368 : Jeff Oxford – Optimize your Amazon sales through outside links
Are you developing sales outside of Amazon for the long run? Are you investing time in developing content to support your products? Are you gathering those names for a real customer list? Jeff clearly has the expertise.
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Transcript: (note- this is a new tool I am trying out so it is not perfect- it does seem to be getting better)
Jeff: [00:00] The thing is, you know, you, you in Google, even if someone isn’t starting their search on Amazon, if they started in Google, there’s they could still find that Amazon listing and it Kinda goes back to we’re talking about where when you’re. If you have, if you’re on Amazon or on Ebay, you know one opportunity that people are missing is you can also get your own listings to rank very well on search engines so you can optimize your Amazon listing and I think the best place to do that is within the content. Making sure that you’re having a lot of content on your Amazon descriptions and your keyword in the content and that we can touch on this more a little later, but also with the linkedin link side. If you can get other websites to link to your Amazon listing. Your ebay listing in Google sees that that’s going to have a positive impact on your rankings. And not only can you get traffic within Amazon with an Ebay, but it can also get traffic from Google, bing, and other search engines.
Cool voice guy: [00:48] Welcome to the ECOMMERCE guys. Focus on the people, the products, and the process of incomers cylinder today. Here’s your host, Steven Peterson.
Stephen: [01:01] He just wanted to mention two sponsors today. Solutions Four, ecommerce and sellerlabs scope for step solutions, four ecommerce solutions, the number for e-commerce dot com as Karen lockers group where she manages Amazon accounts for brands and and smaller sellers like ourselves. We’ve been with her, I think it’s coming on two years now and been thrilled because she helps us with creating listings, reconciling shipments. That’s one the working on right now. I’m making sure handling refunds and things like that and making sure that we’re. We get the money that’s due. Was that more than pays for my service and you can save $50 by using the code momentum, so solutions four ecommerce.com, forward slash momentum. Use the code momentum. You’re going to save $50 a month and she’s going to do that inventory. Health reports new year. You really need to get your account in order.
Stephen: [01:53] Second up is a seller labs scope. You know I talk a lot about it because I’m a user period. That’s. That’s what makes it so worthwhile for me is that we use it for all of our private label, but even for our wholesale business and we do more bundling and stuff like that. Then then, then private label and so it allows us though to really take advantage of those key words and really get them figured out because you have to zone in on the key words and so again, you can use it for your private label business, for your wholesale business. Even if you want to improve a retail art business, sometimes you can get in there and add some keywords and if you can put the right keywords and put the ones in there for the, a number one, number two, number three sellers.
Stephen: [02:37] That’s the best part, right? So go to solar lamps.com, forward slash scope, and use the code momentum and save $50. Okay. Save the money and try some keywords and see if you see an improvement in sales. And once you see an improvement in sales USA. Hm? Let me try this on other, um, other, uh, acents that I’m selling and all of a sudden you start to build a pattern, you see the improvement, and then you understand the value of doing it. And more importantly, you’re teaching yourself, you’re learning what to look for. And I think that’s one of the best parts about scope. It just helps make you a smarter seller. Let’s get into the podcast. Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. This is episode 368. Jeff Oxford. Man, I’m pumped. Uh, again, you know, um, a lot of nerd speak for Jeff, but he knows what he’s talking about and he really, he made it understandable for me.
Stephen: [03:27] I had to pause them a couple times because I had to catch up. You guys were all going to be like, ah, this is easy. I wasn’t quite as easy, but he made it so understandable and it really a couple of foundational pieces. That’s what I asked for and he gave it to us. Really do a b plan for your business. Get A, another plant. And one of the coolest parts of the conversation. And we both came to that realization that not many people are doing is creating that splash page is the phrase he used the correct phrase of versus what I use, but then driving traffic to your existing listing on Amazon, you can enhance your listing, you’re the buy box and man, he gives you some great examples and when you do that and you learn all those things, then you can start selling off of Amazon and you can start looking at other options or off Ebay too.
Stephen: [04:11] I mean it gives you those opportunities and I just think there’s some, some great information, but he gives you basic fundamental building blocks and I think that that’s so important to get started with. And this is all part of the 2019 push. I want you to start at the new year strong. I want you to make changes and enhance what you’re doing. Do more of the good stuff and less of the stuff you don’t want to do. And I think jeff has really done a great job explaining it and making it understandable. Let’s get into the podcast. All right. We’ll come back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. We’re excited about today’s guest because I’m counting on, I’m hoping that he’s going to help us in this couple of weeks where I’m trying to set everyone up for success for 2019. I think he’s going to help us push through some of the stuff that’s clutter, at least to me, a part time seller.
Stephen: [04:56] Um, he can parse some of these things because he’s an expert in a lot of internet stuff, plus he was a seller so he gets what we do and that’s really, really important I think for somebody to have that background. Jeff Oxford, welcome Jeff. Great. Glad to be here. Stephen. I appreciate you coming on. You do have quite an experience, a background and, and uh, I, I want to get to, I want to get to the meat. First off that you were a seller, so a drop shipper but doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter you. You bought and sold stuff, right? You saw people, you directed people are, they found your listing and they bought it and somehow it got shipped to them. And many times it didn’t get shipped to them and you had to deal with all that stuff, right?
