Amazon Product Listing Optimization
Sellers can do Amazon product listing optimization by following specific guidelines when creating their product page. A product’s title, images, introduction, description, bullet points, questions and answers, reviews, and tags are all things that can be optimized to potentially increase Amazon sales. And for our most recent recommendations, check out our easy Amazon listing hacks!
Amazon Product Listing Optimization
Matt Clark was live at Amazing.com’s headquarters to introduce Jason Katzenback and Mike McClary in a video where they teach sellers how to optimize their Amazon product listing. An optimized Amazon listing can create a buyer friendly experience and can help increase a seller’s Amazon product ranking. This subsequently enables customers to decide to buy more quickly, and helps more buyers find the product page.
A product listing can be optimized on both the front and backend. According to McClary and Katzenback, the essential points for optimizing your Amazon listing are:
- Title
- Images
- Product bullet points description
- Q & A
- Reviews
On the back end, SEO tags should be optimized to improve rankings.
Amazon Product Title
The title is the very first point of contact that the consumer will have with the product and brand. It should display the product’s brand name together with keywords gathered during keyword research. It should display the product’s noteworthy features.
Product Images
Images should be clean, crisp, and high quality. They are as important as the title, because images can quickly entice people to buy.
Product Introduction
The product introduction should be relatable to the customer. Make sure you address customer pain points, and tell them what’s in it for them—add descriptive bullet points of the products key features and benefits.
Amazon Product Description
Your product description is the more detailed version of the product’s functionalities, so it should be detailed and focused. This section of your Amazon listing page allows images, infographics, and text to give customers a concise description of the product being sold. The product description section can help with the listing’s ranking since the words in it are searchable in other search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Q & A and Reviews Sections
The questions you will tend to receive are direct and straightforward consumer pain points. They can usually be resolved within a minute or two. These pain points, if handled smoothly and honestly, may help direct more customers to your page. Provide solid, helpful responses and answers to customer inquiries to allow consumers to know your brand on a more personal level.
Amazon Search Terms Optimization
Search terms are the tags that drive traffic to your page. When creating your tags, it is important to know Amazon’s tagging rules. Make sure that you understand the difference between search keywords and buying keywords, in order to utilize the allowable character limit efficiently.
An optimized product listing can potentially lead to more conversions, better rankings, and possibly better profit margins (since a seller can optimize their listing to increase conversions, instead of spending more money on paid search or sponsored advertisements). Read the detailed video transcript below or watch the full video above, to learn more!
“How to Optimize an Amazon Listing” Complete Video Transcript
Matt: We’re at the Amazing.com headquarters here in Austin, Texas. If you’ve been watching, you’ve been noticing that we’ve been talking a lot about selling on Amazon here on Facebook Live. We’ve covered so far of things like product selection. We’ve demoed some hot products. We’ve even talked about suppliers, how to find suppliers anywhere in the world. Well, the next big step of this is once you’ve got a product, once you’ve got a supplier, now you have to figure out how to make things work on Amazon. How do you make your product stand out versus everyone else?
Well, the cool thing is today have two very special people. We have Jason Katzenback, the other co-founder of Amazing.com. We have Mike McClary who is now a co-creator of Amazing selling machine, been very successful. They both sold millions of dollars on Amazon. They’re going to show you right here live how to optimize an Amazon product listing so that you stand out against the biggest brands on Amazon. I’m going to go ahead and hand it off to these guys. Here they are. Mike and Jason, take it away.
Jason Katzenback: Thanks, Matt. I really appreciate it. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the call. Today, we’re going to be teaching you how to optimize an Amazon listing so that you can make sure you’re getting the best conversions, the best rankings and all that stuff that you can get from the benefits of being able to optimize your listing and being rewarded through the results that Amazon gives you. Before we do that, however, we wanted to remind you that this is part of a training series that’s related to the Amazing selling machine where you can get four free videos plus a whole bunch of stuff we’re going to get into in a minute that can teach you from the start to finish of exactly what this business model is of how to find products, of how to find suppliers, of how to then once you have all those things put it together and be able to get it on Amazon and start selling.
Not only do we give you four free videos during this, but we also have some incredible downloads. Maybe, Mike, you can share what they get if you go to Amazing selling machine.
Mike McClary: Yes. Sure. Like Jason was saying, it’s not just the training that we’re giving you. We’re actually giving you real assets that you can use when you are done watching these to go start your own business. The first video, we teach you how to find products, but we also give you a list of a hundred hot product opportunities that you can go out look right now. They’re all selling making tens if not hundreds of thousand dollars a month on Amazon right now. We’re going to give you exactly what countries are the best to sell in. If you live in a country, you’re not sure if you can sell in there, we’re going to give you a list of all the countries that you can sell in and what the requirements are.
We take away all the questions. We’re going to show you exactly how to get set up from that country. Then, in addition to that, we’re also going to tell you, which categories in Amazon are the best ones to start off with because some are great. Some are just good. We’re going to give you the great ones to give you the best chances for really making sales going.
Then, the second video, it’s a lot about finding suppliers. That’s another key part of the business. We’re going to tell you exactly how to find suppliers from anywhere in the world. You don’t get to leave your home or your desk. We’ll show you exactly how to find that. We also tell you exactly what to save them. We’re going to give you email templates, emails that Jason and myself we use when we’re emailing them. We’ll tell you exactly what to say to them. Then, we also share something else. We share the same freight forwarder and so does Matt Clark, so does rich Henderson. We’re going to give you a recording of an actual interview we did with our freight forwarder to answer all the questions you might have about how do I ship a product from overseas, but that’s you find it. We’ll take away the mystery and show you how that’s done.
Then, in video number three, we talk about launching your product to the top of Amazon. What we give you there is my exact blueprint we’ve updated here in 2018 on the rapid ranking system for getting your product to the very top of the search results in as little as five days on Amazon. It’s a great blueprint that you can follow. You can download it, just step by step launch your product and get selling today.
Then, in the fourth video, we show you how to really speed things up and automate this whole process and get the best chance for success.
Jason Katzenback: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it. On today’s call, what we’re going to cover again is how to optimize an Amazon listing pretty much to be able to get the best rankings, the best conversions, and the best benefit you possibly can because what happens here is a lot of people just assume that you can just throw a product up on Amazon and make sales. They think the hard part, pardon me, is finding the product. Then, once they have the product, they just throw it up, but that’s really just the first step. The reality is Amazon is, first of all, a search engine.
Just like Google, just like any of those other search engines, you need to be optimized to be able to fit within the boundaries of how that platform Amazon wants you to be optimized meaning what they expect from you and the title, the description, the bullet points and all those kind of things, but then you also have the consumer. When you’re shopping online, you don’t have the luxury of being in like a Target where you can go pick a product off the shelf, inspect it, look at it and feel it. Online, it’s all visual.
What you have to do is not only comply with what Amazon wants you to do when you’re listing. You have to figure out how to optimize your listing in such a way that the consumer wants your product because it’s one thing to just say, okay, Amazon wants a title, wants these images, wants all this stuff, but if it doesn’t relate to the consumer, you’re not going to get any sales. If you don’t get any sales, that means little conversions and Amazon’s not going to reward you. However, if you have a high optimized listing, you can be rewarded all over the place on Amazon. They’re going to give you. They’re going to feature you. They’re going to lift you up in the rankings. You’re going to get more traffic because Amazon’s going to see this is a profitable product to us. We need to make sure we give it preferential treatment.
That’s why people have bestseller badges. That’s why people have now as we’ll show you on here, I believe, Amazon’s choice like Amazon’s rewarding people for being able to be very successful on conversions and ranking. That all starts with being able to have an optimized listing. Maybe what we can do we’ll start off is we’re going to show you good listings versus bad listings so that you can get an idea into what there is when you’re optimizing a listing, there’s a frontend optimization and a backend optimization. Maybe, we’ll just give a brief overview. Mike, maybe you can do this. Just explain the difference of what the backend optimization versus the frontend.
Mike McClary: Yeah. The front end is basically everything that we as buyers see on Amazon. You see the title. You see the images. You see the bullet points. You see the product description. Actually, you see the reviews. That’s another part of the frontend you don’t really think about. Those are the kind of things that are very forward facing to the customer, things like all [inaudible 00:06:16]. We’re going to tell you exactly how to optimize those things are right in front of you how to get the best way to present your product to the world.
