Episode 4
d677ce1a-8d30-4382-91a1-61794b7b88ab

How to Get Your Supplement Brand on Amazon

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In this episode, you will learn exactly how to bring your supplement brand/DTC brand onto Amazon.

This episode is a step-by-step guide to help you throughout the process.

Get a complimentary actionable PPC Audit here.

Host

Mina Elias
Mina Elias

Meet Mina, a dynamic entrepreneur, chemical engineer turned Amazon expert, and founder of Trivium Group, an Amazon Growth Agency. Leveraging his success in scaling the supplement brand MMA Nutrition from its inception to a seven-figure enterprise, Mina has become a thought leader with a robust presence in the e-commerce domain. His journey includes speaking engagements on major Amazon industry stages, consulting over 400 brands, and appearances on 300+ Amazon and e-commerce podcasts, showcasing his expertise. As a continuous leader and innovator in the Amazon space, Mina’s entrepreneurial spirit and strategic insights drive success in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00.570]

How to get your supplement direct to consumer brand onto Amazon.

[00:00:08.210]

This is a step by step instructional podcast episode. Whether you have a supplement brand or direct to consumer CPG brand, the reason I mention supplements is because I work with a lot of supplements. And so I’ve done this many, many times. And so if you’re already having a ton of success off of Amazon selling your products direct to consumer on Shopify, you’re in retail, vitamin shop, something like that, and you are looking to expand to Amazon, I’m going to give you step by step instructions. I’m your host, Mina Elias, aka the egyptian prescription, founder of the Trivium group, which is an Amazon advertising agency.

[00:00:41.530]

I started in the supplement space, so this is my bread and butter. Without further ado, let’s dive right in. I’m going to give you a broad overview first of what you need to do to get on Amazon. So first step is you need to open up an Amazon account. Then once you have the actual Amazon seller account, there’s like a few hoops you have to jump through.

[00:0:59]

You have to upload your certificate of analysis. You have to get brand registry so you can have a trademark and all that stuff. I’m going to talk about the transparency program because a lot of people that sell direct to consumer or might be in retail, they might get a lot of people hijacking their listings, basically meaning my products sold at GNC, they get deals, they get cheap wholesale pricing. So people there might list on Amazon and start competing with you, which you don’t want that. So I’ll talk about preventing that.

[00:01:26.380]

But once you put the certificate of analysis, I think there’s business insurance needed right now. You need to do liability insurance, a million dollars. You have to name Amazon on the policy. Then you’re authorized to sell supplements on Amazon. So that’s kind of just getting the foundation of having an account right availability to sell on the marketplace.

[00:01:26.380]

Then from there you need to build the listing. So I’ll talk about building the listing, different elements of the listing. Then I’m going to talk about how to choose which products from your catalog to sell, how to validate that there’s demand and that this is going to work. Looking at the search results, understanding are you going to compete? If you have a $95 turmeric powder and you type in turmeric powder on Amazon, I don’t think you’re going to be able to compete.

[00:01:45.610]

Then from there you need to build the listing. So I’ll talk about building the listing, different elements of the listing. Then I’m going to talk about how to choose which products from your catalog to sell, how to validate that there’s demand and that this is going to work. Looking at the search results, understanding are you going to compete? If you have a $95 turmeric powder and you type in turmeric powder on Amazon, I don’t think you’re going to be able to compete.

[00:02:07.070]

People are not going to choose you. You can’t tell a story. People have to see you in the search results based on a keyword that we’re typing and be like, okay, cool. I look at these top four, five, six products. This one looks like it’s the best one.

[00:02:19.610]

I’m going to check that one out. So I’m going to cover that kind of just the first part of in the search, winning the search. And then I’m going to talk about everything that you need to do on the listing and all the things that are going to improve your conversion rate. I’ll talk about advertising, which is obviously a huge part of driving traffic. I’ll talk about how to utilize your existing audience so everyone, all of your customers on Shopify, maybe leverage them to benefit your launch.

[00:02:42.010]

That’s pretty much it. So let’s dive right in. First of all, you want to go to sellcentral, Amazon.com, create an account. What you’re going to do is you’re going to put in some basic information. Your LLC name, all of that kind of stuff.

[00:02:53.460]

You already have all of that, so you’re just going to fill it in. Your name, your LLC name, address, things like that. Once you put that in and you go through this process, they will mail you a physical card to your address. This is your business address, or it can be your house. They mailed it to my house.

