William L. Coney Blog: How to Start a Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Business

You’ve figured out the products you want to sell. You’ve sourced an order from your manufacturer or distributor, and had it shipped to your house.

You’ve even gone through the tedious work of inspecting each package, including the proper labeling, and making sure that Amazon has properly logged them into their systems.

Great! You’ve got an FBA business. Or do you?

By now, you’ve probably realized that you need a bit more than a couple of product listings on Amazon to actually start making sales.

There are a few things you’re going to need for your products to really take off. The process we’re about to lay out for you can be repeated with every new product that you want to launch. It’s a time-proven process to help you start generating sales as quickly as possible.

To get started, here’s what you need:

High converting sales copy that shows your visitors exactly what they’re going to be buying, and why they should be buying your products.
A set of seed reviews to help jump start your Bestseller Ranking and increase your credibility on the Amazon platform.
A proven traffic source for your initial set of sales, from a group of customers who know that they should be leaving reviews.
A plan for tapping into the traffic that’s already on Amazon, while making yourself stand out from the crowd.
A method that allows you to follow up with your customers to increase the sales you make, and ensure that your happy customers are going to leave reviews.
A plan to find more products so you can keep repeating this process.

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Focus on your copywriting first

The biggest mistake you can make on your FBA sales page is to do what every other seller in your category is doing.

Let’s face it: People are lazy, and going the extra mile in your sale pages really only gives you a few options. The best way to set yourself apart is through the sales copy that you use to actually deliver the message for what your product is going to do for the buyer.

There are 7 main areas that you need to focus on when it comes to your copywriting:

Page title
Headline
Feature bullets
Description
Guarantee
Call to action
Product images

Your page title is your first impression

To get started, you need to come up with a compelling headline. Most people simply type out their product name, usually in an effort to follow what they think is working, because so many other businesses are doing it. But this is a mistake.

You need to think of Amazon as one big search engine, because that’s exactly what it is—a search engine for products. That means you can dig in and figure out the keywords that people are going to be typing in when they’re searching for your products.

The best source for figuring these keywords out is MerchantWords. Type in your products, and you’ll get a list of results that are related.

When you’re just starting out, you want to take a keyword or two, that have the highest search volume, and use those. They may be ultra competitive at first, but with the launch plan we’re providing, you’ll be able to climb your way up the rankings fairly quickly.

Include these keywords into your page title, along with your product name. Then, when a visitor searches for your chosen keyword, they’re going to subconsciously move to your page listing because it matches up with what they’re already thinking about. I hope that makes sense for you.

In other words, if someone searches for “Handheld Garlic Press” and your listing title is “Handheld Garlic Press | GarlicPresto by MyCompany,” they’re going to get a subliminal message that you’re speaking directly to them.

This will increase your clickthrough rate, giving you more chances to make a sale, but it’s also going to increase your relevance to the Amazon search engine spiders, helping you to increase your rankings on the category pages.

Your headline comes next

Stop and think about the last time you saw an actual headline on a product page. You rarely see them, right? That’s because most people are following the pack, instead of trying to set themselves apart.

Not you, though. You’re going to use the initial introduction section to create a compelling headline, letting your visitor know exactly what problem you’re going to solve.

But first, you have to identify those problems. Let’s go back to our garlic press example. What would be one of the biggest problems facing people who are looking for a garlic press?

I can think of a few, but the biggest one that comes to mind is having your hands smelling like garlic. Nobody wants that, especially when they’re cooking a nice dinner for their family or friends.

So instead of being like every other seller on Amazon, you need to use the top section to create a small blurb of text that addresses this problem, and lets the visitor know how your product solves it.

Then, you can follow up the section with the standard product feature bullets that you see on every product page.

Feature bullets sell for you

Now you can put together a list of bullet points that highlight your product’s best features. This isn’t anything new, and if you’ve already listed products on Amazon, you’ve probably done this part before.

However, one change you can implement to set yourself apart is to list your product’s features, and then let the visitor know how that specific feature of yours sets your product apart from the competition using the additional text area.

In other words, you’re not only using the bullets section to sell your product, but also to specifically set yours apart from any others that the visitor may have looked at.

The product description is your ace in the hole

By now, most customers will have browsed through your bullets and continued scrolling down the page on a mission to find one thing—your reviews.

Before they get to the customer reviews, though, you’ve got one more chance to sell them on why your product is perfect to solve their problems, and why it is better than your competition’s products.

The description is an area where you can set yourself apart by banking on the laziness of most sellers on Amazon these days. Most times, the seller is going to copy and paste their feature bullets back into the description.

Not you, though. You’re going to take this opportunity to expand on each bullet and address the problems that your customers typically have with lower quality products—in other words, with your competition.

Don’t just type out a bunch of text, either. Make sure that your description is properly formatted, and that you’re going one step further and actually including bold and emphasis tags to help make it easy to read—and skim—through.

You also need to make sure that you’re taking the risk off of the customer. You can do that by laying out a guarantee.

