331: How To Compete Against Black Hat Amazon Sellers With Mike Jackness

Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:21 — 105.3MB)

The most durable way to compete on Amazon without resorting to black hat tactics is to own a content site that sends its own traffic to your listings. Mike Jackness built Tactical.com as a standalone property separate from his ecommerce brand, grew traffic nearly 10x in a year, and now launches products already ranking for their category terms.

In this episode I spoke with Mike Jackness, host of the EcomCrew podcast, recorded in his home office in Las Vegas. He recently sold his Color It brand for a low seven figure sum and runs several others.

Below is the full strategy: why he separated the content site from the store, how his team writes about subjects nobody there is an expert in, how product reviews become product research, and the realistic timeline.

Key takeaways

• A separate content site attracts links your store never will. Competitors will not link to an ecommerce domain.
• Pick one narrow topic. Google needs to draw a circle around what your site is about.
• Expect 18 months for meaningful traffic, with nine months as an absolute floor.
• Roughly 1 in 15 articles is a product review, so Google does not classify you as a review site.
• They buy and physically test every product they review, which doubles as product research.
• Affiliate revenue tells you what to manufacture next before you commit to a product.
• Send content traffic to Amazon for the flywheel effect during the honeymoon period.
• Take listing suspensions out of your inbox. Mike has his team handle them without telling him.

Why build a content site alongside an ecommerce brand

Owning your own traffic source is what lets you compete against sellers using tactics you will not use.

Mike’s framing is direct. He wanted a way to gain an advantage over black hat competitors while staying entirely white hat, and organic traffic is that advantage.

It also functions as insurance. If Amazon shuts something down, that traffic can be redirected to Shopify, Walmart, or anywhere else.

His own history informs this. He has been through multiple Google penalties on sites generating five figures monthly, and describes wishing he had simply built what Google wanted from the start rather than chasing loopholes.

The stakes are higher in ecommerce than in affiliate marketing. A penalty leaves you with a warehouse of inventory, and on Amazon that warehouse belongs to Amazon.

Why he kept the content site separate from the store

Tactical.com is a freestanding content site and the ecommerce brand lives at a different domain entirely.

Link building is the main reason. Competitors will not link to an ecommerce site, and Google appears to trust content from commercial domains slightly less because they carry an obvious agenda.

His example makes it concrete. Crayola would never link to colorit.com, and a large tactical brand might plausibly link to Tactical.com.

The domain itself shaped the decision. Tactical is a category term rather than a brandable name, so he could not trademark it or build a product brand around it.

He also declined to make Tactical.com a general marketplace, since that meant returning to selling other people’s products and creating a conflict of interest with his own.

When to combine content and commerce on one domain

The answer depends on whether you are a content company or a product company first.

Content first means a WordPress site at your main domain with the store on a subdomain. Your category and product pages will rank worse, and that is acceptable because people find you through content.

Mike’s example is a travel content creator who makes packing cubes. She ranks for packing cubes on her content site and routes buyers to her store, rather than trying to rank a product page.

Product first gives you two options. Run a blog subdomain on WordPress if you plan to publish prolifically, or keep everything inside Shopify.

Color It went the integrated route on Shopify, which he describes as a decision made early when the priority was finding out whether the products would sell at all.

Why a content site has to pick one narrow topic

Google will not let you rank for everything, so it has to be able to categorize what your site is about.

Tactical.com’s first year was the mistake. They published across camping, fishing, hunting, survivalism, and prepping without a defined direction.

The circle Google draws around a site that broad is too large to be useful. Almost nothing ranks across all of those categories at once.

They narrowed to survivalism and prepping, which is still deep enough to never run out of material.

The focus pays off beyond rankings. Lead magnets, email sequences, and messaging all become coherent when every visitor arrived for a related reason.

The audience distinction is real. A prepper wants a rugged three-day bag, and an ultralight five-day backpacking sack is a different product for a different person.

How to write expert content without being an expert

Mike has never written a word on Tactical.com, and his team in the Philippines produces all of it.

The standard he sets is unambiguous. Someone searching has a question, and if they click back to the search results you have failed.

There is no word count target. The goal is to exhaust the topic, and if the topic is too large it gets split into a silo with a hub article linking to component pieces.

Research time is budgeted. Writers are not expected to start writing immediately, which is what makes the output credible to an audience of ex-military and serious hobbyists.

The method is curation. Writers watch hours of relevant YouTube content, embed those videos with credit, write between them, and add original infographics.

The engagement result is the payoff. Time on page runs around 20 minutes, which Google rewards, and the reader genuinely gets their question answered.

How product reviews become product research

Mike’s team buys and physically tests every product they review, which tells them what to manufacture.

The ratio is deliberate. Roughly one in fifteen articles is a product review, so Google does not classify the site as a review site and penalize it accordingly.

