Our guest on the 16th of March, 2020, on the sellerboard show was Norman Farrar from PR Reach.
We talked about Amazon Posts, a new “social network” built into amazon, which you can leverage to get free traffic to your listings. Norman shared with us how this process works and why it is a great opportunity to promote your products.
Watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNIxfoxkFQo&t=8s
[00:00:08] Hello, everybody, welcome to The sellerboard Show. My name is Vladi Gordon and my today’s guest is Norman Farrar. We’re going to talk about Amazon posts. Have you ever heard about Amazon posts? If no, then this is for you. It’s absolutely amazing. And this is an absolutely hot topic at the moment because Amazon posts are new. This is a kind of a social network which Amazon is integrating and into its platform. So it’s a way for sellers to post images and texts and to link those posts to products. Kind of an Instagram, if you will. And at the moment, it’s in beta. So it’s a good opportunity to get a lot of free traffic to your listings. So stay tuned. This is going to be really, really exciting. Norman told us everything you need to know about Amazon posts before we start. sellerboard.com is our profit analytics service for Amazon sellers, and our vision is to be the world’s most accurate and user friendly financial analytics service for four sellers. So it’s all you need in one package and it starts at nineteen dollars a month. There’s a one month free trial. Go ahead and give it a try. And there are some bonuses in this package as well. For example, and PPC Optimization Module, which will recommend bids based on your PPC performance. There’s a money back module which searches for FBA errors, cases where Amazon owes you money because they damaged or lost some of your products and did not reimburse you. There’s an inventory manager included which reminds you when it’s time to reorder product and a ton of other useful and cool stuff. So go out and check out our website seller board dot com. Now we’re starting to show.
[00:01:59] Hello, everybody, welcome to the next episode of The sellerboard Show, my name is Vladi Gordon and today I have Norman Farrar with us. Hi, Norman.
[00:02:07] Hey, how are you? I’m doing great, thanks. Thanks for joining. Oh, it was my pleasure. So, Norman, tell us, where are you based at the moment?
[00:02:17] In the background. Hawaii. In reality, in the cold.
[00:02:23] Well, actually, it’s snowing right now, but about two hours outside of Toronto.
[00:02:27] Ok. Nice. But this is a nice crowd.
[00:02:31] Oh, thanks. I said as my old home I wish I was at right now.
[00:02:35] Nice.
[00:02:37] Look, I think that would be a good idea for me as well because of what background is pretty boring.
[00:02:43] There you go. He could be anywhere in the world.
[00:02:46] That’s your economy. Yeah. So normal. Norman, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up in this Amazon universe?
[00:02:57] Sure. And this is the part I really usually hate because I hate talking about myself. But for Amazon, it’s kind of relevant. I’m a real mutt. I’ve been in the business for us. I’ve been actually in business since about the 80s. But I’ve been doing the Internet e-commerce since about 1980 mid. So my first site went up in the mid-nineties for a Fortune 500 company. But yeah, it just they asked me. I had no idea. I didn’t even know what the Internet was. But they said, hey, can you put up a Web site? And it was yeah. If it involved money. The answer was yes. So anyway, I started with that. Other companies saw what we did and they came to us because we were really one of the only companies doing it at the time. And then I got involved with outsourcing to India. We launched a Web site for print on demand and we were probably one of five companies at the time in the world that were online of from that my family opened up. So I got involved with a family business and opened up two factories in Taiwan, a couple of factories and in United States and over in in Canada where I am now.
[00:04:17] But the exposure we had. 15 years ago in China, nobody was there like nobody was there in Taiwan. Nobody was over there. It was really cool.
[00:04:27] So you open a real factory.
[00:04:29] Not like Fonda found one real, fully real factory. And all of our machinery was over there. We were doing even a phone like women’s cosmetic wipes.
[00:04:41] We were manufacturing cosmetic containers for Chanel and each seeing Le Wrong. We’re doing art supplies. But it was the it was the wild, wild west back then. Nobody was there. We were making a killing because I and I should back up. Technically, we’re not allowed to own a factory. So we had general managers that ran the factory for us and we had all our machinery there. But it was yeah, it was really cool at the time. Then after that, part of this expanded out into specialty packaging, warehousing, fulfillment. So what does this have to do with Amazon? Like everything. So when I went, I went with a buddy of mine to an ESM conference. And I think we’re part of Rapid Crash. We join their bonuses and we were sitting there and I’m sitting there going, oh, my gosh.
