413: The Harsh Reality Of Selling On Amazon Today With Liran Hirschkorn

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I have Leram Hirschkorn on the show. And Leram is the founder of Incrementum Digital, and he helps Amazon sellers grow their businesses. He’s done a lot of client work, has his finger on the pulse of Amazon. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about the latest strategies for selling on Amazon successfully. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

00:28
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

00:54
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my eCommerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for eCommerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought.

01:22
So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony.

01:50
And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a run entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:16
Welcome to the My Wife, Quater Job podcast. Today, I’m happy to have Liron Hirschkorn on the show. Now, Liron is someone who I met while I was on a panel for an e-commerce sellers panel run by 8FIG, I believe. And I’m really happy that we had a chance to meet. Liron is the founder of Incrementum Digital, where he helps Amazon sellers grow their businesses. He started multiple seven-figure e-commerce brands himself, and he is now a thought leader and speaker in the space. And with that, welcome to the show. Liron, how are doing, man? I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me on.

02:46
So, Larian, I read somewhere that you started out selling life insurance. how did you go from life insurance to e-commerce and Amazon? Yeah. So my background in my career was financial services. I was a financial advisor and bank manager and I had my insurance licenses. But, you know, I would say probably like a lot of us and, I’m 40. So since like early 2000s, I, you know, was kind of searching for like, how do I make money online? Right. And

03:16
over the years, tried and learned different things, but kind of developed some internet marketing skills. And at some point I said, why am I working for a big insurance company? I was working for MassMutual. Let me see if there’s ways to do it online. Because I was kind of sick of having to chase customers. And that’s what you do as a life insurance salesperson. You are networking. You’re kind of like chasing people.

03:44
Like, uh, guess like being frustrated, you’re like, there’s gotta be a better way, you know, to, do this. So I went online and I found this insurance, insurance-forums.net. And on that, uh, forum, found a lot of independent agents who were kind of connected with an agency, but were marketing online. I met somebody there who kind of became a mentor, uh, to me. And I started online, uh, an online insurance website where I used basically article writing and SEO to drive.

04:13
traffic to the site, get leads, and partnered with an agency in California that was very friendly to doing all the backend and e-signatures and everything else. so I went from going three nights a week to local networking events and BNI and Chamber and all that stuff to basically having people come to me, finding an article. And what I did was I specialized in high risk life insurance.

04:43
which was from an SEO perspective easier because you would write very targeted articles like life insurance with multiple sclerosis or these very targeted SEO articles. you also need, customers need you more in those cases because each insurance company treats different issues differently. So that means if I’m somebody that has multiple sclerosis or diabetes,

05:09
Or maybe I paraglide every weekend out of the year, right? There’s going to be some insurance companies that treat me more favorably based on their guidelines. you really, you there’s a lot of benefit to going through somebody that can steer you in the right direction to those insurance companies. And so that’s kind of what I specialized in. The agency that I partnered with was very knowledgeable and could help me out in terms of knowing where to direct people. And over time I learned. And I did that successfully from 2010.

05:39
until 2015. In 2014, I saw a Facebook ad for Dropship Lifestyle, the ecomagris course. And you know, I took the course and I just saw that I was doing very well in the insurance business, but like I was kind of at a ceiling because the amount of money I can make was based on the amount of people that I could speak to in a day, right? Like I got the leads, speak to people, you know, sell them.

06:07
uh, selling the insurance and, uh, unless I wanted to like hire or build it out, you know, further by hiring people, I was kind of at a ceiling in terms of like the, potential income and e-commerce was the promises of making money while you, while you sleep. Um, and so, um, I took that course, um, started a Shopify site, like Q4 of 2014, made some money, then learned about Amazon and then started, you know, December of 2014 started like.

06:36
Amazon was like some just like arbitrage basically, you know, buying, buying and selling. Um, and eventually just saw that e-commerce, you know, showed greater opportunity than the insurance business. outsourced all my insurance leads to, to, to that original mentor in the space. We split the commission is 50 50. And that allowed me to, you know, sort of have an income while I was, you know, building out the, you know, the, uh, the, the Amazon business. And eventually I sold.

07:03
uh, that mentor, like my, my websites and the business, the business was kind of the websites, right? The traffic and of course that you were getting, um, and went all in on, know, um, on, on Amazon and, know, it was kind of like one of the best things that I ever, I ever did because it was a great time to get into. actually 2014 was like the, hay day. Yeah, exactly. Um, so it was a great time. And, know, I think also as an entrepreneur, it’s one of the.

07:30
maybe superpowers that you might have is sort of the ability to see around corners. You know, it’s kind of like, um, you know, I feel like one of the skillsets that, that I have, and that’s been also helpful in the Amazon space is like trying to figure out what’s coming next. And then if, know, you have a sort of unfair advantage, if you’re able to, you know, get into something before it becomes more saturated and more competitive and getting in then.

