418: Unconventional Ways To Grow Your Amazon Sales With Norm Farrar

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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. And today I have my friend Norm Ferraro on the show. And Norm is a serial entrepreneur and leading Amazon expert with over 25 years of experience. He runs two Amazon companies and he has two podcasts. He’s always up to date on the latest Amazon strategies. And today we are going to cover unconventional ways to grow your sales. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-comm 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. Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce 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 div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

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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 use for my ecommerce store and I depend 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. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

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Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers to pay 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 podcasts that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast,

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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 raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m happy to have Norm Farrar on the show. Norm is someone who I met on a panel for e-commerce sellers. I’m really happy we had a chance to meet. He is a serial entrepreneur and a leading expert on Amazon with over 25 years of product sourcing and development experience. He runs two companies, AMZ Club, PR Reach, and he also has two podcasts, Lunch with Norm and I Know This Guy.

02:37
He’s made over $100 million in sales between his own products and his clients, and he is a thought leader and speaker in the space. What’s up, Norm? Hey, how’s it going? Norm, the beard looks very luscious and beautiful as usual. Well, I had to prep for the show. You know what’s funny about beards is they make you instantly look wiser. I’ve been trying to grow one, but I can’t do it. I think that’s why Tim partnered with me.

03:07
So I’m curious, Norm, how did you get involved in e-commerce and Amazon? You know, e-commerce was a complete absolute fluke. And I’ll take two seconds to talk about it. it was I used to have a consulting firm. was working with a Fortune 500 company. They wanted to get they wanted to be able to take their logo and match it with dealers. So it was a co-op sort of thing.

03:36
but they wanted to do it on the net. And this is back in the late 90s and nobody was doing it. This is a longer story. I’m not gonna get into it, but I ended up paying all their non-contracted suppliers. I got a contract for that and some of them were coders. while other people hadn’t knew nothing about the internet, I was able to do that. People saw it. They started to see that we had, you know, that we built it out.

04:05
And then that led us to other e-comm sites. you know, back, back in the day, back, I think it was around 2000 or earlier. We were doing print on demand. Like we were doing, you know, corporate identity logos for anybody who wanted it, their logos, their letterhead, their, their envelopes. But then it just kind of evolved, got very involved with a family business that was doing, we bought a couple of manufacturers in Taiwan.

04:35
still have a company in China today, but got into fulfillment and packaging. Amazon came around and it became my perfect storm. So, you know, kind of put everything together. And what I noticed was, you know, there was a lot of people that went out to all these mega conferences, but they were just kind of, there was, and I met a lot of these people during, you know, the two or three years that we’d all go out to these conferences.

05:04
And a lot of people were just focusing on a certain thing. They weren’t focusing on external traffic or packaging or branding. And they were doing okay, but they could have been doing so much better. I was lucky. I had a bit of everything and you know, 2014, 2015, if you knew a little bit about everything, you could explode. yeah. I’m kind of curious. Are you still selling on Amazon today?

05:29
I am. I’ve got a successful, a couple of successful brands we’re just launching. I’ve got another partner over at Honu and that’s my sourcing company, Honu Worldwide and Afilabia and myself, we’re launching about three or four new brands within the next month. So yeah, it’s fun. We haven’t been doing that a lot, but just the way it’s come into the funnel, it’s going to be something very unique. So hopefully.

05:57
we’re going to launch successfully, knock on wood. So one thing about Amazon I’ve noticed is that people are very reluctant to reveal what they sell and that sort of thing. Do you publicly reveal what you sell? your brands are? one of the, I am Kevin King is a friend of mine. We got to know each other in Hawaii. Turns out that we both sell exactly the same thing, bully sticks. Okay. Oh my God. have another buddy named

06:25
Kevin, I think he sells bully sticks. It’s gotta be. It might be the same guy. might just, you know, say his name is Yeah, know Kevin also. Yeah. Oh He is. He’s an awesome guy. We’re very good friends. And anyways, we became friends having a cigar on the beach in Hawaii, talking about our brands, basically, uh, you know, how we’re driving traffic and what I like about it and whether it was him or anybody.

