Is your business getting lost in the Amazon jungle?

Jim James: 0:22

Hey, welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur, because I'm really excited today because we're going to a place in Mexico, somewhere that actually I went in 1989. This young man told me that he wasn't actually born then, so it gave me a bit of a history. Check there. Mike Begg joining us from AMZ in Guadalajara.

Mike Begg: 0:43

Mike. Welcome to the show, Jim. Thank you for having me here and I apologize for bringing that fact up.

Jim James: 0:50

You can't help that I'm an old man, but, Mike, you're a young man, but you're building a successful business. You and your team at AMZ ad, you've helped over 550 brands the active launch and grow on Amazon. We're going to talk today about the Amazon marketplace and how you help specifically brands, but also how other unnoticed entrepreneurs can build their brands and build their businesses on Amazon. We're also going to talk about partnerships and how you can build a B2B brand, which is what you and your team have been doing at AMZ ad. We're going to also have you share with us what you think is not working anymore in marketing. So terrific, Mike. Share with us about AMZ . First, AMZadvisers. com is the website.

Mike Begg: 1:39

So, yes, we're an agency. We've been around since 2015, and what we're specialized in is helping brands get from $1 to $10 million per year in sales on the Amazon platform. Primarily, we focus on the US platforms, but we can also help brands expand to the European marketplaces. We have an entire team dedicated to that. We also have another team dedicated to expanding brands to Latin America. What we do is we'll handle everything from the graphic design, the content creation, the advertising and the marketing strategy on the platform and really help your brand stand out on Amazon.

Jim James: 2:12

Well, how difficult is Amazon? It seems to me as big as the Amazon. I guess that's why Jeff Bezos called it that the longest river and all that. Just how difficult is it to build the brand on Amazon? How long does it take? How much resource does it take Mike to do this?

Mike Begg: 2:37

Well, it's definitely more challenging now than it was eight years ago when we were starting. I mean, amazon in general has been known for a lot of disruptor brands or brands to be built natively within Amazon, and the main reason is that so many people go to Amazon and when we look at the total number of searches that are starting online in the US, about 70% of product searches start on Amazon. So if you are going to be found, amazon is a great place to be From that standpoint. There are still a lot of niches and categories that are possible to get into and start building your brand out within those. But a lot of larger brands have really started to shift their focus to the Amazon platform from their DTC websites or from other platforms that they may have been before to be noticed, and these are massive corporations that have huge budgets, so it is possible to get in and compete. But I would say focusing on specific niches versus focusing on broader categories like CPG would be a lot easier.

Jim James: 3:33

Sorry, what CPG might that? That sounds like an industry speaking. It is consumer package goods.

Mike Begg: 3:40

So these are your. You know everything. You go to the grocery store and buy pretty much.

Jim James: 3:44

OK, so has Amazon really stolen the crown from Google in terms of, you know, people going to search for a product with intent going to Google, are they going to Amazon first, now instead? Is that what you say?

Mike Begg: 3:59

Yes, so purchasing, I mean Amazon has stolen a lot from Google. When we talk about ad revenue growth, when we talk about, you know, product searches, like I said, 70% are starting on Amazon and the buying intent is extremely high on Amazon. The intent on Google is more informational. You're looking to compare a product, possibly, or see which one has the best reviews or what's recommended the most On Amazon. You're coming to the page because you're ready to buy, and that's one of the great things that most brands are able to take advantage of is that when a customer comes searching for a non branded term so, for example, if they're not searching for Nike, if they're searching for basketball shoes, they're just looking for whatever pairs coming up first more than likely they're not brand loyal, they are not focused on purchasing from a specific company, and that's the advantage that a lot of brands have is that if you can show up for these non branded keywords, there's a very high chance that the consumer is actually going to purchase your product.

Jim James: 4:58

So you know, Amazon sounds like just a huge search engine, but with the added complication of it always putting in front of the consumer. If you like this, you might like this. It really is the sort of the ultimate switch selling platform, isn't it? How do you help your clients, or how can an entrepreneur's got a product Get all the way through the shopping cart?

