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Unlock the full potential and growth in your business. Join Josh Hadley, a successful 8-figure e-com business owner and investor as he interviews highly successful CEOs and business owners who share specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world.
Whether you sell on Amazon FBA, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Walmart, ClickFunnels, or Etsy you'll learn what is working for the most successful business leaders in eCommerce. Each eCom breakthrough episode is filled with strategies you can implement to help you scale to 8 figures and beyond.
Here's a small list of the topics we will cover:
- How to find new products to sell
- How to find good manufacturers
- How to manage cash flow
- Inventory management (shipping & logistics)
- Optimizing sales pages for conversion
- How to successfully launch a new product on Amazon.com
- Product ranking & optimization
- Amazon PPC management
- Implementing business operating systems
- Driving external traffic to Amazon
- Preparing to exit
- How to hire and build a team with A-Level talent
- Leadership skills
Welcome to the ecomm breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You've already crossed 7 figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley, an 8 figure ecom business owner and investor as he interviews highly successful business owners. Get ready because you're going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world.
Josh:Welcome to the Ecomm breakthrough podcast. I'm your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in ecommerce. Past guests include Adam Heist, Kevin King, and Michael e Gerber, the author of the e Myth. Today, I'm speaking with Alina Vliet. Alina is the cofounder of PressX and founder of AZ Rank.
Josh:She established herself at the forefront of Amazon strategic thinking, and she has ran thousands of product launches over the last 4 years, helping thousands of sellers do better on Amazon and Walmart as well. Today, we're gonna be talking a lot about product launches, listing optimizations, and driving external traffic without costing you an arm and leg. This episode is brought to you by Ecom Breakthrough Consulting, where I help 7 figure companies grow to 8 figures and beyond. Listen, Alina. I started my business back in 2015, and I grew it to a 8 figure brand in 7 years.
Josh:But I made a lot of mistakes along the way that made the path of getting to 8 figures take a lot longer than it needed to. I made a lot of mistakes when it came to, you know, maybe choosing the wrong products to launch or, you know, questioning whether my brand could actually survive. Cash flow issues, hiring the wrong team members or not knowing the right team members to hire or creating an operating structure in my business to allow the business to actually scale. I wish I would have had a mentor along the way that would have been able to help me overcome those stumbling blocks quicker and easier so that I could have reached that 8 figures faster. So to our listeners, those of you who have hit similar stumbling blocks and want to know the next steps to take your brand to the next level, then go to ecombreakthrough.com, that's ecom with 2 m's, to learn more.
Josh:And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month, I'm giving away $110,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. All you need to do is email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com. And in your subject line, say strategy audit. And then plead your case as to why I should choose you and your brand to work with for this month. But today, I am super excited to introduce you all to Alina.
Josh:Alina Vlika is a standout leader in the Amazon industry and the catalyst behind AZ Rank, PressX, and FotoLive. She began her journey in her father's grocery store, which later evolved into a successful publishing house. This early experience in a family business in Romania during the 1st part communism years sparked her enduring passion for entrepreneurship. After earning her master's in international business in 2003, Alina gained a deep understanding of the global market and her career really took a significant leap when she stepped into the Amazon Marketplace, skillfully merging her business knowledge with the fast paced world of ecommerce. At AZ Rank, she and her team developed tailored solutions for thousands of Amazon sellers, making the online selling experience smoother.
Josh:Then with PressX, she introduced an innovative approach to increasing external traffic and brand recognition through a cost effective model. And her latest venture, FotoLive, redefines the user generated content with a fresh perspective. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Alina.
Alina:Hi, everyone. Hi, Josh. Thanks for having me, and I'm very happy to be here.
Josh:Well, Elena, I am super excited to have you on this podcast. You have a lot of experience launching products, helping sellers optimize products, drive more traffic to their listings. And I think everybody listening to this episode wants all of the above. They want to launch better. They want better product launches.
Josh:They want more external traffic. They want to be able to be relevant and scale their brand to 8 figures and beyond. So Alina, with that being mentioned, I would love to hear from you. Why don't you just give our listeners, you know, some of the things that have been on the top of your mind as of late and what's been working for a lot of the clients you've been working with.
Alina:Okay. Where do I start?
Josh:It's all
Alina:over. Yeah. Let's start with product launches. I know everybody's a lot of people in the Amazon space say that even if you have a great product, sometimes it's not enough. You have to also do a great launch in order to be successful on that product.
Alina:And, oftentimes, unfortunately, I see a lot of great products with 4 launches. And I'm saying that in in in the position where I've been in. I've this happened to me as well with our first brand that we've ever launched in, on Amazon dotcom in 2018. It was the same thing. I'm not sure if it was a great product, though.
Alina:But for sure, it was a an awful launch. And that happens because, you know, a lot there's a lot of factors, on that. I'm not going to go into them all. What I can say about now, the current, Amazon state, let's say, and what we've seen in our, campaigns and the brands we work with and our tests is or are, a few things I would like to mention here. First of all, whenever we do a product launch, 2 main 2 of the main things are keyword research and listing optimization.
Alina:And I think in this order, first, you need to to look at your keywords and then you you do your business. You do our listing. In terms of keyword research, something that I've seen more and more these days is that the Amazon data, the data that Amazon provides within, brand analytics and especially product opportunity explorer, has been more and more accurate. I know that, for example, for your own brand, you can you can look at your own data. Right?