06:53
is, hey, if you talk about your niche or if you talk about your product, somebody else wants to come in and play on the first page, that’s just driving more traffic. So it’s up to me to take that sale away. And if I can’t, then I’m not doing something properly. And I’ve got to go back to my listing and figure out why are these people grabbing the sale and I’m not, but I love it. Bring as much external traffic as you can over to, you know, for page one in the search results. Yeah. So you just mentioned, uh,

07:23
So I know at least, well, Kevin and my friend who sells Bully Sticks. So given that Amazon is a market where it’s a little harder to stand out, how did you establish your brand over the years? And what advice do you give people that you advise on how to establish a brand? This is a really great question about perceived value. I mean, that’s what it is. I could get into everybody talks about their primary image and their slide deck or their title with their keyword phrase upfront or their bullets.

07:53
But if you take a look at your initial, if I were to type in natural bully sticks, or I’m gonna give you a better example, this is a real case study. And this is about a knife, a simple knife. So the very first thing we have to do is, you type in, let’s say it’s Damascus knife, go to page one and you see where you can stand out. Are all the knives going right to left, left to right? Is it a box in the package?

08:19
How can you stand out if they’re all black and you introduce some color? And then from there, it’s where are the price points? I know this is kind of bass-ackwards, but where are the price points? There’s usually three tiers in Amazon. And in this case, you could see that there was a price point between $19.99 and around the $49 range. It could even be a little bit less.

08:43
Those are mostly your Chinese sellers that are selling direct and they feel that they have to do this to, you know, make, um, just to create search, uh, sales velocity, you know, just a ton of sales, but they’re not making any profit. That’s where a lot of sellers make the mistake. They try to compete there where the next level is around the $49 up to around. It could be, well, I know for a fact it’s $124. So.

09:12
you’ve got that 49 all the way up there and where do you fit in? And then you’ve got the top tier, which is around that hundred ish to $124 up to about three or $400. So this is what we did. And this is a, know, we saw the product, it was in a clamshell. So it’s just hard plastic, looks really crappy with a cardboard insert. And it was on the market for $49. We said, well, let’s spend a few dollars on packaging.

09:42
let’s revamp the look and feel of the package and the look on Amazon. And that went up to $79 to $99 up to 124. And to this day, it ranges between 99 and 124 depending on the season. It’s a $16 knife. So we were able to achieve a $49 bump to 99 to 124. Then we went back to China.

10:10
And we said, well, let’s take a look at wood. And it was $3 extra to put this knife into wood. We packaged it into a really cool inner package and outer package. And that was out at around the $2.24 range. Now this had a slightly different look to it. Same manufacturer, instead of having layered steel, we had it hammered. Same cost, $16 out at $2.24.

10:39
and all the difference, it was just in packaging. That’s perceived value. And I think if people start looking at that or start building a brand off of that, with this company, you you had a full set of cooking utensils that you could bring out, high quality, people see the brand, you could drive people over to your website, you grab their email list and give them a paring knife, you know, something very inexpensive.

11:06
And now you’re getting more and more people that are loyal to your brand. So I find that the biggest mistake a lot of people try to make is try to get huge sales volume without looking at profit. You know, you could get mid sales volume and make a heck of a lot more. I’ve also noticed that, you know, just targeting the low end is generally not a good idea. And, you know, when I shop on Amazon today,

11:32
I actually don’t buy the cheapest item because I actually click to check the brand to see if it’s like some Chinese brand and I usually avoid those. I tend to purchase from the brands who actually have a really nice website. They look legit, especially for something like a knife. For certain things, I don’t care actually. But for something like a knife, yeah, I’d probably look if it’s a kitchen knife for sure. I am curious though, for the bully sticks, that seems harder to differentiate, right? It is.

12:01
what we decided to do was create a whole different look in the package. And this is going back to a really good graphics designer, and it’s knowing when to use 3D renderings and when not to. So if you take a look, there’s some people that have got some iPhone pictures up there, and they’ve got some that are a product photographer, but you can’t get the ripples out of plastic, like the thin plastic ziplocks or whatever they’re using, and it looks horrible.

12:30
You know, it could just be a Ziploc with just, what am I trying the word? Anyways, you can see the ripples going through it and the product. This is where, if you have a nice graphic artist come up, take a look, do your competitive analysis, see how you can stand out. I know how we stand out is that we have a complete, like it’s a completely animated look. People love it. And it carries over to the website. And we decided that.

