CONGRATULATIONS!
You’ve found a product, sourced it, and have placed your first order with your supplier. You’re all excited to start making those Amazon FBA sales that others are making! Now, you’re waiting for your product to arrive at Amazon’s warehouses. This is a crucial time that can make or break your launch. The waiting game can take a few weeks, usually anywhere between 3-8 weeks topbankinfo.ru . But it feels like forever because you want to just start making those Amazon FBA sales ASAP. Now, the question is what do you do in that time while you are waiting for your products to arrive at Amazon’s warehouses? Most importantly, what do you do so that you have people lined up to buy from the day your product goes live on Amazon?
Become an Amazon FBA Sales Machine!
This is what I’ll cover in this piece. There are many ways to achieve that but I’ll focus on the fastest and simplest way to do that. Most importantly, that anyone can duplicate by simply following these proven methods!
This is based both on my own experience as co-founder of Amazon marketing agency as well as what I’ve been learning from other experts in the field. As we all know, real education is a life long journey. Even more so in a field as fluid and constantly changing as Amazon FBA and E-Commerce are. I highly encourage all of you to constantly keep learning from other experts through their podcasts, books, videos, events, etc. One such expert that I have been looking up to is Ryan Daniel Moran, the founder of Capitalism.com I’m a big fan of him and of his podcast. As a matter of fact, I’m currently reading his book “12 months to $1 Million: How To Pick A Winning Product, Build A Real Business And Become A Seven Figure Entrepreneur”.
I highly recommend his book to you guys as well. In it, there’s a chapter called “Stacking The Deck” which covers that very specific topic of what to do while you’re waiting for your products to arrive at Amazon’s warehouses. I’m summarizing it here for you guys and adding my own thoughts to it. Please read this and most importantly, take notes so that YOU IMPLEMENT these proven strategies in your own Amazon FBA business and generate a ton of Amazon FBA sales. When you stack the deck in your favor, you will have people ready to buy your product the moment it goes live on Amazon.
Before even getting into the nitty gritty of things, let’s quickly mention what NOT to do, and that’s ironically, what most people do: that is do nothing and just wait for their product to arrive at the Amazon warehouses, sit tight, and hope that Amazon gives them the love they need on their big day. That’s obviously a recipe for disaster, as if you do nothing, then you can easily guess what’ll happen on Launch Day. Exactly: crickets. Nada. Nothing.
Stacking the Deck for More Sales
So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about what you should do and that starts with Stacking the Deck.
In its most basic and simplistic form, Stacking The Deck boils down to building your audience online on the platform where your target/ideal customers hang out the most.
We also need to take a closer look at and answer a couple of equally key questions of that process:
- How much of an Audience do I need?
- How should I build my Audience?
We’ll look into these questions further in this piece.
Step 1: What is Stacking The Deck?
Stacking The Deck is building the foundation for your business in terms of an Audience. An audience that is responsive, engaging and loyal. That starts with building your social media presence that will help you get more Amazon FBA sales. To achieve that, you need to fully immerse yourself into your niche, to fully familiarize yourself with it so that you can identify your target market, your ideal customer, what their pain points are, and where and on which platform they congregate the most. Depending on what your product is and your niche, the platform may vary.
For some niches, that could be Pinterest or Instagram or YouTube or Facebook. So do take the time to study your niche inside out to know that!
In his book mentioned above, Ryan shares with us what he did very successfully with his yoga brand, for which he used Facebook and built a FB page. He started sharing content on the page to get their followers to like and share that content. They spent $10 per day on ads to build the following. They engaged with their followers in the comments. After about 30 days, they had around 3,000 people who liked their page.
However, they didn’t stop there. This was just the start! They did one key thing that most do not do and that’s what really allowed them to build a rapidly growing and most importantly, responsive and invested following: they documented their journey of building and releasing their product onto their Facebook Page. They didn’t brag about the product or try to sell it. Instead, they simply talked about their product by showing their followers the prototype process, explaining the difference in their product and sharing every change they made to it based on the feedback they were getting from people like their followers.
So what they did, was listening very carefully to what their target customers were looking for and they just made a product exactly as their target customers were asking for. And they documented the entire process on their page.
You’re essentially creating a product for them to buy. So it’s not much about getting more Amazon FBA sales, it’s you getting Amazon FBA buyers instantly adding your product to their carts.
What this accomplishes is that not only it drastically separates you from all the other sellers who may or may not be even doing anything to stack the deck in their favors from Day 1 and make rapid Amazon FBA sales! And in the rare likelihood that they are doing that, they’d be mostly selling as opposed to sharing content and definitely not be documenting the process!
