Revox Podcast

The short answer is YES! Absolutely put a video on your Amazon listing. But a couple of things to consider:It doesn't need to be fancy or professional. Sometimes simple iPhone videos perform best anyway. So don't overthink it, and don't overspend!People WILL watch your video, so give them something useful. Tell them how to use the product and the benefits they'll get from using it.Keep it short. Amazon's always changing the length of the video you can upload, but try and keep it under two minutes. Really good videos probably don't need to be more than 30 seconds.Don't link to ANYTHING outside of Amazon. It won't post because Amazon doesn't like poachers.

Ads are getting more competitive, which means more expensive. It’s important to make sure that you have a good advertising strategy to keep your advertising campaigns profitable and low cost. Use mid-tail keywords. At first, these don’t look super appealing because there’s not an apparent winner as far as sales volume goes. But if you can find several mid-tail keywords, it’s just as good as finding short-tails, and it’ll be cheaper.Target products, not keywords. Because it’s a specific product, and not a search term for several products, you can get clicks for a fraction of the cost.Bid higher on low-ACoS keywords. It sounds counter intuitive, but it’s way more profitable to bring a keyword with a 10% ACoS to a 20% ACoS than it is to bring a 40% ACoS to a 30% ACoS.Organize your campaigns well. So much money is lost in translation because data is hard to access due to poor organization. Link to Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s8QncDFx0s

LINKS: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/how-amazon-s-liability-for-third-party-30990/ https://www.sfweekly.com/sponsored/amazon-accountability-needed/

Amazon is instituting the ability to leave ratings without reviews. This probably dilutes the efficacy that written reviews have in the algorithm. This is good, in my opinion because it gives smaller businesses a chance to compete with bigger brandsTax forms are out for the year. If you made more than $20k in revenue, Amazon will send you a 1099-K form. These are now available for tax purposes.

-FedEx returns after a one-month exile from Amazon. Now third-party sellers can again choose the carrier to ship their packages. My opinion on this is that it’s temporary. Amazon is only interested in monopolies, and sooner or later FBA will be the only fulfillment channel on Amazon. Every month they get more efficient, and with a bigger network of fulfillment centers. No one will process orders better than they will. Let’s face it, Seller-Fulfilled-Prime wasn’t really that great anyway (super expensive), and Amazon wants to do away with it. -I personally don’t think counterfeits are as big of a deal as people are making them out to be, and I think people should really stop complaining about it. The only way Amazon’s going to be able to get rid of sellers is by making it harder to prove a product is real. Honestly this makes life a nightmare for sellers, so I would rather play the long game and wait for bad seller to show their colors and get suppressed by Amazon than truncate my ability to launch and iterate on products. -Sellics updated their article on Amazon’s A9 (why it’s title May 2019? I have no idea). Basically, Amazon now says that the 250 characters in backend keywords does not include spaces or punctuation. In other words, the 250 characters (formerly 249 bytes) now only entails actual letters. Sellics advises that you still keep your most important keywords at the front of your 250 character list. My take is that if you believe the algorithm works at all, you probably don’t even need the 250 characters

Before we get into the news I’d like to announce that I’m going to focus the Revox podcast going forward on Amazon specifically. Amazon is the area i have the most expertise and it’s where I feel like I can provide the most value. Although there are plenty of other marketing things I do and understand, Amazon is a place where I know I can consistently perform well, and that’s where I want to help out the most.There actually wasn’t much by way of news for Amazon this week. Like other businesses, I imagine Amazon spends most of Q1 planning goals for the year and how they will execute them. Speaking of planning, the new fee structures are about the hit next month, so make sure you have your prices and logistics set for that. Most people will see a small increase in fees overall, but many products will actually see a decrease in fees.Let’s get into the meat of today’s podcast. Amazon has recently started to really crack down on buyer-seller messaging. This has been a hot topic for quite some time, but now Amazon is really bringing down the hammer. The buyer-seller messages policies have pretty much always been in a state of flux. Usually, the policies have become stricter over the years. Recently Amazon has started cracking down on sellers and revoking their privileges entirely for no apparent reason. They’ll send out an email saying that the seller violated a policy, but one say which one directly. I think this all headed towards removing any sort of request from the platform at all. You’re already no longer allowed to send external links, promotional content, discounts on future products, or anything like that. Very VERY soon, the only think you’ll be able to contact your customer about is whether or not they got their package, which, if you’re doing FBA, isn’t even your job.

There is a lot of really awesome information on the internet. Some of it’s free, some of it’s paid. But there’s a lot.How can you tell whether an internet marketing guru is legit or fake?They talk about others’ success with their course or product instead of their own (they don’t eat their own dog food).They act like they have a secret. They don’t most.They try and sell a dream instead of information and facts. In other words, they say “imagine what this product could do for you,” instead of “this product solves x problem.” Be wary of the fake gurus. There are some real guys out there, like Chris Conrady.

80% of people will see and read your title, only 20% will click through and read your copy. This is kind of a bogus statistic, but it highlights a principle that is very important. And that is that your title has a huge amount of weight in your sales copy. If your title is really good, that click-through-rate will go up, and so will how much people watch, read, or listen to your content.But here’s the question: do you optimize your title for SEO or conversion? In other words, should your title be focused more on keywords or click-thru?In many ways, it depends on your platform, but I would err on the side of conversion. Most search engines are smart enough that they know how to find your product, even if your info isn’t super optimized for search. In the example of Youtube , rely very much on conversion. On Amazon, though, maybe more on search.

Instagram released a bunch of new features for business owners (super useful for small business owners too).   Alex Toobey wrote an article with all of them in there. You can check that out here: https://alextooby.com/new-instagram-update/

How good a theme is comes down to mainly two things: functionality and speed. Some themes have one or the other, others have both, but most have neither.Odds are, if you know what you want your theme to look like, you won’t be able to get it with a free theme. Even most premium or paid themes don’t offer a bunch versatility, which means you’re going to end up with some frustrations. Not only can it be hard to make the theme look the way you want, but it can also be super difficult to get it to work with certain plugins. So functionality is huge. You want a theme that’s super versatile.The next is speed. A lot of themes are just loaded up with a bunch of garbage that no one wants to use. If there is a feature that it has that you don’t want, odds are that theme is going to slow down your website. Some themes that allow you to customize things use what’s called short-code, which basically means instead of changing the actual functionality of the theme, it has a code that performs an overwrite. This will slow down your website a HUGE amount. Avoid shortcake if at all possible.So which theme is right for you? Now the question is what do you want to use it for? If all you care about is getting your content out there and you’re just blogging, there are two options I recommend. 1. Clean Bloggist. This is free and you can search it in the Wordpress Platform. It’s super simple, wicked fast, and it is the best theme I know if all you want to do is create content. 2. My second recommendation is Acabado. This is basically a glorified version of clean bloggist. It’s geared towards making a blog monetizable. This theme is premium and is $50/year or $99/century (weird, I know).If you need something that is more customizable, I would recommend getting a bare bones theme (premium) and adding a visual builder plugin. I use GeneratePress premium for my theme and BeaverBuilder Standard as my plugin. Both of these are annual renewal premium products. But they’re worth it. They make things fast and easy to edit.So there’s a lot out there. But make it easy on yourself and don’t spend hours and hours looking for the perfect theme only to realize it’s not all it’s cut out to be. I spent hundreds of dollars on themes and plugins before realizing I can do just about anything I want if I get GeneratePress and BeaverBuilder. You probably won’t ever need another theme again.