Alina:You have insights. You have a lot of a lot of data inside your brand analytics dashboard. But, for example, if you're on the launch, a new product, you don't have that data. Right? And you go to all those tools.
Alina:You go to Helium 10, Datadog, Douglas card, whatever, whoever is out there, and you try to get the best data there is. Well, we've done I think we're close to 6,000 launches
Josh:Wow.
Alina:Right now. Yeah. I know. It's a lot. And, in the last more than 6 months, I would say, Product Opportunity Explorer data and especially those top 25 keywords that we we're seeing right now are what they need to be.
Alina:In the beginning, it wasn't like that. I've we've had a lot of, like, I don't know, not errors. I think I would say just like inconsistent data from Amazon. But now they're getting their head together because we're on a podcast and I cannot say that works. Right?
Alina:They're getting everything together and they're giving us good data. So I would very much put that if you're not doing that already, I would very much put that into your strategy looking at product opportunity explorer. For example, if even if we're doing a relaunch, an old product, the product that went out of stock or had whatever issues, was shut down by Amazon, The best results we've had, the the best success we've had were, was on the ranking on the keywords and and relaunching on those keywords. And that means focusing on PPC with with the strategy that each seller or each brand, chooses. And if they chose to work with us as well, with those with new way of doing giveaways that we're applying right now, those keywords also, work very well and fast.
Josh:Interesting. Where do you so if you go through your keyword research through, you know, Opportunity Explorer, where are you finding the biggest bang for your buck? Are you saying that those keywords need to be in your title, or bullets or description, or is it all of the above? Like, how are you recommending people incorporate those keywords into their listings?
Alina:So what I what I what I've seen that works best, and I I very much like this because I see it as a very efficient way, is to take that list of 20 to 25 keywords and put it together and see how many keywords you can combine, like, keyword into keyword. So, for example, if your main keyword is garlic press, and your second main is garlic placed garlic pressed stainless steel, I would use garlic pressed stainless stainless steel. And
Josh:Kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
Alina:Exactly. And maybe try to kill 5 or 6 birds with 1 stone, for for that matter. So that would be the first, thing I would do. And then depending on how many of those words we have, how many of those long long tail keywords but, with root keywords inside, of course, first place is the title, 2nd place would be the description, and 3rd play place would be the bullet points. Now, in the last few months, a plus premium has also been very important and the that metadata that we are allowed to put in into the premium a plus has been proven to work very well.
Alina:So I would not ignore that.
Josh:Are you would you recommend duplicating keywords? Let's say I already have keywords in the title. Would you put them in the metadata for a plus Yeah. Content as well?
Alina:Yes. I wouldn't put them in the title and in the bullets or in the title and in the description, but I would put them in the title and in the metadata, or I would put them in the title and in all those fields in the flat file that nobody fills in. Subject matter even. I don't know if I mean, I'm sure you know, but maybe some of your listeners don't know that even just working on that flat file on the Excel file, you can still add that column that says subject matter. And sometimes I don't I I don't know to say, a percent an exact percentage how much does it work, but it still works.
Alina:If you add the column, you can literally get your subject matter back right back on your listing and fill that up with keywords.
Josh:Fascinating. Interesting. That's a great hat. I love that. Yes.
Josh:So, Alina, you also briefly touched on PPC. How important is PPC then when you're launching?
Alina:Well, first of all, let me say I don't like PPC. I actually hate it. So I'm not an expert by no means. So what I would, what I say and what we recommend to people, brands, our clients is do not stop your PPC while you're doing a different type of launch, because oftentimes, some some do. So PPC has to be there.
Alina:Those keywords that we're working on, those keywords that you are the most relevant on needs needs to be there in in your PPC campaigns. I don't wanna go deeper Yeah. Into that. But, one thing that I can say would be that the the most relevant keywords, even if they are not your main ones. So the smallest long tail keywords that are exactly what the people are searching for, the exact definition of your product should be placed, in an important place, let's say, in your PPC campaigns, not just left there among other 50 keywords in a, I don't know, whatever, broad campaign.
Alina:So those type of campaigns where those very relevant, long tail keywords get a little bit more, bids on, a little bit more attention in the PPC have proven to work very well during launches and even relaunches too because Amazon Amazon likes that. Amazon likes to see that you're paying for something more than just the main one, just the main keywords where everybody's fighting on. And Amazon, you know, needs to adjust the bids. For those more keywords, it's a lot easier. And they get their money and we get our rankings up.
Alina:It's just the way it has to be.
Josh:Makes sense. So it sounds like you don't love PPC. You're saying that it needs to be on, but you're saying that you have a separate launching strategy that's not entirely dependent on PPC. Is that true?
Alina:Correct. Yes.
Josh:What is that? So let's dive into that now.
Alina:So it has 3 components. One of them is PPC, as I explained before. I, I'm not gonna repeat that. So PPC has to be there in the amounts and budgets that everybody considers, appropriate. That's one thing.
Alina:Second thing is the I'm not gonna say search, find buy because we're not allowed to. I'm maybe I don't know. The redefined giveaways or, the surveys that we do right now, kind of a market research combined with the purchase that gives you also some feedback about your listing and about your products, at the end of the day. So, basically, we still do them in a different way. And 3rd so this would be the 2nd component.
