to, you know, to wrap up the screenshare here, yep. Before I bore everybody with the tech, if we go to the front facing copy of the actually plus content. And by the way, here’s a hack for you today. How many of you don’t have your brand story filled out? Many of you’re asking, what’s a brand story? Exactly. A brand story is an additional module on top of your A plus content. Notice here it says from the brand. This is an easy five minute hack to take more space on your detail page. Why do you want to take more space, because every single thing on the Amazon detail page is a giant rabbit hole. If I was defending turf on my own listing on my Shopify website, you probably would only have something along the lines of this, right? You show me the images, the video and by and you’d be done. But on Amazon, we’ve got there’s an ad, there’s an ad, there’s an ad. And as we scroll down, add row there ad row there. So therefore taking up as much space as humanly possible is in your best interest, both for conversion and for traffic purposes. And in the case of taking up space so that you don’t click somebody else’s, that’s conversion. But in the case of traffic, you want to have lots of copy, because that helps the search engine result page look better. Alright, so last thing to show here, when you hit Inspect Element like this inside of Google. Yep. You’re then going to see the alt text image right here. So we got sweet grass, lavender camp, fire, pure plant, etc. This is where the engine is going to use that information. It’s set as the image alt text, that’s the tech behind it. Alright, so I bore everybody with the tech. I’ll stop my screen share and turn it back over to you normal. Alright, so
Norman Farrar 29:44
before we got started to go down the a plus side. One of the things I want to talk about, because it’s the way that you’ve set it up, and a lot of people again, we started off talking about aesthetics, you’ll have the big pictures. It looks great. But what I liked the the one thing that I liked that you brought up was, okay, you can have those big pictures, but at the end have a carousel of a bunch of small pictures. So you could, you know, stick the the old tax, tech and all text into it. So I think that’s important. I don’t think that’s been discussed a lot like, I don’t hear people talking about what size of images to put in. I hear about esthetics a lot of the time, and what you told about brand story too, not very much. Not very many people even know that brand stories available on a plus. Good, great points,
Steven Pope 30:38
Kelsey, want to pull up the screen again. So in the product module that that norm was just emphasizing there, here, we have four images, you could put five or six in here. And not only do you get the benefit of having multiple links here, see, I can put my cursor on it and click the other product. If somebody buys a fruity scent soap for me, chances are, they’re going to buy a masculine. So for me to write one for him, one for her. And so that increases the average order value. And then the point that Norman was making here is each one of these photos all have their own all texts, right? So having multiple photos is a net benefit here.
Norman Farrar 31:14
Yep. Okay, it is just after 1230. We haven’t even talked about the price today. So, Steven, why don’t you just mention what you’re giving away today.
Steven Pope 31:26
Alright, so take the screenshare away here. So this nice t shirt I have on, I’m going to upsell this t shirt. Because this t shirt is the softest fabric on the market. I bought 10 different fabric types in my hunt to build the best t shirt. So if you think my Amazon guy would be worthy to be on your shirt, we’re going to give away a free T shirt today.
Norman Farrar 31:47
All right, and on top of that we’re going to give away as long as you’re not already part of the Centurion League, we’re going to give away a month of his Cinterion league as well. Also, if you’re interested in Stephens, let me see the the keyword at the key word, phase one that he was just talking about. He’s got we’re going to be putting in a link, you can check it out, you can download it, and you can get all the information. And I have to tell you, there are a ton of people that will say, Oh, this doesn’t work. This is you know, try it, just try it. We went we tried it and we saw results. So what Steven is talking about, you don’t have to use. But if you bring out a product, why not give it a try? And I’m sure that you’ve had some pretty hard hot conversations with a few people.
Steven Pope 32:44
I mean, SEO is the most complicated topic to debate. It’s more complicated and more technical than design. And with design, people will debate the aesthetics all day long, right? So it’s just more it’s like all of that except more because then then not not really arguing like which image am I likely to click on? Which by the way, you should just run an A B test and not even have that debate. But now you’re also debating how does the Amazon algorithm actually work? Well, Amazon publicly states this. Well, we know that Amazon doesn’t actually, you know, it’s like the left hand at Amazon doesn’t know what the right hand is doing very frequently over at Amazon. So it’s like, how do you trust that? You can’t, right? So you got to test it, you gotta you gotta you gotta find something that you can test yourself to see what actually what actually works.