[00:3:7.850]

They’re going to mail you this card and there’s going to be a code on it. Once you get this code, you’re going to put in the code and then they say, okay, we’ve validated that you live at this address. Then sometimes they’re going to schedule an interview with you where they’re going to ask you basic questions, who are you? What are you trying to sell? Stuff like that.

[00:03:26.130]

Very simple. So you schedule that call, and right after that, you’ll get your account. Now, this process takes a while. Takes like one month, maybe two months. If the code never shows up in the mail, you might have to ask them to resend the code.

[00:03:39.720]

And so it might take like two months. So if you’re planning on, oh, I want to launch on August, don’t start doing this like mid July, right? You got to start earlier. So give it two months. This stuff takes time.

[00:03:52.520]

Then from there, the next thing you want to do is you want to get approval to sell in that category, which is supplements category. This could also be for cosmetics or any category that you’re in that you’re trying to sell. And the easiest way to do that is to go to inventory and add a product. And then when you click on add a product, it’s going to open up. Instead of saying like you’re going to create a new listing, you just say, I want to sell this other product or you can create a new listing, one or the other.

[0:04:16.360]

I usually get ungated faster by trying to sell someone else’s supplements and then they’re like, okay, cool. You need to submit certificate of analysis and GMP certification. But you can just create your new listing as well if you want to do that. Create your new listing. Put in the bare bones.

[0:04:30.410]

You need a UPC code, which is the UPC code that you’re going to have. You’re going to probably end up using an FNSQ code which is an Amazon specific barcode. Basically think of it as your seller central account and your UPC code had a baby. And they create the FNSQ code which is a unique code to you and the product. So if someone gets the product and they’re like, oh my God, my stomach hurts so much.

[0:04:52.250]

I took this product and I’m sick. And they scan the FNSQ code. They know that it came from your seller account. So if there’s like ten people selling the same product, then they can find out who did that. So you put in the bare bones.

[0:05:03.560]

So you need the price, you need a main image, which is easy. You have already all of that you put in like your manufacturer name, which is your name. When are you going to start selling? You’re going to put some other things like dimensions. So just like the bare bones, obviously you’ll know if you can’t click submit because it’ll say you still need to fill out these fields.

[0:05:21.470]

So just fill that bare bone stuff out. Once you do that, they’re going to say, hey, you need approval. You’re going to have to choose a category, obviously. So while you’re creating the listing. So they say you need approval and then they’re going to walk you through the approval process saying you need to submit these documents, which is certificate of analysis, GMP certification.

[0:05:37.840]

They might ask you to do liability insurance as well, which is fine if you’re trying to do liability insurance. Just go into your settings of your account, account settings and then there’s going to be a part where it says liability insurance or insurance business insurance. Click on that, it’ll give you some options. I get mine from Hiscox. H-I-S-C-O-X.

[0:05:55.250]

You have to name Amazon as insured on the policy. So you might have to get an additional policy. It’s not that expensive. It costs me like maybe 600 a year or something like that. Something like not that significant.

[0:06:04.910]

Once you submit that paperwork, make sure the certificate of analysis is clean. Make sure the GMP certification is within the last twelve months. Submit that stuff. They might ask you to submit all different sides of the product, like real pictures. So you can just grab one, take your phone, take pictures of all sides, take pictures of the barcode and then upload it.

[0:06:23.450]

So they’re going to ask you for that. Then that’s going to take a little bit of time. Make sure if you are selling fat burners, testosterone products, any product that can make a claim, right? Like lose fat, gain muscle, build your testosterone, stuff like that. Don’t start with that.

[0:06:38.750]

Just do your creatine supplement, right? Because you just want to get approval to sell in that category and then you can list your other products. Now the thing is if you start doing like fat burner or fat burning, pre workout, things like that, thermogenic, any of that kind of stuff, testosterone booster, you’re going to get flagged and there’s going to be like a longer review process and you want to shortcut that time. So you don’t want to take too much time going through that process. So start with a super simple, easy one.

[0:07:04.650]

Then from there you’ll get approval. If you don’t get approved, just keep submitting the paperwork. And again and again change different things. Amazon system is incredibly glitchy. I had to submit my paperwork five times and it was the same thing.