07:59
was definitely a good time to get into the space before it matured. What’s funny is I had a good buddy who made a killing off life insurance also. Same thing. He had a website, I think it was Life Insurance by Jeff. Jeff Rose. Yeah, he’s a good buddy of mine. He wasn’t your mentor, was he? He wasn’t my mentor, but he was good friends. I knew him at the time. We were all in the same circle. Jeff Root was my mentor who’s still in the business today.

08:29
And yeah, Jeff Rose, like I had met at the time also, and it was kind of like Amazon is, kind like a small circle of independent agents, because that was also something that was sort of newer at the time, right? Agents started to market online. And yeah, Jeff Rose had built himself a good personal brand in the space for financial planning.

08:56
And yeah, so yeah, small, small world, small world. Yeah. And then now we met through Amazon. Yeah. So I, I’m actually curious about your e-commerce brands. Are they still running today? So I have one brand that’s still running today and another brand that I sold, but still have patents on. I get, I get the royalty still on the, on the patents as part of that deal. Yeah. I still, still basically have one, one brand in the space. Do you share what those brands are publicly or?

09:26
Yeah. I mean, the, the, the brand that I, that I have right now is in the arts and crafts. called, it’s called crafty mint. It’s mainly actually just three skews. Very, very like one very successful listing. Uh, that’s, uh, that’s on Amazon. I wouldn’t say today it’s my main focus, but, uh, it makes, it makes money. and I’m considering getting into another brand right now that somebody is selling, um, to, uh, kind of buy in and build up. you know, I still, I still like the.

09:55
like the space, I would say since about 20 January, 2020 end of 2019, my focus has been more on the, on the agency side. Yeah. But it does allow you to be like, you can try your tactics out on your own products first, right? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, know, it’s to be kind of in the game and see, see what’s happening in the space for sure. So I’m curious. So what is, what is the current Amazon landscape? I know it’s changed a lot in the last couple of years.

10:22
First of all, my first question actually is why did you decide to go the agency route as opposed to focusing more on your brands? Yeah, it’s a good question. I kind of like fell into it into even like helping sellers in 2015. took a, I started out with arbitrage. I didn’t even know like private label existed. And then in 2015, I took a private label course. And I started to really learn and go to a lot of like masterminds and really like, you know,

10:53
buy every course and like really dive into learning. And, um, I started to become friendly with the guy, Andy Slammons, who ran that course in 2015. And eventually Andy asked me to like partner up with him, um, help him, you know, revamp the material and he already had kind of a following. Um, actually he invited me. The first thing that happened was he invited me in 2016 to a like private label retreat. He was doing in Breckenridge, Colorado. And he said, like, just come for free. Um, and it was like a $5,000.

11:23
you know, weekend and, um, came, helped him really enjoyed it. And then he asked me to partner. I kind of fell into this like space of helping sellers too. And eventually I saw advertising starting to get like complex and some sellers were starting to ask me to like, had taken courses in it and learned it. So I was, we’re starting to ask me like, Hey, can you help me with my ads? And I started doing it as like a side gig side hustle, like, you know, running ads for them. And eventually it was running ads for like 20 sellers and you

11:53
overwhelmed in terms of like running my own business, running ads for those sellers. Um, and so I put a post out on my Facebook, like, Hey, I’m looking for some people to kind of help me out and brought on like three sellers who really just wanted to learn their main motivation. Wasn’t like to kind of make money, but they also wanted to get better at PPC and learn and hire them. Um, and that was like the first three people kind of hired at the agency. And over time it just grew. And I just saw the opportunity at the end of 2019 to.

12:22
really, really grow, grow that business. would say also that the first person that I hired was, uh, his name is Brian. He was a student of mine in the course. had a very successful wholesale business. I wanted to learn private label. Um, and, um, he, I would say is extremely good, like operationally. And I would say, you know, I’m more of the visionary in the business. He’s the integrator in the business. And that’s something that I think I really lacked in my e-commerce brands. Like.

12:52
I was the visionary, but I would say operationally not as, not as strong. And I feel like if I had Brian with me in the, in the e-commerce business, you know, instead of having, you know, a $2 million, you know, revenue business, would have had a $10 million revenue business because I would, you know, I develop patents and like ideas and product development. I was really good at that, but you know, wasn’t as good as like optimizing my logistics, you know, and sure.

13:20
those aspects of the business and in the agency, felt like I really had that right team in place, especially with him to really be able to scale it. and, you know, would say it’s big reason why, like the agency has taken off is because we really have that great balance of visionary and integrator in the business. And, you know, that’s a good learning lesson for me. And like for anybody listening, right? Like, I think most of us, like, I think, um, we actually hired new West coaches here. And she told me for every.