Jeff: [05:38] Absolutely. Yeah. I’m basically what happened. So my, my first interacts with all my marketing was trying to make an ad sense site and get some evidence from banner ads, but I realized you need so much traffic to make it work. And what I saw is that these job shippers making so much money online and I was in college at the and being a college student, I was passionate about beer pong,
Stephen: [06:01] lazy, interested in girls and drank beer. And you’re like, Hey, this is easy little fountain. It’s just like a vending machine. It just keeps coming.
Jeff: [06:09] Exactly. That’s what it’s all about. Like how can I get more money for less work and a drop shipping seem like the way to go. So you know, first step, find out what your product is going to be and being in college and you know, liking to play beer pong. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to create an ecommerce site that sells beer pong tables because you can’t really get them at, at your local store, at least back then you couldn’t. So that was my first, my first ecommerce site with drop shipping, beer pong tables and that’s Kinda what got me into the game.
Stephen: [06:35] That’s hilarious. I mean, I think about a skill set, right? Wait, I’m really good at this game. It’s called. I can see the conversation with that dad. I’m really good at this game. I become kind of unknown on the circuit. Know what is it? Oh, it’s beer pong. It’s this table. It’s a specialize in. I can, I can see you trying to sell that. Um, so how much success did you have? Did you have success with it? I mean, were you able to direct people to your particular beer pong table and get them to buy?
Jeff: [07:04] Yeah. My first site, I mean neuroscience that takes longer to rank, but I was able to break into the top three for like big, big competitive terms like beer pong tables, beer pong table. I was going up against the manufacturers that had huge budgets and I was just on a shoestring budget basically doing everything myself and for free and uh, yeah, I ended up selling it and making a quick buck on it so that, that was a fun project. Can you tell us how,
Stephen: [07:30] I mean, was it out hustle? Is that how you were able to get it to that level? I mean because they, you, I would think any big competitor would have teams working on this and companies that they probably outsource to and all that kind of jazz. How could you some little college student? Probably half drunk most of the time. How did you, I mean, is that part of the sacred. I mean, did you, just because it wasn’t a job for you, it was like a thrill. I mean, what was it that did that for you?
Jeff: [07:55] So at the time I was actually working full time. So this is like, you know, I, I started the website right towards the end of my, of college. My first job after college was working in Sco for an seo company. So I, I knew how to optimize websites, I knew about link building an about page optimization. I think part of it is just really knowing that the nitty gritty of Seo and then consistency and it’s just kind of just slow gradual improvements month after month. And then after about a year I really had some strong rankings.
Stephen: [08:25] Well, it’s powerful what you just said. Consistency. Um, because my last interview, it was one or two percent the conversation. Is that still true? I mean, I know that was some time ago, but that, that consistency regardless is really critical.
Jeff: [08:39] I’d say consistency is so important for any online marketing channel, but all the more with Seo, because Seo, if you’re doing facebook ads or Google adwords, you know, you can flip the switch and you can, you can get pretty good results by the end of the week or by the end of the month with Seo and it really is a longterm play where you have to kind of make these incremental gains month after month after month and you might not see the fruits of your labor after a month or two months or even a few months, but you know, once you started doing it for three, three months or six months or even a year, that’s when you can really see some strong results.
Stephen: [09:15] Consistency is the answer. It’s the consistency seems to be the answer for almost all of our challenges. Okay, so you, you create the site, you have some success. Uh, the, you got to get a job, so are you have a job but you gotta move on, you sell it and you’re like, okay, I like this thing. That proof of concept. Was that part of a part of your resume? I mean, he was at a really important part of your resume and then if so, which I think it would be, what, what did that allow you to do that advanced you even further and you get what I’m asking?
Jeff: [09:52] Yeah, I think I see what you’re saying. Uh, it was, it was definitely exciting to see that I could create something that didn’t exist, build it and then sell it and it’s very fulfilling to me. It felt fulfilling to me and my, throughout my whole, you know, the past 10 years or so, my, I’ve always been striving to find a way to achieve passive income and it’s way easier said than done. I try, I mentioned I, I tried it with an ad sense site and that seemed almost impossible. I wanted to drop shipping. It seemed like it got me closer and my plan was always to use my consulting, whether it’s employee or freelancing to find a passion project and get that to take off. So, um, you know, my first beer pong stadium, it got me closer, but I could see it wasn’t really the market wasn’t there at the time where I could see it take me there.
Jeff: [10:38] So I thought I’d just sell out and go into my next project, which then I started a three d printing website and um, I funny story, I’ve realized I’m pretty good at marketing with websites, but I’m not, I’ll be the first amount of not the best with operations and with this three d printing an ecommerce site. What else? Drop Shipping, three d printers because, you know, five years ago, everyone’s talking about three d printers and how it’s going to change everything. So I jumped on the bandwagon and uh, I wasn’t the best with my credit card security system and I got maybe, Gosh is $25,000 of chargebacks in one single month and after that it kind of put a bad taste in my mouth. So that’s when I, I press the pause button for drop shipping.