[00:05:35] This is everything I’ve done in my life. We’ve come together in Amazon. That’s perfect. When was it? What? What year was it? I think 13. I think that was the time. I forget now. It wasn’t that long ago. It might have been a little bit later than that, actually, but, um. Yeah. Is it around that time? Yeah. We put it this way. We started out my buddy and I in A.M. AM. That was the that was the beta testing basically for HSM. And then we jumped down around three I think. OK, fellowmen ever.
[00:06:14] That was a S M is the amazing selling machine. That was one of the first Muslim courses sold in the US in the world basically.
[00:06:24] Mm hmm. Right. So that’s where I got my start was through them,
[00:06:30] Ok. Yeah, maybe. What have you done since then? You’re still a seller? Or do you have any other businesses? Right.
[00:06:40] I’ve got a few businesses. So Amazon, I love Amazon and I think like one of my businesses is managed service business. And so to be in managed services, if I’m going to take care of other people’s brands or just like a larger brand or even some individual that’s, you know, looking for help, you have to sell on Amazon, because if you’re not selling on Amazon, you just don’t know what’s happening in Amazon. So that’s so that’s one area. Also got a press release company with Shane Arguello. So Shane and I met at an event and we start talking about press releases and content marketing and all that good stuff, influencer marketing. So we started something called a company called PR Reach. And then there’s another company I have, which is a really cool we were just talking about it is really cool sourcing logistics company called Whole New Lifestyle. So I am a firm believer in vertical integration. I like setting up like, you know, from ADC and kind of controlling everything in the middle.
[00:07:49] Ok. Very cool. Are you a seller yourself at the moment for sure?
[00:07:54] Yeah, I’ve got a few brands. You have to be. Yeah. If you’re not, I have to see what’s happening. I’ve got to see if my account suspended. I’ve got to see how I get out of that suspension. Yeah. I have a couple of burner accounts too. And you know, they might experiment a little bit with them. I’m not saying go out and do that, but you know, for me, I have to know and I have to know how to turn on a dime. I have to know. Hey, at Amazon post, what are they all about? Or, you know, whatever new thing that Amazon comes out with. Apply it to my accounts. And if it works, then, you know, tell other people about it.
[00:08:28] Cool. Look, I heard an interesting buzz word is that Amazon boasts. Oh, yeah. Well, biggest thing out there right now. Actually, I’ve never heard about it. I was going to ask you about your start and how you launch products. But let’s let’s talk about this for a second. So what is what is it?
[00:08:44] Was oh, my gosh. So Amazon Amazon had a failed social media program called Sparks. It was a disaster. So all it was, was you would post what you bought. So, you know, being more narcissistic, you know, oh, this is what I bought. What do you think? It failed?
[00:09:03] Was it a social? Was it like Facebook? It will be within Amazon. OK. Like within your listing on Amazon.
[00:09:13] So that failed. And then Nike left them. When? About the time when there was heated words going back and forth. Nike was saying no. There was no community. There was no ability to grow a brand. They weren’t interested. And and Amazon shot back. You know, there was a lot of bad, bad blood between the two. One week after they left, they started something called Amazon Post. And it was their their social media platform to bring out a community and the ability to build a brand. So this is it’s still beta. Hardly anybody is using it. And it’s an incredible way to generate. Hundreds or thousands of new traffic and high converting clicks.
[00:10:03] Oh, my God. OK. So what? Oh, how could I find it? Is it like both of them without you go? That’s exactly it.
[00:10:09] So, first of all, you have to go into your cell or central account. Scroll down and enable it. Let’s just say post. It’s it’s default. At least a few weeks ago, it was still defaulted at none. And then you have to go to enable or whatever it is. I think it’s a view at it.
[00:10:26] Ok. So you do know exactly where it is. So know when I went to post Amazon.com, it says, OK, thanks for your interest. This is in beta. Yes. So do you know exactly what I need to click on the seller Central to enable it.
[00:10:40] It’s if you if you just scroll down, you’ll see the word post. OK. And then you just enable it. And then once that’s enabled, you go to post dot Amazon. You sign in using your normal southcentral account. Then you have to create a profile. And what’s nice is you can create a logo. Your name automatically populates. And then once that’s set up, you can start posting. So it’ll say create a post. Now, post is set up with basically five different elements. You’ve got the logo in your brand name. You’ve got the image which the image can be three different sizes. I think it’s 16 by 9, four by three and one by one. And you just mix it up, use you know, use whatever image that you want. Then you’ve got in an area for a caption which allows you to see two lines. But I don’t know how many the character count is because they’re two lines is different on different phones.
[00:11:47] Ok, but it’s all kind of like Instagram, right?
