Changes At Amazon, Review Strategies, & The Four Stages To Building An Audience

Foreigners. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. This is Ryan Daniel Moran. And on today's show, we're going to talk about the recent announcement and changes that happened over at Amazon. In case you've been living under a rock, Amazon made some major changes to the rules around the way in which it's okay to get reviews, essentially banning the concept of incentivized reviews, which means that the, the tit for tat method of giving away free product in exchange for reviews has been squashed, which may or may not put out of business some of the popular review services that people have been using for a couple of years now in order to inflate their reviews and especially kick things off and get enough reviews in order to get conversions. Now, when this was announced, it was called game changing. It was called the end of an era, it was called the leveling of a playing field, it was called all kinds of things. But in my interpretation, all it really does is revert us back to the way things were about two to two and a half years ago and forces entrepreneurs to be a little bit more creative and intentional about the way that they grow their business. But before we go into how this might affect physical product sellers and Internet entrepreneurs, I want to bring up just the fact that Apple is not concerned about these changes. Quest Nutrition is not concerned about these changes. Organifi product that I have talked about as an example in some of our trainings, something I use myself, is not affected by these changes. Julian Bakery, which really doesn't even have any reviews, and I've used as examples in some of my trainings, they have like 30 reviews, average of 3 stars. They're not affected by this change. Now, what I'm getting at here is the fact that businesses that operate like brands that have followings and that have exposure and are not entirely reliant what their conversion rate is on Amazon, are not affected by these changes. Not at all. The only people who are affected by these changes are those who live and die by how many reviews they have in comparison with their competitors. Now, I'm not suggesting that's not important. Of course I care about that and my physical products. I bring home a significant amount of my income from selling on Amazon. But it's important to note that real brands who have exposure in the marketplace beyond just Amazon are not affected by this. And I am surprised that it is taking something like this, a situation like this, in order to wake entrepreneurs up to the fact that they have to build businesses bigger than just one channel. Now, I have said something along these lines before on the podcast. But when you're in a commodity based market, meaning you are selling a widget to sell a widget, and there is no defined target market with no value add, the only thing you can do is compete on price and reviews, which at the end of the day are really weak value propositions. The way that you solve this long term is by having a defined audience, solving their pain points, developing an audience that chooses you versus just buys from you because you're the lowest price. Price is the worst differentiating factor among all the things that you can use to create value in the marketplace. Now this goes for physical products, it goes for digital products, it goes for services, it goes for software. If people are only choosing you because of price, you are in a. Well, you know, Walmart makes a whole lot of money. So maybe I won't even say that. But if we compare Walmart to Whole Foods, who has a more loyal customer base, who charges more money, who is in a better position to have people rally behind them, we all know that's Whole Foods. Whole Foods sells the exact same thing as Walmart, in some cases just for twice the price. I've heard some people call Whole Foods whole paycheck because you spend your whole paycheck there. And yet I still voluntarily go there, as do millions of other Americans, especially here in Texas. So what I want to address with the time that we have together today is two things. One, what do we do in order to get reviews on a regular basis so that we can compete in the marketplace? Amazon specifically. And number two, how do we develop rabid followings? How do we develop something that gets an audience to choose us? How do we really build the audience bigger than Amazon? And we're gonna do this in two parts. First, we're gonna cover those two pieces and then we're going to go through the presentation that I gave@the amazing.com summit a month or so ago on a future podcast. But first, let's start with the review getting process. Now if you remember from several years ago, I talked very publicly about how we got reviews and it was through calling our customers. And that resulted in us winning in every market that we went into. Amazon's a lot stingier with phone numbers now, but the concept is the same of developing relationships with your customers. So if we were starting from scratch, I would have someone full or part time emailing every single customer personally and letting them know that there was somebody real on the other end, if they needed any help, that they should feel free to reach out and I might even have my customer service team sending handwritten cards to my customers. I might be sending them direct mail pieces just as thank yous. I might be sending them extra samples of our product. I might be sending personalized letters to our customers just to let them know that there's someone who cares about them. I might be putting stickers on my labels saying how much their feedback means to us or how much we appreciate them as a customer. Sending them back to webpages with free gifts or coupon offers. These are all things that I would be doing these are all things that I would be doing in order to develop a customer relationship. Oh my. A customer relationship.

