How To Drive Amazon Traffic - PPC, International, Google, and Influencers w/ Mike Zagare

What we like to do is we like to be very aggressive with headline search, sponsored product, and then also product display, ad and also get that organic visibility. So now we're swarming our competition. They literally are suffocated by our advertising presence to the point where people see us and we have more real estate. On Amazon's page, which is always a home run.

You're listening to Freedom Fast lane, presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now, your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Ryan Daniel Moran.

Oh, fastlaners, how much do you love me? Ryan Daniel Moran here. And I just got done recording today's episode, which is, you can't see me right now, but I got fists flying in the air. I'm waving him around like I don't care. So I'm on with Mike Zagarri today. He runs a company. He actually runs a couple of companies. One is in the pet supply market. He just sold one of his businesses, which was a physical therapy practice. And he's got another gig, which is called PPC Entourage, which measures, manages and basically allows you to control traffic, specifically Amazon traffic. But what we're here to talk about today is some really interesting data and some really interesting changes about Amazon traffic. So Mike got really fascinated a couple years ago with where is all of the traffic hanging out on Amazon? Is it hanging out in sponsored products? Is it hanging out on blogs and then coming to Amazon? Is it hanging out on Facebook and then going to Amazon? Where is the concentration of traffic coming to Amazon.com so that we can align our focus of where do we advertise and where do we go court influencers and where do we need to optimize? You are going to be shocked at the sources of traffic coming to Amazon.com it will be no surprise to you that the most traffic from Amazon in terms of conversion rates are people going to Amazon.com and searching for products or searching for keywords. That should be no surprise to you. It's just over half of that traffic. That leaves almost 50% of the traffic coming from other places besides Amazon.com so what that means is, is if you dial in the Amazon side of things, there is 50% left on the bone. Where is it? That's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. We're going to talk about where to align your focus. We're going to talk about how to optimize and how to automate the Amazon side of things so that you can go pursue this other half of traffic and conversions that's sitting on the sidelines. Now, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who spend hours and hours or have a full team of people whose job it is to play with sponsored listings, to play with split tests, to run different pricing strategies in order to get Amazon optimized. And that's a good idea. But what's an even better idea is to find the system or the solution, let it play, and then you are freed up to go pursue new opportunities. I call those multipliers, I call them the things that actually are deserving of your time for you to go spearhead new areas of growth while the systems that you've got in place continue to run and continue to optimize. So what really surprised me about my time with Mike was that there's one source of traffic, one that is 30% of Amazon's traffic. That's crazy. It's actually 10 times the size of social media traffic. Mike's working on some solutions to be able to track all of this, but for now we just geek out about where the traffic on Amazon is coming from, what we need to do in order to maximize it, where you should put your focus, and some new opportunities that Amazon is rolling out to expand the advertising opportunities. The platform's getting bigger. There's some brand new things coming out that are still in beta. We talk about that. We talk about all things Amazon traffic. So if you have any physical product for sale, I think you're going to be excited and you are going to be fascinated by this chat with Mike Zagarre.

What's up, ladies and gentlemen, germs and children of all ages. Actually children above 13, maybe if you're under 13, this is not appropriate for you. We're on with the tall and mighty, the powerful, the talented Mike Zagarre. Welcome to Freedom Fast lane, dude. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Hey man, thanks for having me. What an introduction. Glad to be here.

Well, dude, I want to ask you a bunch of things because I know you've really dialed in the traffic side of things to blow up some of your physical products brands. But before we get into all the tactic y tactical stuff, I believe congratulations are in order. You just had a big exit, did you not?

Yeah, man, I exited the business I started when I was 25 and I'm a recovering physical therapist, meaning I was doing physical therapy for years and I just wasn't really satisfied with it. I woke up every day with just not very happy about It. So while I loved helping out people and I loved building that business, it was totally time to exit. There's all these changes with Medicare, there's keeping up with that business model, and it was just the perfect time to exit. And man, it's been amazing. It was a great experience selling my first business. I have to say, you know, I'll.

Bite my tongue on getting into a political rant, but since you gave me a great softball there, you know, we've got a couple members in the back room who are doctors who also sold their practices and are kind of moving out of that world. Because that's happening. It seems like there is a more difficulty entering in that space. And it does seem like a perfect time to get out of that business and start selling physical products on the Internet. I can think of two that recently sold their practice just in the back room, and I'll add you to that as the third. So tell me a little bit about what that experience was. Like you sold a business that was not an Internet business, and I know you were kind of more full time in the physical products brand already, but what's it been like to now be all in on that?

