HOW TO CHOOSE IMAGES FOR AMAZON
One of the best things you can do to increase your sales on Amazon is to have really good images. Images increase your conversion rate, and by increasing your conversion rate you also get a better rank from amazon. So needless to say, but having good images is a huge aspect to selling well on amazon.
Depending on the type of category you’re in, you can have anywhere from 6 to 10 images per listing. The best way to decide on what images to use it to have your images tell a story, or a narrative. You want to take your customer down a path that leads them to buying. And the best way to do this is to have images that also have text on them. Sure people can see the images, but it’s also helpful to have text that explains the benefits of your product as well. You can do this for all of the images except the main image, which should be your image on a plain white background. All other images appear to be fair game, at least for now. It’s technically against the TOS to put any kind of text on the images, but I’ve never run into any problems.
So this is how the layout generally tends to go for the images. The first image, as mentioned above, is simply a clear picture of your product on a white background. You can put a logo on this image as well to try and make it stand out from the crowd. This is also your most important image because it’s the one that will show up in the search results. And you want to “win the click” which means that out of the 16-24 products on the first page, you want the customer to click on yours. So it needs to look different than all the others ones.
The second image is a parts list, or a picture that has everything that is included when the customer buys your product, even down to the instruction manual. If there’s batteries included, put them in this image. If there’s interchangeable parts, put them in here. Basically everything that’s included in the box, you want to make sure the customer sees everything.
Then images 3, 4, 5, and 6 are images of your product in action with added text benefits. So if your product is a waterproof wireless Bluetooth speaker you can show an image of the speaker in the shower, attached to the wall. The text can be something like, “waterproof so you can shower and listen at the same time.” It’s pretty simple, but it’s also very powerful. Images with text will convert better than images without, just keep that in mind.
And finally, the 7th and last image is some kind of guarantee. Most companies on amazon offer a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee or a lifetime guarantee. Some are 3 months or 6 months, or a year. Whatever your guarantee is, you’ll want to have it be the last image so it’s the last thing going through the customer’s mind when they view your images. They’ll know that it’s safe to buy your product, because if they don’t like it, or it doesn’t work, they can always return it and get their money back.
So that’s about it for images. Do this for all of your listings and you’re almost guaranteed to see an increase in your conversion rate.
HOW TO WRITE COPY FOR PRODUCT LISTINGS ON AMAZON
One of the hardest and sometimes most challenging thing to do is to write good sales copy for your amazon listing. Instead of creating your own, I recommend copying your competitors, and I’m not talking about copying their copy and pasting it onto your own. I’m talking about looking at what they’re doing, and using the same strategy.
Here is how it’s done. You want to make sure your Title and Bullets have the best keywords stuffed into them, and you also want to make sure that you don’t use a keyword more than once, because it hurts your ranking. For the title, put as many keywords as you can and at the same time you want to make sure it’s actually readable for the human, not just for the amazon algorithm. It needs to have all the keywords, but it also needs to appeal to the customer as well.
For the bullet points, again you’ll be using the keywords, but you’ll be doing a little more selling in these bullets. If you haven’t already done so, you’ll want to see what the customers are most excited about and what they hate the most in your product. The easiest way to do this is to go to similar competitor listings and take a look at the 5 star reviews, and also the 1 star reviews. Find out the pros and cons, the simply write your bullets so they mention the benefits and pros that the customers like. And for the cons, write about how your product overcomes those, or how your product isn’t prone to the same negatives as others. So if customers are complaining that the product breaks really easily, you’ll mention how your product is durable and built to last. You’re essentially handling any objections in these bullet points.
Then there’s the product description, which is the least important out of the three mentioned. In this area you’ll want to use any keywords that you couldn’t fit into the title or the bullet points. You can talk about some of the benefits in this area as well. A lot of times customers will just skip over this area altogether, so it’s not the most crucial thing to spend your time on. A good guideline you can follow is to start with a benefit about the product, then give a list of everything that’s included, ad another benefit or how it can improve your customer’s quality of life, and then finish with a call to action. The call to action you want to use is to tell the customer to buy your product, or add it to their cart.
That’s it. It may take awhile to get the hang of writing these at first, but if you stick to the guidelines it will soon become second nature to you.
HOW TO LAUNCH PRODUCTS ON AMAZON
It would be nice if it was possible to simply list a product on amazon, maybe run some sponsored ads, and have that product sell extremely well. But the fact is that there’s a lot more competition on amazon then they’re used to be. And in order to get sales you need to be “seen.” And the only way to be seen is to have your product ranked on the first page of amazon. Easy enough right? Not really.
There’s a specific process that needs to be followed each time a product is launched to make sure it ranks well and to make sure a lot of money isn’t unnecessarily wasted. Amazon looks for a couple key components when they rank products: daily sales velocity and conversion rate. They want the most sales per visitor that lands on your listing. And what used to be the best way to do this was to give product away in exchange for an unbiased review. Amazon recently made changes to their TOS that now prohibits this. So the next best thing is to sell products at a highly discounted rate in order to get reviews.