Norman Farrar 33:28
Exactly. Now, if you want this hashtag we’ll have Kelsey, and if you take two people, you’ll get a second chance to enter. Also, Kelsey, put your finger on the button, we’re about to go to his sponsor. Thank you Z CO for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Are you looking to take your ecommerce business from local to global, you can with the help of z and their brand new app. That’s right, you can track live shipments with push notifications. Get detailed lead times for each stage of your shipment, and store all compliance and VAT reclaim documents in the palm of your hand. All while listening to lunch with Norm. Ready to expand your E commerce empire. And take your Amazon FBA business global. Use the link in the description to learn more about Z’s new app that’s now available on desktop and mobile. That’s z.co z e dot c o okay. Alright, so now let’s move on. I know we started this, but let’s talk about your traffic strategy. So you know, what are the action points that people do have to take?
Steven Pope 34:46
You need to fill out every attribute available to you on Amazon. So that means having a long title. That means filling out bullet points that maximize those fields more text than you might want and It means putting 500 words of text in your A plus content. And it also means running advertising, all from day one. Now, here is the next five second hack today. Okay, how many of you are using Amazon social posts? You might know about it. But are you actually using it? It’s like Instagram for Amazon, right? So a lot of people don’t realize that there is free traffic ready for you right now. So I’ll share my screen again here to show what we’re talking about with social posts. So if you go to any brand store, and they’ve made a social posts, you can go to posts, and you can see some of the things that have been posted here. So you got not only could you have these tags down here, you can see the actual product, you can you can make them click the products and see see a direct link, you see the stars, you see the price, you see the product, it’s basically a giant ad for you. How much does this cost? Nothing. It’s free. Go make an Amazon social posts three times a week. It’s the free advertising. So So where does the show up? This shows up at the brand store right here, which nobody’s clicking on, and nobody’s dealing. So don’t worry about that one. But it shows up at the bottom of the detail page. So if we go to a detail page, so let’s click on the men’s soap one here. So this is one of my brands, I saw ages stage, and we scroll down, there’s the brand store brand story again. And as we go down here, if I was on a mobile phone, we would see social posts, somewhere between videos, and customer asked questions. But on desktop today, they don’t show the social posts. And the reason why I think that we see that from from Amazon today is because they have found that on mobile people are more social and more socially engaging. But on desktop, they’re not on desktop conversion rates are affected by including social posts. So that could change at any point in time. We have seen video ads start getting beta tested on Amazon’s detail pages as well. So we all know that if you go to amazon.com, right and type in so let’s go to amazon.com here, we’re just going to type in funny wineglass and we got a headline ad up top, there’s my ad for my own product right there. And position number one. And as we scroll down, here we go. There’s a video ad, right, we all are aware of the importance of video ads and where they show up in search. What you may not know is that Amazon is going to throw these video ads onto your Amazon detail pages very soon. So if you are wondering how Amazon’s PPC costs are going up 35%. And what you’re going to do about it, the fastest and easiest answer is make some really dang good video ads. And not only will video ads start showing up on detail pages, they’re also starting to show up on Twitch and other external platforms. So so if you think about it, like Amazon is out of space, there’s only one headline ad right only one person can win that there’s only four sponsored product ad spots for a sick for a whole row. And then they’re going to go to some organic, and then maybe another organic row and then a video that Amazon’s choice and editorials here, which I think are overrated, too expensive to obtain. But that’s probably a debate on may not win, more organic, more organic, and then probably another sponsor row right here. Right. So so at the end of the day, Amazon only has a finite area for their advertising. So where are they gonna go next? Right. It’s not just you know, I like the Canadian tie in right norms. So it’s not just where the puck is in a hockey game, right? It’s where the puck is going to be. And so, in the Amazon advertising space, where’s the puck going? It’s going to be video, all about video and social posts, which we shared. Last that but social posts, which we previously shared. Also, I think you’re going to have to push that I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon search charging for Amazon social posts at
Norman Farrar 39:27
this rate, I would think at some point they would I mean, it’s still in beta. But we we love Amazon social posts, our clients are on Amazon social posts. And we try it’s not one or two times a week we try to do about three a day.
Steven Pope 39:45
And that’s that’s a good thing to do if you have the assets, right? Yeah. Yeah, if you don’t, then you’re just rotating through.