I actually started the process about two years ago and I hired someone to evaluate the company and then I sort of forgot about it for two years because my physical products brand was doing so, so well. And I had set up the systems with the physical therapy business so that it was actually just running by itself, which is really a dream come true. And I kind of lived off that for two years while I was ramping up my physical products business. Thankfully, I had one all star therapist who stuck around and as soon as he was leaving, he moved to Pennsylvania. I was like, damn, man, it's time to get rid of this right now. Exit stage left. So I actually had everything done two years ago, and then I just had to tweak the numbers a little bit and then put it out on the market. I used the same person, the same broker to find somebody. I had three interested buyers and they were, you know, pretty much. They didn't know what each one was willing to offer. So there was a little bit of a bidding war and I found the right person. And actually it's been kind of an easy transition. I anticipated it being a lot harder than it was, but thankfully we had a good team and our therapists are really good, so everything kind of went smoothly. I have nothing really bad to say about the experience at all. It took a lot longer than I thought though. Took about six or seven months to really dial it all in.

Yeah, that's fairly standard I think for exiting a brand. But what I wanna highlight from what you are talking about is you started it on your own at a fairly young age. You put in the time and the work and then you automated it and then you sold it, which is the exact same trajectory of an online business, of an offline business. No matter what, you tend to start it on your own. You ramp it up, you automate it and then you end up selling it, which is kind of the transition that I made. That's my story with my exits and with a lot of our backroom members or our clients of you start something on the Internet, you don't know if it's gonna work out. You put in the time and the work, you end up bringing on a team and that's when it's time to start to exit. So you made the pivot a couple years ago into physical products brands and tell me about the life cycle that you had starting a brand new business. It's not like you started a physical therapy physical products brand. You went in a different route. So tell me about it.

Yeah, it was interesting because before Amazon I dabbled in about two or three other businesses that failed miserably, really bad, like MLM and all of these different things and it just wasn't for me. And I was in like three or four different businesses before Amazon. And then I started taking a bunch of training on YouTube, believe it or not, started listening, you know, to podcasts like yours and just diving into that. And I had about five or six products that I was considering, thank you God. I decided to pick a product where I could develop an entire product line behind and that I think was the big break. We also were very successful on our first product, which I know doesn't happen very often, but we were very, very excited about that because that's our main product still to this day, our very first choice. So it was an interesting experience. I had to eliminate everything else and just focus on Amazon and focus on my physical therapy business at that time. But, but Amazon within three or four months was really producing nicely for me. And then by about a year in I was able to draw a salary and slowly start to forget about the physical therapy side of my life.

Yeah. What can you tell us about the businesses or the brands? I don't want to dive into any information that you're not willing to share, but what can you share us about either the ramp up process, the markets that it's in or what made a difference in that growth.

We studied the amount of traffic and audience that was available for this particular product. And we're in the pet supply industry. And at the time, really, it wasn't rocket science. I had a cat, you know, and I was choosing between, yeah, choosing between three or four other products and one was an air horn. I remember it was doing really well on Jungle Scout back in the day. I was like, you know, let me look into that. And the cat products and the pet products won out. So it was, it was all about just coming up with something that I know would never die off or go away. And there was a huge audience behind it. And also we wanted to create a vertical, a solutions oriented business. So we picked a solution within the cat and pet industry and just focused on that. And I think that helped to get upsells and cross sells and build an audience and really something that people could get behind.

That's beautiful. So tell me a little bit about the brand that you ended up scaling. What was. I know you started with one product. That's still the bread and butter. You rolled that out to, I think five products. You said, tell me what the overall trajectory has been and where you had an inflection point where you could say, okay, what, I can walk away from my physical practice now.

Oh, that was about a year in, I realized that we were onto something because our main product was doing well. So we started to come up with other products that complimented that product and started an entire product line. And then we opened up other product lines that were very similar in the pet industry space. So we now have about, I think we have 42 products that are going. Not all of them are great. Little disclaimer. Some of them are terrible. So I think like the rule of thumb for us has been two out of every five products that we've launched have been good ideas and we've had some really crappy ideas, you know, so we tend to try to launch about 15 products a year. And now we're up to about 45 different products, some of them. And this is an exercise that we do all the time. We chop products off of our list. We call it the chopping block exercise because it's just not good to get behind. But that was our trajectory. We realized that, you know, some products are doing well, some products aren't. We scaled our business up to a point where I felt comfortable taking a salary. And also going international has been a great thing for us as well.