When things get easy, we get lazy. And when you have things like review groups and when you have giveaway services, it's really easy to get lazy on the review getting process. But what we really want is a deep relationship with our customers. I might have Facebook groups for my customers. I might have email lists. I might be getting them to rally behind me on social media. I might. I want my customers to connect with me in every way possible, in any way possible. Because the deeper and the more intimate the experience, the more repeat business we will get and the easier those reviews will be. And these are things that your competition are not doing. You think your competition is putting a strong intent into getting your customers to come back and follow you in someplace? No, of course not. So if you do that, you are, you are miles ahead of the game. Now the other piece specifically on reviews is I am of the opinion, the way that I read the changes, it seems to me now I'm speculating. I don't know what goes on in Amazon's brain any day of the week, certainly not today. But the way that I see what is going on is that Amazon is effectively trying to end the reviews in exchange for free product because they see that being massively abused. But I suspect that going to your customers and.

Getting them to review your product.

And how you communicate that is up for some interpretation. But using your existing customer base to review your products and then sending them other products for them to review or sending.

Other bonuses I think are still on the table.

So I think that the idea of incentivized reviews has some creative flexibility. Now, I think you should always be familiar with their terms of service and operate within them. But I think there is still opportunity for people who sell on Amazon to get creative in the way that they communicate with their customers and encourage them to leave. Reviews and reviews coming from your customers are going to be much more effective, much more persuasive, and they're going to create higher repeat order rate as well. So you have possibly been sitting on a gold mine with the fact that you've got thousands of customers and you have a host of people who have already chosen and consumed your product that you can go to and Amazon allows you to email them within your system. So if you use that and you use it persuasively, I think that there is still some room to.

Interpret the terms of service changes how you will. But still to contact your customers and encourage them to leave reviews, and what happens after they leave a review, I think is up for interpretation. Now, the fix for everything, the fix for all of this. The reason why brands aren't affected at all by this change is because they have an audience, which for the life of me, I cannot understand why so many physical product sellers are so lazy in developing their exposure in the marketplace outside of Amazon. For the life of me, I cannot understand the resistance to building up an audience, except for the fact that maybe they just don't want to go through the grind again. The grind of starting from zero and building up something that gives them more sustainability and more predictability than anything else they'll ever do. Maybe it is just addiction to quick sales, which I totally understand. It's way easier to throw up a second product and increase your sales. But just like there are three stages to the million dollar business selling physical products, there are three stages to building up a million dollar audience. And I'd like to go through them briefly with you now. First there is the grind. The grind is when you don't have any followers. You might be selling product or maybe you're just blogging and nobody is showing up. Maybe you don't even have any products to sell. You're just trying to build up an audience and that's what you think is going to give you the ticket. And nobody is listening. That's the grind. No one's listening. You don't even know how to build up the audience. The thing that you need to do in this stage is first identify where your audience hangs out. Do they follow YouTube channels? Do they hang out on Facebook? Do they, do they scroll through Instagram? Where do they spend the most time? And it is your job to start putting content in front of your audience in the modality that they're used to consuming content. Now chances are people will not listen to us. There's a chicken and an egg issue, because who's gonna listen to you if you have no followers and how do you get followers if no one's going to listen to you? That's why during this stage, I recommend that you focus heavily on advertising to your target audience. Run ads to your audience if they're on YouTube, run sponsored ads if they're on Facebook, boost your posts or boost your videos. If they're on Instagram, buy shoutouts or run ads on Instagram. Whatever it takes to get in front of your ideal audience, do that until you have a thousand followers minimum. Now there are plenty of people who have built million dollar businesses with a thousand followers. Or by the way, if you're building an email list, if that's your preferred modality to talk to your customers, run Facebook ads or podcast ads or what have you, to the landing page that collects their email address until you have at least a thousand of them. Now we can look at examples of this. If we look at Organifi, which is a green juice powder, they did it all on YouTube. They just kept putting out content until they had thousands of followers. Then they could launch any physical products product they wanted. We look at Onnit. Onnit had one product, Alpha Brain, and they advertise it all over the place, specifically on podcasts, almost exclusively on podcasts, in order to collect the number of customers that they wanted and then they moved on to other products. But the formula here is to advertise your business and your product until you have at least 1,000 subscribers. It's at this point that we shift over into the growth. The growth is two things. One, you start putting out content in front of the people who are already following you. And if you've done your job right, they will start to share it. And as they share it, the audience starts to grow. The other piece is now that we have some content and we have a little bit of a following, we can start connecting with other influencers that we have, whether that is hiring brand ambassadors, whether that is creating affiliate relationships, whether that is just messaging and partnering other with other people who have followings and agreeing to share each other's posts. This is the point where you can start leveraging your following to get in front of other followings that might be doing podcast interviews, it might be getting on YouTube shows, it might be going to similar Facebook pages and sharing each other's stuff. It might be doing cross promotions with other people who have email lists. This is the point where you start to partner with people who have similar size audience as yours and start to get some synergy moving together. You will do this. You will continue to Share content with the following you do have and you might continue to run advertisements to build up the following and you'll be leveraging that to get in front of other audiences. A great example of this would be when a couple of years ago we built up our initial following for Zen Activesports on Facebook on a Facebook page called I Love Yoga. To get that audience. We spent about five between five and $10 a day to get Facebook likes to our page until we had about 5,5000 likes. When we had 5000 likes, we started running content to our audience. They started to share it. They actually shared it pretty aggressively because we knew what they liked to talk about. We did similar content to the ones that got a lot of shares and comments and we didn't do the stuff that didn't get engagement. We also started to hear from other yoga related pages and we started connect to connect with them and in one case we sponsored one of those pages and got a whole bunch of their followers and other times we just shared each other's content. So we benefited from some crossovers and eventually that page grew to like 30,000 followers. That's a sweet following. 30,000 followers is a great place to launch products, to ask for reviews, to get people to buy whatever it is that you've got, wherever it is for sale. So that is the, that is the two things that you need to do inside of the growth. And then in The Gold Stage 3, that's where it's cool to start to monetize that audience. That's where you can launch products to them. It's where you can cash the check. It's where you can send them off of Amazon, you can send them to E commerce stores. I would highly recommend that you send them to content that pre sells them on product. This is where you can really get a twofer because if the content is good, you can build goodwill with your audience while at the same time pre selling them for the products that you have and you can send them wherever you want so you can start to monetize that audience. When you have pieces of content that do that effectively, then you can run traffic to those pieces of content. So you build both the audience and you make sales at exactly the same time and now you're home free. First we need to get a little bit of an audience and we'll have to spend a little bit of money to get there. Then we'll have partnerships start to build up and then we'll have content that we can run traffic to that both builds the audience and Makes us money at the same time. And after running through this process, you'll have a following of people that you can launch products to that will happily give you reviews and you will never have to worry about review groups again. Not that you would even want to. We used to do a workshop called the Next Level that was specifically for Amazon sellers doing.