Alina:And 3rd component, a little bit of external traffic. Even if you don't have a TikTok shop, even if you don't have a budget to do a press article or, I don't know, something crazy like that. I mean, not crazy, but a little bit more expensive. Just make a YouTube channel. Make an make a a few TikTok posts.
Alina:Come to us. We can help with that. Just make a few TikTok post post and then find some people that can, go through those posts to your Amazon and purchase, either through us or your friends and family or whatever. Just give Amazon some feedback and some data that some traffic is coming from external. And the funny thing is that even in I know a lot of your listeners and a lot of people out there are saying this is like, you know, cheating and fooling the system.
Alina:Yes. I know. My two comments on this would be, 1, I don't think there is I don't think there is anybody doing 7 or 8 figures who didn't check the system just a little tiny bit. That's one thing. And second thing, if you just start it, start and do it, like, very, very, moderate.
Alina:Don't go crazy like people used to do it in days or, like, Chinese some Chinese sellers still do. If you don't go crazy like that, it will add up. It will be the snowball effect. And then in a matter of days or maybe weeks, organics will come in, and you won't have to to do that.
Josh:Awesome. I love that. So, Alina, I think that, you know, I I also love to, you know, let's quelch the notion of, you know, oh, these are black hat tactics. In my opinion, right, I don't think these are black hat tactics or even gray hat tactics. If you really think about it, think about a a well known brand.
Josh:Right? Let's say it's Kraft Foods, Mondelez. Right? They come out with a new Oreo cookie. And let's say they're the the first channel it's going to become available on is going to be on Amazon.
Josh:They have an email list. When they run ads on TV, if their first channel was to direct people to Amazon, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to run TikTok ads. They're gonna run TV ads. They're gonna run radio ads.
Josh:They're gonna do all of this, and they're gonna say, come find our new Halloween Oreo or whatever it is. It's It's the new springtime Oreo, the new 4th July Oreo. Right? Whatever it is, they're basically telling, you know, hey. Search for this.
Josh:You know?
Alina:You'll find it.
Josh:The name for you.
Alina:I know.
Josh:You'll find it and come learn about our product. Right? So you're not doing anything that I think is like, oh, this is this is illegal. This is against TOS. It's like the big brand illegal though.
Alina:I'm sorry for interrupting. If you ever do this, whoever's listening, if you ever do this, just stop there. Don't go further with the reviews.
Josh:Yes.
Alina:That's crossing the line. And we don't do that. We don't recommend doing that, and we highly recommend staying away from that.
Josh:I would say you stay away from reviews with a 9 foot pole. Which means you just don't even talk about them. You don't even, you know, obviously they're important. But you I think that Amazon's done a decent job as of late that, you know, just getting customers to leave reviews. And I don't think you need the hacks to get reviews.
Josh:And guess what? If you have bad reviews, then guess what? Probably means your your product sucks. So that means you need to get you need to work on a better product. It doesn't matter.
Josh:You know, you having a friend or 2 or 10 that go and leave your reviews are not worth your account help overall. So I love that. Now, Alina, I
Alina:would They just, rolled out the new vine, program where they they even offer 2 or 3 for free and then or for, like, a very tiny amount, which is which is good. I mean
Josh:Yep. Yeah. And the find program, it's super easy. And, yes, you can get some reviews to get your get your product started. Alina, I wanna learn more about, you know, kind of like steps 2 and 3.
Josh:You talked about, you know, it's not search find buy, but it is, you know, surveys. Tell us more about what those are and how that works.
Alina:Okay. So, everything is related to the first one of the first things I mentioned here, and that was the keyword research. And not necessarily the research itself, but the way you're choosing your keywords for your product. And not necessarily for your launch, but for your product overall. And what we've seen in so many 100 of thou and thousands of launches and in so many products that we see, every day is that going from day 1 on the main keywords, I know everybody wants to be there, and we should be there at one point.
Alina:But going straightforward to those keywords, and I mean PPC listing, several places, different places in the listing, and then maybe giveaways and stuff like that. I am not saying that it's necessarily bad, but it's taking a longer time and it cost it's gonna cost you more. If you're focusing on this very relevant keywords, which are longer tails, which which sometimes don't even have a search volume detected detected by the tools. But finding 10 or 20 keywords of that kind, all of those keywords containing inside your root main keywords, main, second main, third main, and making, like, a like, a a ball of, of those keywords, and implementing them into your listing and into your launch strategies, including PPC, including giveaways. That has been I think maybe I I would say not 100%, but let's say 99.9% of the situations are success for us.
Alina:Focus I mean, start start with the low hanging fruits and then climb to the top. It's gonna cost you less, way less. You have no idea. Just an example. If you're, doing giveaways, and I know a lot of people do even if they don't admit they do them.
Alina:If you were to to do 1,000 units on your 2 main keywords in a very competitive niche, like supplements or sports or fitness or whatever and get those long launched and get those, not launched ranked in top 5. If you would go with 10 or 20 of these keywords that I'm talking about and group them and, try to, you know, build, like, like, a a sentence from them, like, everything to make sense at the end. We've had cases where we got those 2 keywords ranked and a bunch of others with 200, maybe.