Documenting the process is KEY as it shows to your followers that you do value their feedback, care about them and your business is based on giving them exactly what they are looking for. And doing that, you’ll have not just buyers but loyal fans, if not evangelical fans who will become your biggest fans!
So your goal during that waiting time is to build a community of a few hundred people who are responsive and passionate in order to have as many eyeballs on your page/product to allow you to get the ball rolling and get your first crucial sales and reach the first milestone in your Amazon FBA journey: 25 sales a day!
That’s your main goal during that time to build that! To recap:
- Find out where your target customer hangs out the most online (is it Facebook? YouTube? Instagram? Pinterest? Linkedin? etc and build a community on the platform where your target customers hang out the most.
- Run ads for 30 days to your page on that platform (say 10 bucks/day) until you build a following of at least a few hundred followers who are highly responsive and passionate.
- Share content about the niche/product.
- Most importantly, DOCUMENT your journey of developing your product. Tell them why you’ve chosen this niche/product, tell them in detail what kind of improvements are you making in your product and why it’s going to drastically improve the experience of your followers using it. Etc.
- Regularly post content and pics about the journey of developing your product.
- Share pics from the factory at every step of the way.
- Show them that you care about them and value their feedback and that your product is based on the feedback they have given you so that you can get them THE product they are craving for!
- Tell them when the product is going to be launched and be available!
- Rake in those Amazon FBA sales
Doing that alone WILL set you apart from 99% of your “competition” as they are NOT doing that at all!
Now that I have explained what Stacking The Deck is, let’s tackle a key element of this process:
How Much Of An Audience Do I Need?
As Ryan mentions in his book, what matters most is not so much the size of the audience but the responsiveness of your community. Again, quoting Ryan: “The goal is not to have a lot of passive followers, your goal is to have people lining up at the door on launch day, ready to buy your product!”
Your goal again is to get enough eye balls from engaged and passionate people, who have followed your journey of documenting the process of getting THEM the product that they’ve been asking for and waiting for!
Ryan shares with us in his book this formula:
1,000 followers + 10 personal contacts + 1 influencer = 100 sales.
Using the strategies outlined above on this piece, you should be able to reach those numbers. But first, let’s do one more time a quick recap of the steps involved in the process as that’s CRUCIAL:
- Find out where your target customer hangs out the most (is it Facebook? Youtube? Instagram? Pinterest? LinkedIn? etc and build a community on the platform where our target customers hang out the most.
- Run ads for 30 days to your page on that platform (say 10 bucks/day) until you build a following of a few hundred followers who are highly responsive and passionate.
- Share content about the niche/product.
- Most importantly, DOCUMENT your journey of developing your product. Tell them why you’ve chosen this niche/product, tell them in details what kind of improvements are you making in your product and why it’s going to drastically improve the experience of your followers using it. Etc.
- Regularly post content and pics about the journey of developing your product.
- Share pics from the factory at every step of the way.
- Show them that you care about them and value their feedback and that your product is based on the feedback they have given you so that you can get them THE product they are craving for! Tell them when the product is going to be launched and available!
- Last but definitely not least, tell them when the product is going live and available for them to get it!
Doing the above, should easily get you to build a highly engaging community of at least 1,000 followers. Add to that 10 personal friends to talk about you, your product and your journey on launch day, and to complete the puzzle, a micro influencer, you will be able to reach the numbers you need to get the ball rolling. That’s about 100 sales on Launch Day!
What kind of Influencer would you need to really stoke the fire, as Ryan likes to say?
Ideally, you’d want to build an ongoing relationship with an influencer with an audience of at least 10,000 followers. Again, the same holds true to both your audience and the influencer’s audience: it’s not the number of followers that matters but the responsiveness of their community. It’s infinitely better to choose an influencer who has a following of 10,000 people who are highly responsive, engaging and passionate than an influencer with 1 Million of passive followers who couldn’t be bothered and don’t give a thing about the influencer.
Ryan also shares in his book a couple of excellent tips regarding influencers that would tremendously benefit anyone who implements them.
The first one is to partner with influencers and making them an official part of the brand and not just merely having them posting a story or making a post about you/your product/brand etc. If you just pay an influencer for a post/story, that’s a very low ROI as it only gives you a short lived exposure which might not do much to sales. Not only that, but the influencer would have no interest in your product/brand other than just getting the cash for the post/story.
However, if you make the influencer to become part of the brand, such as a brand ambassador, then they’ll have skin in the game and will be much more involved in ensuring they create content that actually resonates with their followers. And followers also act accordingly. If they see the influencer is posting a story/post just for the sake of posting it as a promotion, they also won’t bother much about it and their engagement rate will be very low.
