#406 – Amazon Product Ranking Strategies For 2023

Today, we welcome back for the third time Alina Vlaic of AZrank and PressX to catch up on the latest updates with her Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce business. We also talked about different strategies for launching as well as ranking your products inside these different marketplaces. Bradley and Alina also talked about press articles for your Amazon products and what is the real value of these press articles for your ranking in the long run. Make sure to stay until the end because our guest Alina shared the juiciest 60-seconds tips that we’ve ever had on the show.

In episode 406 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Alina discuss:

• 02:00 – Updates On Alina’s Amazon & Other E-commerce Businesses
• 04:10 – Strategies That Are Working Well For Alina
• 07:00 – Her Reaction When Amazon’s TOS Changed
• 10:15 – How AZrank’s Services And Surveys Are Helping Clients Today
• 11:45 – Using Search-Find-Buy In Other Marketplaces
• 14:00 – Launching & Ranking Strategy For Walmart
• 16:11 – The Invisible Backend & How It Can Help Your Organic Ranking
• 20:00 – The Discovery Fields Should Be Keyword Stuffed
• 23:30 – Look Under The Compliance Fields
• 26:30 – Reason Why Listings Are “Shadow Punished” In Ranking
• 27:20 – Talking About PressX And How Can It Improve Your Product Ranking?
• 32:00 – The Non-Tangible Parts Of Marketing And Press Exposure
• 35:20 – Jumpstarting Listings Using PressX
• 38:30 – Alina’s 60-Second Tips
• 42:15 –  How To Use Amazon Posts In Product Ranking
• 44:00 –  How To Get In Touch With Alina

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a strategy field episode with tips on launch, Etsy, Amazon, and Walmart ranking press articles and much more. Make sure to state at the end for some of the most juicy 30-second tips that we’ve had. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews by following up with them in a way that’s compliant with Amazon’s terms of service? You can use Helium 10 Follow-Up in order to automatically send out Amazon’s requests or review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don’t want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me/followup. You can sign up for a free account, or you can sign it up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and from the other side of the world. Live in Romania. We’ve got Alina back on the show for the third time. How’s it going? Aleena?

Alina:

Hi Bradley. Nice to be here. Thank you for the invite. It’s going well, let’s say.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now we’re not gonna go too much into Alina’s backstory. My editor here gave me notes where you guys can actually get this on the other times that she was on the podcast. So check out episodes 122 guys and 267. So 122 and 267. You can learn all about Alina’s, Amazon selling journey and, and some of her other endeavors that she’s been doing. But right here, we’re just gonna hop right into things. I have so many things I’m thinking of I want to ask, I hope we have enough time to get through them all, but, but just first of all let me just ask you about your apart from all the other million things you do and million companies you seem to be involved with these days, you’re also an Amazon seller at the end of the day, Helium 10 Elite member, just like the rest of us. How has your Amazon business been doing the last it’s been way over a year since I talked to you last on, on the podcast, but, but how, how’s it been going?

Alina:

It’s been going very well, considering the amount of time I put into that, because as you said, I’m involved in, in many things, too many. I think it’s been going well, growing. We’re way over seven figures, two brands stable constantly launching new products. Well, we’re trying to, because this Q4, I had like six new products I couldn’t launch because of the restock limits. Everybody’s familiar with that. Other than that, I’m still testing a lot of stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

How about Walmart?

Alina:

Walmart has been down for the most part of the year because there we had some seasonal products, but now it’s back up and it’s doing very well, actually.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, awesome. Awesome. That’s good to hear. Have you launched on any other platforms outside of Amazon, or Walmart, like for example, Shopify or anything like that?

Alina:

No. No, not yet. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Etsy?

Alina:

Etsy, I used to, until I got my account shut down a couple of months ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, was it one of those things where they’re like saying your products don’t qualify to be Etsy products or something like that?