Josh:Wow.
Alina:Same results, just a different approach. And I know it's it's for for some sellers and for some brands, it's very hard to digest because their niches and their categories are extremely competitive. And whenever they tried this before, they would have done, like, 1,000. I'm not saying it's, it works all the time with this ratio, like 200 to 1000, but always, it's less. It's always less.
Alina:Because and the the the simple fact be behind it that maybe I mean, we'll we all know this as Amazon sellers, but maybe, you know, in the speed of everything we're not aware is that Amazon likes relevance. It's more than velocity. First thing is relevance and be, after that come all the other conversion rate, velocity, bids, and everything. First thing is relevance.
Josh:Makes a lot of sense. How are you reaching out to these customers then? Do do brands need to have their own customer email list or are you running ads on Facebook or where is this coming from?
Alina:We're not running ads on Facebook. Customers don't need to have their own list. We have our own people, and there are a lot of people. We have their own we have our own audiences. Sometimes we do this magic campaigns on specific audiences if people want to.
Alina:We're developing right now, another thing which I think is gonna be very good. It's like a poll service, but not like their the polls that we know of. It's like more of a breakdown of everything that you wanna know about your existing product or about your a competitive competitor product. And that's how we kind of structured or divided our audience into focused audiences. If you need a baby, we're gonna go to moms and new moms and toddler moms or whatever.
Alina:If you wanna go to fitness, we're gonna go to people doing fitness and so on. So that's one thing. But main thing, we have our own people. It's everything is taken care about. It's taken care of by us, and it's going good.
Alina:Very good, actually.
Josh:Are people doing full purchase buys, or are you giving them promotion codes to use at all?
Alina:A full purchase usually works a full purchase price usually works best. Now if you have a $200 items item, sometimes you it's easier to add a coupon or a discount code depending on how you strategize your launch. Some people just wanna start at 50% of of their gold price and then go higher. Some people just wanna start with their full price and put a coupon. What I can say is that both work, coupon or no coupon, but no coupon I mean, full price leads you to need to do less units than the than the the coupon or discounted price.
Josh:Awesome. Makes a lot of sense. I love that. And then the last thing, you you talked about kind of the 3rd step. Why don't you elaborate a little bit more about what's involved in that 3rd step of launching?
Alina:External traffic. So, this is a lot. External traffic is like the word on everyone's lips Yeah. Nowadays. So what we do best, let's say, what we have the most experience is in in our launches, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily launch directed, would be the press.
Alina:The press articles, the press releases, the listicles, for example, right now is a craziness with the, you know, those Black Friday, list because the top 20. You know? Those help a lot a lot. Traffic, sales, brand awareness, Google ranking, everything. It helps a lot.
Alina:But Black Friday is just one time, once a year. Right? So you you cannot always have those. If you have the budget and if you have a decent brand, if you are 7 figures, you should have a decent brand with a bun couple of products at least that do well or maybe more products, but each of them doing less, but together, they they make a lot of a lot of sense, then I would say it would be a good idea to try this. If not, if you're just like on your first product, if only if it does 7 figures, but if you have just one product, I I'm not sure if that works because the whole idea of the press, it's not about the numbers.
Alina:It's not necessarily how many sales did I get from that article, what was my conversion rate, what what was my add to cart rate? What was my attribution? Whatever. It's it's more about everything else. It's more about the brand awareness, the brand recognition, people hearing your name.
Alina:Google, raising that, brand name in in the results and and allocating that brand name to other, keyword searches too. And on top of everything is that, for example, in our case but I I think in other people too. If you write an article with us, if we do an article for you, it stays there forever.
Josh:Mhmm.
Alina:If you have an attribution link provided to us and we use that attribution link in a press article, 2 years from now, when you're gonna search, when you're gonna look in your attribution dashboard, you're gonna go get clicks. You're gonna see clicks on that attribution link that came after the article. And that was those were for free. And sometimes, they can be huge. You know?
Alina:It's just like, I don't know, some product just goes viral on TikTok and everybody searches and searches, that product, and it's one of yours. You know? They're all kind of this this type of scenarios that can happen. So it's it's more about an I I see like an investment, you know, in your brand doing a press article. We have brands that come to us and they say, I don't care about the sales.
Alina:I don't care about conversion rates. I don't care. I just want an article in one of these publishers. And then next month, say, I want another article in one of these publishers just to be there, just to have their their their name, spoken about and their products, of course.
Josh:And do you and does it pay off over time, I guess, is the question.
Alina:It does. And from what we've seen so far, we've only been doing this myself. So I'm just speaking from what I know. From for 1 year and a few months. 1 year, 2, 3 months.
Alina:But I've been talking to other people in the industry, and they say I mean, if you have a brand that you really wanna grow it and not just, like, sell it in 6 months, it's worth it. I mean, there's nothing wrong with selling it, but just do it now if you're gonna sell in 1 year or in 2 years so you can add something, to your brand value in this time. You know? Yeah. If if the time period is too short, then I wouldn't do
Josh:it. So tell me how that would work. Give me a scenario with how that would work with a product launch. Let's say we're we're willing to invest in it. We wanna have a successful product launch.