About a million dollars a year showing them how to get into the multi millions. We haven't done one in a while just because I was a little bit burnt out on them. But one of the things that we talked about on day one of that workshop was we went over what I called the 500 reviews in a weekend strategy which was very simply running promotions to our audience and asking them to review. It was very simple. It was within Amazon's terms of service. And guess what? It still is the only catch. You need to have the audience. If you have the audience, if you have the eyeballs. None of these changes affect you. None of these changes hinder your progress. You just have to be more intentional about the relationship that you're building with your audience. You know, someone said something to me when I first launched my physical products businesses and they said to me, every customer, I go out of my way to make sure they have a good experience with me. We go above and beyond. We do whatever it takes to make them happy. And it sucks at first and it sucks at second. But at third, that audience rewards you and they start to choose you and they start to talk about you. And creating the experience is the one thing that no one can compete with you against. They cannot out price a positive experience. They cannot out price someone who goes the extra mile. So that is what you can do in response to these changes. Increase the customer experience that they have with you. Build the following off of Amazon. Give your audience what it wants and the audience will reward you for many years to come. There are plenty of people who have done just fine by having a really big audience and half heartedly monetizing that audience. That is just as essential as having good products with good sales processes. Because it is your audience that gives you predictability, allows you to protect your profit margins and allows you to be independent of one sales channel or one technique because they will always find a way to buy from you. In the next podcast we're going to talk about about how to build a business that is bigger than just Amazon. We're going to go over the presentation that I gave recently at the Amazing.com summit, which is always a hit, and we're going to go through the strategies that we use to build a sustainable brand and have customers wanting to buy from you regardless of where you are listed. Stay tuned for that one. But until then, as always, I appreciate you listening and I'll see you on the next show.