13:50
for visionaries, there’s one integrator. So a lot of us, think that are in e-commerce, like we’re idea people, and it’s very helpful to have that very strong systems process. yeah, absolutely. Yeah. My wife is actually really good at the logistics part. So that’s why we work. Yeah. We do butt heads all the time, at least for that asset, it’s really good. All right. So how has Amazon evolved over the years? I know you’ve been in doing this since 2014. If you were to launch today,

14:18
What’s different than when you launched back in like 2015, let’s say. Yeah. So, I mean, I think in general today, you, the, the platform has professionalized more, right? So, you know, 2014, you can kind of put up a product, kind of throw up anything, right? You can put up a product in, in what today would be considered like a highly competitive space and you would have a good chance to, to succeed.

14:48
Um, I remember in 2019, uh, um, I spoke in, China, um, and this guy picked, picked me up from, Alibaba and I was talking to him in the car on the way to the hotel. And he was like, this kid. And he’s like, yeah, like he’s, he’s like, Amazon’s gotten harder a few years ago from China. We’ll put a product merchant fulfilled from China and we’ll just get sales. Like you didn’t really need to do anything else. We just put up a product, even merchant fulfilled from China and it would get sales. you know, today the platform is a lot more competitive, more saturated.

15:18
more professional. So today you need like much better listings, much better creative, much more thoughtfulness about the product that you’re going to, you know, uh, put, put up there. Think about what your differentiation strategy is. Um, and I think depending on your budget, like today, you know, uh, you can’t just go in and get into the resistance bands market, right? Like it’s super competitive. If you have a smaller budget to start with, let’s say like under

15:45
you know, $20,000 or $15,000. Um, I would say you could still have success, but my advice would be to go into a much, much like niche opportunities. Um, and you know, there’s still many, many niches on Amazon that like the non-sexy niches on Amazon that are, that have not yet gotten professional and matured. like today, for example, I was talking to somebody, uh, and they’re working with brands in the, kind of like

16:15
water filtration, you know, not water filtration for like in like gardening kind of products, irrigation and like those kinds of products. And they sell like two things and timers for your, you know, for your, um, water system and stuff. And like the listings on Amazon, like are terrible, you know, and like those like brands haven’t, haven’t, uh, you know, taken, taken, um, control of their, uh, of their listings there. And like, there’s still these niches that do have awesome opportunities. You really need to.

16:43
but you need to do more work to find them. But yeah, like 2015, 2016, you can go into like pretty competitive categories and like have a good chance to succeed. Today, I would say if you want to go into one of those categories, you need to have significantly more capital and understanding of Amazon. I’ll give you another example. Somebody last night messaged me on LinkedIn and they said, hey, we’re manufacturer of like saline, like nasal sprays and like health.

17:13
OTC, over the counter health products, right? I wanted to reach out to you, talk to you about helping us, you know, sort of like launch on Amazon, right? And I was having conversation with them and like what they don’t understand is like, they’re, I kind of explained to them, you’re going to be, you’re going to have to be willing to lose a bunch of money for a sustained period of time in order to break into the market. And that was not the case back then. And today on these kinds of categories, like they,

17:41
You know, they have to invest six figures plus in order to just break into the category and be willing to lose money, you know, in order to build up enough reviews to be, to be relevant, um, going, going into those, you know, I’m sure he would understand that too, cause that’s probably in that particular space, even DTC, you still need to invest a ton of money and try to get people on a subscription or something, right? Yeah, exactly. And, and Amazon, yeah, you have subscribe and save, but like, that particular niche also has

18:09
You know, Amazon basics has a product brands and I’m like, what’s your pricing strategy? Uh, and he’s like, um, I showed him the prices on page one, like, know, $9, $11, like $7, right. For like a four ounce thing. And he’s like, well, we’re going to sell a two pack, four and a half pounds for, know, like $16. I’m like, it’s going to be super challenging. Like you got no reviews. You’re yeah, you’re selling a two pack. You’re pricing higher than the market. Like I don’t think they fully understand the strategy, you know, like.

18:38
No, you need to come in with like a one pack at, you know, 499 probably or something, you know, and like, just build and like have amazing packaging and listing and video, and then be willing to lose money until you have a thousand reviews. So, so that you could be relevant and potentially then start pricing, you know, like, like the markets, but, um, and I wouldn’t take on that. I wouldn’t take on that. Uh, I went like somebody doesn’t understand that. Like we would not.