Stephen: [11:20] And you said I’m probably better at the marketing side. I can help others. That part, you know, that’s not a bad thing to figure out that that’s not your lane. Yeah, I mean obviously you wouldn’t be where you are today if you didn’t figure that out.
Jeff: [11:33] Exactly. It’s one of those things. I love the saying fail faster where you know, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to hit roadblocks. Just just keep chugging along and adjust as you go. Okay,
Stephen: [11:44] well, I’m interested. Got You. Offer a whole myriad of services and uh, you have a whole bunch of things and you know, kind of in our pre talk, we talked a bit, most of the sellers that I’m talking with here are listening to this. Don’t have their own website. They don’t, a lot of them have products. They’re bringing products to market. They’re trying to get their products out there and generally I’m going to say generally most of it is only on Amazon. Now, the good news is you can help drive traffic to your listing on Amazon. Correct. Am I going to make a bunch of statements? I just make sure I’m correct when I said this so me, I could create a landing page or I could do a facebook ad and I can have that listing or only go to my listing on Amazon. I don’t have to do anything outside of that. I can have it show just my listing. Am I correct?
Jeff: [12:33] Yeah. You’re actually touching on a very effective strategy that not many people talk about lunch and that’s you can do. So I just sat in my chair a little bit taller all of a sudden, Ooh, I like where your mind’s at because you don’t hear people talk about this, but you can actually, you know, when people talk about getting traffic on Amazon, getting revenue on Amazon, they’re mainly focused on like Amazon optimization. How do you show up higher and your category and how do you get more views within the site and how do you know? Amazon has its own advertising where you can show up higher, but what they don’t. What I don’t hear people talk about much as you can optimize your Amazon page just like you would a landing page or a website that you own. You can make sure you have the key words properly for Google just like you would Amazon and even we can touch on this more later, but even talking about link building, you can even build links directly to your Amazon pages so they rank higher in search results. Instead they bring in more traffic to your listings.
Stephen: [13:30] Oh Dude. It’s funny. We kind of had this Gary v discussion beforehand and the piece of advice is you got to do everything and so I sit back and the question is, do you want to be a walmart that sells, I don’t know, 40,000 skews? Right? And they make a ton of money, but they got a lot of responsibility. They got a lot of moving pieces and if you’ve been to a walmart, they don’t all seem to be working well, right? Some were really great, but sometimes there’s 48 cash registers and two people operating. I would say that there’s something wrong with that model, right? Or do you want to have a very few skews? Very few products, may few brands. Maybe that’s a better way to say it, but then optimize them to get the most from them. And that to me is where, at least in my mind, my limited capacity. That’s to me where this, what you’re talking about is really the big advantage. You agreed.
Jeff: [14:30] I, I would agree. It’s, it’s taken a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun.
Stephen: [14:34] That’s a great way to describe it. Yeah. Okay. So, so let’s talk through, you know, I want you to sell the listeners on why they need their own website landing page, facebook page. What, what, what would you suggest? Because again, a lot of these listeners are going to be small sellers like myself selling a few products, trying to get it done on a shoestring budget. We’re back to your beer pong, but we’re not drinking yet. We should be. But anyway.
Jeff: [15:02] Exactly. Maybe after this we can play a game of beer pong. I’m not playing by the way. Just so you know.
Stephen: [15:08] I’m an old dude. It was not around when I was young and we’ve had quarters that was our game, but never played.
Jeff: [15:15] Well, there’s a first for everything. I guess I’m all right. I got one story that I think might shed some light on why you can’t just be on Amazon and it’ll a little background on myself. I run an ecommerce seo company, so I only work with ecommerce clients marketing, right. It’s one 80 mark
Stephen: [15:34] and their number’s one eight zero marketing.com. Okay.
Jeff: [15:37] That’s right. And um, so I’ve, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of different ecommerce store owners over the years and many of which also sell on Amazon and Ebay and other websites and there’s one client I had and um, he sells pearl jewelry and he was selling on its website as well as Amazon. And he had this one particular product. It was a pearl necklace that had a heart on it and he was just killing it on Amazon. We’re talking tens of thousands. It might’ve been over $100,000 a month just for one product. It was, it was great. Amazon, as you know, I’m sure your listeners know has lots of data on everything. They know what you’re selling, they know how much traffic your pages are getting and this must’ve flag something Amazon system because it wasn’t, wasn’t long, only a few months where all of a sudden Amazon had their own version of the product that was almost identical but slightly different and my client’s list and got buried overnight. It just. The revenue just stopped and that’s when he decided, all right, I can’t just focus on Amazon. I got to kind of diversify and I’ve seen a similar trend where a lot of sellers on Amazon, they see the revenue, but there’s also a fear there that they know at any time that could stop and it’s completely out of their control. So a lot of people move to having their own site. Just
Stephen: [17:01] a terrifying in in, in those of us who’ve been doing this for awhile. We all know people that that exact same thing has happened to where you can’t get the buy box no matter what you do, and it’s like, wait a second, I’m the only. Oh No, you’re not getting that buy books and so somebody else is going to show and your rank, you’re going to be listed further down. And so we’ve all seen that and why that happens. Um, you know, I’m not here to judge, I’m just saying that it, it likely will happen to anyone who is selling at one point. And so what do you do? What’s your plan? Really, that’s what it is. And so in the old days though, from what I understood is that, you know, creating a website, I mean, I know it’s easier today than it ever, right? Shopify, we’ve got to shopify store, so that’s easy. It was simple to set up. I mean even I can actually work in there, right? However, getting traffic to come to Steve’s shopify store as opposed to what we sell on Amazon, we sell the same product. It’s night and day. I have not. I can think of one example of someone that sells 90 percent of their products on their own website versus Amazon only one example of all the people I know and I know a lot of people.