[0:07:17.760]

Maybe change the date, change this, change small amounts of small, small changes. And finally after five times they approved it. And this is happening with my friend right now. We’re bringing his brand. It’s a big, big supplement brand, does eight figures off of Amazon, bringing it onto Amazon.

[0:07:33.110]

One of the flavors got approved. The second flavor didn’t get approved and it’s the same product. Doesn’t make any sense. So expect that to happen once the approval process is done. Now you’re ready to build the listing.

[0:07:43.930]

So to build the listing, you’re going to need listing images. You’re going to need a plus content, images which are like banner images in the middle of the page, your listing. You’re going to also need to do keyword research so you can do keywords in the front end and the back end and all that kind of stuff. You’re going to need to write your title. You’re going to need to write your title.

[0:08:02.370]

Good copywriting, bullet points, all of that kind of stuff. So that’s what you need to get started to build your listing. When it comes to creatives, you can’t just use the creatives that you have already on your d to C site because they’re ugly creatives. They work on your d to C site because you can tell your story so much better when you control all elements of the landing page. But when you don’t control the elements of the landing page, what you’re going to need to do is you’re going to need to basically, number one in the Main image, convince everyone.

[0:08:30.260]

Amazon is like a shelf. You’re in Whole Foods, you’re in Erowan, you’re in whatever sprouts. If you’re in vitamin shop, you’re on the supplement shelf, and then you’re like, okay, I want to buy turmeric. I want to buy pre workout. You’re going to look at the images, the front of the product, right?

 

[0:08:43.960]

And that’s how Amazon works. It’s the exact same thing. You can see the main image, you can see the price, and you can see the reviews, and that’s how people choose which one they’re going to pick up and look more thoroughly at. And so your main image really needs to spit out why your product is better than everyone else. And what you can do is you can slightly manipulate your label.

[0:09:05.710]

You have a product, the label is already printed. You’re not going to change that. But you can do a 3d render that has, for example, the word keto blown up or zero carbs, zero sugar blown up or whatever it is, whatever benefit that you have that’s going to separate you from everyone else, have that blown up. You can just change certain elements. People will buy the product and get it in the mail and they’re not going to say anything.

[0:09:27.620]

They’re going to be like, okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty much the same product. They’re not going to complain if you change it too much. They’re going to be like, what the hell?

[00:09:34.390]

I thought I bought something else. So you don’t want to change it too much, but you want to enhance certain aspects on the label so that you can sell your product better. You can use packaging. So, for example, how do you take advantage, you have a bottle. How do you take advantage of more white space?

[0:09:48.430]

So you put the bottle and then you put a box in the back and in the box it has these big words on it. Now they get the product in the mail, there’s no box. No one’s going to care, right? The bottle came. That’s what they wanted.

[0:09:59]

So you can do things like that when you have like a six pack we just did this with a six pack of keto pasta where they used to just show the bag of pasta. I’m like, guys, we need to take advantage of this. So we put a box in the back of the pasta, we put the six pastas in it, and then on the box, we just had all these big words, keto, zero carbs, nine calories, all of the stuff, which was really attractive. And then people would see the different pasta, and they’d see our pasta and they would click on ours. And so you need a main image that’s attractive, and then the rest of your images need to sell your product.

[0:10:35]

Like, assume that the people that are shopping are not going to see the title, they’re not going to see the bullet points, they’re not going to do anything other than they’re going to scroll through your images. And if they scroll through your images and it gives them the necessary information, and it’s like, this is exactly what I want. This is better than everyone else’s product. That’s what’s going to help your product convert. So you need that kind of images.

[0:10:54]

And I know that everyone who’s selling direct to consumer doesn’t have these kind of images. They just have, like, the front of the bottle, the side of the bottle, the back of the bottle, some influencer working out with the product, right? And I’m like, okay, this doesn’t tell me anything. How many milligrams of caffeine is in there. You know what I mean?

[0:11:10]

Don’t make me go, like, hunt for the information. Just say, this is better than everyone else because we have three different types of caffeine, and one of them is slow releasing. Da da da da, whatever it is. So your images have to sell your product a plus content. Exact same thing.

[0:11:22]

Now, let’s talk about title and bullet points. And by the way, right after I finish this, I’m going to jump into how to choose on your catalog. Right. And I’ll talk about some of the constraints that we have. So, title, the title is the most important thing when it comes to SEO optimization.

[0:11:38]

The way to do keyword research is basically you’re going to go to a tool like Helium10. I love Helium10. There’s other competitors, like Jungle scout. I don’t think they compare to Helium10. Helium10 is the best, in my opinion.