Now, on the backend, if you’ve never sold on Amazon, probably like you haven’t done that before, there’s nothing to be worried about. In the backend, there’s some really cool things you can do as well. One of the most important things are your search terms or the keywords that you feel people are looking for when finding your product. There’s a section inside of Amazon. You go and then you put in all your keywords that you want people to really see your product when they’re searching for. You have to do it the right way.
If you don’t know how to do this and it’s not overly complicated, but if you don’t know the tricks to it, you could literally be missing out on tens if not hundreds of thousand dollars in sales. To bring this back to the real world, when we talk about product listing optimization, I know we all get a general idea like, yeah, it makes us more sales. It makes our product look better, but realistically, what does that mean to you? We had members just last year that we talked to them about their listing at a live event that we had. We taught them one simple tweak on the back and the search terms. That meant tens of thousands of dollars in profits for them by making that one little tweak.
Jason Katzenback: The interesting thing about that with this one little tweak was these were already people that were selling pretty decent for selling very well. They thought they had it all like they had an optimized listening that everything was great. When we looked at it and instantly Mike found this one little thing they could improve on. The next day, they came back to us. They said they had a 30% increase in sales already right away and how it improved and what it meant for their entire year. It was incredible.
That brings us back to exactly my point is how you have to satisfy Amazon, but you also have to satisfy the consumer. With Amazon, for example, they have it so that your backend keywords, you’re limited to the amount of characters you can use. I believe it’s 250K.
Mike McClary: Yeah, 250 over five lines so 50 characters in each line.
Jason Katzenback: But if you go over that, Amazon doesn’t use any of the keywords. You give them exactly what they want. First, you give them what they want, but then you have to make sure you’re using what the consumers are actually using. You have to understand what terms that you should have in there. You have to understand because you can just say any keyword. For example, this product that we have right here, which we’re going to show you, is an optimized listing. You might assume, okay, facial cleansing brush because that’s what I think this product is. That’s what it should be optimized for, but that’s one of the things that we’ll get into.
You actually can use Amazon itself so that you optimize your listing initially. It’s as good as you think. Then, you start Amazon’s tools like sponsored ads. Then, Amazon tells you exactly, “No, these are the keywords that convert best for your product.” You should take these keywords now and re-optimize your listing because these are the buying keyword because there’s a difference between search keywords and buying keywords. For some reason, it doesn’t matter what type of product. Certain keywords will convert on certain products better than others. It has nothing to do with what the functionality of the product or anything. It all has to do with the packaging and the branding.
You can never assume that what the best way to optimize your listing is. That’s where the power of Amazon comes in because you can do all this research, optimize it. Then, you allow Amazon to then tell you over the next couple of weeks, “No, this is really what you need to optimize it for.” Then, you re-optimize your listing take advantage of that and you’ll definitely see a skyrocket in results. I overtalked you there. I know we’re [crosstalk 00:09:45] we were talking about backend keywords, backend optimization. Then, let’s talk about front-end optimization. [crosstalk 00:09:51].
We talked about what it is, but I think it’s a perfect time to get into a real example of it. What we wanted to do is we’re going to show you an awesome optimized page. Then, we’re going to show you a pretty good optimized page. Now, we’re going to show you a poorly optimized page. Our hope from this is that from this not only will you learn how to optimize an Amazon listing, but you’ll also really be able to see the differences of what they are because it’s one thing learning the steps, but it’s another touch. You visually understand it and connect the dots.
The first thing we’ll talk about is always the most important when it comes to your listing. That is …
Mike McClary: I would say the title the title.
Jason Katzenback: The title. Exactly. The title as you can see is where it says this thing right on top where it’s the … I don’t even want to say the word. What is that? What is that?
Mike McClary: ETEREAUTY.
Jason Katzenback: ETEREAUTY facial brush waterproof body facial cleansing. This is an excellent listing. When we say an excellent listing that means that there … All the components of the listing have been optimized perfectly. Again, it starts with the title. Now, maybe you can explain what optimizing a title looks like?
Mike McClary: Yeah. There’s two things to think about when you’re creating the title for your product. One thing is what is the customer going to see? When you go to buy a product you want a title that tells you what that product is. You want to have a brand name in there. You want to have a very clean professional-looking name. If you look the very beginning of this product right here, the ETEREAUTY facial brush. That first part tells you what the product is.
Now, that makes you have some real confidence that this is a good product. It has a real brand that’s creating it. It’s not just some guy creating this product in his basement. It has to look like a very good real product that you could buy off the shelves of Target or Walmart or any high-end store. That’s what you want to have front facing to the customer, a title that looks really good.
Now, on the other end of it, you also want to have keywords in your title because Amazon places the most importance out of your entire listing as far as what it shows up for in search results based upon what words are in your title. Facial brush is the number one searched term on Amazon when they want to buy a product like this. You want to make sure that you have facial brush in your listing, in the listing title and as close to the front as possible. The keywords have to be in there and it still has to be a really well-written and a good-looking title.
It’s a balance because the more keywords you have in there the more searches you’ll show up in, but if you have a 50-word title that has all these different keywords stuffed into there, I know I wouldn’t buy that product. I would feel like, “Wow. They’re really trying to just game the system on Amazon and this product looks like something that they’re, all they care about is just getting as many keywords as possible in there.”
Jason Katzenback: Absolutely. What I wanted to show you here what I have in the background is the reason why the title is so important is because it’s also one of the first things people see when they’re searching for products on Amazon. If you have a well-optimized title and as you see I typed in facial brush and right away this one is the bestseller. One of the reasons it’s the bestseller because as soon as you look at the listing, you can tell right away with the title, it is a facial brush waterproof body facial cleansing.
It tells you, it explained, it gives you that answer. It gets your attention and pulls you in because I’m looking for a facial brush this is a facial brush, but it actually reads well. If you just saw a facial brush, facial brush, facial cleansing brush like just keyword stuffing, it wouldn’t explain anything to me. I guarantee you wouldn’t get the good results. You want to be able to not only optimize so you rank for Amazon, but you need to remember that real people are reading this, real people need to be attracted to your listing so you need to word it in such a way that real people will want to click on it.
I don’t know if you have anything else to add on that?
Mike McClary: No. Not on the title.
Jason Katzenback: How many keywords would you recommend you optimize a title for?
Mike McClary: I like optimizing for somewhere around 5 to 10 keywords. Again, now, when we talk about a keyword, sometimes it could be one word like brush is a keyword, however, I like optimizing for two to three-word keywords. Facial brush to me is much more specific and that’s much different than a hairbrush that one might be searching for. Two-word keywords are really good to optimize for because they give you enough specificity, but they’re not too vague and I like to keep it [inaudible 00:13:58] somewhere around five or maybe a few more than that.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah. Cool. Then, the next step is the next most important thing is your images, and the way Amazon allows you to show images is you have a featured image, which is the image that is the first thing people see when they come on the listing. But as I showed you earlier, just a moment ago, it’s also the image that’s provided the … That’s neat. I didn’t see that before. It’s also the image that’s provided when people search on Amazon and that image comes up.
Your title in your primary image also become like a classified ad. They become an advertisement so that when people are searching on Amazon, you want to come up in the listing and be the product they want and this is why images are so critical because a professional-looking image that is crisp, clean, and really shows the product in a good light is huge. It will help you with better click-through rates to your listing and better conversions.
Let’s maybe touch on what a good image and why this is a good image. Could you do that?
Mike McClary: Now, here we go.
Jason Katzenback: There we go.
Mike McClary: On this image right here what you’re saying it’s a, they have an all-white background, which is one of the rules of Amazon. They’re going to tell you always put a crisp, clean image on top of a white background that way the product itself jumps out at you. Now, in addition to that, you’ll notice they’ve done a few other things here that maybe kind of on the edge what Amazon want you to do and generally, you probably shouldn’t put any words on your first image, but they’ve done it very, they’re just calling out a key feature, which probably isn’t, it’s a great selling point for the customer.
People want to use this in the shower. They want to know it’s waterproof, they want to know it’s going to last so they call that out in the upper right-hand corner. In addition, this is a waterproof product so they have done some graphic manipulation here and put some water surrounding that. Now, what that does for me, when I see that listing, that image compared to all the other brushes out there that jumps out at me.
In addition to showing that it’s waterproof, they’re using that to really catch the buyer’s attention when showing that image.