13:00
Why don’t we make a combo pack and see how that goes? So instead of just the BullyStick, somebody else could get, you know, a BullyStick with another product, and then we could see how they go, what are the reviews, and then bring out the other product as a standalone, or just stick with the BullyStick. So was trying to figure out, you know, what people would like with that brand. So coming out with a really cool graphic and it costs.

13:28
Coming out with the 3D rendering was what I think was a lifesaver and coming out with the brand. So the names of the brand is so important on Amazon. People will buy brand even if it’s a cool, they might not know it, but if it’s got that perceived value, I always say, you can, like you just said, you went out and checked a website. So if that website can bring across authority.

13:55
So maybe you’ve got content on it. Maybe you’ve got really great pictures. Maybe in Google, you have authority by being number one or number two. You’re in a press release. You’ve got content. You see images going across that are all yours. Authority equals trust equals sales. If you don’t have it, if you don’t have authority, you don’t have trust. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have sales. We’re micro brands. Some of us think that we’re big time brands.

14:22
We’re not, we’re micro brands and we’ve got to get people to trust us. Yeah. So it sounds like one of your secret weapons is the packaging really, right? Packaging is so important and it doesn’t cost. just did another product of mine is soap. We just did a rebrand and there’s we’ve gone to right now we’ve got a test package out there, which is a simple tuck box with a really cool graphic and an insert.

14:51
We build a brand story around it. People love the brand story that goes around it. We don’t, we don’t. the brand story? Well, it’s that my wife and I were visiting Hawaii. And while we were going through an open air market, we found an artisan soap maker and we bought some, we took it back and almost instantly we found out the difference it felt on our skin. So we talked to the, you know, the, soap maker.

15:17
He was telling us about the harsh chemicals and I had no idea. This is a true story. I had no idea that certain brands couldn’t say soap because it wasn’t a soap. They were just harsh chemicals. So he kind of gave us an introduction into it. We brought some back for our friends. They loved it. We said, we got to jump into it. And we did. And so now, you know, we’ve got a great company.

15:44
We sell soap, we sell a bunch of other products related to beauty and soap products. And now we’re going to the next, we’re evolving into the next brand or the next look. And it’s going from a tuck box into a beautiful, rigid box, which looks like it’s a high-end gift rather than just a bar of soap. Yeah. So mean, soap is probably one of the hardest things to sell.

16:11
I mean, I imagine the keywords are really expensive and everything. So is this the type of product when you launched, did you actually have to spend a lot of money to launch it? I spent a lot of time and money more on the website than trying to launch. did back in the day, I hate saying it. So Amazon, I’m not saying I did it. This is all hypothetical, but back in the day, you know, you would pay for reviews.

16:39
And so we got those reviews that way to get the sales velocity going. Nowadays, it would take a bit more time, a bit more money, but there are some really cool ways of launching products on Amazon that people aren’t using. So if you’ve got a brand and you’re using Amazon posts, for example, and you’ve got that community and you’re going live once in a while, or you have an influencer doing this for you.

17:08
You’ve already built a community that loves your product. Forget 50 or 60 or 70 % off. Here’s a 10 % off, buy my product. They love it because I don’t have to give them a huge discount. But there’s also the tricks with digital coupons. can drop your, like during the launch, you can drop that 30 % to 50%. PPC, it’s all about PPC, the Amazon brand referral program now, driving traffic.

17:37
You know, they’ll pay you drive traffic. So it’s not as bad as what a lot of people are saying, especially if you start to leverage influencers. Influencers, I think, are the key to success on Amazon right now. Interesting. So if you were to launch your soap brand all over again today, walk me through the steps. So how do you find your influencers? What do you look? What do you pay them? OK.

18:05
So if we’re doing the influencers, the first, one of the first areas where I would look on Amazon is I would build out my post campaign. So I want to build traffic there. I would also build out my store where there’s a banner with a big red arrow that says follow here. I probably have a very small Facebook ad pushing followers over to my storefront.

18:32
And maybe if it’s the launch, giving that discount, letting them know that there is a 50 % off discount. So you’re not paying for rebates. You’re paying for a discount and it looks legit. Amazon likes it. The next step is either going live. said a lot of things there. So when you say push them to your storefront, do mean your Amazon storefront or your websites? Amazon storefront because I want them to follow. So if they can start following, I can build up that list on Amazon. Now the next step to this.