[0:11:49]

Download the chrome extension and you can sign up for account. It’s $97 a month, super cheap. Use my code. Just kidding. So you can sign up for helium ten to do some of this research.

[0:11:58]

And basically, you download the chrome extension, get x ray, type in your main keyword. So if you’re selling electrolytes powder, for example, type in electrolyte powder. The results will show up. You pull on x ray, it’ll show you the revenue of all the competitors. Pick the top ten competitors that are most relevant to you, then do run in Cerebro.

[0:12:16]

Click on run in Cerebro. So what that’s going to do is going to go to Helium10, run in Cerebro. Cerebro is their tool, and it’s going to pull all of the keywords all of your competitors are ranking for, then put in some advanced filters. So maximum position is 60. So any keyword that’s like all the competitors are beyond position 60, doesn’t really matter.

[0:12:32]

Minimum search volume, make it 500. You don’t want keywords that are less than 500 searches a month, not that important. And then minimum ranking competitors. If you have ten products, I would do seven or eight minimum ranking competitors. And what that means is it’s the intersection of eight or nine of those products.

[0:12:50]

All have the same keywords. So you’re basically getting a very refined list. Once you have that list, this will help you write the title in bullet points. But once you have that list, you can look at the highest search volume, most relevant keyword, that’s your main keyword. Then you can go in, type in the main keyword.

[0:13:04]

That’s how you can get all of your information. But besides that, now that you have your keyword list, they’re going to go from like 102,000 keywords to like 65 or 50. And so once you have that super refined list of keywords, what you want to do is you want to include in the title. The first thing in the title is the highest search volume keyword. So for me, it’s like electrolyte powder.

[0:13:24]

That’s the highest search volume keyword in the electrolyte market. I want that to be right at the beginning of my title, and then I’m going to write my title and try to keyword stuff it, but still make it readable. Chat GPT is amazing at this. So you can use Chat GPT to basically say, hey, I need you to write my title. It’s going to be 250 characters for Amazon.

[0:13:41]

I believe zon tools and data dive both also have that feature where you can actually just choose the listings and then say, hey, do an SEO optimized title for me. And they would do the Amazon title. So you can do it on chat GBT yourself. You can use a tool like zon tools or datadive bullet points, exact same thing in the bullet points, features, benefits, why it matters to me as the customer, why you’re better than everyone else, maybe a guarantee, whatever. Honestly, most of the time, people don’t read the bullet points.

[0:14:8]

You have to sell through the images. So now that you’ve filled out the listing, you have the images, you have the a plus content, you have the title, you have the bullet points, you have the dimensions of the product. Make sure that they’re perfect, the weight and all of that stuff, because that’s what your fees are going to be based on. Then from there, you’re ready to go. You’re ready to send product to Amazon.

[0:14:26]

Now you’re like, how do I choose which products to send to Amazon or which products to list on Amazon? First of all, there’s an issue, well, you can only send a thousand units in the first time that you start selling. You can send 1000 units in, and then once you send 1000 units, you start selling and then you can send more and more in. When some people come to me and they’re like, yeah, we want to list these four products. I’m like, this is a horrible idea.

[0:14:46]

First of all, when you launch on Amazon, there’s something called the Honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase is basically Amazon’s learning phase. In the first 30 to 45 days, no one really knows how much, but they give you this unfair advantage to show up really high in the searches because they want to see if you’re a good, good product or not. If you’re a good product, they’re going to rank you high. You’re going to continue to sell a lot.

[0:15:4]

If you’re not selling that much, they’re going to be like, whatever, let’s put them on page four, where he or she belongs. With that, the honeymoon phase, you need to go for the highest sales velocity possible, and you cannot do that if you have multiple products. So trust me when I say you should stick with just one product. No matter how much you want to do more than one product, just stick with one product. Start with one product.

[0:15:23]

Now that you start with one product, you’re like, okay, which one should should be? Should I just pull the best seller from my catalog? Obviously, thinking about your bestseller from your catalog is a good idea, but you got to validate it. This is what you got to do. You’re going to pick your bestseller and you’re going to find what that main keyword is.

[0:15:36]

So if it’s a pre workout, it’s just going to be pre workout. If it’s electrolyte powder, electrolyte powder. If it’s plant based protein, it’s plant based protein, whatever it is. And then you take that keyword and you go and type it in the search results. And then you look at the search, you look at the products, their main images, their price and their reviews.