Jason Katzenback: An example I want to use of that where I saw immediate results early in my business was this one. I started selling on Amazon, it would have been five years ago now. I was selling the exact same product as the manufacturer, but I ended up just putting in a little patch of raspberries beside the product and made it completely different but all of sudden it had this natural feel and it was a raspberry related product and my conversion skyrocket. I became the best-selling product for Ketones at the time on Amazon.
I’ve since gotten out of that market, but that was just proof to me how important the images were. I changed nothing else on my listing except I updated the image and it made a huge difference. We say the title is the most important, but really it’s really close between the images and the title because the title will get them in, but if the images are like totally off and don’t … Yeah, and we call them actually … What do we … I’m drawing a blank on the name, but we call …
Mike McClary: The secondary image?
Jason Katzenback: Yeah.
Mike McClary: Yeah. I call them secondary or lifestyle images.
Jason Katzenback: Lifestyle images. Thank you very much. You want lifestyle images, maybe explain what lifestyle images.
Mike McClary: The primary image per Amazon’s rules and the most important thing, you show the product. They want to see the product, however, what we know from years of selling is that what people really want to see is they want to see people using the product. How is it going to change their life? How is it going to make their life better? What this company has done a really good job with this listening, they’re showing someone using this product. That way as a buyer, I can imagine myself using that product and getting the great results just like this lady in this picture is getting right there.
It’s so powerful to have a lifestyle image and multiple lifestyle images in your product listing. Now, I want to mention one other thing too, you also touch an awesome point about you talk about the title being the most important thing, but there is a school of thought where a lot of people tell you that the image is the most important thing. Let me tell you the reasoning for why I think the title is probably edges it out a little bit.
The title is going to catch the buyer’s attention and it’s going to catch Amazon’s attention to make sure that people see your product. If you don’t have a good title, you won’t show up in any of the listings. Now, the image, however, that’s really what a customer is going to see. What that’s going to do is once you have a good title and your product showing up, the image will catch their attention, get them to click on it, and then, hopefully, buy the product. It is just about as important as a title I would say.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah. I actually wanted … I hesitated at first when I was saying which one was more important. The reality is everything we’re going to show you is very important, but there definitely are factors that will get you better results on Amazon that affect results more, but really the title and the images are close.
Mike McClary: On the images, I want to point out … Could you click on the second image for me there? What the seller here has done is they’ve created something called an infographic. These used to be on the gray area as far as what Amazon’s concerned because, again, I’d mentioned they don’t really want words or special badges or graphics in your product images. Well, they’ve clarified that recently and they don’t want that on your primer, your very first image that shows up on the search results, however, all the other images like these lifestyle images are secondary images and infographic can be very powerful and actually helps the consumer buying experience.
It tells them all different kinds of features about the product. It may give them instructions on how to use the product and this right here, they actually have several different infographics on this listing, they’re great because, again, they’re telling you so much about the products. You don’t even have to read anything. I could see the image and I could just go through the different images and I would know enough about this product probably to make a buying decision.
Jason Katzenback: Your goal here is to be able to get people to want to choose your product over the competition. There is so many competitors out there, you need to be able to rise above the noise and be the reason that they choose you because a lot of these products are very much identical. Yeah, they do some different tweaks, but at the end of the day they pretty much would do the same thing, and so, the difference is what you do from a communication standpoint of how you present the product to the end-user and that’s why it’s so important that you optimize your title and your images, not to what you think they should be, but what your customers think they should.
That means doing research, making sure that you understand, first of all, what the product is but what the benefits, and the reason I’m leading into this is the next step is people want to know what’s in it for me. For example, they’re buying a makeup brush and in the beginning, especially, there’s a lot of people that would have just shown the package of the product. We actually have one here where right there that would have been the primary image and that’s all they would have done.
It’s like this is the product this is what I’m selling, but people need to understand, first of all, that’s why we call them lifestyle images, how it relates to me, but the biggest thing there is how does it benefit me? What advantage? What’s in it for me? That’s where now the next step is you’ve got the bullet points, the features, and benefits that products have.
When you’re searching on Amazon, whether you’re on mobile or on text there’s something called the above-the-fold. What happens is in business and marketing you want it like newspapers and you think when a newspaper was folded in half the biggest most expensive part to ever have in a newspaper was that front section above the fold because people didn’t have to take any action, they simply looked at the newspaper and they could see the news was right there.
Well, on a website above-the-fold means before someone scrolls, before someone has to engage with the page, what is the information they see? The above-the-fold is the most critical point because as you can see above-the-fold not only tells you the title, it not only gives you the images, but it has the Add to Cart button right there. It’s right there so that’s telling you that Amazon saying that a lot of people make buying choices without ever scrolling on the page. They’re putting everything there so that people can make as much of an informed decision as possible and that’s where the title, the image is, but also right here, the about the product.
I think they have different names for that sometimes. Sometimes I think it does say benefits?
Mike McClary: Yea. Sometimes features and benefits and … Go ahead.
Jason Katzenback: No. You go ahead.
Mike McClary: Sometimes, I know this one right here, on this listing. Things are category specific. This is a health and beauty product. There are electronic category, sports and fitness, sports and outdoors, there are different ways Amazon presents the product to you. On most products, the features and benefits these bullet points are above-the-fold like Jason is talking about. Amazon’s always testing so with healthcare related products, they’ve decided that they’re going to move these down a little bit and make you click on it to show all of the five bullet points.
Jason Katzenback: That’s important too. Amazon will display listings for different categories even in the same category just depending on how you get to the page sometimes things are different like search results and everything so they’re always split testing, which is a huge benefit to us because they’re always trying to figure out how to get people to buy more products. That’s one of the advantages of leveraging Amazon.
When you have the features and benefits saying, “The big thing here is remember, don’t … What you need to do is you need to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and understand what are their pain points, what are the reasons, what are the emotional regions that they’re buying this?” You might think it’s a facial brush, what are their emotional reasons? But maybe they’re frustrated because they can’t figure out like this says here a complete face and body cleansing system.
Right away, it’s like, “Oh, finally, like I need a complete system. I don’t want just face soap, I’m looking for a complete system.” Two-speed motor delivers thorough cleanses. That one I’m actually, I think they could do better on like really what’s in it for me, a two-speed motor, but what my point here is what they’re doing and they’re obviously doing very well because they’re selling very well, is they’re telling you right away what the benefit to you is.
It’s fully waterproof. There’s no risk with purchase. It’s got a full range of attachments, but I think what they could even do better even though this is a good listing is really connect it to the emotional side. A full range of attachments so what does that mean to me? A full range of attachment so. I would end it up like I would say the feature like the features is a full range of attachments, but what’s the benefit to me? Say that, like explain that right away, is the benefit that this is a full range of attachment so you can clean your whole body from head-to-toe, maybe that’s the reason because I don’t understand why there’s all these attachments. Your job is to tell them.
Now, then there is, you see where they’re capitalized, we usually tell people to try to put the benefit. What’s the benefit to me? Then, the rest of it is where they expand on that and actually this is part of this helps with keyword rankings, right?
Mike McClary: Yeah. Absolutely. Bullet points.
Jason Katzenback: Maybe you can go into a little bit more of the bullet points?
Mike McClary: Yeah. I was going to mention also on the bullet points what some people do is they’ll ask the question at the beginning. Tired of having to use multiple devices to clean your face or tired of not having enough attachments when you’re trying to clean your face.
Jason Katzenback: Much better.
Mike McClary: Tired of having to jump out of the shower in order to clean your face. This one you can do it right in the shower. They put the pain point right in front of you, ask you the question, and they make you think, “Yeah. I am tired of having to get out of shower to clean my face.” That’s a great way to do exactly what Jason was talking about.
Now, so one of the other benefits though to bring it back at the keyword ranking, we talked about the title, we mentioned the backend search terms that we also need to make sure our keywords are in, bullet points are the third most important feature on your listing when it comes to search ranking. If you have a keyword that you really want to start ranking for and it doesn’t fit well in the title that we talked about, you don’t want a spam-looking title you fit every keyword in there.
Let’s say that, but you still want the customer to read this, you still want to rank for something. For example, let’s talk about in the in a shower. Multi-attachment, that could be something that people are looking for, multiple attachments. Put that in the bullet points and people searching for it, you will rank for keywords in the bullet points. It’s another great place to put keywords.