Most sellers offer a 100 percent satisfaction guarantee to ensure that the buyer has zero issues making the purchase, knowing that they can easily get their money back if they’re not happy.

After laying out your guarantee, make sure that you tell the visitor to make the purchase. This is called a “call to action” and can be as simple as reminding them of why your product is perfect for them, while restating your guarantee, and mentioning the amount of positive reviews you’ve received.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Make sure your pictures are high quality, and really sell your product. You don’t want to put all this work into making sure the page looks good, and then just include some stock product photos that you’ve pulled from your manufacturer’s website—or worse, low quality pictures that you’ve quickly taken with your smartphone’s camera.

Now isn’t the time to start cutting corners. Your product photos are one of the biggest selling points for customers, and you need to invest the money (or time) into making sure they look good.

The best strategy to use is to hire a professional photographer that specializes in taking product photos to do the work for you. If you prefer to keep things in-house, you can still set up a small studio where you can shoot the pictures yourself.

Go through videos on YouTube that teach you how to setup a small photobox, and get the lighting correct so that the images look like a professional created them.

Once you’ve addressed all seven of these areas, it’s time to build your sales page. After you’ve built it, let it sit for a day, and then revisit it.

When we’re working in the trenches, it’s hard to spot small mistakes that we’ve made. Letting the page sit for a day and then revisiting it will give you a fresh set of eyes, so you can get rid of any errors and mistakes that could make you look like an amateur to your potential customers.

Step 2: Join product review groups to jumpstart your Best Seller Rank (BSR)

There are groups on Facebook and around other places on the internet that are designed with one specific goal in mind: to connect product sellers with product reviewers.

You know that the credibility you display on your product pages relies almost solely on the reviews that other customers have left for you.

If a visitor lands on the page, even if they love your copy, and they do not find any previous customers who have left positive reviews, there is a high chance that they’re going to find a related product that does indeed have positive reviews.

To help kickstart your base reviews, and make sure that customers are getting an honest opinion about your products—one that can be used to influence their purchase—you need to join up with a few groups.

Jump onto Facebook, and start searching for the following list of groups:

Then, after joining, introduce yourself, and let the members know that you have a product that you would like to send out to people, in exchange for a transparent, and honest review.

The two keys that you’re looking for are transparency, and honesty. Let them know you’re not looking for a one or two sentence review. Instead, you need honest reviews that have showed the prospective customers the reviewers actually used the products.

The last thing you want is for a bunch of reviewers to leave a short, canned response. When your reviews are filled with those types of comments, it doesn’t look good to your buyers, and they can tell that you’re manufacturing reviews.

Once you have a couple of takers in the groups, ask to see their existing reviewer profile. Verify that they leave in-depth reviews before you send any products to them, and don’t be afraid to let them know they’re not a good fit for you if they leave the types of canned responses I’m talking about.

Taking this one step further, you can also use Amazon’s Top 500 Reviewers list to find product reviewers who may be willing to leave you a bit of feedback in exchange for a free product.

This method does require a bit more work, but the reviewers hold more clout with Amazon’s customers when they can see the “Top 500 Reviewer” badge next to their review.

Step 3: Sign up with a launch service to increase your sales

Putting a bit of money up to tap into an existing audience is a great way to kickstart your BestSeller Ranking on Amazon. The higher your BSR, the better you rank on the category pages, and the more sales you make.

So, what can a launch service do for you?

Quite simply, they’re going to put you in front of an audience that you wouldn’t normally have access to, or have the skills to find on your own.

They’re going to make launching your business easy.

One of the biggest launch services, Viral Launch, gives you access to an audience of 150,000 people, effectively letting you launch product after product, without having to put in massive amounts of time (or money).

If you’re launching a new product, or trying to bump sales for one of your existing products to push it further up the category results, you’ll be able to gain a massive influx of sales and reviews.

While we can’t vouch for any one specific launch service, and Viral Launch is being used as an example only, the premise behind these services is that you’ll be able to increase your BSR by throwing a bit of money at the problem.

That being said, if you’re working on a tighter budget, reaching out to more reviewers in the groups we’ve just listed for you works, too. It’s just a slower process than outsourcing the campaign to an actual launch service.

Step 4: Build an optimized Amazon PPC campaign

If you prefer to save your money from a launch service and get your products directly in front of the customers on Amazon, you can easily pull it off by building a PPC campaign.

In case you don’t already know, PPC stands for Pay Per Click, and lets you advertise in specific areas on Amazon in exchange for paying each time one of your ads gets clicked.

Setting up your Amazon PPC campaign is a fairly straightforward process, but you need to slow down and make sure it’s completely optimized before you actually start spending money.

The goal of optimizing your PPC campaign is to make sure you’re paying less for your clicks, and that your ads are enticing enough for visitors to click through to your product pages.

Your product listings should already be optimized for conversions, if you’ve followed step one close enough.

You’ll also want to make sure that you have enough positive reviews to help influence the buyer’s decision once they’ve landed on your sales page.

If those two areas have been properly addressed, it’s time to set up your campaign.

