Amazon Review Changes PLUS How To Build A Major Brand

Hey, everybody, my name is Ryan, if you're not familiar with me. I help high achievers build businesses and invest the profits. And most of my income and most of my business comes from selling physical products for the majority on Amazon. Also in some retail stores and on our own website, we do about $10 million a year in selling physical products. And I'm making this video for those of you who sell physical products, who are running brands on the Internet, because this week a lot of us saw a surprise, kind of caught us off guard, some changes at Amazon regarding the way that they're allowing and now disallowing reviews. And in case you were living under a rock, the change was that they are no longer allowing incentivized reviews, which means giving away free product or highly discounted products in exchange for reviews, which is the majority of the reviews that are made in our little circle in the way that small businesses kind of get attention in order to get sales. And I want to talk a little bit about what you can do about it and how you can operate at a higher level that will help you get around some of these changes. Now, in my experience, I've been an entrepreneur for about 10 years. We've trained well over a hundred millionaires to launch physical products brands, multimillion dollar brands. And in my experience, from what I have seen among especially our community, is that there's two types of businesses in our sphere, there are cash flow machines and there are brands. The difference is that cash flow machines are highly profitable, they make money quickly, and they usually rely on tactics or hacks or loopholes in the system. And that's how most people get their kicks in the entrepreneurial world. So if you've been launching physical products and you're getting reviews by giveaways and ranking for keywords, that's awesome, congratulations on what you're doing. But if that's all you're doing, then you're probably running a cash flow machine. On the other side, there's brands. A brand is something that might use some tactics, they might use some loopholes, but it's a very small part of their strategy. Whereas in the grand scheme of things, the overall overarching strategy of a brand is to build rabid, raving customers that will find them and buy them regardless of where they're listed. If it's on Amazon or E Commerce or retail, they might have a primary strategy of where they're featured in retail, or they might focus on Amazon. But behind it all, it's all about the customer experience and making sure Their customers feel connected to the brand and come back. And the benefit to that is that you can charge higher prices, you have more repeat customers, you have more predictability, and ultimately you can sell for more money. If you want to sell your business now, there is more work up front. It might require more of a team, it might require require you to be more strategic, but ultimately it has a higher payoff. Whereas a cash flow machine requires or really caps out at about a million dollars. That's what I've seen. Cash flow machines tend to cap out. That tends to be the ceiling. So if you've been dependent on giveaways to get reviews, it's time to borrow some strategies from the brand side of things. And that's what we focus on. We focus on helping people build brands. There's a reason why our course is called the Brand Builder Bootcamp and not the Make Money on Amazon course, because they're very, very different experiences and people do make money in our trainings, but we focus on helping people build scalable and sellable brands. Now let's talk about some examples here and some things that you can do about it. Because the way that you will really break through a barrier like you might have been served this week, especially if you've been dependent upon giveaways in order to make money and get reviews, is to start going where customers hang out and bring them into your fold. Now, I would recommend that you look at places off of Amazon and there's pools of your ideal customers hanging out all, all over the Internet in little pockets. They might be in Facebook groups, they might be on forums, they might follow certain thought leaders. If we put up an ad or some helpful content in front of them and bring them back into however we're capturing our audience, be it a squeeze page or a blog post, or if we're connecting with our customers via a Facebook group or a Pinterest page. However we reg communicate with our customers, we're gonna put our content, or whatever it is that gets people bonded to our brand in front of those pools of customers. So let's say that most of your customers follow Rachael Ray because you sell kitchen equipment. And if that's the case, then we might advertise on Facebook on the Rachael Ray or other cooking related channels and bring them back into our Facebook page and show how our product or service helps them achieve whatever goal they're trying to achieve by following Rach Ray, whether it is learning to cook better or to have quick, easy meals for the family, or to impress at dinner parties or whatever it is, however your product helps them meet that goal. We don't focus on price, we don't focus on the features of our product. We focus on how our product will help them reach their goals and the goal that will be revealed by whatever they're following or whatever they're liking or whatever YouTube video they're watching. These are all great places where our customers, our ideal people, will hang out and we'll put our benefits in front of those customers in order to start building the brand experience. That's how we can elevate our brand from being more than just an Amazon business or something that's dependent upon reviews. And you will see this in your own shopping behavior that you will turn off the part of your brain that looks at reviews if you already know the benefit that you want to get from a product. So if you observe, if you're sold off of Amazon, like you really want this product, because the benefit that you learned somewhere else, you'll go to Amazon. And when you're shopping, you won't care about the reviews nearly as much as if you were commodity shopping, which would be more of a cash flow business. If we look at the big brands in our space.