Alina:

Exactly. And I tried everything but seems like I cannot, I cannot open it again. It’s like a gone blank.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, that sucks. With one of the products that happened to me. So I’m not sure if somebody reported me, but I mean, it’s definitely more, I mean, it’s made in China, but it’s still handmade. It’s made by somebody’s hands like, like, come on guys. It doesn’t matter where, where it’s manufactured in should qualify. All right. Okay. So Amazon is doing well for you. Walmart is, is doing well. What has been something you’ve learned? Or like maybe you accidentally had some success on Amazon or Walmart or purposely like you implemented something and man, it really made a difference. Anything like that that you can think of that’s happened in the last year?

Alina:

Yes. I don’t know if I mentioned this the last time, but it’s been a while. So I was just starting to do that and it has proven to work very well. So my products are on Amazon, one of the brands in the industrial scientific category, and it’s like packs of 10 or packs of 20 pieces in a box. So I realized that many people were buying more than just one box. So I created for each of the best-selling five SKUs or six SKUs, let’s say I created three or four variations, like packs of 50 packs of 100 packs of 200, all of them FBM fulfilled, because if you were to send them in FBA, then profit margins wouldn’t be that great. And I was just looking on some reports. Going back to that, after a couple of months, I started combining them because they kind of work together. if you buy one you need, you may need the other one at one point, the other product. So I just like virtual bundles, but they were self-standing listings, FBM and all combined under parent ASINs on Amazon. Okay. And I was just looking on some reports the other day. It’s been 19% of the sales on Amazon go through among all those FBM, which is kind of cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

19%?

Alina:

19, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I, I’ve been saying that for years, hey, guys, do fbm, but like for me, the, the reason why I say do FBM is, is I can, you can get at least two to 3% in my experience at it. So, so that’s interesting. Sometimes you can get even a lot more. So that’s good to know.

Alina:

When you do packs like that, the values higher. Some of them are $100 or 150 bucks for per specific product. So percentage-wise–

Bradley Sutton:

Wise. Oh,so like on the revenue side, it’s 19. Interesting. Very good. Very good. Now let, let’s go ahead and, and hop right into some different strategies. I think everybody who’s been listening to you from before knows you as Alina from AZrank and we’re gonna talk about some other endeavors you’ve been doing lately. But tell me about the day that the announcement came out before. Did you have a heart attack? Did you and your husband like contemplate going to a mountain to meditate to kinda ease your worries? What was your thought process when Amazon was like, no more search, find, buy, in the traditional sense?

Alina:

It was very funny, actually. I don’t know if you remember I was in la I was at the Helium tan workshop, and at the moment I saw the post, I was in an Uber driving from Irvine to downtown LA for a meeting. And I was like, seriously, 9:00 AM in the morning and you’re coming with this, what joke is this? But no, it was true. It’s been one year now, one full year. And I have to admit very honestly, that change for us turned things better, our campaigns are working better because of all the other things that we do on top of that. So then I was like, terrified. Now I’m happy. I think it’s okay. It’s been okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah, and, and I’ve, I’ve used I, I’ve talked about it on the show multiple times how AZrank works nowadays it’s like, Hey guys like, you can’t just tell people to go search, find, and buy stuff, but you’ve gotta do different things. And so one thing that you guys do correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been a few months since I’ve used the service, but you don’t even force them to use a certain keyword, but what you do is, like, you say, Hey, which keyword would you use to find this kind of product? Just to, to see a general Amazon buyer’s buying habits. And sometimes they even pick like their own keyword to use. Is that right?

Alina:

Yes, correct. And on top of that, market research, a lot of market research, which for the actual process of purchasing seems to be very important.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. That was what I really liked about it is, is, Hey, all right, you got this keyword. Whether they picked one of the ones that you thought it would be or not. Now it’s like probably a lot, some of your main competitors are on there, and then they give you some feedback on based on like, Hey, how does it look in the search results? the main image the price point, and the title, Hey, click on some of the competitor’s listings and then compare it to mine. how, how, what, what gets at you at the bullet points and stuff, and you get all this kind of insight. And we’re back in the old days, all we did was like, all right, Alina, I need seven purchases over eight days for this keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

And boom get it done in a sense that was kind of good old days it was really easy to get to page one, but there, there was nothing really that could help you make your listing get better or your strategy get better. But now since you’ve changed your formats to kind of like this survey thing, it’s almost like Helium 10 audience, or PickFu except like on steroids here. So I know my personal experiences with it, but, but what about on your side? Like any customer’s experience as you know you don’t have to say their product or anything where, where somebody went through that process with AZrank, and then they got some like crazy thing input from a customer that they never would’ve realized, and they acted on it and it really worked out well for them. I mean, I’m putting you on the spot here, but can you think of anything like that recently?