Norman Farrar 39:52
Yeah, and you know, you can you can get the assets very easily if the person has so any other type of social media Do you can get it from people tagging you like just on your inserts, ask people to tag and then use an app like repost and then just upload it to your Amazon posts. There’s so many things I know with, you know, one of our companies, we just asked chefs to provide recipes. That’s awesome. And they did. It was really cool. So I mean, there’s, and then what you can do is like with all of the assets that you’re putting out there, you can always withdraw the asset of the of the asset from the account. Let’s say it’s older, and you can reestablish it. So it’s not like you have to have, like, ongoing, but if you are using influencers in this, look, I think Sumner Kelsey, it was Sumner Hobart that put out that video that showed he started using Amazon posts, and he didn’t see any results. And then he came back a year later. And he saw the engagement in the heat that he received over the year. And he freaked out,
Steven Pope 41:03
like wow, how many? Excuse 1000s and 1000s of clicks? Yeah,
Norman Farrar 41:07
yeah. So you don’t see the immediate result? Maybe. But I know I have my best four impressions. So this is just impressions. But I have one post that has over 200,000 views right now.
Steven Pope 41:21
That’s a lot.
Norman Farrar 41:21
That’s a crazy amount for Amazon posts.
Steven Pope 41:25
And that product insert ideal take, I know you’re already doing this, but I want to tell everybody else you should do is to. So instead of asking for reviews, like review generation strategies, in my opinion, dead, like post mortem, not even worth touching anymore. I don’t even think you need reviews to launch a product anymore, in my opinion. And I’ve launched multiple products where I didn’t have reviews and did just fine. And I share my results on my YouTube channel. But But product insert, engagement generation is the future, right? So Canadian hockey metaphor, keep that one going, where’s the puck going? Right? The puck is going so that you need to have engagement with your customers? Well, how do you engage them? Norm just gave it to you engage them on other social media? Well, how do you get them there to begin with everybody you send a product insert to give them a $20 gift card, if they post a picture of them using your product. That gift card could go to your website. Currently, this is probably in the gray zone, but is not explicitly prohibited. And even if it was, I’ve never heard of anybody getting in trouble for this so far, could change in 12 months from now. Absolutely. But if you give them a gift card to post a picture of your products with a hashtag on Instagram, then you go through and give them a one use time gift card code. This is the cheapest way you’re going to be able to get more photography of your products in use by a consumer and they post it on their own social media. So it’s like free advertising. You then repurpose it and post it on post it post it on your own Amazon social posts as well. You’re probably doing all this already. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Not surprised. Last thing I’ll say is product insert. So I sent out a nice giant postcard here. Normally you get one of these by chance. I did not. Okay. I feel it out. Yeah, so so I’ve got I’ve got postcards I sent to 25,000 Amazon sellers, trying to see if I could drum up more business. So we’re talking about product inserts. It is illegal to take your Amazon Seller addresses and send them a mail don’t do that. But it is not illegal for me to send a postcard to all of the Amazon sellers because all of your addresses are public record now.
Norman Farrar 43:43
There we go.
Steven Pope 43:45
Alright, so if you ever wonder even at that, if you ever wondering why you get a postcard from an aggregator or an agency that’s one
Norman Farrar 43:52
right. Okay, I know that we have a bunch of questions. So Kelsey, I think we should start
Steven Pope 44:00
digging my wife just said it was good to see you again norm
Norman Farrar 44:03
and I haven’t seen her but it would be good to see her especially if she was coming on the cruise. Yeah, there you go.
Kelsey 44:12
Alright, so we do have a lot of questions not sure if we can get to all of them today but let’s give it a try. From Zachary thoughts on the new brand metrics for Traffic Conversion and other tools. also wondering why I do not have this love yet. Is it random? Who the yellow the tool
Steven Pope 44:28
so anytime Amazon rolls a tool out there’s a 10% chance it’s going to have value. For my experience. It’s like for every 10 Things Amazon changes one is really good. Nine duds. I would say Jury’s out on brand metrics in my opinion. I think it’s a nice nice to look at, but I don’t know how actionable It is at this stage. Are you gonna do a cameo? Alright, we’re gonna put we’re gonna have a cameo from my wife.
Norman Farrar 44:54
Oh, there we go. Yeah, hey, oh, Baby Adam. Oh my gosh.
Steven Pope 45:00
Well, I’ll put I’ll put them up in front of the camera here. There we go. He’s a cutie. Oh god
Norman Farrar 45:07
don’t put them through the camera. Yeah. Oh, that’s awesome. He just he just had to see Uncle norm Yes. Oh,
Steven Pope 45:17
thanks for the CAMEO.