Jason Katzenback: The whole thing with keywords as well, again, it’s not just for Amazon, but there’s also a psychological trigger for people when they’re shopping so if they type facial cleanser system and this system and this product comes up and they see in there a few times that that keyword is in the listing, it also reconfirms to the buyer, “Yes. This is a facial cleansing system.” It ties it both ends so it helps you with the rankings, but it also helps close the loop for the consumer to say, “Yes, this is exactly what I’m looking for.”
Other cool thing about, one of the things you want to be is you don’t want to hide, you don’t want it like … You want your users to have the best customer experience possible. Amazon is all about customers. It doesn’t look at competitors, it looks at how are we making our customers happy and that’s one of the secrets of its success. You want to follow that. It’s a great, great thing to follow because at the end of the day, the consumers, the customers are who are giving you their funds. You need to be able to make them happy.
That starts with being is clear upfront on the product experience from the beginning so with this example why I’m saying that is it says, “Requires four AA batteries not included.” Don’t think that’s a negative like it’s a positive because if I know, okay, at least, I’m not expecting this to come with batteries that helps me with my experience because now it’s saying, okay, I’m going to have to buy batteries to come with this. Because if I bought this thought there was battery as it came [inaudible 00:26:53] there’s no batteries and I didn’t have batteries and I was super excited to get it, I’d be so frustrated.
You want to make sure in your bullets not only are you telling them the benefits and features, but you also want to make sure you highlight certain things so the experience, in general, is just better.
Mike McClary: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s going to make your reviews stay consistently high. You don’t want negative reviews and the higher reviews are the higher, the higher you convert, and then, that conversion rate is depending on how many people will visit your product and how many people buy. You want as many people as possible to buy it.
Jason Katzenback: Absolutely. If you’re just joining us, I just want to bring it back in that we have a completely free training series of four. They’re about 30 minutes each the training [crosstalk 00:27:30] there’s 4 of them, you get completely free if you go to amazingsellingmachine.com that walks you through this entire business model, plus we have a boatload of free downloads for you that are exceptionally, exceptionally high quality. There’s an interview with a freight forwarder, there’s action plans, there’s blueprints. You get it all.
We’re going to go into much more detail about what you get free in just a few minutes once we’re done with the training part. I just want to remind you if you came on and you’re wondering, what is this business model they’re talking about? Go to amazingsellingmachine.com and you opt-in and I promise you, you’ll be blown away with the free training we provide you.
Mike McClary: Now, let me give a quick shout out. We have tons of people on here. We have Alisra, Gilyard, Govinda, Samuel, Elaine, Robert, Matthew everyone is getting online and we have some great comments on here. We will be answering questions as well too. If you, after when you’re done watching this and you have any questions at all, feel free to ask them in the comments and we’ll try to get to as many as we can before we’re done here.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah. One thing that really I appreciate is not only that you leave comments, but could you please share and like the post? It helps us out a lot. It really encourages to keep giving formation like this. On this video right now, whether you’re watching on Facebook or whether you’re watching it on YouTube, please give us back some little bit of love, share the post, like the post, and let other people know about this awesome training we’re putting together.
All right. The next component of a listing that’s really important is the description. Now, with the description, there’s two parts to description. Recently, Amazon release what’s called enhanced brand content, and prior to this, it used to be something that was only available to a special elite group of Amazon sellers that were brought into what’s called the vendor central program. It is vendor? [crosstalk 00:29:14]
Now, one of the things that Amazon has done is they’ve used the vendor central, found features that work and rolled them out to other sellers and enhanced [inaudible 00:29:23] contents, one of them where Amazon is claiming they’re seeing significant improvement in conversions for people using them. What the enhanced brand content allows you to do is use images to be able to really sell your product.
Before Amazon would only allow you in your description to be purely text-based and they’re very limited on what type of HTML code you can use. Meaning, like can you make this word bold? Can you make this word a bullet point? Those kinds of things so you really had limits to what you could do and how you could explain and show your product, but now with enhanced brand content, it allows you to really help them to see it in a whole new light.
As you can see in here with all these great images like it just really helps you. Again, it talks about the product, how you use it, they show the water thing like it’s waterproof. There’s no arguing there that they’re saying it’s waterproof. Directional rotation so they’re really able to, again, how you saw in the primary images, now with the enhanced brand content, to even show more lifestyle images, more reasons why this product is your choice for the best product out there.
You need to use it. I don’t know if you have any advice to give on creating the enhanced brand content.
Mike McClary: One of the things that I think that brings to the table is that people still realize or still, the consumer generally thinks that when you come to a product on Amazon and you see a fully blown out page with enhanced brand content on it that’s a big company. That’s the Nike, the Apple, the Samsung, all the companies out there, they’re the ones traditionally who’ve had all these great images on their product listings.
Now, today, you and I can do that. We can create enhanced brand content and not only could make ours look the same, we can make it look better because we’re always testing, we know what works, and we know how to compete with the biggest players out there.
Jason Katzenback: That’s a really good point I want to throw in here. A lot of people ask us, “Well, how can I compete with the big brands?” Well, Amazon allows you to do and the problem is most of the big brands don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They know what they’re doing off Amazon so they just come in on, let’s just throw it on Amazon and we clean their house.
Actually, a lot of our students now start working with people that own businesses on Amazon, big brands, to help them because they know we’re so much better on it, better at it, and that’s the cool thing because Amazon totally levels the playing field. It makes it so anybody could actually come in as long as they do the right things and really do well selling their products. The second part is the text product description and am I missing something here?
Mike McClary: Yeah. They don’t even have it. They don’t have it here.
Jason Katzenback: It is an option where you can fill in both the text and I think one of our examples does show it but, again, when you’re doing the description, remember that this is all part of the process. Think of yourself as a user, someone that’s shopping on Amazon. I come in, I land on this page so what I want to do is I want to see does it relate to me. Then, I want to scroll down and I want to make sure through the description, I want to validate to myself that this is the one that I think it is. This is the product that answers all my needs.
Right here, the description needs to be answering those questions. It does this, it does this. This is a bragging time. Tell them what your product does. Don’t assume they know anything. Don’t assume that, and the other thing though is don’t tell them generic things say, “This is a facial cleansing brush. It’s plastic.” You see a lot of people do that where they explain things that’s like that’s not a selling feature. Your point here is the reason why they’re buying it, they’re not looking for something plastic, they’re looking for facial cleanser that’s heavy duty, that’s waterproof, that’s going to work for them, that achieves certain results.
You got to figure all those things out and usually reviews help you do that. We’ll get into that maybe in a minute, but it’s your job to be able to communicate to that and that’s why the description is so important and the other benefit is the description helps with rankings.
Mike McClary: Absolutely.
Jason Katzenback: Maybe explain that part?
Mike McClary: Yeah. We talked earlier about how the title probably the most important feature when ranking for certain searches people do on Amazon. Then, the backend search terms that you can’t really see as a buyer, but we know as sellers how to go in there and enter the right keywords, and then, we talked about the bullet points or the features and benefits that those keywords in there also help you show up for ranking when people are searching. Well, last, but definitely not least, the product description we’re talking about. When you’ve typed in a paragraph or a bullet points about your product, Amazon does index keywords in there and you know who else does? Google
Jason Katzenback: Google.
Mike McClary: Bing, Yahoo. We don’t talk about ranking outside of Amazon too often, but I know that a significant number of sales come from people still searching on Google for products and that’s why you want to make sure that your product description looks as good as possible and has additional keywords that you want to rank for in all the major search engines.
Jason Katzenback: One of the things, and that’s why it’s good to leverage everything Amazon gives you because if you’re just using the images by itself, that text is now missing. You can’t put text in behind it but you really, one of the big things here that a lot of people don’t do is they don’t take advantage of everything Amazon’s giving you and it’s really important and kudos to you to being on this training, it’s all about becoming a student of the business. There’s so much changing on Amazon. Every day they’re coming out with new things, they’re making changes, and they’re not the best at being direct on communicating.
Sometimes they’ll communicate in generalities, sometimes they’ll communicate it like three months after it’s actually been implemented. That’s one of the great things that we love doing is working together as a community to share these things because we know it’s so hard to keep up with all those changes, and really, look, one of the things we know for a fact, it was like the example we saw at the live event. There’s so many people that are not leveraging everything that Amazon has and just one small tweak can make an absolutely profound difference.
Then, we’ve got the next thing about the optimization of the listing. There’s some other areas we’re going to hit on the key ones. As you can see the question-and-answer area, this is, again, primarily for the … What listing are you on?