19:07
take them on because we know that it’s like, he’s like, okay, yeah, we, can sustain that and blah, blah, blah. But like, you know, Mike Tyson says, you know, uh, everyone wants to get the ring punched in the face. Like after a month of losing $25,000, will, will they still be willing to sustain it? And that’s kind of like Amazon in those very, very competitive categories. Um, and I would say, um, on the other, on the other hand, if you’re a DTC brand and you have like branded searches already on Amazon,

19:34
You coming in with like a massive advantage and you can really come in and have very low cost to get your option. Or if you pick the right niche or have the right capital or differentiate your product. If you come in with a differentiated product, then you really don’t want to compete on just price and reviews. And I think that’s very important to understand. It’s a very different landscape than

20:02
D to C where like, you know, somebody isn’t necessarily price shopping or looking at tons of other products like right, right around you. So how would you fight like all the manufacturers in China that are just starting to sell directly on there? Actually, it’s been happening since 2017. They’re just flooding the market with cheap stuff.

20:20
Yeah. So, I mean, the interesting thing is like over the last year, um, us sellers are actually gaining market share. it’s like one of the first times ever gaining market share. Um, there was just an article in a marketplace pulse, um, about how us sellers are gaining market share, um, against the Chinese. And there’s a number of reasons for it. Um, one, you know, Amazon has restricted inventory at FBA. A lot of the Chinese sellers were kind of used to sending inventory direct from China to FBA.

20:48
didn’t necessarily have the infrastructure in the US with three PLs, et cetera. So that’s been an advantage. Also last year, Amazon went hard after getting rid of a lot of manipulation. I feel like the, and Amazon’s getting harder. And I feel like for the Chinese sellers, also the opportunity isn’t as good as it was, you know, like a few years ago. like there’s a little bit of you know, more hesitation and yeah, the sort of,

21:18
ability to manipulate and use black hat, think is, you know, it’s still there, but it’s not as, not as strong on the platform. Amazon’s doing more. And so I think, I think really comes down to like branding and marketing that it really comes down to, you know, the ability to, you know, compete against, um, you know, against, against Chinese sellers. Yes, the, like they’re willing to generally take on less margin.

21:46
Um, but a lot of the Chinese sellers are now actually the factories. are people that are just sourcing from the factories in China. So they may have some small pricing advantages, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily huge. They do have the ability to jump on trends and source and sample and do all that faster. But I think if you’re, you know, a good marketer and a good brand and you understand, um, the market and the levers that, Amazon gives you. then, you know, on top of that, if you’re using, you know, um,

22:14
marketing opportunities, like building a real brand and building a following on social and you’re working with influencers, right? And like, the more you do that, the more you kind of get out of just competing, you know, again, like on, on tactics. And I think that’s, that’s kind of the way to be better. If you ask the Chinese sellers, they say the U S sellers have an advantage. And if you ask the U S sellers, the Chinese sellers. guess we, yeah, there are people in the U S that have advantages also, right? mean, this, language.

22:43
the culture and everything. Just curious, do you do any of those things at your agency or are primarily like a PPC, kind of like Amazon strategy agency? Yeah. So, we have started to drive external traffic into Amazon. So, we run Google ads into Amazon. We also do influencer marketing into Amazon. And then we’ve started to recently run ads against the, like at the influencer, like pages whitelisted and get access to their

23:13
TikTok and Facebook business and run ads from their profiles into Amazon as well. It’s definitely an area that I see of growing importance. One, likes, the Amazon algorithm likes the external traffic from a organic ranking standpoint. And two, as Amazon cost per click kind of rises and gets more competitive, you want to have additional channels to be able to drive traffic.

23:42
The, you know, we saw one of our customers this week, um, had a product that went from like, I know a couple of thousand in terms of bestseller rank to number five off a tick tock video about Alvera juice or something that was, um, that, know, an influencer put out that it wasn’t a paid, a paid thing. You know, somebody who had a following put out a video and it got millions of views. Um, and we were really seeing like the tick tock effect last year.

24:11
One of the, think the number one search term at some point in Amazon was TikTok leggings. Uh, was, know, this, this like big trends. we’re definitely seeing how, uh, especially TikTok is, is influencing, um, commerce. And, um, you know, I think this is, you know, talking about like seeing around corners. Um, I see this, I see this user generated content becoming more important. Um, I also happened to think, you know, today on Amazon, you have something called Amazon posts.

24:40
And Amazon posts is basically the ability for a brand to put up like a lifestyle image along with a caption. And it shows up like on mobile and sometimes on desktop on listings. And I just put a post on LinkedIn kind of saying like brands should be accumulating user generated content because what happens when Amazon opens up those posts for videos, like real type content, right? Like on the platform, if you have that user generated content ready to put out there, you’re to be at a big advantage.