Alina:

Yes. No, it’s okay because it happens quite often. I mean, I don’t have something that like explosive or at least I don’t know of something that explosive, but the feedback is wow, I never thought of this kind of use for my product. I didn’t know that people actually use this product for this. Because we have, we ask them like, what other uses would you do with this product, for example? What, yeah, what other ways would you use it, sorry. And then something else is the packaging. The packaging ideas are very creative, like the craziest thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Talk about that for a second. So are you talking about like, so maybe they get the package and then they give their input on, Hey, I would’ve made this packaging differently. Is that what you’re talking about?

Alina:

Yes. That’s the second part of the survey we do after they receive and they say, Hey, besides the fact that it came broken, this wasn’t good, this blah, blah, blah all kind of that I would do this. How about you do this? Or creative ways of putting that into practice basically.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Changing. Interesting. Okay. Alright. So the traditional search, find, buy as we know for Amazon not, not something we should do, but correct me if I’m wrong, but like Walmart, Etsy, other websites, like, there’s nothing in their terms of service against traditional search, find, buy, right?

Alina:

That’s correct, yes, there isn’t.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, good, because I just hit you up last week to do one on Etsy, and so I’m just making sure now the reason guys, why I hit up AZrank for this was I’ve had the Project X coffin shelf on Etsy for a while, and usually we’re like the top selling coffin shelf, but then I noticed sales were down a lot. And then I looked in the search results and the weirdest thing, like, there’s not even that many coffin shelves on Etsy. We got pushed all the way to page three on Etsy. So I hit you up. And then how many did you actually do for Search Find by Etsy with the hopes of it going up? What was it like 10 or five or what did you do?

Alina:

Six, but it was down. It hit page one down bottom after four.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go ahead and take a look here. Let me see if I can share my screen here. It’s on him on Etsy. Now let’s do coffin shelf. This was literally just days ago that we, we did this. There it is, right there, right on the by the way, I’m gonna kick this guy off. This guy’s copying our pictures and everything, but I’m not really that concerned about it because it’s like $47, but ah, some people are so ridiculous. But here we are, right there on the top of page one. Excellent, excellent. So, boom, that, that actually, that actually worked well with only six units. We were able to get to the top of page one. So AZ rank is still working the traditional way for search find buy, and sometimes that might happen, guys, you should check there’s no keyword tracker or maybe there’s a keyword tracker out there, I don’t know. But Helium 10 doesn’t have a keyword tracker for Etsy, but, but check if your Etsy sales are down, check your main keywords and see if you’ve dropped in rank, or if you’re trying to launch a product and you just can’t seem to get on page one by yourself, Alina might be able to, to, to help with that. And then on Walmart, how, how is it working for Launch? Like, what’s your strategy with AZ Ranker for your own products for getting to page one on Walmart?

Alina:

Well it’s kind of the Amazon’s old days, PPC and search, find, buy together. It, it still works very well, even if Walmart is changing their stuff like crazy. Like every day something new is happening right now. They’re they’re very focused on the creatives like A+ Content. They’re starting to show videos on some listings I have on my products, videos has been a tremendous increase in sales for those products. And also something that I learned from my experience wait a little bit. I mean, whatever you do, even if you do search, find buy, even if you do PPC, just wait a little bit until you see actually the needle moving. Either you check it manually or with keyword tracker, because Walmart’s algorithm is very different than Amazon. In Amazon, you can see like in 24 hours, maybe 48 hours in Walmart might take even 10 days. I saw I had a situation or two actually. So just, just be a little pa patient and then you’ll, you’ll get there you’ll see the ranks.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Now, speaking of coffin shelves I haven’t even checked what’s going on with a coffin shelf on Walmart, so I might need to, to do that. But on Amazon I’ve talked about this before, where, where it seems like it’s been shadow banned from getting to the top of page one on coffin shelf, like we’re still one of the top coffin shelves, but it’s almost because of all, because of our sponsored placements, and we’re very high up there for top-rated products or whatever that other sponsored section is. But for organic, we just cannot get beyond like position 10 to 12 and we stay around 15. So one thing you had said right before we were on this call was that sometimes there is something in the backend of a listing that could be affecting rank. Was that, did I understand that correctly?