19:01
is also making sure that I do PPC. I want to run PPC for a while. always run my auto campaigns for a few weeks, see what comes out, make any adjustments that need be, and then I can plan it out. So I don’t spend a lot of money on PPC upfront, but I spend enough on the main keywords that I think are going to convert, and I start to build it over time. Once I do that,

19:30
and I’m going go back to influencers now. If I’m doing a little bit of live stream, I might get a few people coming in. If I go to and hire an Amazon influencer, so they have a whole database of live streamers. You can go and pick and choose somebody that fits your personality to do this for you. They’re going to go and blast it on Amazon and you reap the benefits. Now, one of the other things

19:58
If we want to go on to like a TikTok, TikTok creator, we could do this ourselves or there’s services out there. A seller alley, for example, they’ll do this for you. They’ll go out and find influencers and you pay X. You can, on TikTok, you can pay next to nothing to about a hundred dollars for nano influencers. So these are people that usually have less than 10,000 followers. You can go to a micro influencer that’s 10,000 to a hundred thousand.

20:27
So anywhere within those two, you might be going from 50 to $400 for those types of influencers, but they have a lot of following and the engagement and trust is there because these are people that if you’ve got 10,000 influencers or 5,000 influencers, people trust you. You’re not out there with the Kardashians where you’re spending a lot of money. There’s lots of exposure.

20:55
but very little engagement. more of a brand awareness. And I do know a brand, Boxycharm, who used the Kardashians and did phenomenally well with celebrity influencers. I’m not telling you to go out and do that. It’s just low end, know, nano to micro influencers. You get them promoting and you can promote on your TikTok if you’re

21:24
brand is suitable to TikTok, you can take what they’ve promoted and done, and you can promote it as a promoted post on TikTok, which looks good for you. These are all things that we kind of look at influencer-wise. Now, on the other side, we try to launch with a bit of content on our social media and we put up, it could be just a one pager for our website. And in our insert, we’ll drive traffic over to the website.

21:54
And typically what we’ll do to try to get somebody’s email address is that we’ll have something on the website that is not associated with our Amazon account. let’s say I have a Dead Sea Mud on Amazon, but there’s Spring Basil, you know, or something on my, and they get a free bar. So I’m not giving them a PDF. Nobody’s going to give you your, you know, I shouldn’t say that, but you know, typically they want added value.

22:22
it was the knife company, give them a free paring knife, $29 value, or something along those lines. It costs you a buck, sell it for 20, you can say it’s $29 as long as it’s posted somewhere, then they can’t say you’re lying.

22:40
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.

23:08
Now, first and foremost, protecting our 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.

23:38
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.com. Now back to the show. How does that work? So if you’re sending people to Amazon, you’re giving away a free pairing knife. Is that pairing knife on Amazon also, or do you send it to them separately? If I run in this added value account, typically I won’t have it on Amazon. I like it that way because they can’t go back and say, just go back to Amazon because I love Amazon.

24:08
I want them to still buy on Amazon, but don’t forget here we have this website. You can, we want to be able to target you in our email ladder or emails or SMS is that we’re going to be sending out. And like for our soaps, we’ve got well over a hundred different types of soaps. So if we’re bringing out new scents or if we know that somebody likes a masculine scent or a fruity scent or whatever it is,

24:37
We can target them on a segregated list. And now we’re getting more business that way. So we’re getting, we’re hoping to get more business off of our website, a significant amount more than off of Amazon, because I don’t use Amazon subscribe and save. Some people do. I don’t because I like playing around with my price and Amazon will start giving you those nasty emails that if you’re playing around with price, they don’t like it. I can.

25:06
throw them over to my soap site or my dog site or whatever, and I can put them into a subscribe and save. And on your website. Yeah. And that is the ultimate. If you can convert somebody over to recurring revenue, that’s what you want to do. So you just talked about a ton of stuff in the last 10 minutes. Let’s kind of break it down. So let’s start with Amazon posts.

25:34
because I don’t hear a lot of people talking about that. What is your post strategy? Oh, okay. So first of all, anybody who has brand registry should go in and register for Amazon Post and that’s post.amazon.com. And you can just put your logo up there and you can just repurpose your typical social media. Now, for us, what we did, for example, we wanted to…

26:03
do something a little bit different. We wanted to bring as much engagement as possible. So one of the things that we used on our social media, but also an Amazon post, is come up with recipes, showing a chef using the knife, here’s a recipe, and we would post it whenever we could. Or it was going to culinary students and saying, hey, here’s like a $100 knife, free. All we ask is that you tag us on your Instagram account.