Jeff: [18:11] Why? What is it? It’s one of those things where I think it’s part of it as an industry trend where, you know, when Amazon first kind of started pushing the Amazon prime two day shipping, it really caught on it and help their growth and you were seeing a trend where people instead of going to google to do product searches, they’re instead going directly to Amazon. So that’s one thing that it makes it difficult if you’re an SCO because you’ve got more people doing product searches on Amazon or in some cases you’ll have people use google to find a product and once they find it they’ll go to Amazon to see if they can get it there with their prime account. So I think that’s part of it is there is so much opportunity for Amazon. I think the number of searches on Amazon’s growing every single year just because more people are starting their search process there instead of google. So I think there’s definitely a lot of opportunity there. Um, but I mean, I, I see across my clients look at to Google analytics. There’s also, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars worth of revenue that you can get from Google and other search engines without using Amazon.
Stephen: [19:16] So I mean, you know, I guess you’re directing your clients to, hey, have a b plan. You need to be off in addition, right? You’re not trying to get off, but you need to have this other option and then if you’re going to do it, you want to do it right and you’re going to have to build it out. Correct.
Jeff: [19:33] Exactly. Okay. Hedge your bets. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Stephen: [19:36] Okay, so there’s a reason that you want to have it. And again, you don’t have to do your own website. You can use a shopify store, bigcommerce or woocommerce and blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s a million different options or it can be a landing page. Correct. We had that little discussion beforehand, right? It could be just a dedicated landing page to Steve’s water bottles. I’m always using my water bottle example, but it could be just that water bottle and then that link can take you right to my Amazon listing. It doesn’t have to have its own shopping cart or any of that. It could literally go to my listing of my product on. That’s the buy box they see, so that’s a pretty cool thing and it could be facebook ads, so let’s, let’s bring it together. So we, we sold the people on what they should do now. Best practices and I kind of, I kind of pressing you for this is I’m looking for some foundational stuff and you were like, well is it this, this and this, because you were basically saying it really is all of these, Steve, I want you to go to some real building blocks for people. The things that they need to pay that are kind of like absolutes, the minimums to really do effective work.
Jeff: [20:34] Yeah, that’s great. I think the first decision that someone needs to make is it make more sense for them to just do a simple landing page that may be linked to their Amazon listing of the e listing or should they actually have like a shopify? I. I’d say if you just have a few skews, a few products, then you can probably get away with just a simple listing that’s going to. It’s kind of a landing page, it talks about your products, but really the goal is to get them to your Amazon page. If you have a bunch of skews, you know, if we’re talking like 50 plus, then that’s probably when it makes more sense to, to build out your own shopify site, just because a little more moving parts. You know, for me, I’m always about the path of least resistance. So if you can get by with just a simple site that then go for it.
Jeff: [21:18] Um, and then from there, the first step of the stl processes keyword research, you want to go, there’s free tools out there. Um, one of my favorites is Google keyword planner. You, it’s completely free. You just enter in keywords that describe your product and it’s going to suggest keywords for you. It will show you the search volume so you can see what people are actually searching for to find your product. And this is where they’re searching on google specific. That’d be fair. This is not Amazon search. This is google search. Yep. That’s exactly a google search and um, but, and if you’re getting, usually it’s pretty similar, like if you’re saying that one keyword has more searches than another keyword, you’ll usually see that same pattern and being in Yahoo and other search engines. Okay. So that’s the first step. Firstly, what are people looking for?
Jeff: [22:04] How are they searching for your product? Uh, once you get that, you know, you kind of want to make a list. I want to start grouping them together by category. Maybe it’s a, you might find people using certain keywords for one of your products using different keywords for other products. You basically just want to see what make a list of all the keywords people are using to search for, for each of your products. Then you’re going to optimize those pages so you know your first want to make sure you have a page for each of those groups of keywords. You want to optimize it with. The title tags are going to have the keywords in there or the closer, the key word is to the beginning of the title tag, the better. Okay. Well you don’t want to slow down. You are knee deep in nerd speak and you know.