Mike Begg: 5:29

It's certainly a challenge. The way that we really position this conversation with most brands is to consider the marketing funnel or your sales funnel within your business. A sales funnel exists within Amazon. There's people that come to the platform that are ready to buy immediately and you want to take advantage of those advertising placements or the product placements and show up there. There's people that are coming to a product page and there's opportunities to show ads on those. That's where you can create consideration more of the middle of the funnel aspect, and then there's opportunities to be discovered. That's really top of the funnel with the headline search ads, with placements on Amazon and off Amazon. There's a variety of different things you need to consider. When it comes to the merchandising aspects, the best way is to protect people from leaking to other products is, first of all, you have to drive people to your page. Once they're on your page featuring other products within your catalog on the ad. So targeting your own products with ads is extremely important. Then, from there, protecting all of the potential branded searches. If someone's coming to Amazon and searching for your brand and you're not advertising on those keywords, you're just increasing the chance that consumer is going to leak to another brand. Those are the main aspects that you want to consider of how to show your products and how to prevent other products from showing up on your product listing.

Jim James: 6:50

It sounds, so might be with AMZ advisors. You have to be a big company and afford advertising on Amazon. What about the unnoticed entrepreneur who's launching a new product? Are you saying that? It's really, frankly, an impossible pitch, a bit like if you were to go to one of the supermarkets in the UK or in America or Asia. I think shelf space is very, very difficult unless you've got a huge ability already to deliver on through logistics and volume and so on.

Mike Begg: 7:24

Yeah, I mean shelf space comes with its own challenges. We're talking about digital shelf space, and the cost of digital shelf space is much lower than what you're going to find in a traditional store, for example. There are many products that can be extremely successful with limited budgets. If you have $1,000 to $2,000 a month, it's more than enough to get started and start converting sellers. When you look at how Amazon compares to other websites or other platforms, the conversion rates on Amazon are usually going to be higher. On your own website, you might see 1% to 2% conversion, 1% to 3% possibly. On Amazon, the average conversion rate is about 8%. You're looking at a significant increase there. By being able to be on the platform, advertise in the right strategies, you will have a higher chance of converting, a higher chance of getting a better return on your ad spend. All of these things are beneficial for you to start growing in the long term and also creating that brand awareness and that brand discovery for people to go to Google later and find your website or your social media or whatever it may be, and then purchase through other channels.

Jim James: 8:27

Mike, are there certain categories of product that, if you like, give you more hope as an entrepreneur than others? In the obviously books, there's, I think, literally tens of thousands of new books going up each week onto the Amazon bookstore, for example. Especially with AI now it's even becoming even greater, almost flood, isn't it. What would be your guidance in terms of niches or categories that you think there are opportunities for you to get into? Keep dareck you can get into.

Mike Begg: 9:00

Well, I mean, there's almost an unlimited number of niches within Amazon. I can tell you the ones that I would avoid the most, and those are typically supplements. If you are starting as a first-time entrepreneur and you do not have significant resources, supplements are generally going to be the most competitive category on Amazon or in most platforms in general. Another very competitive category can be cosmetics. Those are both difficult categories to get started in. They have their own benefits in different ways. Most of them have high customer lifetime value, but the cost per acquisition makes it very difficult to make money with limited resources when you're starting, For example. There are other, smaller niches where you might find some success. I originally started selling products in the art supply category. I then moved into some outdoor products, outdoor goods products. I also have a small, small food brand that I sell. There are a variety of niches that you can find and it really helps to have a third-party tool like Jungle Scout or Helium 10 or Zanguru to help you identify what the search volumes look like, what the sales volumes look like, how competitive it really is, and that from there you can make the best decisions.

Jim James: 10:10

Okay, great, there are some tools available to help you to navigate that If you were to build out a store. Just final question on the Amazons what would be the basic brand kit that someone would need to have a chance of making sales on Amazon?

Mike Begg: 10:31

At a minimum. There's three things you need to really start with. The first would be a great SEO. You need to identify what the most relevant keywords are for your product. Learn how to place those within your product listing Most relevant keywords in the title, next most relevant in the bullet points. After that product description. After that the back-end search terms. This is what Amazon is going to index your product for on the platform, so it's going to take those keywords and say, hey, I'm going to show up here. That's extremely important. Your product images are going to be the next most important thing, so this will be number two. You want to make sure that your product images really highlight the benefits of the product, how it's solving a problem for the consumer, how it's addressing the main search terms, for example of this. The second product let's say we're selling water bottles. The second product image it should clearly say water bottle in it or whatever type of water bottle. It's going to increase click-through rates. It's going to increase conversion rates. All that's going to be beneficial to your product in the long term. The third thing you need to start with is sponsored products advertising. This is really the bottom of the funnel ads, non-branded keywords If you're selling water bottles, showing up for the keyword water bottle or recycled water bottle or reusable water bottle, whatever it may be, when you're showing up for those non-branded keywords, it's like I mentioned earlier there's a very high chance the consumer is going to purchase it when they search for it. That is the three things that are necessary to start with.