Josh:We wanna get some press for our new product as well. How much should I be budgeting? Where's that press article typically going to come from? What type of traffic could I expect from it? Can you share maybe some more of those details?
Alina:Sure. So, I'm not going to go too much into all the budget scenarios that we have, but, usually, our best working publishers are, in a $6,000 range, 6 k range. What does that mean? You it means that you have to promise to me that you are willing willing to spend $6,000. And then you come to me, you sign off the thing, and then we're going to get this rolling for you.
Alina:We're going to discuss the publishers. For example, let's say you're gonna have, I don't know, home and decor. Right? Or no. Let's say beauty.
Alina:Right? Something for women. We have a bunch of magazines for women. We're gonna go talk to them, and we're gonna come to a selection to, let's say, I don't know, 5 titles. We're gonna go to them and say, okay.
Alina:You're right. Your article will most probably, be in one of these 5 titles. Right? Then after that, you say yes, and we're starting our work, and the article goes live. Well, if that article gets 100 clicks, usually, our CPC just as an average is between $2.5 for these articles.
Alina:I know for some people, it can be this is very expensive. For some people, it's very cheap depending on on their categories on Amazon and how much the bids cost. Right? So let's say $2. So let's keep it around.
Alina:So for $6,000, you could get a maximum of 3,000 clicks. Right? Now if you if your article only gets 100 clicks, you only pay $200 and still get the article and still have it live out there and still be able to use it however you want. For example, this is a hack for other people that are using, press articles right now. You can run your own Google Ads on those on those press articles that are already there with your attribution links inside and just take it from there.
Alina:I know everybody knows what that means. So if your article gets 100 clicks, you pay $200. If your article gets 1,000 clicks, you pay 2,000. If your article gets 3,000 clicks, you pay the whole budget. If it goes extremely well, if and you wanna add more to your budget, you can add more.
Alina:So that's that's how it goes, basically. You only pay for what's spent.
Josh:Yeah. How are the clicks working? Like, how are you tracking the clicks? Are you just monitoring the, the referral link? And that's like No.
Josh:Download that support.
Alina:So first, most of the cases, like, over 90% of the cases, people use an attribution. So you have your own, which I don't have access to. So you you as a brand have your own way of tracking those through your attribution dashboard. That's one thing. But we don't charge based on that.
Alina:We charge based on our own software that is connected through an API with the publishers, and we track them. Usually, our so if we say we had 1,000 clicks, your attribution would say 1200 clicks. So usually, we're less. It's it's around there. It's not exact.
Alina:I mean, nobody Sure. Can say.
Josh:Yeah. I guess I my question is, at what point do you stop, you know, having to pay for those clicks so that it lives on in perpetuity? Right? So if I
Alina:start when the budget ends. So if you reach in our example, if you reached 3,000 clicks or $6,000 and you wanna stop and don't add more, then we stop. You don't pay for anything else, and it's the article stays there.
Josh:And you could then run your own Google Ads if you wanted to. Exactly.
Alina:Nobody does that.
Josh:Fascinating. Fascinating. Awesome. And then you also mentioned, like, getting on TikTok. Right?
Josh:And Yeah.
Alina:That Tell me that's one.
Josh:Tell me about that.
Alina:So that's the, let's say, the expensive solution.
Josh:The expensive this is the expensive solution. Alright. Let's hear it.
Alina:Or, no. This was the expensive solution. The the first article was the
Josh:expensive. Okay.
Alina:TikTok. Yeah. The cheaper ones would be TikTok. I mean, TikTok, what we offer right now and I know there's a lot of ways to to do to go on TikTok right now. From going to the influencer hub, in their platform to making your own shop, to, I don't know, having just people random people post about your product.
Alina:So there's a lot of ways. What I what I, would like to mention here, strictly regarding product launches. If you don't have TikTok on your bucket list or I don't know. If you're, maybe your product is not necessarily fit to TikTok. Some products just aren't, for example, for TikTok.
Alina:So you would have no way of going to an influencer and saying, hey. Would you like to promote my beautiful toilet paper on TikTok? You know?
Josh:Right.
Alina:It doesn't really work. But you could still have, a few posts about your brand. And through family or friends or through us, we can help with that through some content and just build a basic brand page on TikTok. It doesn't have to be a shop. Just a page.
Alina:But when we do the giveaways, part of them, we can redirect them to TikTok through TikTok. Or this was just an example of TikTok because it's the most you know, it's the word in everybody's mouth right now. Like, external traffic equals TikTok. Yeah. But, I love for example, I love YouTube, and all the campaigns we did with YouTube had great results.
Alina:Same thing. Build a page, put some content out there, create some some, I don't know, some give some value regarding your product. I don't know. Some show off. So some examples of how it can be used or whatever.
Alina:Instructions, guarantee, whatever. So people can go there, and we can redirect them through that. Instagram. Any pretty much anything. But TikTok is very valuable right now.
Alina:YouTube works very well. Instagram works very well. Facebook, so and so. It's still pretty much everything that Sarah works, but the more you go be, like, far away from everything that has been common, like, you know, everybody was using Facebook ads, like, forever.
Josh:Yeah. Yeah.