Jeff: [22:46] No, I mean it’s good. I mean don’t get me wrong, but you’re going to have to give us a little bit more than that. So when you say title tag, help me understand what that means. So, um, every single page has what’s called the title tag. If you search something in Google, you have the blue link that the very top of each listing that’s called the title tag. Oh, okay. That is the most important ranking factor on a page itself. So if I’m looking for a blue water bottle, um, that if that’s the major search term that we look up and it happens to be blue water bottle, blue stainless steel water bottle, I want to have my listing is close to that search term as possible. That’s what you’re saying. My, my html connection there. Correct? Exactly. Okay. Okay. I got it. I’m a little slower.
Jeff: [23:36] Everybody else’s like the Steve, of course. I’m a little slow right now. I just wanna make sure I get that right. Okay, go ahead. Yeah. If we’re. If we talk about the fundamentals of onpage optimization, let’s say you searched something into google. Every listing is going to have the title tag. That’s the blue link at the top that says the name of the page. It’s going to have the Meta description. That’s those two lines of black texts that described the page, and then you have the url. So we want to make sure we have the keyword in all three of those elements. So we start with the title tag. Put the keyword in there. Google is going to see that. It’s going to understand what the page is about. The Meta description is basically just like writing ad copy you want to sell the searcher on, on why they should click on your listing versus the other 10. Talk about, um, you know, why you’re better than the others. Talk about your value propositions. Maybe you, um, are cheaper. Maybe it’s higher quality, maybe. Um, it’s, it’s organic. Whatever it might be, you want to put that in the manuscript so they’re more likely to click on your listing and then with the url you also want to have the keyword in the url. So those are Kinda the three basics of optimizing a page
Stephen: [24:37] and that gives you the best opportunity to be seen when somebody is looking for blue stainless steel water bottle.
Jeff: [24:44] Exactly. When you have that all on your page and Google comes to your blue stainless steel water bottle page, it’s going to see, okay, we see these keywords in the title tag, we see that it’s at the manuscripts when we see that it’s in the url. And then most importantly, make sure you haven’t mentioned in the copy on the page itself. Um, you know, Google is essentially a very fancy mathematical equation and when it goes to the content and starts seeing these instances, then um, it’s going to understand, okay, this page really is about blue stainless steel water bottles and that’s going to have a positive impact on your rankings.
Stephen: [25:16] In the old old days, I remember people would have, they would literally have on the page all these words that just say blue stainless steel water bottle, yellow stainless steel water bottle, right? Whatever that was called way back in the day. We’re trying to game the system. Correct?
Jeff: [25:30] Right, exactly. They would. There’s a term called keyword stuffing where people would just go overboard where it be like looking for blue stainless steel water bottles. We have the best blue stainless steel water bottles are blue stain. You don’t want to do that. You want it to read naturally. You want it to read it and, and not second guessed that, okay, this sounds kind of weird and my recommendation, if you’re looking for some sort of guideline on how often do you use your keyword in the content? Um, I’d say once per every hundred words is probably at least a good general guideline. Um, but what I found is the more content you have, the better you can rank. Um, typically 300 to 500 words. If you really just want to have the best chance it’s going to be where you want to be content wise, I’m really describe your product, talk about how it can help people, um, if you want to have some reviews, that can also help, but the more content you have, the better and you want to be as in depth as possible. You want to really go in deep and talk about why your product’s the best who coots for who can use it, and as Google sees that you’re covering all these different kinds of topics related to your product that it’s going to have a great impact on your keyword rankings.
Stephen: [26:38] [inaudible], you could actually get penalized by stuffing too. They’re getting smarter and they’re figuring that stuff out and you will get penalized.
Jeff: [26:47] Yeah, you are absolutely right. Ten years ago you could stuff and get away with it actually ranked pretty well. Nowadays, if Google realizes this page is really over optimize, we’ve seen many cases when purposely decreased or rankings and penalize you
Stephen: [27:01] what we just described about Amazon doing, right. All of a sudden you magically off the first page. Right? It sounds like similar.
Jeff: [27:08] Exactly. Amazon, Google, you know, bolt, you can get screwed on both. So you’ve got to hedge your bets.
Stephen: [27:12] [inaudible] got to hedge your bet. Let me ask you this, because what you’re describing have, you know, really getting that optimized is the exact same thing we’re doing on Amazon, right? We, I mean there are companies that do that give you that same search stuff. You’ve got to buy it on Amazon. So they see, you know, there are different algorithms but conceptually they virtually worked the same.
Jeff: [27:32] Yeah, I’d say so. I’m familiar with the basics of Amazon search, but I’m not, it hasn’t been my focus, but from what I’ve gathered that both have an algorithm that looks at looks at certain data points and you know, if you need to check all these different boxes to make sure the best chance of showing up at the top.