Mike McClary: They actually have. If you go … It’s really below all the images. They have exactly what we’re talking about the product description.
Jason Katzenback: Yes.
Mike McClary: You can’t see my screen here so I’m on a Chrome PC, you’re on Apple and right now Amazon is split testing. They are showing me additional details that you can’t see that I can see that Jason can’t see. This is a great example of Amazon constantly testing to see what’s working better.
Jason Katzenback: If you maybe just throw your computer around and show …
Mike McClary: Yeah. Let’s see. Want to give a close-up of that right there.
Jason Katzenback: Put them on the spot. As you can see comparatively mine shows view larger, but it doesn’t have anything under the view larger, it just means it will grow, it will show the image larger. Yeah. Amazon’s always split testing.
Mike McClary: We used to complain about it. Did you get enough [inaudible 00:35:54]? We used to complain about it, but I love it because they do a lot of the work for us. They figure out exactly what’s working, what’s not working, and a guarantee they have all the data in the world. They’re going to know which of these different listings converts better and eventually, only one will be shown.
Jason Katzenback: I wish we could show your listing because they actually have a very good optimized product description so if you can see that products description they’re doing a great job. When you’re creating a product description, maybe we’ll show another example and just so that we can see it. [crosstalk 00:36:22] Yeah. This is a terrible product description. With a product description, one of the things that you want to understand too is that people are scrolling. With this, when I scroll like, it’s like … Yeah. I missed it already.
You need to have something that’s big enough, you use bullets to get people’s attention. First of all, they stop, they’re scrolling, and then, maybe I would see something really big like gently brushed away dust or something. Something that stands out really high. Instead, they make this so like I’m not getting anything out of this description. In fact, I’m just like scrolling by it. They’re like satisfying Amazon by giving a description, but they’re not helping the consumer make a more educated choice and the chances are, they’re losing a huge amount of conversions because of that.
Your description is about selling the product. Use as much text as you possibly can with what Amazon gives you because if you’re not, then you’re just robbing yourself of potentially keyword rankings, but actually selling your product.
Mike McClary: Speaking of sales, one thing we haven’t mentioned yet, the product we’ve been looking at, you might wonder how much money that product is making. It’s doing just about $150,000 in sales a month. That’s not a year, that is a month. It’s a good-looking listing. They’re doing a lot that’s well over $1.5 million a year in sales for that single product. That is a very profitable great listing.
Jason Katzenback: 100%. Yeah. As your product becomes mature they have an area in here Amazon has called question and answers, and what that does is it also, when you think from a search engine perspective, Google and all those other things, it gives more text and relevant content to make your listing more important to Google but, again, it’s a whole user experience. This is an area where you can answer questions, where you can have questions posted that really when you provide the answers, what it does psychologically is when someone’s on your listing and when they see questions and they see solid responses, it helps like make them feel that this is the right product for them.
You want to make sure that you’re watching this. The worst thing you could do and I believe this other product has it, yeah. You see like all of their products zero votes, zero action like are the care touch wipes stiff or soft? The answer is just soft. This is a perfect opportunity like when that answer, when that question came in when it … That should have been something being checked daily by the product owner and they would have gone in there and look at it like, cool, here’s an opportunity now to really sell the fact that they’re soft.
Instead of just having the word soft, you’d say, “Our wipes are extremely soft but also durable. You’ll love them. They’ll feel like silk on your face,” or something like that.
Mike McClary: It takes five minutes a day.
Jason Katzenback: Exactly.
Mike McClary: Another feature too that Jason is getting to is that these questions and the answers you provide, it’s a selling point for your product, and it’s more content, and it will help you in the search rankings. Google keeps seeing answers about these are the best facial cleansing system on the planet, eventually they’re going to start ranking you for that.
Jason Katzenback: 100%. Then, last but not least in the main thing is your reviews. Your reviews really come down to two things. Is your product good and do you have customer support that is good? A great customer support can help a mediocre product, a bad product no customer support can help. The whole business model starts with finding the right product, and that means making sure that you have a product that does what the consumer thinks it’s supposed to do.
You always want at minimum is to give them what they expect. Don’t try to shortcut them. Don’t try to like make it cheap because if it’s cheap it’s going to break, they’re not going to be happy. Reviews, however, used to be a lot more effective for actually ranking so if you had two products everything else equal, the one with the higher reviews would rank higher. It doesn’t seem to be that fact at all anymore, but what reviews do is they help conversions.
What that means is they’re the social proof that helped make me decide, “Well, this product has 30 4-star review average, but this one has 500 and it’s 4-1/2-star review. Right away, I’m like, “I’m probably going to go with the higher rated product.” Unless there’s like a huge price discrepancy or anything like that so a big thing too with reviews is don’t let your first negative review hurt you. That’s going to be your experience when you get selling on Amazon especially the first time you get a negative review.
We know of a funny story of someone that actually wanted to shut down a product with their first negative review. It’s a reality because it’s like you take so much personal joy in it, but sometimes negative reviews can be positive because not only are they revealing to you the imperfections of your product where you can get better, but they’re also making it real. If you go on a listing that’s just 100% 5-star and nobody’s questioning anything on the product, the chances are like that just doesn’t feel right. Nobody’s going to be 100% all the time happy with any product, and so, those negative reviews just bring reality into it.
Your job is how you respond to those negative reviews so especially what I like to see in this product isn’t doing is comments on reviews. It’s really important, again, to show the end-user that you as a company are engaged with the audience, you’re listening, you’re thanking them for positive feedback, you’re thanking them for negative feedback, you’re not blaming them, but you’re working with them and you’re telling them, “Please, contact us. We have a refund policy. We want to make sure you’re happy.”
Engage with them, listen to them, and it goes a long way. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to add on reviews.
Mike McClary: Other than don’t stress about them. If you do all the things that we teach you in the free training, you have a great product, great listing, you get great customer service, the reviews will come. A lot of [inaudible 00:42:08] gets stressed about it. It’s a natural byproduct of doing everything that we teach you. The reviews will come. Your business will continue to move upwards. I look at this product we’re talking about right here. We’re giving some suggestions on improving it. It’s a product actually doing what $1.8 million a year.
What’s oddly enough, everyone can make improvements. I know that all of us here could make additional improvements on there. If this company actually made a few small tweaks, they probably increase their sales of the 10, 15%. Think about what that means when you’re doing $1.8 million a year in a product.
Jason Katzenback: Lifted optimization is something that you don’t just do once. You’re constantly doing it. We’ve been 45 minutes. We’re going to be cutting this off pretty shortly, but we’re going to go through right now a few examples of a lesser optimized listing and then a bad one. For this one, their title again is great. It actually reads well. They obviously did their keyword research. They know the keywords to have in here. They’re very clear on that. On their images like to me, I guess what I would have done on the primary image is probably had one opened maybe, but overall it’s good. It’s pretty good.
If you look at the size of the image that Amazon gives you, this is one thing I wanted to show you. You want to make sure you do … I think it’s 1000 by 1000. You want to make sure at minimum, it’s a thousand by a thousand really high definition because, again, people on Amazon, they’re looking at the image, but some of them will want to click on it to see it closer. You want it to be very crisp and professional-looking, so a really high definition image, perfect job here. They’re good. They’re showing lifestyle images of you actually using the product type of things that it could clean. Overall, I think their images are pretty good.
Mike McClary: Just so you know, this product does $50,000 a year, a month, sorry, a month in sales. That’s over half a million dollars a year in sales. Average maybe 25, 30% profit margin. Another great product that is making a very healthy salary just for one product.
Jason Katzenback: 100%. Their bullet points pretty good like the only thing is like high-tech formula. What’s the benefit to me on that, but they’ve got the China feature like a benefit. Then, they explain what it is. They definitely have room for improvement here. They can add more text, which will help answer more questions and really get better rankings, but again always like individually wrapped, but what’s the benefit to that? I don’t care like individually wraps so that you can just throw a couple in your person and be gone. They’re very portable like figure out why individually wrapped is a good thing. Then, tell them that, really important.
Mike McClary: The first one right there to the high-tech form of that it’s ammonia free, why does that matter to me? Are you worried about too much ammonia in your house for your kids or your pets? Worried about the streets that ammonia can leave on all your treasured devices, that’s a great way to start it off and get their attention and show them their pain point and how you’re going to solve that.