Now, if they see that the influencer, that they already value highly and follow, is posting about something that he/she is passionate about, then the followers will be much more likely to give a serious look at the post/story. Even more so if the influencer does talk about that product/brand repeatedly, then that will add an extra layer of trust and legitimacy in the eyes of the followers about that product/brand.
The second awesome tip that Ryan shares in the Stacking the Deck chapter about influencers is to sponsor a related podcast or YouTube Channel since those will have the exact audience that you are looking for. And if the Podcast/YT Channel has a respected “leader”, then the responsiveness of the audience can be quite high!
Ryan shares examples of some of his students sponsoring major podcasts such as the Joe Rogan Experience and the Tim Ferris Podcast/Blog and after these episodes/blog posts went live, these brands took off to the stratosphere! Now, starting out and with a limited budget, you may not be able to reach these big guns, but you can and should actively search for micro influencers who have fairly popular podcasts/blogs in your niche.
How Should I Build My Audience?
I’ll quote Ryan here as he puts it very eloquently:
“For the purposes of promoting your product on Launch Day, you can ignore the latest social media buzz – you don’t need to become an expert on any specific platform. You just need to choose a way to get in front of your ideal “person” in a way that gets their attention and encourages them to follow your journey. Your best bet is to discover where your audience already lives (online) and combine it with how you are comfortable communicating with them.”
Nothing more to add. Just follow that to the letter! Print it and memorize this. It’s that simple! Do not overthink things and over complicate things. Just follow this to the letter!
Now let’s look at the next key element of this process:
What kind of content do you create for your audience in order to get their attention so that they follow you? Most importantly, what kind of content do you have to be creating so that they are anxiously awaiting for your product to go live so they can buy it when it launches?
Again, as I have mentioned earlier in this piece, what you need is to document the process of making this product and building your business. Again, this is not the time for you to be selling your product, JUST YET! Instead, share your story, tell them why you’ve chosen this niche/product. Share pictures of your product at every step, from idea, prototype, sample and launch. Post pics of the factory, production process, inspection stage even of yourself and or your friends holding it and using it. Share your thoughts about it, about the journey, at every step, about the product etc. Share videos where you talk about these yourself. Show them how nervous and excited at the same time you are.
Also, another crucial thing for you to do, is that after you’ve fully immersed yourself into your niche and understand what they want, look into what’s the hot topic of the day/week/month in that niche and share your thoughts about it. Whether it’s a blog post, a podcast episode or a video of you talking about those issues is a great way to further cement your connection with your audience to build that vital trust and responsiveness.
Talking about what’s hot and the buzz of the day/week in your niche achieves a few crucial things:
– It engages your audience and attracts new people to your community.
– It creates variety from the pattern of you posting content about your product/brand/journey. And that’s refreshing for followers as it conveys to them that you’re not just about selling, selling but that you’re also very engaged in your community and are aware of what’s happening. – Last but definitely not least, these discussions created from these buzzing topics, give you even further invaluable feedback/data from your EXACT target market!
To find topics, you can follow what’s going on in the news, follow Google Trends, make a list of commonly asked questions that your audience might be asking. You can also take your keywords and enter them on a site like www.answerthepublic.com to get a list of the most commonly talked about questions on any given topic. You can also enter your main keywords on YouTube and Google to get a ton of ideas and inspirations on what topics/questions people in your exact niche are asking about and talking about and you simply create content around those topics, keywords and questions and share your thoughts on them. As simple as that.
Doing that will create engagement in your community and the more engagement a community has, the more exposure Facebook/YouTube/Instagram etc. will give them when people search for communities on these platforms. So even if you have a small community to start, share content that your ideal customers are already talking about and that will create a snow ball effect of growing your list even further.
You can also approach other influencers in your niche. However, do not approach them asking them to feature you, your brand, your product etc as nobody likes that and they are bombarded on a daily basis by others doing that. Instead, do what will catch their attention and separate you from the others and again, that’s something that incredibly, not many are doing!
As Ryan eloquently puts it, “ultimately, a brand is just trust that you build with people.” You build that trust by building relationships with people in your niche, whether they are potential customers or other influencers in your niche.
So when you approach an influencer in your niche to collaborate with you, you want to do it from a perspective of building a relationship with them and not make them feel like a transaction. How do you do that?
Simple. Not by asking. But by GIVING.
I’ll quote Ryan here as he puts it perfectly:
“Hi Jim/Marie, here’s a piece of content I made that I think your audience would love. Is there anything that your audience is struggling with that I could write about or speak to, in order to serve them?”