Stephen: [27:50] You know, I’m sitting here thinking about, you know, earlier in the discussion we said that, you know, Amazon has such a strong presence that Google’s not quite as strong. People are searching directly on Amazon, not a, not necessarily in google like they used to. However, if you do search in Google, you Amazon comes up also. I mean lots of times it ranks really high for what you’re searching for, so it’s really important that your products are represented there. If not, your competitors will be
Jeff: [28:17] right. Yeah, that’s. That’s another thing is you know, you in Google, even if someone isn’t starting their search on Amazon, if they start at Google, they could still find that Amazon listing and it Kinda goes back to we’re talking about where when you’re. If you have, if you’re on Amazon or on Ebay, you know one opportunity that people are missing is you can also get your own listings to rank very well on search engines so you can optimize your Amazon listing and I think the best place to do that is within the content. Making sure that you’re having a lot of content on your Amazon descriptions and your keyword in the content and that we can touch on this more a little later, but also with the link building side. If you can get other websites to link to your Amazon listing, your ebay listing and Google sees that that’s going to have a positive impact on your rankings and not only can you get traffic within Amazon with an Ebay, but it can also get traffic from Google, bing and other search engines, vengeance
Stephen: [29:06] and if you get the respected sites, and I we’re going to go there in a second, but I just want, I just had this deep thought and I want to think about this. You drop shippers, you, Jeff, isn’t that. I mean to be fair, I mean it’s funny. I’m helping a friend with a product and I’m like, dude, you’re stuff is so heavily drop shipped on Ebay. He goes, tell me about it, but every single item from Amazon is basically drop shipped on Ebay and in Google and you’ll find all these things and they’re selling them at a higher price. Go figure. Right? So they can make money. That’s because they are taking advantage of what? You’re not taking advantage of us, the seller. Correct. Right. I mean like it was like a dull moment when I just realized that it’s like, wait a second, if I don’t do this, somebody else is going to do this for my product.
Stephen: [29:53] Correct. Exactly. And then you can sit there and say, well, Hey, what do you care, Steve, you sold your product, right? That’s the old drop shipper line, hey, I bought your product. Why would you care what I know I want to sell it for 10 times what I have. I mean, let’s face it, right? So, okay. So there’s another argument why you want to say, okay, let’s get to link building because I think this is another thing. So you have, uh, another, uh, so one 80 marketing is, uh, is his website and I’ll qualify it and say, I don’t benefit again, unless you use the services and you win. Then you can say, Steve, that dude was awesome. You have another site called link hunter. That’s a service that you offer where basically you’re helping build links because that’s hard, right? And I mean, you can explain how it works, but I just want to make sure that if stuff gets organized and you’ve put it in place, are you able to maintain it through link center?
Jeff: [30:44] Yeah, great question. So you know, like you said link hunters, it’s something brand new and it’s mainly aimed for people, whether you’re an Amazon seller that wants to build links and promote your products or if you have a shopify site or even just a splash page and you want to get more links to your website, that’s where [inaudible] comes in to help with the outreach efforts. So it, you know, like you said, link building is one of the hardest parts about Seo, but it’s also the most important part. Whereas the biggest metric and helping you rank is how many links are going to your website and how powerful proof. Correct. Is that what it represents? It’s proof that this is good stuff because we take a vote. You know, every link is basically a site voting that hey, this, this site’s worth Lincoln to this site verse worth sending traffic to. So Google and Google sees that and there’s been correlation studies done year after year and even now and 2018 going into 2019, the number of links going to your website and the quality of those links is still the number one ranking factor. And when I say quality, basically a link from New York Times or Huffington post is going to carry a lot more weight than if I created a blog last week and link to you because they’re called trusted sites, right? Yes, exactly.
Stephen: [31:57] Okay. Alright. And so getting those links and figuring that out, what was cool to me, what I liked about when I went through this, it allowed you to uh, so. So for example, Steve’s water bottles, I want them to make it to the athletes page, some athletes page. So from what I’m reading of link hunter, it basically, it can let me go to that. There’s this side I want to go to. I can then get their email, send them some way to a personal message saying, Hey, I saw this great product. I think this will be great for your thing. And then that way you get them to a link to me. Is that Kinda the way it works?
Jeff: [32:36] Yeah. You can over simplifying it. I’m sure know you got the of it. So link building, like I said, it’s very complex now you could spend hours, days reading about it and still not come up with anything actionable. So I wanted to make something that’s simple enough where you don’t have to be an seo expert to do it. And the first step is choosing. All right, how do you want to build links? Do you want to do a guest post? So if you like writing articles, you have someone that can write articles for you, you can post on another relevant website or a blog and I can get them to an end the end that post have a link back to your site. Or maybe you want to do product reviews so you can go pitch your product to a bunch of relevant blogs and get them to review it.
Jeff: [33:13] Include a link back, or if you have a piece of content, you know there’s some ways you can promote that. So you choose the campaign type that interests you the most and then it will walk, walks you through the process and you enter a few keywords that will show you a different sites in your niche that you can target as well as their seo value of their email address, has built an email templates so you can kind of help you with the outreach side. So it’s really, it gives you all the tools you need to get the links and it kind of walks you through this process that I found to be most effective.