So just to make sure, I understand you've Got one central brand that you started that did well, and then you started complimentary brands to that one. And you've got a total among all of the brands of 40 some products. And some of them do well, some of them not so good, but they're all in that pet market, is that right?

Well, actually we have one brand, but different product lines within that brand. So we sort of feed off of just that one brand. And we're just building out that brand now for the next three to five years. And then we plan on selling that off probably in the next two to three years, we plan on selling that business off.

Yeah, got it. So one of the things that I've noticed, which is where I was going with this, is that I think a lot of physical products entrepreneurs underestimate how many brands or product lines are possible within a given market. So I think a lot of traditional marketers or old school entrepreneurs see this faster, which is that if you've got a list of moms, for example, and your target is moms, you can have a kitchen line, you can have a weight loss line, you can have a kids line, you can have a cleaning line, you can have all these different product brands that are marketed to the exact same target market. So when Mike says that he's got 40 some products on the pet supply market, if you're in that market, you know, after a couple of years of understanding that market, it's easy to see how you can branch out into so many different areas. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs miss how many different products you can have to the same, different target market. Now, Mike, 42 Products is a lot in a couple of years. So how big is your team and how did you fund all of that?

Sure, our team is growing. I actually don't know the size of our easy team because we tend to. We hire some people part time and full time, so we have at least 10 people on that team. It's growing fairly rapidly, but we have our systems down in place. You know, we have. Our biggest thing was inventory management. So we got a team around inventory management and taking care of shipping. That's one team. And we meet every single week. I really feel like that area I had to learn the most going in. And if I were to do anything two or three years ago, I would have had a team just dedicated to inventory management because that was a. We made so many mistakes right then and there. And now we're becoming more sophisticated, so we spend less time doing that and we're more dialed in and less Mistakes. But even with that, we still make mistakes. Also, we just hired a new person who's in charge of new product development, which is really, really big. So they're working about 10 to 15 hours per week and they're getting, you know, just skilled in that one thing, focusing on that one thing, finding out new product lines, what people are looking for, what they don't like about a specific product. Then we go into it, get samples. So that's another person. And now we have an entire social media team, SEO guy and blogger, slash email team, and also manychat. So we're doubling down. We're super into building up our audience and also our Facebook group because, you know, we, we listened to what you said, Ryan, on the podcast and we've been doubling down on our audiences. For sure. It hasn't really paid off yet. We're still slow to go with our Shopify sales, but we feel confident that in the next year we can dial that in and really be able to not totally lean on Amazon, although we still love Amazon.

Yeah, that's a lot of people on a lot of products. You got a lot going on, obviously, so you always seem to be in a good mood. Mike, how are you funding the growth out of all that?

We've had our definite hiccups. We've used Amazon Lending, which helped to fund some of the growth of the new products, which for sure, besides Amazon Lending, that has been our main vision vehicle to fund some of the inventory needs and some of the growth. I do remember, actually one of your podcasts was on multipliers. So we've been focusing in on using that money towards multipliers and things that will help scale our business and take it to the next level. But we're also not afraid to invest in our team because we really feel that that's a great place to invest in. So mainly Amazon Lending, if we need it, we use that.

Yeah. So I don't mean to toot my own horn, but here I go. Since you brought it up. The podcast that Mike just brought up of Multipliers is a podcast episode called Only Invest in Multipliers. It's worth a Google. It's probably my most unsung hero episode. I think it's as far as high level content goes, it's one of the things I'm most proud of and I don't think it gets the love it deserves. So it's called Only Invest in Multipliers. It's a real mind changer. Now, Mike, I know that one of the things that has really helped you dial in the products that have done well is you're fascinated with traffic, you're fascinated with Amazon traffic off Amazon traffic. So what have you done that has really moved the needle in terms of launching or promoting so many products?