[00:11:50] Right. It’s their version of Instagram. OK. So with that, you can see two lines, but you can have up to 20, 200 characters. So all it’s going to say is see more, read more. This is where Amazon did something really smart. It says show product. And when you click on show product listing, you’re listing drops down. And then if you click on the listing, it goes over to your product listing. Now, this is how smart. I mean. They wanted to make sure that people that clicked on the product listing. There was a buy. So typically, if you go in and you see a picture and you click on it once. OK. OK. It’s a nice pretty picture. But if you click on it and it goes to another post and you click on show product and it shows another dropdown and then you click on the listing, you’ve got to be pretty committed to buying the product. Yeah. So we’ve shown and there’s no sales measurement, but we’ve shown on acounts where we think it’s about 30 percent convert 25 to 30 percent conversion rate. Oh my God. Yeah. And the other huge thing about this, so we’ve got this this one company we just did it with.
[00:13:10] We said, hey, you got to do it. It’s too much work. It’s not too much work. It’s really simple. You can use this exact same stuff you’re doing for social media. We’re getting on average twenty thousand views in about three to four days. And one of our images just I was on a podcast the other day talking about Amazon posts. I said, oh, we just publishes it was eighty seven thousand views.
[00:13:34] And that’s for free or it’s free. Oh, my God.
[00:13:39] Yeah. And so. Eighty seven thousand posts are eddies that seven thousand views. The one below it was twenty nine thousand twenty eight thousand twenty three thousand. And these are all on the same day. Hundred thousand views. Over a hundred thousand views. And you said like 30 percent conversion. Oh, OK. So there’s the click through rate. Click, click, click rate is very low because you’ve got to click that either they’ve set it up three times or four times. So you’ve got to click the post. You’ve got to click on it again. Well, you’ve got to click, show, show product. And then when you see the product, you’ve got to go to the list.
[00:14:18] Got it. OK. So 30 percent conversion is relative to the clicks that you get.
[00:14:24] Look, relative to the clicks and the clicks are very low. But if you get people like the one for eighty seven thousand, we had two hundred and fifty seven clicks. Well OK. I’m looking at about 30 percent and the product was one hundred dollar product and it was for free and. The big bonus part, OK, is that you see it on your listing. But guess what? It shows up on your competitors listing for free.
[00:14:58] Tell me more about this like Culkin. How can I see it as a customer? Where do you see that all?
[00:15:03] You see if you can go to any mobile app. OK, well, your app is on mobile app, on iPhone, on Android, whatever. You and you log in and you type in anything so you can type in like bully sticks or chef knife. And you’ll you’ll scroll down and where the first section is when you see it. It’s below the EBC. It’s under customers who frequently bought this. And then you’ll see your brand name if you’re doing it. So X-Y see more of X, Y, Z. So it tells you your brand.
[00:15:42] There’s a carousel of about 10 posts from you or fifteen. And then it and it’s also it’s just above the questions. Now, if you scroll down further, this is where you don’t want to see it on your brand. But if you scroll down further past the reviews. So the very last thing I’ll say, related posts and these are where your competitors are. But if your competitors aren’t doing anything, they’ll never show up on your page. They’re not doing anything on their listing. You will show up on their page. Now, there’s no one Amazon doesn’t allow you to at this point, pick the competitor. Their rhythm go up and it’ll place you into what they think are related niches, your competitors related niche.
[00:16:31] Yes. But this is only available in mobile, right? Only on mobile. Yeah. OK. And only in the app. Also on the mobile. What’s.
[00:16:41] Yes, that’s correct. And I mean, I think that I don’t know if it will ever switch over to desktop because more and more and more like the majority right now is on mobile. So I don’t think they’ll ever be working with desktop on this.
[00:16:58] Well, Instagram is mobile, right? So they’re right. Exactly. Might be a role.
[00:17:04] But the amount of exposure you get, like it’s all carrousel driven. So when you when you click on it, like when it says more from X, Y, Z brand, it’s all you can cross-promote. So I’ve got other products. Yeah. And it’s very visual. So it’s also dependent on your content. Well, you know, this is where you want to get social sharing. And. Yeah, yeah. Like people. People. You can. You can show features. You can show benefits. You can show ingredients. You can show cross promoting of different products. So like on a knife company, you might have a paring knife, a steak knife and a butcher’s knife. You know, just to show. And then I think it’s really important for lifestyle. So, Candy. Or Polish lifestyle photography.
[00:17:58] So tell me, like those some eighty seven thousand views. Did you get them from basically from the competitors because they need to click on a product, right.
[00:18:08] Either on your product or a competitor’s brought.