26:31
And, you know, during your graduation or whenever we get those pictures and we could show that or we would just send out free to chefs and say, just want to want you to tag us, you know, with your knife using it. If you can add a recipe, perfect. If you can add a video, even better. So we were starting to build out content for our posts, but could also be repurposed for any other social media posts.

26:58
Okay, that’s what I was just getting to. Most people make the mistake of not posting enough. So they’ll, and they don’t see the immediate change, but I’ll challenge anybody who has a account out there right now that maybe has half a year to a year in sales, go out and create three to five posts a day, three to five posts a day and do it. Just do it. Have somebody do it for a month.

27:28
and see what happens. And what you’re gonna start to see is that you’re not gonna see sales, but you’re gonna start to see the engagement and the clicks and the click-throughs to the summary start to add up. And I’ll give you like with the knife, you hardly see this anymore, but we had 200,000 impressions in the first week with this one image on Amazon. Got the proof, took the snapshot, so people could actually see that that’s how many.

27:58
Our average was last year was 20,000 views for these posts that we were putting out. Now, typically though, if I put out a brand, you might get a couple hundred, you might get a thousand views and you’ve really got to monitor the engagement and what’s working and what’s not working. And you can always withdraw a post and then bring it back.

28:24
If you think that it’s not getting exposure or starting to go down. The reason I’m saying you’re not going to see it right away is Amazon has made it very hard for you to buy. You’re an email marketer. So you know that anytime there’s a click, you’re going to lose probably 50 % of your traffic. So you have to go into your post. You have to click either on the logo or on the image. Then you click and there’s the post. So you have to click.

28:53
either the sales summary or if you want to scroll through the carousel and look more, have to click again. So there’s your second post. Your summary is your third post. Going onto your product listing is your fourth post. Buying the product is your fifth. So you’ve gone from 100 % to 50%, 50 % of the 50 % all the way down. So what ends up happening, and I think Amazon did this on purpose, is you’ve got a really captivated audience on that fourth and fifth click.

29:22
So this is the challenge. You go out there and you do that, do it for a month and you see if your conversion rate goes up. So all of a sudden you’ll go from 23 % conversion, you’ll see it at 27 or you see it at 30 or 35. You don’t have an explanation. That’s your explanation because people, the click counts, your fourth or your fifth click, depending on where you’re going, it’s…

29:50
it’s going against your, like people are landing on your product page and they’re clicking, they’re not clicking off. So that’s what I like. I know Sumner Hobart, who’s an influencer, really great Amazon seller. He put out a bunch of posts about a year ago and he put out a video and he said, I had no idea I had this, this had these grouping of posts had this much of effect on my listing. He shared his report and it was like, I’m,

30:19
I’m making this part up, but I think it was thousands of clicks going through to his listing. that one post that you made that had 200,000 impressions, what was it? You won’t believe it. This is the weirdest book. It was like this. So you would think that, first of all, polished images really never worked for us. It was always these candid images. We had this lady who had the knife and had

30:48
put it between her fingers, like her hands. And she had this kind of psychotic look to her. And it was like she was just psycho, but it worked. And it was the, would never ever have thought that would have worked. was just an image. No text. was just an image. We typed something, you know, I forget what the caption was. Um, and then we ran it for a week and then we couldn’t believe why it all of a sudden it took off.

31:18
but that was the one that really took off. then over a period, there was one, almost a solid year where every time we were publishing anything, you would see around 20,000 views. Amazon has changed it up, more competition has come on. So those views now have come down a lot more, but it’s a great way to get extra conversion, better conversion, and what happens when you get better conversion rate? Amazon rewards you.

31:48
So not only do you get, not only do they get promoted, but on your PPC charges, your PPC charges start to go down. So it costs, it does cost money to do it. It’s free by the way, but it costs money and time to do this, but it’s well worth it in the end. Let me ask you this, if you’re already doing Instagram and TikTok, can you just post the identical stuff on posts? Pretty much. you can, one of the things, let’s say somebody tags you.