25:10
I don’t see any reason why Amazon would not open that up if they want to kind of compete with, you know, Instagram shopping, et cetera, right. To get people to spend more time, you know, on the platform. And I’m sure they’re seeing what’s happening on TikTok.

25:25
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

25:53
Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

26:23
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E M E R G E C O U N S E L dot com. Now back to the show. I mean, they could have their own TikTok just for products, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So like I see that as the next phase of what Amazon is going to is going to do, which means it’ll be even more important for brands to have that user generated content that they can post through.

26:51
and through their storefronts. And Amazon has wanted to make sort of social commerce work, you know, for a long time. Yeah. So just curious, if you’re only on Amazon though, how do you get the UGC content? Yeah. So if you work with influencers who are promoting your product and sending that traffic into Amazon, then you get that content from the influencers. So when we do influencer marketing, and I’m assuming when…

27:19
most people are working with influencers, they get the influencer to agree to sort of give them that content to use after, right? So part of what we’re doing is influencer marketing and then yeah, also getting that content that the brands could use and post on their own platforms. And I think eventually we’ll come to give you that ability to post it on Amazon, but you know, not quite yet. Although today you can.

27:46
know, take a compilation video of influencers, put it on your listing, run video ads with it, right? There’s a number of different things you can do with it on Amazon. Put it on your storefront. You could just make a page on your storefront that’s like, you know, people love our product, whatever, right? And just post like, there’s no limit to the sort of like videos you could put on a storefront page on Amazon. You can just put tons and tons of like sort of testimonial videos on your storefront using that user generated content.

28:13
Let’s talk about influencer marketing. What is your strategy there? What type of influencers do you look for? What’s the going rate? What do you typically ask for? Yep. So we actually, we’re working with a range from, from nano influencers up to mega influencers. Um, for the, um, mega influencers, what we’re doing is we’re more working on a little bit of a longer term, like let’s say at least a month sort of engagement of like multiple posts. you define what your definition of mega versus nano is also?

28:42
Yeah. mean, think mega influencers. I’m not talking like Kim Kardashian, like right now. mean, probably like, you know, a million, five million followers. Uh, we’re talking about Tik TOK or Instagram here. Um, so, so a lot on Instagram for this, um, because what we see the opportunity and the downside with Instagram is that most of the time influencers just want to do stories, but obviously that story disappears in 24 hours. ideally what.

29:12
is get like a month engagement and get, you know, at least a story a week for, for a month so that you kind of getting more, more visibility out of it. That’s, that’s what we’re testing right now. Um, we’re doing a lot of, would say, you know, 50 to 250, 300,000 followers, a lot on Tik TOK and getting rates, you know, between, uh, a hundred dollars and $300 for, for those kinds of posts.

29:41
100k from 50 to two, 300,000. We’ve even got free from, some in that, um, in that range just for free product. Um, so not a non-expensive in some cases, sometimes they quote us so low that we’ll also say, Hey, we’ll give you an additional commission per sale to just give them more incentive to, you know, be more persuasive and drive more and drive more, um, more sales. Um, and yeah, generally our.

30:10
strategy is to really be able to drive sales. Some people are doing it just for the user generated content or just for like sort of maybe some of the ranking benefits, but we’re really trying to drive sales. we’re trying to also, we put together this kind of like Excel sheet, trying to also understand really what is the addressable audience from the influencer. So if somebody has 300,000 followers, okay, 70 % are, let’s say 97 % are real, right? So we take off 3%.

30:38
70 % are in the US, right? So we bring it down to 200,000. 70 % are women aged this and this, right? So we’re trying to understand what is the actual addressable audience and what is the potential kind of sales that we can drive off of it. And we’re able to drive sales. We recently had influence, so we had 20,000 followers and promoted a silk eye mask and sold 16 units and it was just like a free.

31:06
you know, free posts just, just for product. Um, and you know, that’s, that’s good, right? If you can, if you can get that gift, give free product and, know, drive an extra 15, 20 sales, uh, that, that day from it, it’s good. So I want to also rule out some of those, let’s say smaller info influence influencers in their, you know, ability to, to, drive sales, obviously the product, the post, like all that is, you know, uh, important aspect of, um,

31:33
being able to generate sales and it was a 50 % coupon code. It’s funny. Like I actually advise that people avoid like putting all their eggs in one mega influencer because it’s always hit or miss. And yes, if they’re mega, they’re going to charge more too. Cause you never know how something’s going to convert. what do you, so do you, is that the same way you do things or? mean, yeah. So generally we’re, know, like when we work with a client, we’re trying to get, know, initially our first sort of batch, like, you know, 20 to 30 posts with like,

32:03
a budget of maybe $3,000, right? And then between free and paid, and then if they’re willing to test like one mega influencer that might be three to $5,000, we’ll test it essentially. But we’re not putting all of our budget necessarily there. if all the budget they had was like two or $3,000 for like paying the influencers, then we wouldn’t suggest putting it all in one.