Alina:Even Google Ads work. I'm not a specialist in Google Ads, also either, I mean, but, we have we have had some some good results with driving traffic through Google as well. And, actually, it's one of, actually, it's one of the strategies that we use in the ranking, combining the Amazon, surveys that I've talked about previously with some purchases from Google based on keywords and all that together make makes a good mix. So bottom line, have something, some kind of page or content on, on any of these platforms or all of them and insert that into your launch or relaunch by directing some sales to Amazon but through that.
Josh:Through those other channels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels. How are you how are you creating those, those reels? Like, are you recommending that brand owners should, you know, dance with their products? Or how do they how do they get, you know, some engaging traffic? Or, you know, what type of posts are they creating?
Alina:It's very different depending on on on the product. So what we do in in photo life, our UGC service, so we do genuine content. I barely encourage sellers to give any kind of any type of instructions. Just the main thing. Like, for example, you know, these are white.
Alina:Don't don't say they're black or something like that. Just I'm giving a foolish example, but Yeah. Not stay with the right, stay stay to the left, look at the camera or whatever. It's it's not studio. It's like genuine content, and people love that.
Alina:The more genuine it is and the more people talk from their bathroom with their, shower, towel in their heads and from the toilet sometimes or whatever. People love that as long as it's not forced. You know? It's it's it's like whatever people think about their product, they're putting it out there. That type of content, I'm I'm, I'm recommending right now.
Alina:And something that I would very much encourage everyone everyone to test is try running some Google Ads using those type of content, video or photo. You're gonna you're gonna see unbelievable results compared to a white background, a stylish photo with filters and colors and everything. People seems like people don't I mean, the buyers, you know, the the your audience, don't buy that anymore. They wanna see the real thing.
Josh:Fascinating. I love that. Alina, we've talked about so many great strategies. I would love to hear from you. Do you have any case studies that come to mind that you could just share some of the case studies of people that have implemented some of these tactics that we've we've discussed today and how they're working in the in the real world?
Alina:Oh, yeah. There's so many, trying to figure out to to find something that, can actually be interesting. In terms of press, we've had, the best results I can say we've had with beauty items. So if you're if you're having if you're, into the beauty category, I would totally recommend a test. I usually tell people even people that wanna that say, hey.
Alina:I wanna put, like, I don't know how many how much money into this. I say, no. Just let's do one. Let's do one test. Let's do one campaign, see how that goes.
Alina:So beauty works very well impressed that I can say. In terms of launches, case studies, forbidden keywords, for example, we've had a lot of, good results. For example, if you're into the CBD, and then I know a lot of people are, or into, adult products. By the way, adult products work very well impressed. I don't know why.
Alina:Interesting.
Josh:Good to know. Maybe change change change business models is what you're saying to people.
Alina:Could be. Yeah. So if you're into forbidding, this type of niches, like, where you have forbidden keywords that you're not allowed to do PPC on or stuff like that, we managed to get those ranked by using, for example, for CBD, by using buyers and focusing traffic from states, US states, where CBD was allowed. I did not believe that was a fact, but, apparently, it is, and it worked really well. So somehow Amazon is connected to that.
Alina:I don't know why and how. Interesting. Also, geo ranking. Do you believe in geo ranking?
Josh:Tell me more about it. Are are you specifically talking
Alina:about, like codes. Like, for example
Josh:Where your inventory is and all that. Yeah. I I think there's something in Amazon's algorithm for sure that measures how quick can somebody get it. You know, do your products jive more with people from the south versus people from the east coast, etcetera?
Alina:We're working on something. I cannot say too much about it, but probably next year is gonna be live. And, it should be very interesting for especially more established brands in terms of duo ranking and how to track your keywords. Sorry. But, what I would say right now, definitely to test, is to, try to spread your inventory by yourself, not rely on on Amazon.
Alina:Try to spread your inventory as much as possible. I'm sorry. Just my son. Spread your inventory as much as possible using, there are a a few tools out there that can help you to do that. And if you're doing that in a launch, it's visible.
Alina:The the way the way it it adds up together. I don't have anything in mind right now, like a specific example from a specific category, but we've seen plenty. Yeah. Having having Amazon, basically, you make their job easier. Right?
Alina:Because you already send that. I know it costs a bit more in the beginning to for that shipping cost and everything to spread it around. But then the at the end of the day, it's gonna be worth it because it just needs one carton. You just need to send to send one carton into that specific location and get some sales. And whenever you get some sales, then Amazon is gonna replenish by themselves the rest.
Alina:Just, you know, 1 it's the the the expense of 1 shipped carton to a location. And, for example, I use helium 10 with heat maps. K. They have, I know probably there are others out there, but that's what I use when I look the so they have heat maps showing you where where your inventory is and where your sales are. And when you cross check those, you're gonna see some opportunities out there.
Alina:For example, places you get sales but no inventory. Imagine what happens if you're sending more inventory into that. Places where you have inventory but no sales. Let's try to push that a little bit and focus on that part with some sales.
Josh:I love that. Alina, then if I want to do that, what tools would you advise or recommend I use in order to force, you know, sending to specific, you know, FBA centers?
Alina:My favorite one is Shipment Maker Pro. I know they were out of not out of business, but they they did some remodeling through, on their APIs and and some software stuff. But they're back in business right now, and they're working very well, and I'm very pleased with them. So that would be my number one. I I don't I don't even know if there is another one, but I'm missing it right now.