32:18
Okay, on your insert, you say like to some chef or whoever inside buys your product, hey, tag us. No contest, just tag us. People will tag you. You go to an app like Repost. And so for iPhones anyways, it’s called Repost. You go to the image, you save it to your photos, and then you upload it to your post. It’s that simple. We get a ton of photos that

32:48
our influencer based, but they come off of our inserts. And you don’t necessarily have to say, you know, and I rather not give them something for that, but people like posting, you know, Hey, I got this microphone. Okay, great. You know, I’ll tag like tag us with a microphone. Sometimes there’s a contest involved, but you have to make sure that you know the rules and regulations of

33:16
running a contest because you know, screw that up. Is there a way to automate this process? I don’t know if you can. haven’t. I would love to. Okay. All right. So that was good. We covered posts and then I just had a question on influencers. I mean, you mentioned a bunch of different ways. Like what is your go-to? Do you prefer TikTok? Do you prefer Instagram? It really does depend.

33:43
depend on the demographic and the product. you could Instagram right now. And this was validated from, we were just talking to a really high end influencer the other day. They were saying they’re kind of getting away from the Instagram side, but TikTok is really the go-to for a lot of the products. It’s less expensive. And there’s people there that have millions and millions of

34:13
followers and how you pay the price for those ones too. Yeah, that would probably be my go-to. I still love Tube. So you can still find good YouTube influencers. You can get them to do, and you have to make sure by the way that these aren’t fake. I’m going to give like, here’s just a bonus. I’ve done this. I’ve got a fake influencer. They fake their account. Well, one of the easiest ways is to go and see what they’ve done, what they’ve posted, what the engagement was. See.

34:43
If their comments are just one or two words, awesome, nice picture or emoji, emoji, emoji. Those are all bots. And you can just tell that their engagement is very low with outside of that. And they’re probably a fake influencer. That’s probably the biggest scam out there right now. So Norm, I have a YouTube channel with 80,000 subs pitch me right now. Let’s say I was an influencer for something that you sold like.

35:11
bully sticks or whatnot? How would you approach me? Well, that’s a perfect question because things have changed. Right now, I would probably try to get you in on an affiliate or I might pay upfront first and say, hey, know, do this for me. I’ll give you X. And if it wasn’t YouTube, if I’m looking at a influencer, I’m trying to build a relationship.

35:40
I want to get engaged before I get married. So, you know, I find somebody that has my type of personality. Maybe it’s a beard oil guy or somebody that does beard stuff. That would not be me. And I’d reach out and I started commenting on, you know, just, know, what I thought, you know, whatever he was posting, oh, I love it. I bought this before, blah, blah, blah, blah. Get a relationship going. DM the person, see if they’re interested in your product. A lot of, uh,

36:10
problems I’ve seen when you’re trying to hire an influencer is the entrepreneur has a big ego a lot of the times and their ego goes in front of the influencer. Influencers don’t like that. They have big egos or they want to build up their ego. I would rather work with the influencer and especially if it’s the same personality.

36:39
let them tell you about what they’re doing. Tell them how great they are and what you love about them rather than telling them about how great you are. Kind of like on a date, you know, well, hopefully it’s the right date, but that’s one thing. And then look, if you can promote this, know, what do you charge? You can go into a negotiation. You want to make sure that when you get into the negotiation that you have some sort of contract agreement with you.

37:07
who owns the rights, who owns the IP rights, where can you post this? Can you post it on TikTok or YouTube or can you post it right across multiple channels? Who owns that right? And you wanna make sure you do if you wanna do that. If not, you can get into trouble. The final part to this is commission-based. So especially with the Amazon referral program right now that’s giving…

37:33
uh, back a portion of every sale for external links, basically back to Amazon. So if I go to you and say, look, I’ll give you 15 % or I’ll give you 10 % on every sale that you make, you’re probably going to promote this, especially with that amount of, um, those subscribers, you’ll probably promote this product a lot more than if it was just a flat deal. So the, I, I think the

38:01
best way to do this is to really get out there and as an influencer, and I’m not an influencer, but from what I see you can do as an influencer is to get multiple deals like that and get all sorts of commission coming in, you know, or affiliate based fees. That’s where I see it really stick. There’s a huge opportunity for influencers. And one other thing I want to talk about, and Paul Barron does this exceptionally well,

38:29
He has a swim diaper company and he has built brand ambassadors. So going out to your repeat buyers. Okay, so just getting on that list and getting back to the repeat buyers, talking to them, just really just spreading the culture of your brand and getting them to interact and engage and maybe letting them know the new product and give them a free product or a discount.