32:32
on a megabit phones in one basket. Do you have any guidelines when you’re looking for these? And do you have any tools or are you just kind of doing it manually? yeah, no, we’re using multiple tools. So we’re using one we use HIPC H E E P S Y as a tool. It’s pretty low cost, like $50 a month. One of the things you could do there is filter for influencers that have email in their like profile or, know, on one of their profiles so you can easily email them and we don’t like

33:00
try not to, we don’t communicate like necessarily on the platform. We try to just get their email. We then use Mixmax to do an automated like email sequence, you know, to them. And then we’re also using a platform now called incense.pro, I-N-S-E-N-S-E, where you can do these campaigns and you can generate a lot of user generated content there. Sort of that’s more.

33:26
automated. And one of the things about that tool is that it helps you whitelist the, helps you like do the whitelisting process for running ads against like the influencers profile. That one’s a little bit more, I the minimum fee there is like 400 bucks a month. So it’s a little bit more of an expensive tool. But that’s, those are the main platforms that we’re using. also using, UpFluence has a Chrome extension that’s free for up to 20 uses a day that will give you data on the demographics and

33:56
whether the followers are real, who their demographics are on the influencers themselves. So that helps us like understand, you know, where their audience is, what age range, know, sex, geography, their following is, and to see if it’s a good, you know, if it’s a good fit. And then obviously like manual work and looking at the comments, looking at the profiles, you know, looking at like the, some of these platforms will give you like, if you’re looking at one thing, we’ll give you like suggested profiles.

34:26
Even people who comment on the posts of a product that is similar as of interest, we would look at those people as well who have an interest in that and reach out to them. So combination of manual work and tools. So if you had a $10,000 budget, how would you split it between TikTok versus Instagram at this point in time? So I would generally want to understand

34:56
the target audience, like my feeling is I would mostly go after TikTok. TikTok today. Yeah. For a number of reasons. Number one, mean, the post stays. Um, you know, uh, we generally will ask the, uh, influencer to have a link in their bio. Like we’ll generally, if they don’t have like a link tree, we’ll kind of actually show them instructions on how to set up link tree so that, you know, they can put links to their own stuff and to, and to the product, you know, for like a week. Um,

35:25
and also tag the brand so that if the link is gone, they at least tag the brand. so the brand would have it obviously in in, know, in the profile, but you know, the video, the video stays and you know, generally I think there’s more organic reach. Yeah, it can last. mean, I have some TikToks that it’s been like over six months and it’s still getting traffic. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously it’s going to pay off a lot more than, you know, a story on, on Instagram. So, cause most influencers on Instagram are reluctant to

35:54
post on their feed, right? Because it kills their reach. Yes. Yeah. They’re reluctant to post on their feed and they probably don’t want a bunch. They probably don’t want their whole feed to be like product promotions because it doesn’t look good. And so the stories disappear. So you, you don’t necessarily see that, you know, how much products they’re promoting or that they’re like, you know, promoting products. So yeah, they’re very reluctant and they want a lot more money for it. And generally TikTok influencers don’t want as much money because sort of like

36:21
the value of a follower on TikTok is less on Instagram because it’s much easier to build up followers on TikTok than it is on Instagram. So we can get away with paying less generally on TikTok than we do on Instagram. And in that respect also, it’s almost like the number of subscribers doesn’t really matter as much, period, right? Because you could just have something with zero, someone with like 100 followers hit something big. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The number of followers

36:50
I mean, we’ve had people with less followers and their video gets 50,000 views, somebody with more followers, the video gets 8,000 views. And so yeah, the number of followers, like there’s just a lot more organic. I have video on TikTok that got 4.7 million views and I’d like no followers when… So were you dancing? I was in Miami and we got into, I was with somebody, we’re driving from one place to another. We go to the parking garage.

37:20
And we got into the wrong Tesla and just opened up or guys like thinking it’s his Tesla. I start, I start filming it and, um, and like, kind of went viral, but, know, I had another video of like making like, you know, uh, like a roast with my wife. got like a hundred thousand views and stuff. And I don’t really have like a following on Tiktok. Um, but some stuff just kind of takes off, right? So, you know, that’s, uh, that’s the potential and that’s why I’m putting some marketing over like.

37:48
Okay, I’m doing Amazon PVC. You should be doing it. I’m Google ads into Amazon, but like none of that stuff can go viral. Let me ask you this. So when it comes to looking for TikTok influencers, are you paying more attention to their style and their delivery as opposed to just their metrics? Yeah. I mean, we’re paying attention to, yeah, we’re paying attention to like comments, you know, engagement, you know, and, and, um, yeah, how they’re presenting the product.