Alina:

Correct, yes. In the invisible backend, let’s say in the flat file.

Bradley Sutton:

In the flat file. All right, so I’m gonna share my screen for those, watching this on YouTube. And let’s, why don’t we walk everybody through downloading the flat file and then what to look for, and then who knows maybe this is not, we’re not gonna find something on, on this, and I would say probably not. We’re not, but who knows? But, but maybe somebody else out there, if you are on a keyword where, where you’ve traditionally were on the top of page one and you know you’re getting conversions in PPC and you know you’re converting for it you can tell from brand analytics, you can tell from search query performance and then you just can’t get your organic rank back up. this would, this would be something to look at. All right, so here, I’m gonna share my screen here. Hopefully you can see, all right, so I’m in seller central. Where do I go?

Alina:

Inventory reports.

Bradley Sutton:

Reports. Inventory reports. Okay.

Alina:

Inventory reports. Yes. And then you should have check if you have on the dropdown category listing report.

Bradley Sutton:

I do.

Alina:

Okay, then, hit that. Wait a little bit and then download.

Bradley Sutton:

So select category, I don’t need to do that. Yes. All. And then select report format. I hit Excel.

Alina:

Excel, yes. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

And listings created after. Do I need to do that or just leave it blank? Leave it blank. Select status filter all and then request report.

Alina:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I hit request report. Is this pretty fast?

Alina:

Yes, it is.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So it’s downloaded. So now I go ahead and hit download, and then let me open it up in Excel.

Alina:

Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So I got it. I got that Excel file opened here. So now what’s the next step?

Alina:

Now we have to find the product that we need to look at because this is basically your whole catalog, and I very much recommend to everyone out there just download this report once a month, because it’s basically your full backup of your whole catalog. It took, you saw how long it took. Five seconds.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. All right. So our coffin shelf, I know that it should be FBA. Let me find that here. FBA-coffin. All right. Here it is. All right. I have an FBA-coffin here. It’s line 15. So now what?

Alina:

Now you have to go to the right.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Alina:

Cell by cell, I mean, yeah, here in this information, you don’t have much to look at. It’s basically your product description. It’s your key product features, but however, I do see that you have a lot of empty cells and you shouldn’t have that as many cells filled in as possible. Helps

Bradley Sutton:

You Well, yeah. That’s to protect your listing from other people going and doing crazy things in, in other marketplaces, right?

Alina:

And for ranking.

Bradley Sutton:

And for ranking,

Alina:

I cannot give you a proof. I mean, like you do, but I’ve seen working on my SKUs, and it’s the same. They’re all in the same category. And I see when I work on, on one, which is very similar to the other, the one that I work on is always gaining rank because I, hold on, stop over there, the green, it’s called discovery. These fields, I always, but absolutely always recommend to keyword stuff them. Target audience–

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what does this mean though? That it’s all gray? It’s all gray out. That doesn’t mean anything.

Alina:

Try to type in something. Does it work? So sometimes when they’re gray, you are not allowed to change because there, it’s something, I don’t know, whatever Amazon from that field. But if you are allowed to type something in, that means you can change. And now they’re gray because you don’t have something.

Bradley Sutton:

I think some of these are actually available even in the front end. You can do, but I just have them blank in there.

Alina:

Exactly. Some of them are, and you have them blank, which is okay, not good. So for example, target audience, and other attributes, you can put keywords. I usually use phrase keywords. So the phrase form of the keyword, the full keyword, even if that means repeating some words. But that’s the way I do it. Some people maybe, I don’t know, just like to put words, but for me, it worked this way. Platinum keyword. Just leave them blank. Those are the only ones we don’t fill in.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Alina:

But besides that, everything should be– Amazon actually tells you if you look, these green cells are all tied together under the name discovery. So these are the ones that help buyers discover your product on Amazon. Kind of make sense, right? Look, additional features, I mean, you can put here some of these. I started testing at one point right when we, you discovered there was something that was showing right below the title.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. Yes. Well, that is called mine is blank right now, but yeah. Yes,

Alina:

Mine too. But you know what I’m talking,

Bradley Sutton:

There are special features. Special features.