Jim James: 12:01

Right, Mike, I see it. I guess if people are not entirely sure or confident, they just come to AMZ Advisors and get that work done for them. I know you guys work on Amazon, walmart and Mercado Libre, which is the Mexican platform. You're one of the co-founders of AMZ Advisors. This is a show about entrepreneurship and how you build a business, as much as what you're doing. Just tell us what has been the way that you have been building the brand and getting your own clients. I'm assuming you're not selling your own services on Amazon, because I don't think there's a marketplace yet for services. It's not that kind of directory yet, is it? How are you building the AMZ Advisors Sure Brand?

Mike Begg: 12:48

So, specifically, I mean when it comes to Amazon, there is a service provider directory that we are in and there are a variety of other ones, but other services that are not related to Amazon. You're right, you can't sell those on the platform. From day one, we realized the importance of trying to stand out, and we realized that to stand out, we needed to build authority within the space. At the time, there weren't many other companies doing this. We are still one of the oldest companies doing this and we realized that by building out SEO content, blog content, being discoverable on Google, bringing people to the page we were going to be able to start establishing ourselves as one of the predominant companies in the Amazon space. At this point, we started in 2015 with SEO. At this point, we generated over 50,000 unique website visitors per month. That has been incredibly powerful. As the company kept growing, we started focusing on other ways to establish authority. A lot of that would be partnerships, podcasts, webinars, that type of stuff to just show our knowledge and explain what we know, and that is really the best. The thing that we believe is the most important in building a company, especially in the service space, is you need to show your potential customer. What you can do.

Jim James: 14:01

And looking at Mike's website, AMZ Advices, AMZ. For those of you across the phone, you create an incredible amount of content. Your blogs almost daily or every other day. Can I ask you, is that you getting down at night and writing, or do you outsource that, or are you now using one of the content writers?

Mike Begg: 14:27

No, we have a full team that's dedicated to producing content. So we have a SEO manager that helps with all of our identifying the blog topics, the editorial, the posting. We have a few freelance writers that are actually producing the blog post for us. I think at this rate we're doing about 15 blog posts in-house for ourselves, With partner collaborations. We probably get two to three additional blog posts per month from partners, and then we're also publishing another four to five blog articles on other company's websites to drive people to AMZ. So, yeah, we do put out a lot of SEO content and that's really the long game that we play.

Jim James: 15:07

Yeah, I can see. That's amazing. You've also mentioned partners, Mike, and this is somewhere that AMZ advisors is being innovative, because they don't see many companies if you like, they're SMEs in B2B having these kind of partnerships. You want to just talk to us about the partnership strategy?

Mike Begg: 15:29

Yeah. So in general, part of it originally came from the SEO aspect of like how do we generate more visibility? We talked about it before, before we started the show about backlinking and building backlinks. One of the easiest ways to build backlinks is blog swaps. So, for example, I write one blog for your website, you write one blog for my website. We both went, we both get backlinks. We both get more visibility. Doing that over time was the first way that we started working with partners from there. After that we realized there were other ways to collaborate. Some of those were podcast interviews, some of them were webinars, you know, getting feature on each other's newsletters. So there are a variety of different ways to start building out that authority and start building out those partnerships and collaborating together. And then the most important and challenging thing of partnerships in general is just keeping them going. Once you collaborate with someone for the first time, how do you continue to work with them in the future? Because once you build those stronger partnerships or the stronger Relationships about collaborating on things, they're more likely to send you referrals. You're more likely to continue to find new and innovative ways to collaborate, to test new ideas when it comes to creating content. So those are all the benefits of having good partners, and you're also leveraging a lot of their market knowledge. So, for example, we recently did a webinar with a partner that didn't know how to use LinkedIn live or didn't know how to use LinkedIn to Create events and invite people, and we taught them how to do the entire thing and they're they love it. Now that they think it's incredibly powerful. They're able to get way more registrants for their webinars than they were before From this whole way that it knows. So there's a lot of benefits to having partnerships from both the learning side and the actual content creation side.

Jim James: 17:17

Mike, that's, that's brilliant. Yeah, so really, you and your team are publishers as much as promoters. You know very, very interesting strategy. You've made it sound like a textbook case of a successful business, Mike, so I don't want to strip away that impression. But would there be something that you've done and in the marketing realm that you would say, or something you've seen that's not working In the way that it used to? I would say there's, there's actually two, there's another one that comes to mind now that I think about it.