Jason Katzenback: 100%. Then, we go down. We mentioned them already their description not only are they not using enhanced brand content, but their description is just weak. It doesn’t help me want to buy the purchase. If anything, it annoys me because it’s just … A white space is really important. What white space means is, for example, it’s the space between the highlighted title here and the next line.
One bad thing people often do as well is they don’t put spaces in it. They just make it a big clump of text. People don’t read big clumps of text. They want things broken up. Your job here isn’t to give them a novel to read. It’s to highlight points. You want it broken up easy to read so I can skim through and really hit home on high-level points. You don’t want to overwhelm them with words and things that’s not needed. You really want to hit on key points and break them up and show them, man, I wish we could show that other listing because it’s just that’s more important than just a clump of text.
Mike McClary: When I look at the product description, I’m going to speak to anyone on this call who’s not native English speaking. If you’re worried about selling on amazon.com or maybe in a European marketplace because of the language barriers, you’re worried about how well your English is, this product’s been 50,000 a month. Their English, as a native English speaker, is not very good. As a matter fact, they have a huge grammatical error in the first one on glossary surfaces. It should be on colossi services, sticks out right at you, but they’re still selling $50,000 even with these in here. By simply working with the community of people who could help you tweak your language, which is easy to do, we’ve all liked help people like make sure that you do, all you do is you ask a friend who you make who speaks English. Read through this. Just make sure I don’t have any glaring mistakes that clean it up.
Then, your listing will look better than this one and have a better chance of even doing better sales, but my main point was don’t worry about whether or not you feel like you can compete with other English speakers. People are doing it and doing very well and crushing it.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah, but with that being said, I want to also say that the people that do optimize and do make sure that it reads well and everything will be better because I know this from being a business for so long. I get people that complain to me because of my English because of like the word in the grammar, all those kind of things. There are people that immediately see a grammar mistake like that. They’ll be turned off. They’re like, “No. I’m going to another product.” You want to make sure you’re presenting yourself as professionally as possible. You want people to feel confident that you know what you’re doing.
If you can’t even write a description about your product that you’re selling, you really have a good product, like if you don’t even know what it is because you can’t describe it, chances are there’s someone that I’d rather trust to buy a product from. I hope that made sense.
Jason Katzenback: Reviews, they’ve done pretty … Their question and answer. They’ve got a few You see more answered questions, so not a lot of questions going off for it. This was the one where they just answered with soft. You see more answers, but just no really good detailed answer. The thing is the first person responding should be the best answer anyway. That should be you making sure you’re helping your [crosstalk 00:48:06].
Mike McClary: That’s not even a response from the seller. These are … I don’t see the seller actually responding to this. There is a way where you as a seller can respond to the questions and give them the answer that you want them to have.
Jason Katzenback: Cool. Then, for time, let’s go to the poor list view. Now, the reason why we say this poor list is a few things. First of all, that you can see right here 100% silicon. They don’t have the space between the word; rubber, dye, green, they don’t have a space. First of all, Amazon is a computer. They’re coming out with AI. They’re doing all these things, but they look at things with assuming that you know what you’re doing. What they’re looking at now is this is one word now.
Instead of being two words, they’re clumping that together, but it also just looks bad like you want to make sure that your title looks good. It reads well, but also like bath brush 100% silicon, shower massage, body scrubber, green. Really, that’s all you have to say about your product like no benefits, there’s no other things people are looking for to use that for? Like you’re just more or less being functional like a robot like this is a green scrubbing brush like your job is to really get them to want to choose your product first of all by having it formatted poorly makes me not want to click on your product, but also you’re just not doing yourself justice by even explaining the product. Maybe you can talk about the images.
Mike McClary: Yeah. When I look at the image, we learned earlier that Amazon one requirements is having a crisp clean image on a white background. The first thing you’ll see in this listing is they have an ugly image on a gray dingy background. As a matter fact, all of their images on this listing, they’re basically the exact same image. It just looks like one person holding the brush in different angles. I don’t know how that sells the product to me. There’s no lifestyle images. There’s nothing that jumps out that tells me anything about the product. All I can say is these images are really, really bad.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah. Like I look at this picture and no offense to anyone, but they’ve got like some dry hangnail skin going on there, a bad gray background. It looks like their hands actually may be a little dirty. Is this telling me that this is only for guys because it’s a guy hand on there? I’m assuming. It’s not doing me anything. First of all, you should be featuring the product. What’s the product? Like show the product in its best light. Then, like if you’re going to have it in someone’s hand, show a guy’s hand and a lady’s hand like don’t just like this to me right now, honestly, it looks like it’s an industrial hand scrubber for like mechanics.
That’s what the visual images are telling me. If that’s what it is, well done. You’ve done a good job, but something tells me that’s not what it is because it says it’s a shower massage thing. That’s the importance of the images is you’ve got to think who is your target audience, how many guys are going to go out there seriously because I know I’m not that are going to shop for a shower. I can’t even talk, a shower massage brush.
I don’t think guys are probably your target market, but right now, you’re selling it to that audience. Now, I could be wrong. It might be, but this is why it’s so important to know your audience because you need to show your audience so they can relate to it. This is not looking like a female product if it is.
Mike McClary: It looks like a dog brush. That looks like the rubber brush that we’ve bought for our pets.
Jason Katzenback: Next, the bullet points how they do that.
Mike McClary: Well, they did a little better with the bullet points than they did with their images. They start off something deep down cleansing, starting off a bullet point, but then they start losing us from there, more effective than hand. Again, not very good English there, bristle brush or washcloth. Then, there’s no way to continue on the sentence as a skin cleansing brush for your face and body. I don’t even know what all that really means there.
The main part of it and caps they talk about deep down cleansing, maybe I should just left it there. The next bullet point, improved circulation. They had me at the start of the bullet points. Then, they trailed off and left me from there. Again, I see some spacing issues in here. I see grammatical issues in here. It’s just the bullet points are really losing me as well.
Jason Katzenback: Now, with that being said, one important thing to remind you about is like Mike said too because we also teach people to sell in Europe. They can start selling on Germany and everything and we’re not native German speakers. There is a point. There’s something that about taking action. If this person that has this listing just got this up so they could get something up there and now they’re optimizing and making it better, good job because you’re taking action. You’re moving forward. You don’t want to be a perfectionist here and like make sure everything’s 100%.
It’s better if you have the product in inventory to get it up and selling. Then, though make sure you optimize it, make sure you look for feedback and get feedback and everything because, yeah, like if this person wasn’t a native English speaker, good for you for getting the listing up, but now is the product owner. It’s your job to make sure you get feedback from native English speakers so that you can have your wording match what they’re looking for.
Mike McClary: Absolutely.
Jason Katzenback: Description, this is what I meant by just one clump description. It makes it so like I almost say it’s exhausting to read because now I have to pay attention and break apart what each segment means like where are the periods so soft and comfortable like I have to read everything to know like what’s the next point. You want spacing so that okay, like soft and comfortable space, high performance space, super soft, so I can skim and see all those points. You also want to put some bolding in there, so maybe super soft bolded waterproof bolded, but you don’t bold the whole thing. You just bold special keywords and triggers that you know are going to be important items for that person to really make an informed decision. We’ve good five minutes. I want to make sure … Reviews horrible. You talk about the reviews.
Mike McClary: This customer or the seller only has two reviews as a matter of fact. One is a five-star, probably the very first review there ever. Well, it’s not the first view. The second view they got, but that review was over two months ago like they have not went out there and tried to even get reviews. One of the things we teach is provide customer service and ask people for reviews. If you feel like I have a good product, ask them. Don’t feel bad about asking for a review. They’re clearly not doing that. Then, their other review the first one they have is a two out of five stars, which is seen as a negative review by Amazon. It’s definitely going to make customers who come to this product. It’s basically got a very poorly rated product.
Now, the other thing they’re not doing is they’re not going through and commenting on these reviews, something that’s something you do. Again, takes five minutes a day to look at your listing, look at the questions, look at the reviews and comment on what you have.
Jason Katzenback: Like on this review here two stars. Right away, I would respond and say I’m sorry that you were not happy with the product. Remember, we have a full refund. Please, contact customer support. We’ll work with you to make you happy with this, but like really drive home that you care about them and that you’re sorry in that. Don’t make up excuses don’t say, oh, this is a fake review or you don’t know what you’re talking about. This is a great product because all you’re going to do is make that person respond and even more angry.