Stephen: [33:45] And so how important is that now? Especially in today’s. I mean it’s just crazy. I mean how many gazillion sites are there on any subject? Right? How, I mean finding the right ones. Does it help you figure out the right ones too? Because you just don’t want to link to anyone, right?
Jeff: [34:04] Yeah. That, that’s exactly you want to. And this is all about getting other websites to link back to you because that’s what’s gonna make the biggest impact. I’m sorry I said it wrong, but yeah, I get what you mean. Yeah. So, um, it, it does help you with the right ones, you know, we will find it. Let’s say you’re doing guest posting, we’re going to find, you know, you’ll, you’ll see sites that have allowed guest posts before, so they’re more likely to link to you. You’ll also see the seo value of the site, so it’s not just going to be some brand new site that was created last week. Uh, you know, you can see ones that have some seo power to it. Um, so yeah, that’s kind of all built in and um, you know, it kind of gives a little bit information about each site so you can make sure it’s relevant to what you’re selling.
Stephen: [34:42] But the other thing that is, at least it appears, and correct me if I’m wrong, is it gives you reports for followup later on so you can actually see if there were any results. And to me, again that gives you, that didn’t work. Okay, let me tweak this right? And then you can fine tune it over time. Correct.
Jeff: [34:57] Exactly. And that’s one thing that’s cool about it is you can connect your email account. So it will, if you send an email to a blogger and they don’t respond after three days or five days or seven days, it will automatically send a followup email for you and you can kind of track that to see who’s, who’s not responsive, who’s interested. And then I keep pursuing those opportunities.
Stephen: [35:17] I get those all the time. And it’s funny. I can tell that that’s what it is because I’m like man, they will not let me go because they get on my show or what have you. And I’m like, they are not letting me go. I’m like, there’s somebody tracking that somewhere. That’s really cool. All right. The other one I think that’s really important for people that, that really, you know, we’re, we use, we use other graphics and stuff and one of the, the, the content piece of it, I think, you know, like you said, getting an article and you can go onto fiverr or upwork or whatever it’s called today and get someone to help write meaningful, actionable content. But visually I think, I think there’s been, I think, you know, I’m guilty of it too, just putting up graphics without really being intentional because I think people learn a lot from graphics when I see one of those charts. And matter of fact, I looked at your samples. I’m like, I’ve seen somebody
Jeff: [36:08] I know happened. I’m thinking he’s got.
Stephen: [36:11] He’s gotten to me. How important is, is a content, you know? And, and visual content especially.
Jeff: [36:19] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s so important and people don’t talk about how important it is. I mean we live in a day and age where every single website is now a publisher of content. It’s not just a media company, it’s, it’s not just a news company. So you got almost every seller, an ecommerce site also pushing out content. So what all that means is that the web is saturated with so much content and if you don’t have a media on it, whether it’s graphics or videos or any type of illustrations or diagrams, your contents not going to stand out. It’s going to get lost in the thousands of other similar pieces of content that’s just text on a page. So I’d say if you really want to stand out and you really want to create content that gets shared, that gets links and gets traffic, you need to start using visual elements to enhance it and make it look nicer.
Stephen: [37:09] Well, I’m going to connect. Um, I’ll put the link to your pinterest page because when you see some of these graphics, these infographics, you’re going to be like, oh my God, I’m telling you, you have seen these before and you’re going to be like, wait a second and you’re gonna. Remember looking at him because to me it takes me seconds. It’s a lot easier than reading a giant article and I mean, I can see the appeal. I can see the point of entry for me in some of these things. I could see that, oh, that drew my attention. Right? Um, and, and so pretty interesting. Um, and it, this isn’t hard stuff to do with technology today. Correct?
Jeff: [37:46] It’s so much easier now. I mean, it’s easier for two reasons. One is outsourcing costs are so cheap, you can find the designer overseas and get a really nice infographic created. There’s also tools out there that can make it really easy. I believe infogram.com is another one that I recommend if you’re just trying to get started with this, it’s pretty cheap. You can, it kind of walk has always sort of templates. You can create your own infographics like a built into their system and they even have like a free plan. So if you just want to like get something basic, you can do it for free. But yeah, there’s technology and outsource that make it really easy to create amazing content.
Stephen: [38:24] You know, as I’m sitting here thinking about, because you given us a lot of information, all three of these things really are critical if you’re going to take the plunge and build a page, a splash page, which is the right term. Sorry, I didn’t know the term. Um, or uh, um, I keep calling them landing page, a splash page or a shopify store or whatever. These three pieces all really work together. Correct. And that’s how you’re going to drive traffic
Jeff: [38:51] that, yeah, that’s exactly it. Whether you have your splash page or your shopify site and you create some amazing content and you promote that content and you get links back to your, your splash page, your shopify site, that’s gonna increase your ranking and it’s going to increase your traffic and you get more targeted traffic. It’s just going to make more revenue.