So let’s step back. Let’s assume that your listing is active, and there’s plenty of inventory at the amazon warehouses. Your listing looks good; the title, bullets, description and images are all on point. You’re set up to have a good conversion once people get there. But first we got to get them there. It used to be a simple as listing your product on a review site and having people buy it and then give a review. These sites can’t be used anymore for fear that your account will get banned.
So then how do you promo your product? Glad you asked, and the answer is Facebook. If you don’t already have a customer email list, the next best thing is to put an ad on Facebook and get people to visit your amazon listing. Since you’re heavily discounting your awesome product, most people will buy which will boost your conversion rate. And since you’re using FB to advertise to a huge audience, you’ll have no problem getting enough daily sales velocity to compete with the top sellers, and then eventually getting your product listed on the first page. From there you can then start getting organic traffic, making your money back, and then finally profiting from this.
HOW TO PICK PRODUCTS FOR AMAZON
Some people think that if their product sells well outside of amazon then it will automatically sell well on amazon too. This is just not the case. There’s a lot of different factors to take into consideration when deciding to place your product on amazon. You have to analyze the competition, you have to find out if there is enough demand for your product. You have to see if you can rank for the most profitable keywords. Before listing your product, it’s good to know these things before you waste a bunch of time and energy and inventory, all for nothing. So let’s dig in.
No matter how good your product is, if you can’t get it ranked then you will have a very difficult time selling it. So if your product is dominated by a particular brand on the front page of amazon, you may not want to try and compete with them. They may be selling hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, but there’s also not a lot of room for you to fit in without spending a large sum of money. That’s one thing to watch out for. Another thing to look for is the amount of reviews your competitors have. If every single person on the first page has thousands of reviews, it’s going to be really difficult for you to compete with them.
To figure out if you can compete, you’ll need to analyze how many units your competition is selling per day. Amazon generally rewards the companies who have the most sales with the first page listing. Amazon gets a cut of every single unit sold, so naturally they’re going to want to rank the people who are selling the most because it means more money for them. So lets say your competitors are selling 1000 units each month. You’re going to need to sell the same amount as them in order to be seen as a top seller. Which means you’re going to have to give away a lot of your product or do a lot of promotions in order to boost your sales. Figure out the costs and you’ll know whether it’s worth it for you to list your product.
Another thing that is highly important is determine how much products are doing in revenue each month on amazon. You may have a killer product, but if the average company is only doing 1k in sales each month, you’re not going to want to list your product. There simply just isn’t enough demand for your product on amazon, at least for right now. Generally speaking, it wouldn’t be worth your time and effort to list a product that only does 1k per month, but you’ll obviously be the determining factor for that.
Lastly, another way to gauge competition is to look at the amount of reviews your competitors have. If there’s some listings on the first page that only have, say 30 reviews or 40 reviews, you’ll know it might be kind of easy in order to beat those guys. You can give away 40 units and get 40 reviews and you’ll be right there with them. On the other hand, however, if almost everyone has over a thousand reviews, it’s going to be tough for you to get that many reviews right away. It can be done, but it’s definitely something you’ll want to take into consideration.
These are just some good guidelines to follow to help you decide whether to list your product or not. They can definitely save you time, money, and a lot of headache down the road.
HOW TO PICK KEYWORDS FOR AMAZON
One of the most important things you can do when trying to rank on amazon is to choose successful keywords. When a potential amazon customer goes to amazon.com they generally go straight to the search bar and type in what they’re looking for. For example they might type in “Bluetooth wireless speaker” and if you don’t have those words in your amazon title, bullet points, or back office, then nobody is going to be able to find your product.
So how do you know what types of words people are using to find your product? There’s a simple step by step process you can use to find the best keywords. The first one is to use Amazon Auto Suggest. Simply start typing the beginning words of your product and amazon will fill in the rest and give you some options to choose from. These are based off of what actual customers are using so you’ll know they are good ones.
Google has a keyword tool you can use to find the most popular keywords that people are using. Just head over to https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner and sign into AdWords or create a free account if you don’t already have one. Once you’re logged in just type in your keywords, and google will give you a huge list of relevant keywords and also show you how many searches they get per month.
Another way to find good keywords is to go to your competitor’s amazon listings and dig through them to find out what kinds of keywords they are using. Go to amazon and type in your main keyword (usually the name or type of your product) and go to the top 10 amazon listings. From there you’ll be able to see some re-occurring keywords so you know these will be good to use.
Using those three methods above will usually give you all the keywords you need, but if you want to dig even deeper you can use a reverse ASIN tool which will go behind the scenes and snoop on your competitors. It will be able to determine what kinds of keywords they are using and have in their search terms fields in seller central. It costs a little money, but it can definitely be valuable if you use it correctly.
One last tip on finding good keywords is to use misspellings in your search term fields. People misspell words all the time, so by using these you’ll have an advantage over your competitors who aren’t doing this. You may also want to consider using Spanish keywords as well, just to get some extra eyes on your listings. If you use all of the methods, you’ll be off to a great start in ranking your product and getting customers to visit your amazon listing.