Alina:

Exactly. And I, at one point I discovered something else, but it was I also don’t remember right now, but, and it was like category specific for one category worked for other didn’t. But if you are playing with it, or if you have a VA that does this for you, it’s a pity to leave them blank. Honestly. For example, some of these like length range, fill, material, shaft type, they’re crazy. You need something to fill in that actually fits. For those, I just put N/A just to be safe.

Bradley Sutton:

Speed unit of measure. Yeah. I don’t think a coffin shelf has a speed unit of measure or torque. Number of teeth, what in the world, number of teeth what is this? All right. So I’m still going, is staying resistant. Like, there’s so many different fields in here.

Alina:

It’s a lot. It’s a lot

Bradley Sutton:

Is autographed. maybe we should autograph each coffin shelf. We can try that. Okay. Occasion type. I’m just scrolling through for those who are listening to this on the podcast and just scrolling through all of these million fields in this flat file here. Now what are we looking for?

Alina:

We’re looking for some compliance fields. I don’t know, because it’s category-specific and it’s different all the time. But the name, so the, the number one and two where it says now theme or season of the product should be something to compliance-related.

Bradley Sutton:

But what are we looking for? Even if we find that, that which would, might indicate that there’s something wrong, like if there is something filled out in the compliance, then that’s where there’s something wrong.

Alina:

Let me explain for a little bit. So if you have a product like the Coffin Shelf, which you don’t need any type of certificate for, because you don’t, right? Yes. Yes. You don’t need any, I dunno, FDA, CPC, whatever, then those should be completely blank.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Alina:

Completely blank. Not N/A, not anything in there. Completely blank. We I had some friends with a pet product, and they discovered after I insisted a lot to send me the flat file to look through it. They had some information there. It wasn’t anything bad. It was just some random words saying something. I don’t remember, but just some random words. And then when she called Amazon, Amazon confirmed that their listing had been attacked and their ranking was like a rollercoaster, couldn’t stabilize with anything. When they took some that out and Amazon fixed it. Now it’s doing amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I doubt that’s why I didn’t think that this happened to me. But it’s important that other people might like nobody’s gonna attack a coffin shelf that sells five units a day, but this is good for people to know how to look. So like here’s some compliance fields. It says legal compliance. So all of these should be blank. And then if somebody downloads the report and they see something here, they should delete it and then, and then re-upload this to Amazon, or what?

Alina:

Yes, that’s the first step. But sometimes compliance fields may not work, may not get approved. Sometimes Amazon blocks those, so if you have something in there, you cannot further change it. So you might have to call seller support and pray for your success. And it goes on and on.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Well, Alina, the strategy is serious strategies for serious sellers praying. While I enjoy praying a lot, I do not pray for Amazon things. I do not think that’s a very serious strategy.

Alina:

Just kidding praying. Let’s say, wishing to have–

Bradley Sutton:

Here’s a whole bunch more. Here’s a whole bunch more compliance. Those compliance regulation type. So what you’re saying is somebody went in and did that to these people. Like interesting. Okay, so this is, this is a good thing that all of mine are blank, right?

Alina:

Yes. It’s a good thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so I’m just gonna scroll over just to make sure,

Alina:

Like everything is blank.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, everything is blank. Again, like for me this is not best part. I know we’ve talked about in the podcast how it’s best to have everything filled out. Then that makes it harder for other people to attack your listing. But for coffin shelf, I didn’t figure that it’s that important because you know who’s going to attack a coffin shelf listing. Alright, right. We got to the end, so looks like I’m good. But there you go. There are something guys that you, you can check out in your flat file if you, if you see some, some issues with a ranking, you make sure that nobody has added some weird things to your compliance fields. Have you ever heard of anything else that has fixed issues with people kind of being shadow punished or shadowbanned on ranking?