Stephen: [39:08] You know, I think back to what Gary v’s advice to me was, Steve, you got to be everywhere. I mean this is, you know, where your, your instagram, all this stuff has to work together and if you coordinate all this stuff, that’s how you, you’re going to have the b plan that we started at the beginning of the conversation talking about is that you really do need to figure this out. Um, and, and again, you can hire a company like Jeff’s, of course we’d love you to write, um, you do that, this kind of service and you only work with the ecommerce companies, but you also put out some content that helps others for free. I don’t, I didn’t even charge me anything, I didn’t see any of these. There was no for me to go to any of these for these samples. It was all free.
Jeff: [39:46] Right, and that’s one thing I love about content marketing and you tell you, I mean you mentioned this a few times about Omni channel being everywhere and with content marketing, you’re kind of getting a few birds with one stone because if you create an amazing piece of content on your site and you promote that out there, what was a few things happening? One, you can get links that’s going to help with Seo, but also you had the social media benefits because if you create some content that people are sharing on facebook and twitter, now you’re on social media and I’ve found content marketing is a way more effective method of capitalizing on social media than it is to just create a facebook page and just do posts. I mean, you can do content calendars, you can have consistent posts on a regular basis, but I’ve never, I very rarely do I see that outperform an amazing piece of content with thousands of shares.
Stephen: [40:34] Dude, I get it. Okay. So I’m going to put all the links for Jeff’s contact, um, for the one add marketing on the website. And if there’s, if somebody had a followup question to you, there’s a contact, is that how they best way to get in touch with you?
Jeff: [40:51] Yeah, I mean I live in, give out my email address. You can reach me directly@Jeffatoneamarketing.com
Stephen: [40:58] one eight zero marketing.com. So that’s it. Um, and you speak at irce any other, um, I assume you’d be speaking, uh, any other places around that people can find you?
Jeff: [41:11] Yeah, I speak at the IRC. He, um, I’ll be speaking at ecommerce fuel live next month, a new orleans. So yeah, I do a few different conferences throughout the year.
Stephen: [41:21] Alright, good. And then when you see, you mentioned you heard him on the show. That’s awesome. Okay. So the goal of this podcast is to help people who kind of get stuck because you know, for whatever reason their, their account gets shut, their Amazon comes on their listing, which is very, very frequent, you know, obviously. Um, but they just haven’t been able to push past it. What’s your best advice to help push past stuck and stuck can mean justin, not in sales. It could mean in products. It can mean in anything.
Jeff: [41:51] Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, it Kinda goes back to what you said before. It’s just consistency where, especially with Seo, you’re going to get stuck. You’re going to do all, you’re gonna, do your keyword research, you’re going to optimize your pages, you’re going to build your links, can do everything right. And you know, a week ago by you don’t see any changes. A month would go by and you all see any changes. So it’s Seo especially. I think again, just touching on consistency and how important it is. I also think I’m testing new things. I mean, we live in a world of all my marketing. We have so much data where if you have a question, if you’re stuck, you can try something else and test it. You say, okay, I tried getting links from these sites. I tried creating this type of page. I tried optimizing my content like this. I tried adding images to my my article. I’m trying new things and measure it. See, see how your rankings changing, how has your traffic changed because of going up or is it going down and keep doing what works and you know, don’t waste your time on things that aren’t working. And as this continuum, this continuous process of testing and tweaking and trying a while, being consistent, I think that’s really going to be the way to get past any sort of wall or barrier.
Stephen: [43:01] I love it. I think the consistency is the most powerful statement in their whole thing. You’re absolutely right. It, it, it’s over time. It’s that. It’s that you know, you know, making sure that you are top of mind when they are ready to buy your top of mind. And again, it’s just putting it out there and continually doing it and I think that’s just so smart. I really, uh, I really appreciate you taking the time. Very informative. Uh, you made it so I can understand it. And then I think the most important thing. So I really appreciate it. Wish you nothing but success. Thank you so much.
Jeff: [43:31] Awesome. Well Stephen, thank you so much for having me. This has been great.
Stephen: [43:35] Great Guy. A lot of knowledge. And after the, uh, after the interview I said to him he should do his own podcast because with that much energy, that much information he could, it’s unstoppable. He’s got a huge advantage. And the fact that he understands our business, the fact that he sold products helps. That’s it because everybody can sit there and give you. It’s like your old teacher who was teaching for 30 years but never worked, you know, that’s hard to connect with. And I always learned more from the teachers that did the work and then came out and taught. That’s where I always could because they’d seen it and they’re like, oh yeah, that’s the way it said that done, but here’s the way we really did it. Boom. It connects with me that that visual stuff and the way that you can explain it, I think he’s got just so much opportunity and I’m encouraging them to do it and I hope a hope. He really does ecommerce momentum.com and reach out to jeff if you have questions. Don’t be afraid to. He said he’s available for them and that’s what you want to do. Learn from everyone and a checkout his services and check out the link for his pinterest stuff because these infographics are amazing. Really, really super strong ecommerce momentum.
Cool voice guy: [44:40] Thanks for listening to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. All the links mentioned today can be found at incomers momentum. Doug, come under this episode number. Please remember to subscribe and the lake us on