38:17
you know, uh, et cetera. Um, you know, and, um, yeah, you know, we see very different styles, you know, some that work like a lot better than, than others in terms of like, the, the, the, the delivery of like promoting versus like making something fun and incorporating the product. I guess the reason why I’m getting at this is you could literally find someone with like a thousand subscribers and really kick butt because they’re like, it’s much easier to find hidden gems, right?

38:46
Right. Yeah. On TikTok. Yeah. And also find and develop relationships with influencers. You know, you’ll, you’ll develop relationships with people before they take off like crazy too. Right. So like, it’s going to be hard. It’s harder for them to raise rates on you. Right. Like if you already have like a good relationship, you like working together, um, as they’re building up their following. So the idea is to generally develop like long-term relationships with those that you find you’re having, you know, success with in terms of like, it’s easy to work with them.

39:16
They’re like, you know, they represent the brand well and they’re able to, you know, get attention on, the video. Um, yeah. Uh, couple, just a couple of random Amazon questions. Yeah. Search, find by rebates. Uh, they’re kind of officially against terms of service. Now, do you still see people using those still? Or I think a lot less. Um, you know, we were, we were running some rebates for clients in the past last year. Um, and then we stopped.

39:44
when, when, know, officially kind of came out that you shouldn’t be doing it. Um, I think it probably still works well, but, um, I think a lot less people are doing it, but I also, I also haven’t seen Amazon take action. That’s what I was getting at actually. Yeah. I haven’t either. haven’t seen Amazon take action against it. And so, you know, it’s one of the things with Amazon, like people do something because like, if I don’t do it,

40:10
I’m kind of like at at a disadvantage because Amazon’s not taking any, any action against it. But the thing is that Amazon at any time may say, Hey, like the bottom lines, Amazon knows what’s happening. They know, like, they can tell the URLs and things. And at some point they can decide to take action on it. So, um, I think there are better, still better means. Like, I think your budget is better spent on. Influenza marketing than rebating a bunch of, a bunch of customers, know, um, and getting

40:40
And I think really, to me, the biggest difference is like 2020 from the past is 2022 is really, I think a year people kind of go back to basics and really work on like A-B testing your creative and your copy and your advertising and look to build more of a brand than just Amazon tactics. It’s funny building a brand. mean, that implies that you’re

41:07
putting out like your own content, you have your own website and everything in addition to Amazon, right? Yeah. mean, building, building a brand is, you know, I guess a lot of ways you can define brand, but right. Like your, your, your, your brand evokes some kind of emotion or, um, you know, something you’re, you’re thinking more about your messaging, your look, your feel. And yeah, and yes, you’re, you’re

41:36
running activities off of Amazon too, essentially. I mean, in some ways, could you say if you’re on social and you’re driving everything to Amazon without your own website, are you a brand? Maybe, but I think just like developing an audience in a community or a presence outside of Amazon, I would say more about building a brand and doing things that are, let’s say, a little bit more…

42:05
higher up the funnel, like brand awareness. Influencer marketing is essentially more of a brand awareness play than all immediate sales. And doing that consistently over time will make people go to Amazon, look at you and be like, oh yeah, I saw that a month ago. I’m familiar with it. I’m more inclined to buy because I remember seeing it somewhere else. And that’s part of it. All right. So let’s say you want to launch a product. What percentage would you allocate to influencers versus

42:33
PPC versus just ads in general. If you were to start all over today. Yeah. mean, so today launching a product, um, I would probably allocate most of my marketing to PPC and maybe some to Google. The influencer marketing side, uh, I would probably drive more of the external from Google today for like launching product because number one, it takes like a month or so to even get together your research on influencers, send them the product outreach.

43:03
So you have to do that prep, but you know, I believe in influencer marketing will work better on a product that already has some reviews and social proof because it’ll allow you to convert better on that product once it gets to Amazon. But I would still want to drive some outside traffic just for the sort of external traffic benefits. And I could probably do that more cheaper and faster with Google. with Google specifically, are you talking about shopping, search or display search? Because you can’t really do shopping as an Amazon seller.

43:33
Um, so, so basically text, text ads, you know, into, uh, search, search based text ads into, into, into Amazon. know, hopefully I’m pricing good enough and that I can get some traction, but even those clicks and just traffic will be, will be helpful. I could just do it a lot faster and I would wait up to build a little bit of traction in terms of reviews before I go out and do influencer marketing on it. Because, you know, a product with a product that, that has.

44:02
good quality and quantitative reviews will do better from that outside, you know, influencer promotion.