Right. So our biggest thing has always been sponsored products and mastering sponsored products. Actually, I can never say that I've mastered. It's an evolving thing with Amazon. There's new features, new avenues coming out almost every single week it seems, which is really fascinating. But back in 2016, that was the number one thing. And by the way, 2016 was my personal crush year where I just was, for some reason had like extra energy and took it to the next level. But the number one thing on my list was learning how to do sponsored products. So I'm a caffeine sort of junkie, Starbucks junkie. And I just dove into Starbucks and dove into sponsored products and tried to learn the ins and outs to get the most amount of internal Amazon traffic. I didn't want to focus on the external stuff yet because there was so much going on internally that I knew that, you know, let me focus on that first. Get that down, get that dialed in, get my listings dialed in and then focus on the audience, then focus on building that out, which is where we're at right now.

Yeah. So I want to start there because I'm hearing this more and more. In fact, if you're kind of half listening right now, this would be a time to tune in because I'm hearing this more and more that entrepreneurs, specifically Amazon based entrepreneurs, are moving a lot of their ad budget, a lot of their launch budget to where they used to give away a lot of product. They used to go into the red on selling things for a dollar and instead dumping that same money into Amazon pay per click and Amazon sponsored listings and doing whatever it took in order to get those conversions up. And that's their launch. I'm hearing that more and more. And I know there's still individuals who are using giveaways really successfully. We use our own list, so we use a combination of going really hard on sponsored listings in combination with our own list and our own audiences to bring products out of the gate. But I'm noticing more and more of that move to spending large amounts of money on pay per click as a way to get products off the ground, get reviews, get rankings. So, Mike, I know that you've been doing this longer than most people, so is there anything that you're doing differently now than everybody else that is giving you an edge with so many products.

Well, with pay per click, the first thing that's the most important is having a really good listing. So a lot of people are, you know, I guess, a little skittish on investing in the listing up front with good images, good copy, all of that stuff even if you have no reviews. I tend to be very aggressive with PPC because if I'm going to use a launch service, I'm going to be spending a lot of money on using that launch service anyway. I'm going to go in the red on the launch service. So why not do the same thing and have the same mentality and mindset on PPC and just dive in all in at a loss if you have to for the first two months. You know, you can set a budget if you wanted to, but that's fine. And then try to drive that rank through that particular keyword. And also that's going to help with a lot of reviews and help to get that organic placement and just get the whole flywheel going when you're on Amazon. So we are a little aggressive. We'll go targeted, either a phrase match or an exact match in a sponsored product campaign. We'll use a higher than suggested bid price and really try to drive the sales. We even do it without any reviews. Just a solid listing though. And then you know, we also have a brand name that helps a little bit, but you don't need that either. You just have a good solid listing, good images and then pump it up.

Yeah, I know. We had Jeff Lieber on the podcast recently who was talking about headline advertising and like the new areas that they are opening up at Amazon for for sponsored listings. What are you seeing convert well right now or where is your focus going in terms of sponsored listings?

Sure. So headline search ads are really good. It's now available to Amazon. All Amazon sellers used to be just for vendor central. The thing with that is you really have to test it out and you have to find the keywords that are going to be profitable for you. So I recommend doing a lot of AB split testing. Just spend an extra couple hours doing that because it'll really pay off. There's a little bit more in terms of the variables when it comes to headline search ads. You're going to have your main image, you have your headline and also the keywords. Whereas sponsored product is very simple. You're basically just adjusting your keywords and your match types. For headline search ads, it's everything. So it's a little bit more complex, takes a little bit more time to master it. But once you do, you can be rest assured that your competitors are probably not going to go to the next level and do what you're doing. So go out and test that stuff out. You're going to have some clunkers, but you're. Then you're going to find the ones that are doing like 5, 10, you know, 19, 20% ACOs that you can scale out. And then that's the sort of the top of the funnel on the listing page. When people go to a search, they see your headline search ad at the very top. So what we like to do is we like to be very aggressive with headline search, sponsored product, and then also product display ad, and also get that organic visibility. So now we're swarming our competition. They literally are suffocated by our advertising presence to the point where people see us and we have more real estate on Amazon's page, which is always a home run. Of course, you have to look at your profits and all that kind of stuff too, and have a budget for ppc. So if it's done within a certain ad spend and you're profitable, that's the best thing. But you have to make sure you're optimizing to get that done.

All right, so you've gone really aggressive into sponsored listings and really mastering that. And I know your interest in traffic, specifically sending traffic to Amazon, goes beyond that. So where else is your focus being allocated right now?