38:59
get them to become your Nanu or micro influencer, and then at some point, bring them in as a brand ambassador. And as a brand ambassador, you have to either take so many photos or videos or publish content or provide content, but you’ll get X, Y, and Z throughout the year from our company. And that, if you can get 10, 20, 100 of those people,

39:28
You’ve got a successful, very successful brand on your hands then.

39:34
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 obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

40:03
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.

40:14
Let me ask you, when you’re going out for influencers, like the process that you just described sounds like it takes a tremendous amount of time. I’m kind of curious what your hit rate is typically percentage-wise, the number of people you approach versus the number of people who actually respond to you. Well, response- Because I’m bombarded by these like every day, like probably like 15 or 20 a day. I can tell you what works on me. If it’s a tool that I’ve used or heard of or a colleague uses, I’ll usually almost always respond.

40:43
If it’s something unknown, like the offer has to be really compelling for me to even test that particular product. Well, I can tell you the way that if we were doing this two years ago, sending it out, we would probably have a very low hit rate, less than 10%. Probably less than 5%, you know, in around that range, 5 to 10%. Taking a look at

41:10
how Paul has done it. So Paul was a business partner of mine. Last year, we started the Chad agency together, got to know and see how he was doing and absolutely impressed with the quality and the outreach he was doing. And for him, he was targeting people who already loved his product. So if you loved his product, why would you not be an influencer? So he had a very high hit rate and was that 50 %?

41:39
Probably not 25 maybe. And I don’t want to put words into Paul’s mouth, but then the brand ambassador program, which is the highest level you can get, you’re paying them with product basically. It’s very, very low because that takes time and it takes effort. You can build it out, but you’re probably sending out to get one brand ambassador. I’m guessing that you’d probably have to set

42:10
Yeah, but probably be in contact with probably 50 people. know Paul Harvey was on my podcast the other day and he was talking about TikTok to get four influences. took him a hundred emails, a hundred to a hundred. sounds about right. Yeah. I’m just curious when he’s targeting his own customers, I would imagine that the number of customers who actually have audiences is probably pretty slim, right? Yeah. But

42:36
what he’s using. So he’s taken a different approach here. He’s saying, look, I want you to take a picture so I can put that on Amazon posts or I can put it, it’s not so much that they even have a huge, like these are, I would call the repeat customers that turn into influencers. So just the other day, not the other day, but last year, he told me that from January, I think it was till April, he ended up with 3000,

43:06
user generated images. By the end of the year, I believe it was at 6,000. And if you take each one of those, and if you were to get, let’s just say it’s 50 to 100 bucks to get the images, because a lot of times it won’t just be one, it’ll be a series. I know I pay a lot of times a hundred bucks, $600,000 of free content.

43:32
100,000 or 50,000, but it’s free content that he has. It’s just ongoing. It’s a never-ending stream. And another thing is that for video, he was telling me that, oh, you know, he had an issue. I forget what it was, but there was an issue. So he wanted his influencers to do a video and specifically targeting this issue. I think it was a bad review that came in on something that was false. And so by the time

44:01
The weekend was over. He had 30 videos targeting this product and these issues. And he just blew it out of the water. He could target it on his social media. He could put the posts up into Amazon. It’s great when you build that network. Nice. So Norm, I wanted you to talk about a tip that you gave on the panel that I thought that everyone listening should know about, which is the Google business profile page. you describe what

44:31
This is kind of like a no-brainer, a pretty quick thing to set up, Yeah. Google is called Google Business Profile now. It used to be called Google My Business. You don’t have to have a Google account or you don’t have to have a G Suite or Gmail, but all you have to do is open up a profile. If you do have G Suite, all you would do is go into those icons, drop down to, I believe it just says profile, and you can create a business profile.