Now you need to pick the type of ads you’re going to be running. There are two different types, and the names don’t really explain what they do.

Amazon Product Ads are going to move visitors off of Amazon, and onto your website. You do not want to run those. Instead, you want to run Sponsored Product Ads, that are going to send the clicks over to your product landing pages.

Once you’ve created the initial campaign in your seller dashboard, you need to select the “Manual” targeting type. This will let you choose the keywords you want to bid on—the same keywords you tracked down earlier in MerchantWords.

Avoid automatic targeting—it’s a quick way to blow through your advertising budget. It can help you figure out new keywords that you may not have been able to think of on your own, but that’s about as good as it gets.

Speaking of budgets, when you’re first starting out, it’s recommended that you spend enough to get a quick influx of data that you can analyze. In most cases, starting with $50 per day is a good idea. Amazon usually won’t go through your budget when you’re just getting started.

Now, you’ll need to set up your bid amount. This is how much Amazon is going to charge you for each click generated to your product pages.

To get you started, you can set the bid as high as $5. While this may seem high, Amazon won’t charge you this much, but you’ll be able to quickly collect a large amount of data you can use to tweak the campaign later.

Then, you’ll need to choose the keywords that you want to advertise on. Amazon will provide you with a list that they think is relevant, which you can go through in order to pick and choose the ones you want to keep. A lot of them are going to be irrelevant to your products.

Go back to your MerchantWords research and gather the keywords you think are relevant to your product, and then include those in the ad set up list.

Once you’ve input the keywords, you need to go back over the ad setup and verify everything is correct. As soon as you save the settings, the campaign is going to be live, and you’re going to start getting billed for any clicks generated on the ads.

Now you need to be patient and let Amazon start delivering you results.

After you’re generating sales, you need to have a plan to follow up with the customers and solicit reviews from them, to further increase your credibility on the platform.

Step 5: Create an automated follow-up email sequence to build reviews

You’re going to want to touch base with your customers four different times.

The first is on the day your product is delivered to them. In this email, you want to thank them for their purchase and restate your guarantee. Let them know that if they have any problems at all they can reach out to you and you’ll be happy to take care of them.

Then, you want to follow up again two days after delivery to ensure they are happy with the product, and to ask for feedback. Let them know that you’re a small business owner, and your business on Amazon relies on happy customers telling other customers about their experience dealing with you.

Finally, you want to reach out to them again seven days after they received the product, if they haven’t already left feedback on your sales page. This will give you a chance to nudge them toward leaving a review. If they haven’t left one after this email, they’re probably not going to, so there isn’t really much point in continuing to message them.

The fourth, and last time that you’re going to contact them is after they’ve left feedback, by replying to their review thanking them for their purchase, addressing any concerns they had, and thanking them for leaving it.

You can implement these follow-up emails inside of your seller dashboard, or you can use an automated service like Feedback Genius to take care of it for you.

The goal with your follow-up campaign is to build a relationship with the customer, which will increase your chances of them coming back and buying another product from you in the future. You also want to make sure to remind them about leaving a review.

Keep your emails short, sweet, and to the point. You also want to make sure that you’ve read through Amazon’s Terms of Service to ensure you’re staying compliant with their rules.

Rinse and repeat

The process that we’ve just laid out for you works like a charm. Any time you want to launch a new product, you can revisit these steps and go over them one by one.

This strategy really works well when you’re building a complete line of products that are all closely related, so you can continue tapping into the same audience over and over again.

If you follow each of the steps, you’ll have an easier time getting your initial set of sales and reviews, and an advertising campaign that will ensure you keep the momentum rolling forward.

You’ll also have automation in place that will help you continue building up your review count so that new customers have an easier time trusting your product, and making a purchase.

It’s a straightforward, time-proven process that you can repeat every time you want to bring a new product to the marketplace.

To sum up the 5 steps, here’s what you need to be working on right now:

Step 1: Spend time creating sales copy that addresses your visitor’s problems and concerns, and that lets them know how your product solves these problems, all while differentiating yourself from your competitors.

Step 2: Join product review groups on Facebook to get your initial set of reviews flowing. Remember to make sure you’re only sending products to people who have a history of providing quality, in-depth reviews, and not just dropping one or two line responses.

Step 3: Sign up with a launch service to tap into an existing audience, and generate your initial set of sales that will quick start your BestSeller Ranking and boost your organic placement in Amazon’s search results.

Step 4: Spend time putting together an advertising campaign on Amazon. Make sure to focus on manual targeting, and stick to a budget that you can afford, but also one that is going to quickly deliver you the data you need to analyze and make smart decisions going forward.

Step 5: Create an automated follow-up campaign to stay in touch with your visitors after they’ve purchased and had the product delivered, and remind them how important it is to leave feedback. Then reply to every feedback message you get, to continue building a relationship with your customers.

from Bplans Articles http://ift.tt/2b8UTJp

William L. Coney Blog

Friday, August 19, 2016

How to Start a Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Business—and Get it Right