Do you think Apple, for example, is Apple gonna care that they can't give away free product in exchange for reviews anymore? No, not at all. Why? Because they have a large following that's gonna buy from them regardless of what the reviews say. Do you think that Quest Nutrition, one of the highest grossing businesses on Amazon, do you think they care that they can't give away free product anymore? No, they just launch a new flavor to their already rabid customers. That's the difference of a brand. Now. Things are always changing in this space. Things are always going to change. Get used to it. The key, the secret, is to always be able to adapt, but also to be building your business on a solid foundation. And I have found that the best way to do that is to look at the breakout brands that are doing things really well and that have had staying power, that have been doing this for a very long time. So this December, I'm putting together some of the smartest brands that I follow that I have watched do incredible things and also people who advise these brands and I'm putting them all together in one room and we're going to go over what's working now, how to build a business that has infinite scalability, something that is sellable. We're going to go through examples, we're going to go through case studies. Of businesses that are being launched right now, how they're doing it. And look at ones that have already gone $100 million and above. And we're going to look at businesses that are going from 0 to 1. The theme of it is going from 0 to 100 million and every stage in between. We're going to cover the whole gamut. We'll cover how each piece falls into the brand building process. And there's one other thing that we're going to cover because I find that entrepreneurs, no matter how successful they are, always are looking for more predictability because there's a part of them that fears that it's all going to go away. So when we have something like that happened this week, there's like this twinge of fear that comes up this, oh no, it's all going to go away. And I have found that the best way to actually, there's two ways that you can cure that. One is to have a raving audience that always comes back. But the second is to have very strategic investment for passive income. Because if it all goes away, if you're well invested in stocks, real estate, investment funds, you can reduce your tax liability. It gives you more predictability, more peace of mind so you can work on your business without the sense of stress that you're dependent upon the next campaign or the next product doing really well. When you have passive income coming from those places, that's when you're really freed up to build something great. And that's why I help people build businesses but also invest the profits. Passive income. So we're putting together an investment panel along with the rest of the business builders this December. And we're going to go through the best passive income strategies, the best tax reduction strategies, the best wealth building strategies, and we're going to cover the entire process of 0 to 100 million in every stage in between. And also investing for passive income. You're going to meet the founder of Quest Nutrition, a $400 million brand that grew from zero to 400 million in five years. You're going to meet JP Sears, who is always entertaining but most importantly has built a raving fan base in just a year. And we're going to go through those strategies. You're going to meet Cameron Herald who advises some Amazon based businesses and also some other brands that are doing 10, $20 million a year. You're going to meet Mike Dillard and his entire board of advisors including Josh Bazzoni who runs 100 million dollar physical products business. You're going to meet his entire panel of advisors because they're launching a new business together and they've all sold physical products, actually collectively billions of dollars worth of physical products. And they're all coming together to launch a new physical products business. And we're gonna go through what their plan is to really scale this. And they're using things like Kickstarter and crowdfunding and other ways to really spread the word. They've got a really cool plan and we're gonna deconstruct that. You're gonna meet Alicia Silverstone, the actress who a lot of people don't know runs a multimillion dollar supplement company and nobody knows it. And guess what, she's huge on Amazon, but she doesn't depend on Amazon because of some brand building and audience building strategies. We're gonna go through all of that and just for fun, we're gonna throw in Peter Diamandis, one of the smartest entrepreneurs alive, and John Mackey, the founder of Whole foods, that does $13 billion in physical products in retail. So we're gonna go through some of those strategies as well. So if you sell physical products on the Internet, if you're an E Commerce, if you are an Internet marketer and you are looking to go from 1 to 10 or 10 to 100 or 0 to 1, I'm putting some of the best people that I know into one room this December 9th, 10th and 11th here in Austin, Texas. And we're going to go through all the strategies that each of the smartest people that I know are using in order to build breakthrough brands, have more predictability, go beyond Amazon and sell a lot of product, go through all of their strategies for branding, building big businesses and investing for the profit. I'll put the link in the description. I hope this video was helpful for you. What is required of you in this time is to borrow from the brand building strategies that have made so many other businesses successful and to implement that into your business. The faster you can do that and the more that you invest into doing that, the better off your business will be and the faster you will grow. Thanks for watching. Please share this with an entrepreneur who you know is growing a business and could use some of these strategies. And I hope to see you this December in Austin, take care of.