[0:15:52]

Reviews. It is what it is. You’re going to need a lot of reviews. This is going to happen. But you look at the price and you look at the main image and you figure out is your product going to be able to compete with these products?

[0:16:3]

Yes or no? And if the answer is yes, then the second step is you go into helium ten and you type in that main keyword into magnet and then you find the highest search volume relevant keyword. So maybe you were going to type in electrolyte powder for women, but actually the broad search term is electrolyte powder. If it has anything like 20,000 searches are up, that’s good. 20,000 searches is a lot.

[0:16:23]

30,000 searches is great. 50,000 searches plus is like very high search volume. You want something with a lot of searches. If you type in gout supplement or whatever it is, and you go in and there’s like 3000 searches a month, that’s probably not the best one for you. Now if all of your products are very niche products and they’re all low search volume, then it doesn’t really matter.

[0:16:42]

But if you have the opportunity to sell something that’s high search volume versus something that’s low search volume, always go with the high search volume. High search volume means more competition, but it means a larger market share, market cap and you can get a bigger piece of the pie, like 1% of a million dollars a month on Amazon is still nice as opposed to 5% of like a hundred thousand dollars market a month on Amazon, something like that. This is just a kind of a broad example. But what you can do is when you type in the keyword on Amazon, like the, let’s say electrode powder, you can go in and with the helium ten chrome extension, when you run x ray, it’ll tell you what the revenue is per month of that market. To a certain extent it’s not like super accurate, but you can also kind of see like, oh, this is a market that sells a million dollars, 2 million, $5 million a month, or this is a market that sells $250,000 a month, which is a sleepy market.

[0:17:30]

So you want to go with a higher search volume market, something that’s more competition because it means that you can win more market share. So now that you’ve chosen that and you’re like, okay, I know which product I’m going to sell. This one has high search volume. I validated demand. I also looked at the competition and I think I have a superior product.

[0:17:46]

And the price point is reasonable. You’re not like so much higher. Again, this is Amazon. So you know who’s going to shop at Amazon, right? It’s not people that don’t mind spending $50 more on a product.

[0:17:58]

They’re the ones that are going to compare and price shop and be like, okay, if it’s $5 difference, but it looks like it’s a better product, I’ll buy it, maybe $10, right? But if they see like, it’s $20 difference, you’re going to be like, what the hell? This is Amazon. So launch. Right?

[0:18:11]

Let’s talk about the launch. First of all, you’re going to create a shipping plan. In shipping plan, you’re going to create the box configurations. You’re going to say, okay, I have a box. It’s 18 x twelve x twelve.

[0:18:20]

There is 45 units in there. The box weighs 45 pounds, whatever, 24 pounds, whatever. And to make 1000 units, you’re going to send 20 boxes. Cool. So you do that.

[0:18:29]

You create the shipping plan. You take that shipping plan, you can pay with Amazon partnered shipping on Amazon. So you can go to inventory, manage your inventory, click on the product, send, replenish inventory, then create the shipping plan. Then you’ll get these ups labels. You go stick them on the boxes, call ups to pick up.

[0:18:46]

Or if you have a warehouse, which if you’re doing well on d to c, you should, you should either have your warehouse like a TPL, and then stick the boxes. UpS will come every day and they’ll just pick up the stuff. So they pick it up, send it to Amazon. You keep the listing closed. You set a future date for your listing of like four months in advance.

[0:19:3]

Just to make sure that you do know, turn on your listing before the correct time. You wait until all of the products are available in Amazon. This will take another three weeks, maybe four weeks, right? So for me, gets to Amazon in two days and then checking know takes maybe two or three weeks until all of my units are available. The reason that you want them to be available is, let’s say you have 100 units available and there’s like 900 units in FC transfer, which is fulfillment center transfer.

[0:19:28]

So they’re moving them around the country in different fulfillment centers. What’s going to happen is once you sell the first hundred, what’s going to happen is Amazon is going to say your product is going to arrive instead of prime, like second day or whatever. It’s going to arrive five days, seven days, and this is going to kill your conversion rate. So you don’t want to do that. You’re going to send the product in and what you’re going to do is you’re going to want to go for the highest amount of sales that you can hit in the first 30 to 45 days, which means if you have loyal customers on your d to C, don’t worry about them abandoning you and then going to Amazon.