Doing that will automatically set you apart from all the others who are only asking, asking and asking some more, if not begging “Hey, can I be on your show?”
Not only will this set you apart but the influencer will be happy to invite you to his/her show! Why? Because it’s helping their audience get new, fresh and quality content that serves them! And in the process, it expands your reach to new audiences and makes you look as a helpful leader, and ultimately, a credible authority in your niche.
Win Win Win for all!
It gives both the influencer and their audience new and fresh quality content.
It brings you new exposure to a new audience of your targeted ideal customers. It helps establish you as a credible authority on the topic. All of which translates into new followers and ultimately, new loyal fans and Amazon FBA sales.
The final piece of advice that Ryan shared in that chapter titled “Stack The Deck” is pure gold! It’s what he refers to as “The Hot List”.
What Is A Hot List?
Once you’ve built a community that is responsive and passionate on the platform where your ideal customer spends most time in online, the next step is to further segment your community into a VIP or HOT List. This is incredibly powerful as it can literally guarantee Amazon FBA sales when your product goes live.
As you’ve been building your community on the platform that best resonates with your audience while documenting your journey, you’ve noticed that some of your followers are more engaged, more passionate and more responsive than others. As Ryan puts it, you want to reward them by putting them “first in line” as the more people you have in that “first in line” to buy your product, the more sales you’ll make when your product goes live.
Here’s how this works:
The big Day, Launch Day is fast approaching, both you and your audience are very excited and can’t wait to see the results of the journey you’ve been documenting and sharing with them so far. You’ve been building up momentum, putting out unique, quality and fresh content and sharing with them your journey without doing much selling. You’ve been building up all this good will of giving, giving and giving some more. However, now is the time to start asking for sales! You’ll do so by posting something like this:
Quoting Ryan using his yoga mat real life example:
“As you know, our yoga mats go on sale April 2! And this early in the process, it’s really important that we get feedback from people who have been following us. Sadly, we only have a few hundred of them available, so I’m holding a handful of them for followers who are raring and ready to go. If you want me to reserve one for you for the first twenty four hours on launch day, comment “I Want One” and I will add you to our hot list.”
When you’re first starting with your first order, telling your followers that you only have a few hundred units of your product, may actually be true! What this accomplishes is that it builds up even more anticipation and creates a buzz and a buying frenzy. As a result, this causes your most passionate followers to sign up for your hot list and will even push those who are thinking about it and are on the fence, to join the hot list!
Then, to further amplify the momentum from this, you may want to follow up with a message like this:
Quoting Ryan once again: “Wow! Over fifty people commented on my last post and said that they wanted one of our yoga mats. I’m so honored — Thank you! I will be holding a total of 100 yoga mats to ensure that first responders get their mat the day that it is available. Sadly, that means that even fewer will be available to the general public, so if you want on the first-in-line list, please comment “First in Line” and I will add you to the hot list.”
Finally, you simply take those people and bring them into a a separate group or platform, whether it’s a private group on FB or an email list. By doing that, it makes them feel special as they are part of an insiders’ club. And when your product is finally available, they’ll be rushing to buy your product!
This is DYNAMITE! It can and will not only help you reach your goals of making sales the moment your product goes live but also to set you apart from your competition as they are more than likely, not doing any of this!
These are proven real-world strategies that have worked over and over and over again over the years. Implement them into your business to Stack The Deck in your favor to not only start making Amazon FBA sales as soon as your product goes live but to also build the foundation of a successful business: having a responsive, passionate, and loyal followers who can’t wait to buy your products over and over again!
Another MAJOR benefit of this is that you may not waste money or products on useless giveaways since you’ll have built an audience and a group of Hot List Buyers, who are highly responsive, passionate and loyal fans who will be raring to buy your products as soon they are launched.
This yes does take time and efforts, but the rewards are incredible and highly worth it. Now it’s your turn to implement these winning strategies into your Amazon FBA business in order to Stack The Deck in your favour
so that you can have people lining up to buy your product as soon as it goes live on Amazon. And reach your goals of 25 sales a day right away!
There you have it. A clear path of a winning game plan of what to do while you’re waiting for your products to arrive at Amazon’s warehouses. Do not overthink things. Just do it! You’ll be glad you did!
I’ll be implementing these exact strategies in my very own Amazon FBA business as well. And so should you. As that’s the way to win and become an Amazon FBA sales machine in this ever increasing competitive market place on Amazon.
To your success,
Payman Lorenzo.
Wednesday, 02, September 2020.
Toronto, Canada.