Alina:

The title length, which I think we already and talked about it, the 150 characters. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t the category, but I think you have it. Sometimes it just disappears and you’re not having any BSR. That hasn’t been happening a lot lately. Other than that, honestly, no.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Now let’s talk a little bit about something we’ve never talked about, you and me at least. one of your endeavors you’ve been doing your new endeavors is a company called Press X. And tell me first of all, how you discovered that press and media and things really helps an Amazon listing. Like, like how did you discover this was just from your networking and ta and meeting people or did you try something yourself and it worked or, or how did you get turned onto this kind of strategy?

Alina:

Kind of both networking and somebody who had tried it. Not me personally at that point, but I got so much into it because it was my thing with the ranking and also Amazon’s things with the latest thing with the external traffic that is so valuable and it’s a must-have basically in Amazon. Yeah. So, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So just tell me how, why don’t you tell us how this concept works? Like not necessarily, I mean obviously it’s what you guys do, but just in general, I mean, this is not something that only you guys can do but obviously you would help with it. But what is this concept of, of getting press for Amazon products? Cause we’re not talking about press releases we’ve talked about that on the podcast before, but what part of media or what part of the press are we talking about? Give us an example.

Alina:

So it’s a product review in press. Okay. So it’s an article talking about your product. Why is it good, why is it bad if it is, but they won’t say bad stuff. So basically a re an extended review with photos with sometimes even some of your other products from the brand mentioned in there, or it can be also about your brand, but in detail. Okay. So it’s not, it’s not like an announcement, like a press release, an announcement, Hey, this brand has launched this product. Make sense? They talk about your specific product and whoever reads it has several links. I mean, has a link in several places inside the article to go to Amazon. And that is your attribution link. Now I think we kind of are the only ones doing this for Amazon sellers because it’s the only CPC-based model.

Alina:

I mean, you just pay for the clicks, you get, you don’t pay for the article being published. We have like a small set of people that it’s irrelevant. If you don’t have any clicks, if you engage for an article that goes viral, you can go with it forever and ever until you want to. Maybe you can spend, I don’t know, $100,000 if it goes viral. But at the same time, if it doesn’t, because it happens sometimes just products aren’t well seen or I don’t know, people just don’t like it at that point you don’t pay because you don’t get any clicks. So basically it’s n something that I really think people should try just because of that. Because it’s just–

Bradley Sutton:

Well let’s talk about, I think people understand cost per click regardless of it’s kind of like an Amazon term too, but it’s very exactly common advertising term. But like my cost per click is 50 cents, whether it’s $5 kind, that’s not the important part. The important part is almost like maybe the conversion. So I’m just wondering you’ve done a lot of these now is it kind of standard like how many conversions somebody gets per click or it you’ve seen situations where somebody might get a lot of clicks but no conversions because their listing is not that great or something. Or is there an average conversion rate on these clicks? Because that’s where it gets, that’s where it becomes more important is not how much you pay for the click, but how far that click gets you,

Alina:

Well, yes and no. The answer to your question, yes and no. So now is, because I don’t consider the conversion is the most important part for this strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

Really? Why not? I mean, at the end of the day you’re trying, I’m trying to sell units. I’m just giving you a hard time, but go ahead and argue with me so we we can get this out.

Alina:

It’s okay. So the whole strategy with the press, it’s not to sell a huge amount of units or a large amount of units in a couple of days or in two weeks, and then measure your conversions versus the cost per click and see if you got profitable or not. It kind of doesn’t work that way. And I don’t think any type of marketing or press works that way because the non-tangible part, as I call it from all this is way higher. Example, last week, 1000 clicks. It was one day a very well-known publisher, very good product, very good established listing, good seller. 1000 clicks one day, 350 ad to carts, 170 sales. Okay. Explicit numbers. Okay, so this can happen for, you might say that’s a good conversion on top of everything else you have, right? Sure. In terms of profitability, where it’s here and there it depends on each how they calculate their budget to, to see.