Sure. So we had somebody on our team look into traffic patterns last month, and we looked at April and May. So as of May, there's a lot of traffic going directly to Amazon. So people are going to Amazon and then using search terms to find their products, which is obviously, you know, great internal traffic. But there's also a lot of external traffic, people who are going to Google and then they're typing in something in Google and then finding an Amazon product and then going to Amazon. So we started thinking, well, where can we get the most visibility for our product outside of Amazon now that we're really dialed in on an internal traffic of Amazon? So we started looking into Google and working with somebody to do some SEO, which turns out it's quite a bit of a process to do that. Like, you can't just say, oh, Google, show my ad organically at number one spot for this.

Just call Google and say, hey, can you rank me, bro?

Yeah, me, bro. They would say, no, bro. So basically, there's a lot of work that goes into that. The other avenues, of course, is affiliate sites that's a good area too, if you know any influencers. And then of course there's social. And when we dove into social media, we found out that a lot of the Traffic, more than 50% of social media traffic is coming from YouTube. Way, way, way more than Facebook.

Would you say that one more time?

Absolutely, yes.

So real slow for the 13 year olds who are listening.

All right, for the 13 year olds. So of the 3 to 4% of traffic that goes to Amazon is from social media sites. If you break that down, 50% of that is from YouTube and 20% is from Facebook. Another 20% is from Reddit and then it's 10% like everything else, including MySpace.

Oh man, here I was thinking all the money was on MySpace.

Dang it.

Rushing my dreams here. Okay, that's interesting. Now that's that small portion that is coming straight from social media. Do you know what percentage is coming from Google?

So Google is 30%. So that's the direct traffic.

Well, 30% of the overall traffic. So like I said before, 55% directly on Amazon. 30% plus go from Google over to Amazon, which is huge.

Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick break and we'll return to the show in a second. Hey, real quick. I'm doing a test in my business right now that I think you'll be interested in. We have a training called Million Dollar Brands and it helps business owners and entrepreneurs get clear on those first three to five products that they're going to build that will get to 25 sales a day at 25 to $30 and thus be a million dollar business. And we sell that for $297. And I recently had the idea of what if at the end of that training when somebody completed it and they filled out a form saying they know what their three products are going to be, they know how they're going to launch the products. Let's refund them the cost of the training. Let's incentivize the action of actually making some decisions in your business and getting clear on your business. And I did this because someone challenged me with the thought of what would I change in my business if I only cared about my customers results and I didn't care about profitability. And I immediately said, let's incentivize action. And then I said, well, would I really spend however many thousands of dollars a month I spend on Facebook ads or would I take some of that money and put it into a scholarship fund and then fund some of the cool ideas that came from my training and it was like this whole world of creativity opened up for me. So this is a test right now that we're running. If you are starting a new business or you are still under that million dollar threshold or even that 25 sales a day threshold, then we have this training called Million dollar brands. That's $297 and it's refunded to you when you complete the training. And I figure if you walk out of that training, you're going to leave with such a clear business plan that you're going to want to work with us on ongoing. So you can find this@capitalism.com brands and depending on when you sign up, we're also opening up strategic windows where you can qualify for a scholarship and have your business funded. So this is all an experiment. If I lose my rear end on it, we'll probably shut it down. But for now you can find it at capitalism.com brands.

Basically what I'm hearing you say is with the total traffic on Amazon, half of it is just Amazon, because Amazon's Amazon. It's us shopping for products and buying them and then a third. So more than half of what's left is coming from Google directly. And then there's a smaller percentage that's coming from social media. Am I getting all that right?

Yeah. And also a small percentage from third party sites, affiliate sites. Less than 10%.

Yeah. So if you were to allocate your energy here, you would obviously like most of us are put half of our energy into Amazon directly and dial that in. And you know, I know a lot of fast laners stop there and then get frustrated. If you were to shift over from anywhere from there you might want to put it into Google and then from there, if you were to pick one social media site, you're saying that half of the social media traffic that goes straight to Amazon is coming from YouTube, right?

Yes, from YouTube. A very small percentage from Facebook.

Yeah. I've got multiple braingasms going on. So do you have any theories behind why so much of the consolidation of traffic is coming from YouTube versus other social media sites?

Well, I don't have any theories. However, it has switched in the last two years. It used to be mainly Facebook and other sites and then there was a point like in 2016 where YouTube just ramped up. So I really don't have any theories at all. Maybe it's the people just love unboxing videos. Who the heck knows if there's just bigger audiences on YouTube. More traffic on YouTube. Yeah.