Norman Farrar 45:18
That’s awesome. So cute when and congrats on that by the way too.
Steven Pope 45:25
Thank you Thank you very much for kids six and under my personal motto is prosperity and all things that means juggle constantly both business families personal spiritual you name and all the new for seven.
Norman Farrar 45:40
Oh fantastic. Okay, now let’s get to the questions after that girl cameo.
Kelsey 45:47
Okay, let’s see from red, which brings in the traffic YouTube Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook or other
Steven Pope 45:54
depends on the product. So my wineglasses Pinterest does best. But I would say if you have a crazy product that’s like a As Seen on TV product, you need a Billy Mays type guide. Probably tick tock,
Kelsey 46:07
huh. Okay, from Tony, if a plus content is indexed, are there any stats on sales I have bought from Google Photos?
Steven Pope 46:19
Does a plus content have any stats on the impact of its sales? I think is the question on an exam. Not tracks technically. But many, many use case studies have been performed on this both by Amazon themselves as well as service providers like my Amazon guy. And I don’t know, I don’t remember the stats off the top my head because it’s such a no brainer to have a post content that it makes sense to have it. But I think that there’s probably no case study that could prove one way or another. Whether text is good or bad. I would I would venture to guess, overall, right? I would venture to guess that having more text will hurt the conversion rate, right. But it will increase your indexing leading to overall more traffic and more sales. And so that’s how I would judge it. One of the things you could do Choni is run an A B test on your a post content, heavy text versus less text. The problem is is I don’t know if Amazon is indexing the test version, or both versions? And there’s a lot of question marks on this.
Norman Farrar 47:22
But like you said, I don’t even I think it was in our last podcast, we were talking about this. But you can if you’ve got a ton of text that you’re going after, and you’re you’ve indexed for it. When you come and you get into phase three, you can start removing some of that. So now the aesthetics kind of bounced back, and you can get away from just heavy tax Correct.
Steven Pope 47:47
I would agree with that statement. The longer your listing has been around, the more likely you can go with less tax and the aesthetics. Now, the question is, though, wouldn’t you want to keep indexing for new things? And so having those those texts there, it might be just like a switch out like a switch route, right? Like, you might just want to change the text go for less sure. But you want to switch it out? Because it’s not set it and forget it. It’s a continued optimization. Right. For example, I wouldn’t spend $10,000 on a PPC campaign until my PPC Manager, hey, I don’t want you to make any optimizations just spend 10 grand, right? Same thing with SEO, why would you give your SEO guy $10,000 of time that they spent working on your listings and not continuously optimize it?
Norman Farrar 48:37
Okay, I just saw something from Marina. Sorry, I missed it are posts indexed by Amazon? I don’t believe so. No, I didn’t think so. If, who knew.
Steven Pope 48:49
However, product reviews can trigger your category to change on Amazon. And I know this because we have a brand called rope ratchet that’s been with us for four years. And when somebody left a risk gay review about how they use their ropes in the bedroom and showed us a picture of a mannequin being tied up. It switched us to the adult category. So if a product review can switch your category, I venture to guess that there’s probably some kind of SEO impact, but we don’t know.
Norman Farrar 49:21
I’ve been told with it with Amazon posts to make sure that you do put in your keyword phrases, you know, so I don’t have any evidence that they do index but just in case why not.
Steven Pope 49:35
I like that strategy that just in case why not. I also think that even if it doesn’t help your asin to index, it absolutely will help your social posts index on other people’s products of like minded items. So so it’s a no brainer from that standpoint. Okay, Celts.
Kelsey 49:53
Alright. And just a reminder that if you’re new to the podcast, we go live every Monday Wednesday, Friday at 12 am Eastern Time. And if you haven’t yet, please smash those like buttons and give us those thumbs up, we’d really appreciate it. On to our next question from Yani, what are the best practices when doing Amazon posts,
Steven Pope 50:11
I think norm just gave the best one, use keywords, make sure you use product photos that aren’t just necessarily your main image of the product, because they already see that in the post itself. And I would also say, variety, and frequency. So I mentioned three times a week minimum, I set the bar pretty low, because I know most of you aren’t going to go do multiple per day, Norm set the bar way up here. And he’s like, Hey, you should be doing five of these a day. And technically, both strategies are good. Minds are getting started strategy and norms is like do you want to be a pro strat?