Alina:

But in my opinion as a seller too, because I’ve done marketing outside as well, I wouldn’t do that just to measure the conversion. I would do it because people see the product. There are tens of thousands of people reading that article without clicking. And sometimes maybe two months from now when you are gonna do another one, or I don’t know, an influencer post or YouTube video or TikTok, they were, Hey, I think I saw this. I read about this on some somewhere a couple of months ago. Maybe I’ll try it now. stuff like that. I know it’s, it’s difficult to measure the exact ROI, and this is the hardest thing to explain to Amazon sellers because we are used to numbers. We need to measure ROI conversion, all kind of that stuff.

Alina:

But when, when we’re talking about press, when we’re talking about this kind of model, it’s difficult and we’re trying to do a kind of CPA model, but it’s, it’s still far away with this being said. So conversion is one thing, yes, but the exposure, the brand awareness, people reading about your product and the fact that you can use those screenshots with that product on your listing, on your social media, or you can get a lot of content out of that. That’s another thing. And also, even if the campaign works, even if it doesn’t work, let’s say the budget ends or the time ends, because we have these two measures, okay, the article doesn’t come down, it stays there. And if you will, check your attribution. I mean, we’ve had cases when months after attribution dashboard was reporting clicks, those were for free. Some of them even got sales but it’s just another way of getting your product out there. For a product for a well-established brand or for an old, old product, let’s say, like coffin shelf for example, may or may not be a good idea, but when you are considering launching a new product to an existing brand, that would be the place that this actually has the most value. This is from my experience, it’s been almost a year since we’ve started the first test with this.

Bradley Sutton:

Have you done it on any of your products?

Alina:

Yes, I have. I have, yes. On one of the sport brands. I don’t, I think we, I told you back then so it was a product that it was out of stock.

Bradley Sutton:

If you tell me something three days ago, I’m gonna forget it. So you definitely have to tell me again.

Alina:

I just remember. So completely out of stock for a couple of months. It was a good selling product, like expensive, like in the $40 price range we were selling.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, hold on. So out of stock, meaning that, meaning that the campaign you did was so successful, it made you sell out, or what were you saying?

Alina:

No, when I started the campaign, the article before that, the product was out of stock, so I had no PPC running on it.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay. Okay. So this was kind of like your way to give it a jumpstart when you went back into stock. Okay, I got you Now. Go ahead, continue.

Alina:

Exactly, exactly. And the budget I did was the middle one, because those were, the publishers were, so was $6,000. It went for, I don’t know, 40-ish days. It was summer. It’s not the best time of the year for this product, but overall, I got, the first day, I think I got around 70 or 80 sales, and it was definitely out of that article because I had no PPC, no ranks, didn’t do anything else. It, it, it slowed down. So it slowed down. Then I got sales and we got back to, I don’t know, 10-15 a day, which was a regular amount of sales for that time of the year for that product without doing anything else.

Bradley Sutton:

Now how are you linking to the listing? Is it using an attribution link or an affiliate link, or what kind of link are you using?

Alina:

Attribution.

Bradley Sutton:

So then on those ones, did you get your brand referral bonus from Amazon on that? Did you ever check that?

Alina:

I did check that. And just some of those were reported. We’ve had issues before with attribution not reported. The clicks were there, so everything was there. What I saw on my end of counting was there in attribution in terms of clicks or page views and everything. The sales weren’t there though, and I know for a fact the sales had to be from there because I didn’t do anything else with the listing and I had no ranks. So that’s why

Bradley Sutton:

So you’re saying that you didn’t get brand referral bonus?

Alina:

I did not, but some other people, I mean, other people do <laugh>. Yeah. Brand attribution doesn’t work always the right way. It’s still in beta, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Alright, cool. So let’s just for last part, the last couple of minutes here do some strategies and the way we do it now is not just TST 30-second tip because people kept not sticking to 30-second, but it’s SST, 60-second tips. So 30 to 60-second tips. Why don’t you think of the two best possible ones that you could give us about ranking or launching or PPC or anything at all? And let’s close the episode with these two.

Alina:

It’s always such a hard one.

Bradley Sutton:

Like you’ve only been on this podcast 17 times and, and you should have known what’s coming. So you could have prepared yourself,

Alina:

I know it was very hard to prepare this. So for the most experienced of our listeners, of your listeners, I don’t know how many of them are familiar with the website called amazon.science Are you familiar with that?