Alina:Anyway
Josh:No worries. If you remember it, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. So, Alina, this has been an amazing episode. You've shared so many great hacks and tips and strategies to rank products.
Josh:And most importantly, these strategies can work for mature products and relaunching and just gaining more traffic. And these are timeless business principles, right? That drive external traffic, increase your brand awareness. And if you do all of those basic things, you know, you start to create this flywheel outside of Amazon, and hopefully you become less dependent on all the Amazon hacks. If you have external press articles or external social social media clips that are driving traffic.
Josh:So
Alina:And what I like to say is that sometimes a lot of and myself included, I'm so much into this. We're so looking only straight forward to this Amazon business or ecommerce business because, you know, it's Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, whatever, other platforms too. We forget to be creative. Sometimes it's just so easy to get a little tiny bit of external traffic on your for your Amazon brand. You know, just have a coffee one day in a Starbucks and start creating a YouTube page.
Alina:You never know what happens. Just have it there. Create a TikTok page. You don't have time or you don't have the knowledge to go to their hub and find influencers and whatever, all the those strategies. That's fine, but just have the page there.
Alina:Have some content. Do yourself or ask your children or your wife or your friends or or whatever to make some crazy stupid videos. People have had crazy sales on TikTok, with, I mean, content that it's literally done on your knees. Like Yeah. It says.
Alina:It's nothing nothing fancy. Just try we all should try to be a little bit more, like, think outside the box, just a little bit more creative and stop following all those rules and what everybody else does. That's that's my take. I know. Some people will love it.
Alina:Some people will hate it, but it's just my take on it.
Josh:But I think it's such good words of wisdom. I think it's just think creatively, be who you are, get yourself out there in the world, test new things. I love the analogy of, you know, a fishing if you go fishing, right, and you just keep using the same bait, you keep fishing in the same boat, and you're expecting different results every single time, it's not gonna happen. What you do need to do is drive to the other side of the lake, throw your pole in the water, change out your bait, put 10 different poles in the water with all types of different bait, and then see what's working, then start doubling down on that. But if you don't and you're just laser focused on, this is the only way I know how to launch products.
Josh:It's the only thing that's worked successfully for me for the last 5 years, and I'm not gonna do anything else. Then as things change, you're gonna be at the disadvantage.
Alina:You said something very important, and I really wanna double on that. We've worked with and we have a lot of close friends and, brand owners. Huge, huge, huge sellers that are that have been selling for since forever, like, 2012, 13, 14, something, like, 10 years ago. And they're some of them are still expecting for the same things to happen in 2023, 2024. It's not.
Alina:Those days, you could do 1,000 giveaways and get 1,000 review reviews, and Amazon was saying thank you for that. You're going to have a great launch. Try try doing that right now. It's it's it's it's a different world. I remember in 2017 when I first started this and I first looked at the Amazon, PPC was so complicated back then, and they only have broad exact phrase.
Alina:They don't even they didn't even have, like, product, I think. And when you look at PPC right now, you need to go to college,
Josh:to
Alina:to the college of PPC to to barely understand it. So, you know, it's you you need to to if you're if you're in this business, you need to adapt and move with the wave.
Josh:I love it. Alina, this has been fantastic. I love to leave the audience with the reactionable takeaways from every episode. So here are my 3 actionable takeaways that I've noted for our audience. But, Alina, you let me know if you think I'm missing something here.
Josh:But action item number 1, I'm going to go back to the very basics, which is make sure that they're you're doing your proper keyword research. And I think we also hear a lot of people that come up with a unique product idea that they're like, this is going to crush it on Amazon. But if you were to actually go do keyword research, maybe people aren't even searching for that type of product on Amazon. And so Amazon's not necessarily your discovery tool, right? They're not known for innovative products, so you're not going to succeed there.
Josh:So it's important to do comprehensive, keyword research. And if you're not leaning into the Amazon data that they are giving you with brand analytics, with Opportunity Explorer, with the SQP data, you're going to be at a disadvantage. There's so many tools, you know, DataDives focused on that and what keywords you used and where you put them in your listing matters in terms of the algorithm. And so make sure you understand that. I think that's 101.
Josh:You've got to have the right keywords in the right places. Action item number 2 is going to be about starting to grow your external traffic to your brand. And I would start by saying this. If you don't have your own audience, you should start working on creating your own audience for your own brand, whether that's building your own audience through insert cards, right? Could be giving a warranty, could be giving away a free digital download, but give something that is actually of value to a customer, collect their email address.
Josh:What we do for our brand is we actually collect their their mobile number because mobile numbers are much more, you got higher open rates, higher click through rates, 10 times better. But now you have a, hopefully, a raving fan base. And that way, when you launch a product, you can do exactly what Alina talked about, what we shared the example of Mondelez and Kraft Foods. If they're launching a new product, they're gonna reach out to their list. You can reach out to your list and say, hey.
Josh:Go find our new product on Amazon. Guess what they're gonna go do? They're gonna go search. They're gonna find your product, and they're going to buy your product, but you don't have to give away any rebates. You don't have to do any of that stuff.
Josh:100% TOS compliant, and you're doing what is proven to work and help rank products on Amazon. 3rd, last but not least, I love the idea of just incorporating creativity into your business. And I think one of the lowest hanging fruits right now still, even though it's being talked a lot, right, talked about a lot right now is TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. We know that those are trending. Even Google's doubling down on that and giving love to YouTube Shorts.