I do call on me. Here's what I think. I don't think I. Facebook is a good direct sales mechanism. I think in my opinion, Facebook is where you build the audience so you can end up getting email addresses, many chat audiences, you send them to other social media sites. But I don't think Facebook is a good direct response platform for Amazon specifically. It can be great for Kickstarter, it can be great for digital products, but for Amazon. I don't know anyone ever who has done a scalable job of sending traffic straight from Facebook to Amazon at scale and gotten that to pan out. However, YouTube, the traffic is already engaged. It's already concentrated around educational search terms or influencers and both of those are sending traffic. And you can do direct traffic on YouTube as opposed to Instagram, which does not allow you to send direct traffic. YouTube has endorsed traffic around either a problem or a person and can send it straight to a solution which might be a physical product. A lot of Amazon and physical product sellers are going to Instagram in order to get endorsements or to get featured. And the problem with Instagram, at least from a tracking perspective, is you have no way to send the traffic anywhere because you can't put links in posts, but you can't put links in bios. So my guess is from a tracking perspective, even if somebody wanted a product that they saw on Instagram, they'd have to go back to Amazon, search for it and buy it. Which means that it's going to get around any tracking purposes of measuring the traffic from Instagram to Amazon. So that was my hijacked way of giving my theory of why YouTube might be number one on sending traffic to Amazon.

Nice hijacking. I agree 100%.

Alright, so Mike, 30% of the traffic going. Did you say 3 to 4% of traffic to Amazon is social media and then 30% is from Google, is that right?

No, 3 to 4% of traffic to Amazon is from social media and of that 50% is from YouTube. About 20% is from Reddit. Believe it or not, 20% is from Facebook and then 10% everything else. Yeah.

And 30% of the total traffic going to Amazon is from Google, right?

Yeah, that's a huge chunk. Yes.

So is that 10 times the traffic from social media is actually concentrated on Google going to Amazon?

It's about 10 times. Yeez.

Okay, so what is your theory there? Tell me, have you been able to notice any patterns of Google traffic going to Amazon? What types of blogs or recommended sites? Or is it Amazon listings ranking in Google specifically?

Yeah, these are all Amazon listings that are, that are ranking inside of Google. So basically people are looking, they're searching for something, a direct search. And you know, now underneath an Amazon listing, maybe somebody's typing in a question on Google and somebody's indexed their Amazon listings, indexed for that particular question. There's actually a way to do that. So that might be a way that people are finding out they're actually getting their answers, their questions answered by going on Google searching for something, then heading on over to Amazon to complete the purchase and complete their investigation of whatever their question was. So that's just one way. Other than that, it's just a direct search. I'm not even quite sure why people would start there. I know my habit, I go straight to Amazon. I don't go to Google and then go there, but I'm sure I've done it before in the past.

Yeah. So this is where I wanted to go next is I wanted to turn the mic over to you on this 30% piece because I know you've been focusing on SEO for your listings, at least from a curiosity perspective. Noticed that it's a challenge. It can be a long grind getting your listings to rank in Google. I also know I've told the story many times of a brand that was just absolutely destroying me. And we could not figure out why they were able to charge higher prices, have higher conversion rates, sell more. They were twice the price of ours, even though we thought our product was better. And the two things that they had dialed in was their branding was on point to the market that they wanted to serve and they ranked on Google and we didn't. And so they just absolutely crushed us. And so I know how important this is, but I don't know anybody who has tracked the nuances of what's working or where the traffic is coming from. So what do you make of this or what are you focusing on in getting that 30% chunk over to your pet supply brands?

Yeah, so I actually worked with somebody who and I asked him that exact same question. Somebody who's been in the business of SEO for over 20 years, because I have not in that business. And what they told me after doing some investigation was that you have to have a dialed in listing and a lot of the Amazon titles that are cool for Amazon, SEO and Amazon search is not good for Google. So immediately he was like, change your Amazon title, change your head. I'm like, dude, I'm not going to do that. Because we're, you know, the bigger piece of the pie is Internal traffic. But there's other things you can do now. You can go in and with enhanced brand content, you can put a lot of keywords and name your images. And under certain keywords, you could put a lot of keywords within that and save keywords in your enhanced brand content. So you can go ahead and do that. You could add keywords at various places in your backend search terms in your backend listing to get hopefully picked up by Google. Also you could ask questions on your listing and have people answer them naturally and organically and hope that that gets picked up on Google. And there's also like various other things and I'm not going to pretend to tell you that I know what they all are, but what he was saying was create like referral sites that would refer to that Amazon page. And then Google tends to like that very much. As he did say, it was quite a process. And it's not something that's like easily scalable across all of your products. Because like I want to scale things like that's my in my DNA. And he was like putting the red stop sign on that one.