The testing is real. They buy 10 to 15 of the best selling products in a category, ship them to the Philippines, and send the team on company-paid camping trips to test them.

That produces original photography, video, and genuine notes on which products fail and how.

The sequence is what makes it powerful. They rank for best fire starter, run affiliate links, and learn exactly how many units sell per month before deciding whether to make one.

By the time they launch, the guesswork is gone. Their tactical gloves reached the seventh best selling position on Amazon, which he describes as no accident.

Why send content traffic to Amazon rather than your own store

Amazon behaves like a flywheel, so external traffic during a launch compounds far beyond the individual sale.

The mechanism is sequential. Early sales during Amazon’s honeymoon period generate reviews, which generate rankings, which generate more sales and more reviews.

The market share argument reinforces it. Amazon has passed Google as the primary product search engine, and someone searching there is going to buy there.

Sending one visitor to your own site produces one sale. Sending them to Amazon can produce ten through the ranking effect.

The tradeoff is real and he acknowledges it. You lose the customer data and the ability to cross-sell, which mattered enormously for Color It where email marketing drove 52% of revenue.

The decision is reversible. Once the brand has consumable products and genuine cross-sell opportunities, the traffic can be redirected to his own store.

How long content marketing takes to work

Nine months is the absolute minimum and 18 months is realistic for meaningful traffic.

You might see a visitor or two in the first month or two, which is not the same thing.

The growth curve is parabolic rather than linear, which is why the early period feels so discouraging.

Tactical.com’s traffic is up nearly 10x this year, roughly two years into serious effort, with each check-in showing another large jump.

They have done no link building to date and are only now hiring for it, meaning that growth came entirely from content.

The cost is a few thousand dollars a month for the content team, which took a long stretch before the return exceeded the spend.

Most bloggers quit before reaching the inflection point, which is the actual reason the strategy works for the people who do not.

How to handle Amazon listing suspensions

Mike has removed suspension notifications from his own inbox entirely.

The reasoning is emotional rather than operational. Nothing ruins his day faster, and he cannot be objective in the moment even though he is objective about it in general.

His team handles it and gets listings reinstated just as fast as he would. He can send the same email and make the same phone call, and he loses sleep and they do not.

The clear-eyed version is that Amazon has no incentive to care about any individual seller. If your gloves do not sell, someone else’s do and Amazon still collects its cut.

He budgets for it. A certain percentage of the business will be affected every year, best sellers will be targeted, and it is a cost of selling on the platform.

The alternative is simple. If you cannot accept that, do not sell on Amazon.

What actually works in ecommerce now

The era of listing someone else’s product and making money has closed, so differentiation is the entire game.

Color It is Mike’s worked example, and he emphasizes that none of it required invention.

The improvements were obvious once he read competitor reviews. A hardback cover so the book is easy to color in your lap and the artwork is protected, plus spiral binding so it lies flat.

The rest addressed the same complaints. Perforated pages because people frame their work, and single-sided printing with a blotter because markers bleed through.

The gel pens followed the same logic. Named colors so people can find the same red again, a carrying case, and included refills.

Those sold at twice the price of the next product and became the best selling gel pens on Amazon.

His framing on where to start is worth keeping. Everyone has already put 10,000 hours into something in their personal life, and that is the subject to build a content site around.

Frequently asked questions

Should your content site be separate from your ecommerce store?

Often yes. Competitors will not link to an ecommerce domain and Google appears to trust commercial sites slightly less for content. Mike Jackness runs Tactical.com entirely separately from the brand it feeds.

How narrow should a content site’s topic be?

Narrow enough that Google can categorize you. Tactical.com’s first year covered camping, fishing, hunting, and prepping and ranked for none of it. Narrowing to survivalism and prepping is what made it work.

How long does content marketing take to produce traffic?

Nine months at an absolute minimum and 18 months realistically. Growth is parabolic rather than linear, which is why most people quit during the flat early period before the compounding starts.

Can you write good content without being an expert?

Yes, with research budgeted in. Mike’s team watches hours of relevant video, embeds it with credit, writes around it, and adds original graphics. Time on page runs around 20 minutes.

How many product reviews should a content site publish?

Roughly one in fifteen articles. A higher ratio risks Google classifying you as a product review site, which carries its own penalties, and dilutes the informational content that earns your rankings.

Should you send content traffic to Amazon or your own store?

Amazon, if you are launching. The flywheel means early sales generate reviews, which generate rankings, which generate more sales. You lose the customer data, and the decision is reversible later.

How do you handle Amazon listing suspensions?

Delegate them entirely. Mike has suspension notices routed to his team rather than himself, because he cannot resolve them faster than they can and taking them personally costs him sleep.

How do you differentiate a product without inventing something?

Read competitor reviews and fix what people complain about. Color It’s coloring books added a hardback cover, spiral binding, perforated pages, and single-sided printing, and sold at twice the competing price.