Bradley Sutton:

I have never heard of that. No.

Alina:

Okay. So that’s a website where Amazon actually posts things about how their algorithm works, how they measure KPIs, how they do stuff internally. The problem is the, it’s very technical. It’s amazon.science. It’s very technical. I am part of a mastermind that with some very technical people that actually took some articles out of there and discovered some very interesting things about ranking, about launching products, about things that you, they actually tell you how to do it. The problem is you need to understand the language in those articles. But besides that even if you don’t, the website has very interesting advanced Amazon News, and it’s good to have it there in the back of your head whenever you, I don’t know, you’re on a long flight or something like that. That’s one thing. I still have to go, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. One more. That’s a good one.

Alina:

Okay, so Google search volume versus Amazon search volume. Okay. I don’t have an actual, oh, I have just remembered the third one. So now I have 3

Bradley Sutton:

I’ll take three. I’ll take three. Yep.

Alina:

Okay, so Google search volume, Amazon search volume, I don’t have the final answer yet, but I’m working on one of the brands. I want to launch a new brand last next year. And I’m looking at Amazon search volume in some niches and or on some keywords actually. So keywords and Google search volume, you might find that on some keywords, the Google search volume is very high, which means it’s trendy and on Amazon, it’s not that high or even almost inexistent for me that thing is very valuable in doing product research. And I think if Google has it, Amazon will have it too. So maybe a good niche to do products in.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So, so guys that that’s something that you can also check in Helium 10. Now a lot of people don’t realize this before you have to go to Trendstar to see the Google trends, but now anywhere where you see search volume in Helium 10, you click that graph, which traditionally would show you the history of the search volume on Amazon, but it also now shows you the history of search volume on Walmart and the history of Google Trends for Google. So maybe you see something as like, ah, this is like 100 search volume on Amazon, so this is not worth it. But then you click on that and you might see something different on Google or Walmart that might be something to look at. That’s interesting. I haven’t heard that strategy like it. What else you got for us?

Alina:

Amazon posts. I’m this close of having an actual measurable technique of using Amazon posts for keyboard ranking. I’ve done so many, so many, so many tests and you cannot track basically anything with Amazon posts. You, you don’t know whether it’s gonna get click reviews or whatever because they, they don’t have any specific algorithm. But in a nutshell, what has proved to be working so far is, for the posts that get a decent amount of views, I duplicate those slightly, and change the image because you’re not allowed to post it twice. The slides changes and in the caption should be a keyword that it has to be indexed, but it, if it’s not ranked, if it’s not in the top 300, it can definitely boost your ranking if the duplicated post has views. Make sense? So you make a post, it has views, just duplicate that one. Try to put a keyword in the caption that you’re not ranked for.

Bradley Sutton:

You mean the same image?

Alina:

The same image, slightly change? I don’t know, just mirror.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t, I’m not the one who does the Amazon post, Shivali and Carrie do that on our account. But is there a duplicate button? Like you just duplicate. Or you, when you say duplicate, you just mean, hey, upload from scratch.

Alina:

Upload from scratch

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right, well, hey, I like, these are some of the best SST that we’ve had. So that you did put, you, you were trying to be humble. You pretend that you didn’t have this plan, you did have a plan, so I like it. All right. So Alina, how, how can people find you on the interwebs? Like, are, are both of your companies inside of our hub are only one of them, or

Alina:

They’re both inside the hub? Yes.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys. So hub.helium10.com and search for either AZrank, no, spaces, right?

Alina:

No space,

Bradley Sutton:

No spaces. Or Press X in hub.helium10.com and any other way they can find you out there,

Alina:

Just the regular ways. Instagram, Facebook with my name and our website, az rank.com. Press x.live. Just, or just Google.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, thank you so much for coming on here. Let’s do some more testing. I’ve done, I’ve done more testing and experiments with you and your companies, and then probably anyone else out there any other company out there because I just love testing and we haven’t done any big, like we did that Etsy test last week that worked. But let’s do something interesting with, with Project X or project 5k so we can, we can tell people about it,

Alina:

Of course, would love to.

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Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.