Josh:So can you focus on that with your products, getting user generated content in there? They don't need to be professional videos and just put stuff out into the world, see what starts to stick, right? Cast 10 different fishing poles out there, see what works, and then keep doing what's been working there. So, Alina, anything extra that you think I missed that our our listeners should use as an action item from this episode?
Alina:On point number 1 with the keywords and everything that you've mentioned, and I've talked about. On top of that, I would just make a reminder. Don't forget about your flash files and those category listing reports that you can download with your, with your whole catalog in it. Just take them one one at a time or, I don't know, parents at a time or whatever and see what's in there. I personally like to stuff all the fields that don't make sense to my listing because, you know, in every category, there's a bunch of fields that don't make necessarily sense.
Alina:Instead of putting NA, I would put keywords where you feel like you should put NA, you should put NA. But you know that if you have your entire, line filled, so your your whole flat file filled with keywords, then it's lower than 1% chance you could ever get hijacked. Yeah. With whatever kind of attack. When I say hijacking, I know we we're all brand owners and stuff, but there have been a lot of situations with, attacks on on people's and, you know, country strange contributions and whatever on people's listings.
Alina:So have your, all your fields filled in from the flat file, n a or keywords.
Josh:Yep. Great advice. And that is definitely a really important action item for sure. Elena, I love to ask every guest the following three questions. So first off, what's been the most influential book that you've read and why?
Alina:That's a hard one. So I think the one that, I'm actually rereading it right now. So maybe that's why it's it it first came to my mind. It's called the Buddha and the badass by Vishek Lakhshani. I hope I'm pronouncing the name right.
Alina:It's the founder of Mindvalley. Okay. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I strongly recommend it. It it just helps you better understand why you do the things you do and why you want the things you want and how to connect everything. For me, it's it's a life changing book.
Josh:I love that. That is one book recommendation I haven't heard yet, and I love getting new book recommendations. So love to hear that.
Alina:Let me know when when you read it. Let me
Josh:Will do. Alright. Alina, next question. What is a new productivity or software tool that you've recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer?
Alina:Actually, I just heard about this one yesterday, and it's called X Mars, X Mars. It was mentioned in MC innovate conference. I was telling you before we started recording. My husband was, has attending it. And it's something that combines PPC with AI and with a lot of human thing.
Alina:I don't even know how to talk about it that much. But just looking at their website and seeing some stuff out there and the things they do and some case studies, it blew my mind. So just take a look.
Josh:Fascinating. Alright. Xmars, is it dotai.com? Do you know?
Alina:Dot com. I think it's dot com.
Josh:Alright. Fascinating. I now I'm gonna have to go check that out. Alright. Last question, Alina.
Josh:What who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the ecommerce space that other people should be following and why?
Alina:Oh, that's the hardest of them all. I would also say, I I follow, Visek, Visek Lakhiani from from Main Valley, but not that closely. Maybe maybe it's I don't know. It's not that much into our industry, let's say, from Amazon. It's it's a it's a very hard one.
Alina:There's so many people out there which I, love and respect. Names that come to mind right now is Carlos Alvarez, and I would say his name because of everything he does for the community. And I don't know how that that guy does it. He's a 9 figure seller, and he still hosts, meetups in live and online 3 times a week or something for the community. So that's amazing.
Alina:Is, an old friend and I think is one of the person who is persons that who's the most passionate about this industry and the game itself. And by the way, I'm not gonna say more, but for your listeners, if you haven't, checked his strategy about keywords, that don't get indexed or ranked, And it's, all I can I want all I would say is about, it is that the whole thing, runs around Amazon recommended
Josh:Mhmm?
Alina:Field in, Helium 10. If you haven't checked that out, you should. We've done some tests, and it works amazingly well. But I'm I'm gonna let them discover what it is what that is. Yeah.
Alina:I've already named 3, so I think it's enough. Right?
Josh:I think that's perfect. Those are some great, people that you've recommended, and we've had each of them on the podcast other than the Mindvalley, guy. So I think, Alana, this has been such a great podcast. Thanks so much for your time. If people wanna learn more about you, they wanna follow along with your journey, they wanna even, you know, utilize some of the services that you offer.
Josh:Where can people find more about you and any special offers you have for them?
Alina:So, if they wanna connect with me directly, I'm on all the platforms with my name, Alina Vlaic. That's alinavlaic. Our main website is az rank.com. Just fill in a basic contact form and, reach out. We'll we love to hear from everybody, just thoughts and questions or whatever.
Alina:This is how we grow, right, by by, networking with other people and learning from each other's mistakes. And, yes, from everybody, if anyone if sorry. If anybody is interested in, testing our services and what we do, just message us saying that they're coming from your podcast. And, I cannot say an a fixed number because everything that we do is very custom, but I promise they will have a beautiful discount.
Josh:Get the royal treatment with Alina when you recommend when you reference the Ecom breakthrough podcast. So there you go.
Alina:Whatever is easier.
Josh:Alright. Well, Alina, thank you again so much for your time and, for sharing all these strategies. And I know our listeners will be following along in your journey.
Alina:Thank you so much.
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