Mike Begg: 17:50

One area that we tried a while ago and then we had limited success with was video Content. So YouTube, creating content on YouTube. We have not completely given up on it, but we know that we need to shift strategy there, because what we were doing before is just not Generating enough traffic. It's not generating enough engagement, it's not getting the visibility In fact, it's actually declining now. So we're trying to change course there. But you you mentioned it about being a publisher creating content I think that's one of the most important things is generating more inbound leads for your business. What we've noticed over the past year and a half or so has been outbound is really dried up. Cold calling most of the time is not going through, or people are, you know, rejecting the calls or blocking the calls, or you're having issues with the, the phone directories or whatever it may be. So I think that's one big aspect of what we're doing is we're trying to make sure that we're not going to be One big aspect of it. Cold email is also really dropped off. I think Google and a lot of the other platforms have started to filter Cold outbound email more into spam than anything, especially if you're including any links. If you're including, you know, any sales pitch, that's, that's too salesy. A lot of that's just going to spam now. So it really is difficult to to build a big outbound side. We mainly focus on how do we drive people inbound, and you know, it's through our content, it's through our partnerships, it's through advertising. So all of these are different ways that we bring people to us and then from there they're that much more likely to actually convert and close Versus. You know me reaching out one-to-one to everyone on the outbound side.

Jim James: 19:25

Oh, that's interesting. Interesting, maybe due to GDPR compliance. That is starting to throttle back, and that's fair enough, I suppose, in a way because people getting too many unsolicited emails. But now they're really relying on authority, aren't they? In and proximity, that if you've got some value to add through your newsletters and through your, through your blogs, people will come to you for that rather than you knocking on their door? Exactly, Mike big, as the CEO and co-founder of AMZ advisors, if there's one thing that you would say you know it really does move the needle as an entrepreneur that you would advise my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs to do to build their brand, what would it be?

Mike Begg: 20:12

Well, I think the first thing is just putting yourself out there and I talked a lot about that on the partnership side In general. You, as the entrepreneur, as the face of the business, you need to be the one out there selling. You need to be the one out there explaining your knowledge, what you know, how you help people, and you have to be comfortable with being wrong a lot. You are going to be wrong a lot in the beginning when you're putting yourself out there and you're going to get negative comments, hate, but all of this stuff is going to help you improve over time and get better and better as being the face, because, at the end of the day, people buy from people. They're not buying from the brand and if they can't relate to you, if they can't connect to you, if you're not out there positioning yourself where your ideal customers are searching whether it be in long form blog content, whether it be in video content, podcast, web webinars, whatever it may be if you're not out there, you're not going to be discovered, customers aren't going to buy from you and you're going to have that much more of a challenging time building your business.

Jim James: 21:08

Mike Begg, it sounds like you and your team have done a brilliant job of building yours, and Guadalajara is a beautiful place to do it from if I remember rightly, the Zocalo in the center of the city. I had a huge backpack on at the time, though, and so, as I was carrying my luggage, my life, with me from North Carolina to Costa Rica overland, I carried everything with me, so I'm sure you're having a much more comfortable lifestyle there than I did all those years ago. Mike, if people want to find out more about you and AMZ advisors, how can they do that?

Mike Begg: 21:41

Sure Well, the best way to get in touch with me is either my email, mike@amzadvisers. com, or to reach out directly through the website amzadvisers. com. You can also contact me through there.

Jim James: 21:53

Mike Begg, thank you so much for joining me and explaining the depths, really, of Amazon. I'm obviously buying things on there, but I had no idea how people sell, so thank you for explaining that to us today.

Mike Begg: 22:05

No problem, jim. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation and hopefully we can do it again sometime.

Jim James: 22:10

Yeah, that would be fantastic and we could partner. Now, of course, see how I can serve your community with some more great content from people like Mike. So thank you, listeners, for joining Mike Begg and myself today. I think that it's fascinating that every different channel, be it Amazon or Walmart or Google, really has its own strategy and its own discipline, and it's great to know there are experts like Mike and his team out there to help, because it's too much to try and learn all on one's own. If you've enjoyed this, do please rate the show on. Your player Really helps and follow the show, because I don't want you to miss another episode. We have, every Tuesday and Thursday, episodes dropping and we have over 750 episodes now in the archive. If you've got a long journey to take and you need some company, I'd happily come with you, especially if you're going to Mexico. Right, thank you. That's all from me and thank you for joining, and until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.