45:01
you start filling in the information and what’ll end up happening. We’ve all seen it on the far right of the Google page. You’ll see either Google maps or you’ll see, you know, the, the Google profile. If it’s on mobile, this is the beauty of it. If I’m typing in, let’s say, uh, my podcast, takes three scrolls of real estate to get down to the second spot on Google, on an iPhone. So you take a three,

45:30
pages of real estate. And what it allows you to do is not only can you index everything immediately, you can take images. let’s say that I want to do Google shopping. You can do that. But if you open up and create your brand on Google profile, you can put your images underneath it. You can take a URL and you can point it over to Walmart, over to Amazon, strictly over to Amazon.

46:00
or over to e-commerce or as many as you want. And they all are indexed. So they’re all indexed for different keywords. You can take a anchor URL. That’s the URL that you want pointed anywhere. And let’s say that’s over to your Amazon store. Every time you put that into a social media post or into content, everything, my podcast or my Google slides,

46:29
my transcripts are all posted with that anchor. It all goes back and links to Amazon. So I’m getting all of these external links that Amazon loves. And if I wanted it to be my e-commerce website, might have either affiliate links or your links going back to your Amazon store, you can point it over there. But it is something that it’s free.

46:57
We have seen, and I can give you an example of a furniture store. So a guy I work with, he did a failing furniture store during COVID in, I believe it was Oregon, okay? They’re going bankrupt. They started Google My Business and they started pumping out tons of content. They ended up getting over 2 million visitors in a month. And the case study actually shows that this saved their business.

47:24
So I’m sorry, did that have more to do with the profile or the content that they were making? Yeah, it had to do with visitors going to their anchor link was going over to their furniture store. OK. And so more and more traffic was going over there because you were ranking for more keywords. And like there’s a car dealer and all he did was use Google’s tools. So Google Sheets and he update the prices every day. Well, Google would see it, they’d rank it. And he was getting just a ton of business.

47:53
because the ranking of the Google Sheets was out there updating his price list and it was just driving a ton of traffic. Interesting. I know Google Business, it also tell you how many hits they got from people searching for your profile, which is pretty useful information as well. Yeah. Yeah. What I like is anything that we touch, anything at all that we touch, we have our anchor link in it and

48:22
We can see just for example, on my own site, which I’m not expecting a ton of unique visitors. They probably would go to Apple to listen, but on my own site, there was nothing. Nobody was really going to my site. Then we started doing this and I think last month, it was about 2,100 uniques, which from zero to 2,100. That’s pretty good. Yeah. It is pretty good.

48:51
Yeah, so we’re happy with that. I mean, that was on a very small scale. There’s so many things that you could get into. You could put in your testimonials. You could get, you can send people a review link, know, send them a review link. They put it up there. Google loves it. There is an area for categories and brands. You can have a full description of what you’re doing. You can upload any type of presentation, your FAQs. You can

49:21
This is another area that I love. When we post a high quality blog article, we can ask people to ask us questions. Those questions are what we wanna see. I call it the answer box. You know, when you go to Google and people have requested this information. Well, all of a sudden, people are asking the question about your product and you’re answering it. And as long as…

49:50
you know, it’s good quality. All of a sudden you’re taking over some space in the answer box or the people who requested blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, your questions are being over there. And one of the things that you can do is before, let’s say you say, what are bully sticks made of? Or what is a natural bully stick? I can go over, I can see the questions drop down. And usually you’ll see it’s either a bullet point, very short form,

50:19
a sentence or a paragraph, but just make sure you do that same structure in your blog article. But those blog articles will, when we publish a blog article, it’s usually 1500 words or more, and we separate it by like just different questions. then it works really, really well. Nice. Hey Norm, we’ve been chatting for quite a while. I really appreciate your time.

50:46
If anyone wants to know more about what you do, you got a number of services. Please tell the audience what your services are and where people can find you online. Yeah, sure. If you’re interested in product innovation, we’ve got a great company called Honu, H-O-N-U Worldwide. And you can just reach out savings at honuworldwide.com. We’ve got a content marketing company called PR Reach and we build brands. And that could just be norm at prreach.com.

51:15
But my podcast every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time is called Lunch with Norm. And if you want to get a hold of me, just watch the podcast. Nice. Well, Norm, appreciate your time. And I’m really glad that we met on that panel. Yeah, me too. I can’t wait to have you on the podcast. Awesome. Take care. All right. See you later.

51:40
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now selling on Amazon is getting harder and harder, and sometimes you have to employ strategies that the masses are not yet employing yet. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 418. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

52:07
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also 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 next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

52:34
Now, when I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.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.