If however you respond nicely and supportively and get them to reach out to you, they might and you never ask them to do this, but they might be like, wow, they blew me away. Yeah, I wasn’t happy with it, but they sent me a new one, refunded me, made everything happy. I’m changing that review to a four or even a three. That is huge because a two star review that just says two stars nothing else it just says too soft and no comment, right away, that just leaves me naïve, oh, maybe this one’s too soft. There’s no proof to say otherwise. It’s just a bad experience.
Mike McClary: Some of our best and most consistent customers are customers who had a negative experience, something the image during shipping, they’ve left us a bad review, we reached out to them by commenting back or contacting them via email if we could. We took care of their issue. They changed the review to a five-star [crosstalk 00:56:07]. Now, they’re consistent customers. It’s an opportunity. Don’t look into something negative. It’s an opportunity to improve your business and your product.
Jason Katzenback: Also, sometimes, people just have bad days like a customer might have just had something. You don’t know. Yeah, they could be wrong. Maybe they were expecting something else. I don’t mind. Sometimes, I’m a terrible customer. Sometimes, when I think I bought something and it doesn’t and I want a refund, I’m like I’m not telling you. I just want my refund. It’s a bad product, but it’s not my job to defend myself why I don’t like it. It’s your job to take care of me and just make sure that I’m having a happy experience. That’s one thing with even when we say about negative reviews, but you’re not going to hit on too much, but you always want to make sure the customer is happy. When you get negative reviews, be willing to give a free product.
Be willing to reach out and contact your customer because negative reviews hurt conversion rates. I see it myself on my list. See the folks in because someone had a bad experience would be like, oh, we see a bit of a drop in sales. Sometimes, it’s because I’ve said like, whoa, we got a couple bad reviews in a row. Then, it’s our job to analyze those reviews, look at what the customers are saying, validate them. Then, take action to be able to rectify it.
Mike McClary: Now, before we get off of this product, I want to mention one more thing about it. We found this product just this morning before the session started, this this poor product that say that really isn’t optimized. The way we found it is interesting. We were looking at the first product, the really well optimized shower scrubbing, facial scrubber. This product was advertising on that page. That’s something Amazon lets you do.
We have a product that clearly the seller doesn’t really care about terrible pictures, terrible title, not very good English, bad reviews. They’re paying money, really good money, to have their product advertised when I can’t imagine anyone who’s going to click on that listing is actually going to end up buying it. That’s one of the reasons why you want to optimize it. If you’re not optimized, you could waste money on lots of every [crosstalk 00:58:02].
Jason Katzenback: The advertising area is talking about was this area right here underneath the buy box. It’s not cheap like it’s costing you money. It’s not super expensive either, but if you don’t have an optimized listing and you’re not even paying attention to it, why are you advertising it? It’s funny.
What we taught you today, we looked at how to optimize an Amazon listing and what we showed you was some real-life examples of a good listing and a lesser good list and then a bad listing. If you want even more training on this topic about running a business on Amazon and this is all about creating your own business. This isn’t about selling other people’s products. This isn’t about being an affiliate. This is about creating your own brand and trust me, it’s much easier than you think to be able to start your own brand of products, but by also leveraging the incredible power of Amazon, Amazon, there’s a reason why Jeff Bezos was recently announced as the richest man ever.
It’s because of what Amazon is able to do. Amazon is now the big shopping search engine in the world. It’s growing by leaps and bounds. You get this for a small percentage being able to tap into that. When I say small percentage is Amazon just charges you per product on a small percentage to be able to leverage their platform. That means you can tap into where millions of people are going every month to be able to buy products really easily. What we have is a four-part training series where we have four videos that are at least a half an hour each or about a half an hour each that’s going to walk you through this entire business model. Plus, we give you some really cool free downloads and maybe you could share what those downloads are.
Mike McClary: Yes. In the first training video, not only do we teach you how to find the hot product opportunities, we give you a list of a hundred curated hand-picked opportunities. These are not just ones went out there and like just dumped a list and throw them out there. We actually looked at them all to make sure they fit the exact criteria. You have a list of product opportunities. Now, whether you want to go up and use those products, that’s up to you, but we want to show you how easy it is to find products and how many are out there. That 100 products is a very, very small percentage of all the product opportunities that are out there on Amazon.
We also tell you what countries are the easiest to sell in, what other countries you might need to actually do a few more things in order to get set up whether you need an LLC or to get a credit card with a different address. We go through the whole process to make sure that no matter where you live, we’re telling you how to get your business set up. It’s really not as scary as some people think. Then, we also give you a list of the categories on Amazon and everyone knows you’ve been out there. There’s sports and outdoors and camping. There’s just all different health and beauty. We’re going to tell you which categories are the best for starting out inside of Amazon.
Now, we mentioned a lot starting out because we will make sure that you can get going and selling as quickly as possible. Once you know this business, once you’re out there making 10, $20,0000 a month in sales, then the world, it opens up for you like the categories that we don’t see are the easiest, you’re free to go into those because you know how to get this business and how to sell. I’m trying to help you out and jump start this process.
Now, on I’m video number two, we do a lot on supplier selection. This is one of the things that scared me when I was starting out. Sure, I might go to find a product that meets the right criteria, but how do I find someone to make this product? I never knew what private label was until I started learning how to start this business. We show you how to find suppliers from anywhere in the world just by sitting down to your computer. You could find these and can communicate back and forth. You don’t have to speak any other language. They all will know and reach out to you and speaking in whatever language you are. We’re going to show you how to do that.
Now, another part of the process also is how does the whole business fit together. We put together we call the Amazon Automation blueprint. It will show you how this entire business fits again from the beginning of finding your product, all the way to scaling your business. We lay out very clear in the document that shows you that. Then, like I mentioned earlier, both Jason and myself and Matt Clark and Rich Henderson, we run our own businesses. We have freight forwarders. Those are the companies that help you get the products wherever they’re made at to Amazon or to your warehouse or to your home we’re going to ship to.
We actually give you our freight forwarder. We’ll give you our name. We make no money off them. We just like we use them. They’re great. I love them. I’m good friends of them now. They did an interview to answer all the questions like I’ve been training. We’ve all been training this for a long time. We know the questions people ask. I got an interview with them on a phone call recorder. I asked those questions so that you can hear from a freight forwarder what is very easy and possible to do as far as shipping the products to you.
Now, the third video is where we really talk about my favorite topic. That’s launching and ranking a product. There are things that you can do on Amazon that really help your product get up in the search rankings and the higher you are ranking for certain searches and the more optimized like Jason, well, just taught you, the quicker that you will start selling and selling lots and lots of products. I give you my formula called the rapid ranking system for launching a product and shooting up in the rankings in as little as five days. We lay that out for you. We have to go through a whole video.
I show you exactly how to go and set this all up. Then, in the fourth final video, we talk about exactly how to really jump start this whole business and to automate it and to make it as easy, as quick as possible to really build your own future.
Jason Katzenback: Very cool. Let’s take a few minutes and answer a few questions. I know we don’t have much time. One thing to remind you, however though, one of the reasons why I want to encourage you that you can listen to us is not only do we both and all of us run our own successful businesses, leveraging the power of Amazon, but more importantly, our students have tremendous success. When you go to Amazingsellingmachine.com, do yourself a favor and check out the success stories. We have loads and loads of success stories from our students where there’s videos or show screenshots. We really want to make sure that you understand that it’s not us telling you that we know what we’re doing.
It’s the results our students are getting. If you’re at all interested in this business model, if you’re at all interested in running your own business, leveraging the power of Amazon, do yourself a favor. At least check out the free training at Amazingsellingmachine.com.
Mike McClary: Yes. We had actually a ton of great questions. We won’t they get to them all. Debbie Krischell asks, does Amazon have a limited number of texts for the bullet points that we’re talking about. [crosstalk 01:04:09] …
Jason Katzenback: That rotates like that’s not always consistent. It’s the same as the title. I don’t believe the descriptions ever fallen victim to that.
Mike McClary: No, they have tons of room there.
Jason Katzenback: But title depending on the category that you’re on in Amazon, Amazon likes to keep it not consistent. That’s because they’re testing things. At the end of the day, the Amazon used to allow, I believe, is 500 for the title [crosstalk 01:04:35] like a few years ago. Then, they limited it. Then, some categories, I believe, 100 characters is the max, but that’s not all category.
Mike McClary: No. Most of them don’t have that.