[0:19:58]

All this stuff, build an email campaign, send traffic from your socials, send traffic from your ads, send traffic from your email list, all to Amazon. So once everything’s available and you’re ready to go, you’re going to turn on the listing. You can change the date from like four months from today to right now. Turn on the listing and you want to blast it as hard as you can with all of that stuff. Amazon loves external traffic.

[0:20:19]

When they see that you’re sending all of this external traffic to Amazon, you’re feeding their environment, their ecosystem. They love you, they love you. They’re going to reward you. So make sure that that’s part of your strategy if possible. You also want to turn on your ads, and you want to turn on ads super aggressively for competitive markets.

[0:20:37]

I like to start at $500 a day in ad spend, which I know is pretty aggressive for a lot of people. But $500 to $1,000 a day in ad spend really sets you up because think about it, if you want to make $3,000 a day in a supplement category, probably starting off at least in the first six months, you’re not going to be more than a three x row ads, right? So you need to spend $1,000 a day to make $3,000 a day. You’re never going to get to $3,000 a day spending $200 a day or $150 a day. And it’s not like you’re going to increase your ad spend.

[0:21:5]

People tell me, okay, we’re going to start off $500 a day, $1,000 a day for 30 days. When do we start tapering down? I’m like, you never taper down. You want to increase your revenue more. You want to be spending 1000, making 4000, 5000 a day, not, oh, I’m going to spend 1000 for 30 days and then I’m going to cut back to 500, what do you think is going to happen?

[0:21:22]

Your impression is going to go down. Sessions are going to go down. Not enough people are going to click on your listing, your sales are going to go down. And so in the first 30 to 45 days, we’re trying to get the unit velocity number of sales that you’re making on Amazon as high as possible. Amazon is going to start ranking you organically for all of the different keywords that you’re targeting, everything that’s in your title, bullet points, SEO, all that kind of stuff.

[0:21:42]

Initially, like you’re spending $1,000 a day making $1,000 in sales. Your organic rank starts going up, you’re spending $1,000 a day. Now you’re making 1500 in sales, spending $1,000 a day making 2000 in sales. And so as you get reviews and as your organic rank improves, you’re going to make more and more money for the same ad spend, which is good. And so that’s the plan, right?

[0:21:59]

The plan is to blast it as hard as you can. Now, with PPC advertising, I like to start with auto campaign, close match and substitutes. Those are the two campaigns that I like to start with. Loose matching, compliments, very broad. They usually don’t convert as well, but I’ll do separate campaigns.

[0:22:13]

So substitutes in a campaign which will target all my competitors automatically, like Amazon’s auto campaign. And then close match will target all of my keywords. Again, auto campaign. And then I’ll take all of my main keywords and I’ll do single keyword campaigns. One campaign for broad, one campaign for phrase, one campaign for exact, at least $100 daily budget in all of my campaigns.

[0:22:31]

Now you’re not going to spend all the $100. It’s going to depend on your bid. I like to start somewhere in the middle of the bid range. If the bid range is ridiculous, like three dollars to fourteen dollars, just start at like $3, whatever. And then you can work your way up based on how you see the traction is on those keywords.

[0:22:46]

Single ad group. So one campaign, one ad group. Don’t do multiple ad groups on Amazon because what happens is the budget splits. Weird. You can’t control how the budget splits.

[0:22:55]

Not like Facebook, where you can set a budget per ad set or per ad group. Single campaign, single ad group, $100 budget for the campaign and it’ll all flow down to the keywords. I like to start with the main keywords. Single keyword campaigns, one campaign for broad, one campaign for phrase, one campaign for exact. And then once I get to after the first ten keywords, I’ll start bunching like three keywords per campaign and then maybe the longer tail keywords.

[0:23:17]

Five keywords per campaign. I don’t like to exceed more than five keywords per campaign. I notice that the first four or five will get a lot of traction. Anything beyond five won’t get that much traction. So I could have a really good keyword, but because the keywords above it are getting more traction, the keyword at the bottom is not getting any budget.

[0:23:33]

And if I increase the budget, the budget is going to keep going to the top ones anyways. So that’s just what I noticed. You could check it yourself. I’ll also go after my competitors. I like to start with low hanging fruit.