Norman Farrar 50:46
Yeah, yeah. And like you just said about content, make a content calendar and mix it up, you don’t know, you’ll be surprised at what types of images or information people will get more engaged with. So it’s different with every category. So just mix it up from lifestyle benefits features, it could show your ingredients, it could be a ton of things. And all those extra posts that are coming in the ones that you’re either getting from influencers, like the lifestyle ones, but also people that are tagged that have tagged you, and I’ve given you their information. So using your product, which are pretty cool. So alright, Celts next.
Kelsey 51:28
Alright, from a screen, have you seen the data that some products will be almost impossible to reverse course on ranking after bad PPC, SEO management for a while? Do you believe in relaunching products under a new Asin?
Steven Pope 51:41
I rarely support launching on a new asin I think that it’s much easier to steer the ship or correct course you’ve got review counts to consider. There are obviously isolated cases where I’m going to say yeah, start anyways. And if you’ve got a three star average, like no brainer start a new Ace, right. But in terms of the SEO and PPC, even though it’s harder to take a mismanaged product and improve it. I don’t think the just there’s justification to lose all of that history. To start from scratch. It’s expensive to start a product from scratch, you’re talking to $3,000 to get a product off the ground and PPC and all the other things that you need. Right. Okay.
Kelsey 52:25
Okay. Let me see. Next one, from Zachary, Zachary, as Amazon matures? Is it going to be more about who can bid higher to rank or more about relevance of the product? is Amazon going to be more greedy? Or a better experience for its customers?
Steven Pope 52:41
Both? Absolutely. Both and probably a healthy mix. Amazon wants to make more money? How do they make more money by charging you more on PPC and by delivering a better customer experience more customers that buy the more than make? So they’re gonna do both for sure.
Kelsey 52:58
Okay, and from Simon, you say continuous optimizes optimizing, how often should a listing be optimized and switch route.
Steven Pope 53:07
So we generally go with a cadence of every 30 to 60 days, it just depends if you’re if you do phase two, SEO, but you don’t have 50 keywords in strike zone that is ranked 2350, you’re not ready for phase three, you might need to rerun the phase two, or you might just need to let it sit longer depending on so so in general 30 to 60 days, I think is a good metric. And you can see if you’re tracking your keywords, you’ll be able to know like Where should I focus and how much I should focus.
Kelsey 53:38
And I’ve gotten this question a couple of times just through social media context as well. But can I use customer images from reviews for Amazon posts? Can I get in trouble for copyright?
Steven Pope 53:51
I do it. I do think it’s prohibited technically. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody get in trouble. I don’t think a customer is going to come after you for using their their product image in a customer posts. Okay, by the way, we’ve also use stock images that weren’t our products in social posts. I’ve never had a problem. And and so I wouldn’t do that if you could use real images, but you got to start somewhere. Sometimes.
Norman Farrar 54:21
Be careful though, with stock. You can definitely use them as long as you’ve got it as long as they’ve got the Creative Commons rights. Right. So yeah, just be careful with like Unsplash is an awesome place to go. There’s a Pixabay is I think another one which everybody goes to, but there are some places out there that look like they’re royalty free until they sue you.
Steven Pope 54:50
If you ever get one of those letters from Switzerland base lawyer saying you used our copyrighted image, my best advices don’t respond They’re usually scammy. Okay.
Kelsey 55:05
All right, and is coming up to the hour, we have about five minutes left. If we don’t get to your questions, there’s always our Facebook group Amazon or lunch with Norm, Amazon FBA and E commerce collective. So we’ve got a great group of people over there that can help you out. Our community is awesome. So check that out. But we can maybe answer one or two more. From Olga, I heard you said before on YouTube, that putting other brands names under search term is not being an issue. Is that still the case?
Steven Pope 55:35
So I’m really glad you brought this up. Since I made those comments previously, it’s now become a problem. Part of one of the tools zon Guru can actually download your competitors search term reports. And now see if you’re using their trademark phrases. Therefore, don’t give your competitor ammunition to report your listing for trademark infringement and use it in a search term field. I think this is a very slippery slope on Amazon’s part, though, because quite frankly, there’s a lot of phrases that are accidentally trademarked and used. And so I think we’re in a slippery slope situation. But right now I would I would just your direct competitor, you know, their brand name. I wouldn’t include it not right, right.