[00:18:10] See this carousel right now you’re going to get my secret. So we we we published for this client four to five times a day. OK. OK. Four to five times a day. And I mean, it could be a listing like one off your slide deck. It could be an image from your EBC to get started. But we go out and we get a ton of influencers and they, you know, happy showing the product. And we just plug it every day and we end with the night company, too. We did recipes. So we showed in the two in the in the display. It’s called the comment section. We show that there was a recipe. And every day there was a new recipe with these knives. Well, what did that do? Anybody who started to do this as a competitor against us, we just pushed them down the list. So and the higher the conversion, Amazon is going to promote your image more. So we’re dominating that right now in the knife category.
[00:19:19] But I like did I get you right? Those carousels are only shown on product pages, right?
[00:19:26] You know, the showing in four different areas. Oh, come on, pick it up and they will put it onto a product listing page. OK. On your product listing page. That’s where if you scroll down the first. So the first one is you’ll see real more from X, Y, Z brand. When you click on that, that goes to another page which shows more of your product. Now a tip. This is a little bonus if you use a sweet 16 by 9 image. It will push down your competitor on that page and they won’t see it. All they’ll see is your or your so your post.
[00:20:11] If you don’t and you say you say he’s one by one, you’ll be able to see your competitor. So, you know, they can scroll down. So it starts off showing you first and then you can scroll all the way down and you can see different competitors at that point. So that’s the second one. This the third one is actually showing up on your competitor’s listing. And the fourth one is when you hit show show more. So there’s four different show, Ma.
[00:20:41] We’ll have a dropdown which will take you over to a listing, but not like they do not show it on the Amazon’s home page or on the search results today.
[00:20:52] I know it’s not uncertain result.
[00:20:53] Ok. OK, so.
[00:20:55] So the traffic is either basically either your your posts exposed to your customers who clicked on your product or they click on a competitor’s product. But that’s basically that’s a that’s an amazing, amazing method to advertise to competitors. Customers. Right.
[00:21:15] I mean, what you’re hoping is that the competitor doesn’t do that to you. Yeah, but I would probably I’m picking a number out of the air, probably. Ninety five percent of Amazon sellers will not do this. And they won’t. They might do it once a week. They might do it once a month. I’m saying like we picked up. Thousands, thousands and thousands and thousands of new clicks. And I’m thinking 30 percent of that board will do so. And this is after after the Christmas holidays. I mean, we’ve just continued to you know, we’ve just crushed the sales from last year. So and it’s all do I think it’s all due to the posts? We do rebates. So, you know, rebates, if we’re targeting some keywords, we’ll do that. But Amazon posts is just a free way of, you know, really just nailing your competitor well.
[00:22:18] So I think it’s probably it’s early days. It’s still in beta. Right. And now it’s kind of a gold rush. And this wasn’t posts.
[00:22:25] So probably it will get more crowded soon. All right. Don’t know. Maybe not so soon. But, guys, you have to try this. Absolutely. I think that’s that’s a good way to basically generate sales for free. That’s the man. Very cool. So do you actually offer any help with this or you mentioned your company, your full service company. Do you have a package focused on that as well or.
[00:22:54] So we. We have. We’ll take care of all of that. So we will do the Amazon posts. This is all part of the PR rich side of things. So PR, which is a communications company. So we’ll take care of setting that up for you. We have an agreement with forty thousand photographers, so we’ll be able to go out and get lifestyle photography done if you want for any. Thousand for 0 0 0 0 thousand photographers. And so there are lifestyle photographers. These are people that will take shots with your product. We also have a large group of influencers that will post their product on their blog or wherever you want them to post it. So we have that. And we also like we do a blend so we can do the posts. The Amazon posts side of things. We can take care of social media, but we love Amazon posts and you can use any of the Amazon post that we create on your social media. If you’ve got that platform going, any of those platforms going and as well as we’ve got, I think it’s the first in the world we’ve got a rebate management system that we take the best of five or six rebate companies from an app to concierge service. So people will actually go in and type, you know, the search find by not just and also, by the way, like the like a seller chat bot where you have an evergreen flow. So I don’t think there’s another company out there doing actually the management of rebates because rebates can be real complicated and we tie that into press releases and then part of that. So there’s for the last launch strategy or the post rebates and we can also do the PPC.
[00:24:52] Ok. Well, that sounds like a great package. So I will include the link in the description, but what’s what’s the link to it? Right.
[00:25:00] For somebody, if you want to check it out, it’s just PR reach dot com. You can see the information on the page. What I’m going to do is I’ll create a custom link for for anybody that’s listening to the podcast, take advantage of a special discount for you.
[00:25:14] All right. Cool, guys. That is in description. So we’ll go in and click on the link in the description. Thank you so much for watching, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If so, then please press the like button and let us know in the comments what you think about Amazon posts and what your experiences with this new exciting tool. And I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Have a great day.