[0:23:44]

So newest arrivals, what you can do is type in your main keyword in the search on Amazon. Then on the right side click sort by newest arrivals. Then all of these zero star beginner people that are launching, you can target those. I also like to target the top competitors even though they’re at a loss because they establish relevance. Now one sneaky, sneaky thing that you can do is once your listing is live on Amazon, you can go and use your buyer account like what you buy your Amazon stuff on, and you can ask questions on your listing.

[0:24:14]

I recommend you ask about 150 questions. At least. You can do five a day. It’s nice to include keywords, of course, because you rank for those keywords. But it’s also nice to include brand names of competitors.

[0:24:24]

So I can say, I’m like, let’s say electrolyte powder, say, how does this compare to liquid iv? Does this have sugar like liquid iv? And then Amazon starts building relevance between you and liquid iv because people, aka you are asking questions about liquid iv or other competitors, stuff like that. So you can do that. You can do it in the videos too.

[0:24:42]

You can have Amazon influencers buy your product and liquid iv and give like a positive response about both, right? So you’re not going to put liquid iv down. You’re just going to say, oh, I like this one. It tastes like this, like that, whatever. This one is also good.

[0:24:54]

It has this, this and that. And it’s an unboxing video. And again, that will establish relevance between the two products which will drive traffic to your listing. So anyways, let’s get back to the launch. Again, the main goal, highest amount of sales units in the first 30, 45 days.

[0:25:11]

You might have to drop your price, you might have to discount it. Start in the low end and work your way up. Now I understand that there’s going to be a conflict between having your price on Amazon Shopify be different, but it’s okay to start with an introductory price on Amazon and then normalize it to whatever your d to C price is. But that’s pretty much it. I mean, that’s a summary of bringing your d to C supplement brand onto Amazon.

[0:25:32]

Things you should look out for. Track your click through rate and conversion rate. Track your number of sessions. The way that I like to track things is look at your impressions. If your impressions are going up over time, it means that you’re doing a good job.

[0:25:43]

Track your keywords. You can go to helium ten and do a cerebral on your asin. And every single week you should be ranking and indexing for more and more keywords. So if your impressions are going up, look at your sessions. Your sessions should also be going up.

[0:25:56]

Your sessions are going to be a function of your click through rate. So you can look at your click through rate. Anything under 0.2% is pretty bad, unless you’re like in a very expensive category. But if you’re a supplement, 0.2% or under is bad. You want to be higher than that.

[0:0:07]

And then look at your sessions. If your sessions are growing over time, that means your traffic is growing. Look at your conversion rate. You can do a quick calculation. One divided by your conversion rate is going to tell you how many sessions you need to make one sale.

[0:26:17]

And then your ad spend divided by your number of sessions is going to tell you your cost per session. You take the cost per session, multiply it by the number of sessions required to make one conversion. It gives you your CPA, your cost of acquisition. And so let’s say that you have a dollar per session, you spend $1,000, you get 1000 sessions, it’s $1 per session. Let’s say you have a 10% conversion rate.

[0:26:35]

One divided by 10% is 1010 times one is $10. So it costs you $10 to make one sale on Amazon. So make sure you’re tracking that. Understand how much profit per unit you have. So if you’re selling a $30 product and you have $12 profit per unit and your CPA is $10, that means you’re going to be left with $2 profit per unit.

[0:26:52]

Don’t expect to make that much money in the first few months. You just want to burn cash to get the highest amount of sales possible. Get the most number of reviews that you can. There’s ways to do it like Kosher, which is basically use like a request review. Automator sellerize has it.

[0:27:07]

Ecom engine has it. Every time someone orders from you, it automatically clicks on the request review button in the orders page, which then sends them an email from Amazon saying, hey, how did you like this product? You can also solicit for reviews. It’s against terms of service, but that’s how the game is played. All right, man.

[0:27:21]

Hopefully this was a solid episode for you guys. Please share. I know this is going to help a lot of people. Reach out to me. My name is Mina Elias.

[0:27:28]

I’m on LinkedIn. M-I-N-A. E-L-I-A-S. Ask me questions. I’ll record more episodes, helping people out.

[0:27:35]

Anything that they need. Stay tuned, guys.

Are You Ready to Experience Exponential Growth?

Get your hands on a free Amazon video audit, so you can make data-driven decisions and maximize your ROI.

Are You Ready to Experience Exponential Growth?

Get your hands on a free Amazon video audit, so you can make data-driven decisions and maximize your ROI.