Norman Farrar 56:15
Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Kelsey 56:19
Okay, and last question. I think we touched on this from Dr. Cause, because you’re smashing it. Congrats, hey, do you believe or have evidence that Amazon is reading image text indexing, like done? So by Google, YouTube and other search terms? And then also, yeah, we’ll keep it to that.
Steven Pope 56:40
So like, is a human reading it? Or is the algorithm reading it? And the answer is the algorithm is absolutely reading anything you submit 100%. The question is, is the algorithm using it to impact the search result? And that’s what’s usually debated. And I would say, yes, they’re using it and and it affects it affects your ranking. Yes. All right.
Norman Farrar 57:04
Okay, so just a quick reminder, if you’d like to get the t shirt, my Amazon guy, and a free a free month to the cert Centurion League, hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey, tag it twice, tag us twice, and you’ll get a second entry. Alright, so before we get over to the wheel, Steven, how do people get ahold of you or your agency?
Steven Pope 57:28
My Amazon guy comm if you contact us there, my team reads every single one of those contact forms, we get about 70 a week. And you can also follow me on YouTube. That’s my favorite place where I like to build a community and interact with comments. youtube.com/my Amazon guy.
Norman Farrar 57:44
Fantastic. Alright, Kelsey, are we ready? Are hold it? Why don’t we do this? Let’s have a word from our sponsor, and then we’ll get into the wheel. How’s that?
Kelsey 57:54
It sounds good.
Norman Farrar 57:55
Perfect. I wanted to give a quick shout out and say thank you to global wired advisors for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Global wired advisors is a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please call Chris shuffling and his team over at global wired advisors.com Yo, all right, the wheel.
Kelsey 58:21
All right at the wheel of Kelsey Olga, you just snuck in. So you and here it goes. The wheel of Kelsey enjoy
Kelsey 58:42
all right, shuffling everyone up. Here we go. 321. Okay, let’s see. It looks like it is going to Michael Michael E. Oh, all right. All right. Congrats, Michael. I will send you over. There we go link for the free T shirts. And yeah, we’ll get you all set up. So that is Kate at lunch with Norm comm to reach out to me.
Norman Farrar 59:14
And don’t forget, there’s a link isn’t there for the Phase One in the search term? Yeah, okay. Good. Very good. All right. Perfect. So I think that’s it. Steven, hold on. After you leave. I got to talk to you about a couple of things.
Steven Pope 59:30
All right. Sounds good. All right. You’re having me on guys. It was lots of fun.
Norman Farrar 59:33
It was a pleasure. Okay, and I had a ton more questions but we had too many questions. Alright, so thanks, everybody for joining us today. We are going to be having a really great show on Wednesday. We’re going to be talking about five Amazon growth levers. Every seller should be pulling in 2022 and that’s with Hamza Ramzan and Razak malice from D one brands it’s going to be awesome Okay, elsewhere Aria.
Kelsey 1:00:03
Okay, I’m not sure if my internet’s gonna be okay. It feels like it’s kind of being a little choppy on my ends. But thank you, everyone. Claudia. DK Kim. We got a ton of new users or follower viewers today.
Norman Farrar 1:00:17
That’s not the internet that’s is just not getting enough sleep or something.
Kelsey 1:00:23
Yeah, I think so. But anyways, I’m going to be posting Stephens YouTube link in the comment section right now. So check that out. He’s got a great channel. I think it’s, it’s one of the best YouTube channels I’d say. that’s out there. So definitely check it out. It’s my Amazon guy. If you search it on YouTube, you know, post that right here. So check it out there also like normal saying before we are now on Tik Tok, so come hang out with me. That’s just lunch with norm. And you can search that on Tik Tok, and you’ll be able to find all of our videos. And yeah, I think it sounds pretty fun.
Norman Farrar 1:00:57
By the way. If you first of all, if you are in Miami this week. I’m going to be down there Tim is going to be down there. So let us know where you are, I think flying down on Friday. And the other thing is too if you want to see the a live we’ll have Kelsey Kelsey will be coming to Mexico. And we’ll be doing live will have Kelsey is in Cancun. So that’ll be fun. That’s April. Not know that but just ready for that.
Kelsey 1:01:29
Fantastic.
Norman Farrar 1:01:30
Okay. All right, everybody. Thanks a lot for joining us today. And join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon, eastern central. Let’s try that back Eastern Standard Time. And once again, thanks for being part of our community. We really could not do this without you. And until Wednesday we’ll see you then. Have a great day. Entre entre