44:09
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

44:39
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

44:50
I guess it just depends on what you sell, but keywords on Google for lot of these saturated products, super expensive, more expensive than Amazon on a per click level. I think it depends. You can even go niche. We’ve seen keywords that have the word Amazon attached to them be a lot cheaper. can go for like barbecue club Amazon. They’re still pretty decent search volume and a lot less people going after that. You can try that.

45:19
Primarily what I would do is like, you know, I might put, you know, a hundred or $200 day budget on Amazon PPC and I might put 25 bucks on Google. like, ultimately I don’t really care so much necessarily about that performance. I just want to drive some outside, some outside traffic and, know, show the Amazon algorithm that, you know, there’s outside traffic coming into this product. Um, and most of the budget I would put around, I would put around Amazon PPC and really in terms of, I would put to get velocity. So.

45:49
just like I would launch a product and three, four days later, like drop the price and maybe six, seven days later, add a bigger coupon to it to really feed the algorithm like positive signals to show my product and to convert. Mostly, I really want to focus on conversion. like my budget might be losing, you know, losing money between PPC and my price on Amazon so that I can get velocity. like that’s most important thing on any new product.

46:17
Also, like the way we structure our PBC is we’ll focus on a tighter group of keywords that are more relevant with exact match and top of search placement. So we’re really kind of feeding them as an algorithm, what keywords we want to tell it that we’re relevant for. So as opposed to like running a lot of like broad match and, you know, things that are going to have a wider net, want to kind of, we want to get the traffic based on like very relevant keywords. So the algorithm understands how, you know, how people are getting to the product and

46:45
around those particular keywords and taking advantage of that honeymoon period on Amazon. Any portion of that budget for developing an email list or SMS or anything like that? Generally, would say most Amazon sellers are not doing that. I would say if you’re marketing to your store, like your Shopify, then yes, but I don’t see Amazon brands and sellers really like…

47:13
focused a lot on email marketing or SMS unless they’re, unless they’re also focused on their Shopify. Right. Okay. That makes sense. I was just thinking like with the email list, you could actually get away with doing search, find buys like to your list and you could. Yeah. And I mean, you could get away with it in a number of ways. It’s, just a matter of will Amazon take action, you know, uh, against it or not so far. I haven’t seen them take action.

47:41
I believe it’s low risk. We also, as an agency, have a little bit more of responsibility and liability. Yeah. You got to go straight white hat, right? Yeah. I don’t want to be responsible for getting somebody suspended. Right. Yeah. But I think generally I would say it’s, at this point, seems pretty low risk to do that. And again, do it in moderation. Sure. If you do it in moderation, less likely it’s more intertwined into your regular traffic.

48:10
You know, people are still using Google ads with like two step URLs, you know, into, into Amazon too. Again, pretty low, pretty low, pretty low risk in terms of, you know, how much traffic you drive there versus versus I’m sure they just do a statistical sampling, right? There’s any anomalies, maybe you’ll get flagged. Yeah. And so far again, have not seen Amazon flag anybody, but we’ve seen more, you know, we’ve seen some people get flagged for inserts, for example, in the past, they haven’t really.

48:37
you know, focus on that. you know, I think Amazon is trying to, they know what’s going on. just think they can’t really enforce all of it, you know? So, um, still they need is to set the example by hammering on someone big, right? Yeah, exactly. And that’s why you’ll see like, you know, Thrasio won’t do those. they’ll publicly say like, like Casey has a Goss who, you who’s their VP of SEO would say like, I, can’t do it from Thrasio because we, can’t have an article on the wall street journal about, know,

49:06
Aggregator manipulating whatever right? Yeah, you as a seller. probably would yeah, so yeah Cool, Aaron. Hey if if anyone out there listening needs help with their Amazon said where can people find you Sure, so I can go to incrementum digital comm We are also on like social media. There’s incrementum digital and linkedin myself. They run hersh karnam linkedin Facebook Instagram We even have an incrementum tick-tock with some okay that town

49:36
Okay. Funny tic tocs we did. We did out out and prosper, uh, and on our Instagram. So, uh, we did the, did this challenge where people are like squatting down to like Beyonce song or something. you know what? I think I saw that. I think that I saw that on Instagram though. You posted it on both platforms. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Feel free to, to, to reach out or, um, if I could be helpful, happy to also answer questions or anything, if I can, if I can give you some guidance. Cool. Well, Aaron, thanks for coming on the show, man. Appreciate it. Thank much.

50:08
Hope you enjoyed that episode. And as you can probably tell, selling on Amazon has gotten super competitive and the days of just listing random products and getting lucky is over. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 413. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash d.

50:37
That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now when I talk about how easy these tools on my blog,

51:06
And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequarterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.