Jason Katzenback: Yeah. Most of them don’t have that, but with the bullet points, the same. What you can do … I think it’s 100.
Mike McClary: When you get into the list thing, when you create your Amazon account, you go in and create it, they’ll tell you exactly how many characters because they know what category you’re in. It is different, the categories in there. Some of those, it’ll tell you exactly how many characters you have left.
Jason Katzenback: They have little question mark box. If you click on it, it’ll tell you exactly how many characters. From my experience when Amazon’s telling you characters, that’s not including spaces. Their character limit is just for the words itself. For example, if you say, “Hello there,” the space wouldn’t count in the total number of characters.
Mike McClary: Now, if you’re worried about having enough room in the bullet points, the bullet points are actually one of most lenient areas for character limits. They’re generally very, very high more than you would want to use. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too much text in the bullet points, but they give you plenty of room in there as a matter of fact for most categories.
Jason Katzenback: Before we answer the next question, just a reminder. We’re given a lot of free content, a lot of content here. Please, like this video, share this video, comment on this video. Let us know your thoughts. It really helps us to make sure that you’re appreciating what we’re giving us here. We appreciate you being here.
Mike McClary: Michael Zinyanni, he’s asking can you please explain if the use of commas to separate your keywords in the backend search terms is good or bad.
Jason Katzenback: I don’t use commas in the backend. What we do is we just space our words. I’ve heard other people use it different, but I believe like you only recommend using [crosstalk 01:06:12].
Mike McClary: No. Amazon tells you. They tell you you’re wasting space if you use a comma in there. I trust name alone. Here’s a question from Mark Valmoria. How do you optimize new original products? It’s a great question. If you’re coming out … The model that we talked about, the easiest way to get started isn’t to invent something brand new. It’s to go out there and find something that’s selling really well and then create your own version of it and improve upon it. We call it product tuning. That’s a term we came up in the past year. It’s a great way to think of this, but let’s imagine you do. You want to create a brand new product. How do you optimize it because you don’t really know how it’s going to work.
I think the best thing to do is what Jason talked about earlier, take your best step on the first cut for it. Put exactly what you think as a buyer you would want to see in the title, the images, the bullet points, the description. Then, every two weeks especially starting up, review your performance, test and optimize. You need to know your numbers. Jason knows his numbers better than anyone I know. He tracks how many people have visits his products. He tracks how many people actually buy them. He tracks it over time. He knows exactly what days. They have a good conversion rates, what days he doesn’t.
Then, he goes through and people running his business with him actually help him figure out exactly what’s working, and what’s not. He’s always optimizing. Really, it’s a process.
Jason Katzenback: Again, it’s about being a student of your business like never just assume that people have it like you need to learn what certain things are. Learn what the data Amazon’s giving you, how you can leverage it and use it that way. One thing we didn’t cover, which I’m going to do real quick here, so when you’re optimizing, that was a good point like what if it’s a new product. You’re really making your best educated guess, but Amazon does give you a hand. This is actually covered in more detailed, I believe, in video one or two of the free video series about searching for keywords.
Mike McClary: It’s video three.
Jason Katzenback: Videos three. When you go to Amazon and you just like, for example, we’re going to use the … What was the keyword we just had. It was facial brush. Facial brush. If I type in facial brush, Amazon now is listing in priority what the most searched for keywords are. What you could do is be very confident right now like I would my opinion right away I see facial brushes for cleaning and exfoliating. I would take probably two or three of these words and initially just optimize my listing with what Amazon is telling me are the most popular terms because then when you start doing the sponsored ad advertising, sponsored products advertising, they’ll now then tell you 100% clear like look this is the keyword that people are buying because Amazon shows you which keywords are resulting in the best results for your result.
Mike McClary: Jason mentioned sponsored product ads advertising, it might be a brand new term for you if you went out of this. Basically, it is Amazon’s own advertising platform where you’re allowed to … They encourage you to go out there and spend some money. You completely control the budget, how much you pay per click. Your ads will show up in the searches. Even if you just start out and you’re not showing up in the normal searches like you don’t have any much sales history, but you’re not showing, you can pay to have your products shown in the searches by using Amazon product sponsored ads. It’s very controllable. It’s very scalable.
What you get like what Jason is alluding to, you get great data on exactly what people are searching for, what they’re clicking on when they find your product and then what they’re buying actually. Then, we use that all the time. Every two weeks would go through and then we re-optimize our listing. It’s a great way to again get free sales because we can optimize our listing where we don’t have to pay for that advertising. It’s free traffic and free sales.
Jason Katzenback: Excellent. As you see here, I typed in the word facial cleansing brush. At the top of the listing, you see here it says sponsored. These are paid out. People are paying in Amazon to be able to make sure that their product shows at the top of the search listings.
Mike McClary: You think we got time for two more questions?
Jason Katzenback: Sure.
Mike McClary: First one is simple. Cathy Gibbons is asking enhanced what. [inaudible 01:10:02] talked about its enhanced brand content, sometimes, called just EBC. If you do a google search or search inside of Amazon seller central when you say [inaudible 01:10:12], there’s all kinds of training. They’ll give you training on exactly what it is. This content comes with templates. Don’t think that you have to be a programmer or someone starting from scratch and design your own webpage. They give you templates like we need these three images here or these two images in the spanner. They’ll tell you exactly what you can put in there. Then, you simply go out there. There are sites we can get like great images for free using stock photos or hiring people to take photos very affordably. Then, pop those into those templates. It’s enhanced brain content, very simple.
Jason Katzenback: On that point, I’ve seen a question in my peripheral about asking what is the optimal amount of images. The optimal amount is the amount of images Amazon lets you do. I believe it’s nine.
Mike McClary: It also changes by category. When you’re adding the details of your listing in your seller central account, Amazon is going to show you how many images you can add. You want to use them all. You want to make sure though that your best image are the first ones that they see because as you could also see on the list and I think there is an example there. Yeah. Amazon doesn’t show them all by default. It says plus two.
Now, it does have a few extra images. You want to look at that. You want to like really understand that’s again being a student of your business. You want to look what does Amazon allow me to do, put the images in there. Now, act as a consumer what does this do to me when I land on the page. Should I move it so certain images are up higher? For example, if you have an image that has one of the lesser popular features as the second image, you would probably want to move that around. One of the more demanded features was the second thing they see rather than the last. Any more questions?
Mike McClary: Last one thing I [inaudible 01:11:51] to get you. I’m sorry we are really, really sorry. There’s like tons more questions. We can’t get to them all. Uhmed John asked how do you insert video on your listing. Really, we’re talking about enhanced brand content again, but that still is not available to everyone like not everyone can do that yet. Once you get to a certain level and we don’t have the exact guidelines or rules right now, Amazon starts making that available to you. Typically, if you are a vendor and the vendor program, we referenced earlier.
Then vendors, people who have a direct relationship, they call it a retail relationship, they wholesale Amazon, they allow you to put videos on your listing. It’s something that, first, don’t worry about it, don’t stress about it. We’ve shown you products that do hundreds of thousand dollars a month without video. Most products don’t have video. Once you start selling, you start doing better on Amazon, that opportunity comes the later on down the road. You’ll be able to do that and increase sales even more.
Jason Katzenback: Awesome. One last thing I saw and this comes up a lot, people say how are you able to predict like how many sales of product gets. We actually go through that and give you more examples in the free training about how we research products. It gives you a lot of information. A lot of it just comes down to our experience. We’re able to know categories, bestseller ranks. We’ve been selling a long time. We help a lot of people. We’ve taught a lot of people. We’ve got a lot of experience to be able to figure that out, but we explain how we do that in the free video series.
Do yourself a favor. Check out the free video series. One more time, I want to remind you, Amazingsellingmachine.com. If you haven’t done it already, I promise you it’s well worth an email. It’s totally free downloads that you get to keep for yourself in-depth training videos that’ll really answer a lot of questions for you. I know you’ll get tons of value on it. Anything you want to close with?
Mike McClary: No. Just thanks so much for being here. I hope you can tell we love doing this. We have loved training, teaching people how to start their own businesses. We sincerely hope that as many people watching this video right now, come six months or a year from now, you have your own business, and, yeah, you’ve changed your life and have a lot more freedom.
Jason Katzenback: Very cool. Please, like, share, comment, spread the word about this video. Help us get the word out more. Help us change more lives. Thank you for sticking with us. Thank you for watching us. Thank you for learning from us and to a very successful future, take care.