Yeah, it is a process. I actually do have an SEO background. That was how I made my first hundred thousand dollars on the Internet was getting feeder sites to rank in Google and sell affiliate products. This was 2006, 2007. So this is my background. And it was a grind back then and it's a grind now. And that's why it's some people's full time business. It's why Google is a platform, it's a channel. So Mike, I know you've been fascinated into going to all of this data of where the traffic's coming from? How are you aligning your focus between your team and where to put their energy and how are you dividing up how to tackle all of this traffic?

So we have a team, somebody working on our internal traffic, our sponsored product and headline search ads, and also product display ads. With a system that we've built together. We now have a team working on that exclusively. And I'm working mainly on the audience building and working on the ManyChat audience and the email audience and all those things. So that's been another piece. And then the SEO team is working specifically on ranking our blog. So they kind of all work together. You know that the audience building, the blogger, the emailer and the SEO guy are all working together as one team. And then my role is pretty much to sort of steer everybody and help everyone push them in the right direction, keep involved with like Knowing what's going on with traffic trends and knowing where people are, and then also learning about different things, like many chat audiences and different things to just keep the team in the right direction and steer people in the right direction. So that, that's sort of my role with the whole thing. I have a bucket of teams that I work with. That's how I see it in my mind at least. And every day I go down that and ask myself, is everyone heading in the right direction or do we need to pivot a little bit here because something just doesn't feel right or something's going in the wrong direction, or we're just focusing too much on one thing that's not. Not really paying off at the moment or won't pay off in the future. So, yeah, that's how I. That was kind of a winded answer, but that's what we've been doing.

Well, you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with where to put their focus because Amazon is so poor at tracking things. Like, they're so poor at giving you the data of where sales are coming from. And I know this has been something that's at least been interesting to you. If you could crack that nut, then maybe you could identify where to best poor ad spend or poor energy. So would you talk a little bit about what you've been doing there and what you've been developing as far as those types of solutions?

Yeah. So I dove into a product called Cash Cow Pro a couple weeks back and I realized that we were spending on certain products, an excessive amount of money on ppc. And not only that, Amazon was taking excessive fees from certain variations. And I'm like, oh, crap. This has been going on unnoticed for a little bit of time here and it's been adding up. So what I noticed was that focusing in on what's really producing, what's the 80, 20, what's really driving the business, and doubling down on that and then getting rid of the things that are just draining energy all across the board. Not only just the products that are draining profits, but the people on the team that might be draining energy or the tasks that I'm doing that are draining my energy, things that are really, like, just bothersome or whatever it is. I've been focusing in on cleaning that up. And I call that the chopping block. Stephen Covey calls it sharpening the saw. I do that all the time to try to keep things, you know, in alignment and feeling good and positive and in my good space, centered space while I work on my business. So that's what we've been focusing in on.

I know you've also been developing some solutions over there. Like, tell me about, like, in the life cycle of you as entrepreneur, you went from a physical therapist, automated that sold that. You then went into 42 different products in the pet supply market, and you're starting to scale that and automate that. And then you went into a third business that was basically focused on traffic and automating that because it was a pain point of yours. So tell me what you've been working on over there.

Yeah, so back in 2016, I loved working on sponsored products, but it was a huge pain point. And for me, it's always been like, I gotta feel the pain first in order to, you know, systematize it and then find someone to work on that. So I really, yeah, I really felt the pain, like doing sponsored products. I hated every single bit of it, even though it was giving me the freedom. And I knew it was scaling my business. It was like dealing with Excel spreadsheets and then dealing with all these messy keywords and not knowing if I've used them or not or where they're located. I had hundreds of campaigns. It was like a jungle on sponsored products inside of my account. And it was working out really well, but I just knew that there was had to be a better way, a better solution out there to keep things organized and structured. So after about six or seven months, you know, everything was working out really well. We were doing, we're making a lot of money with sponsored products, but I just wanted to systematize the entire thing. And we started hiring a team to develop what's now PPC Entourage, which is my baby. We've been really growing there and helping a lot of sellers to take advantage of sponsored products and to keep things organized, but most importantly, spend less time doing it. What was 10 hours for me before is now like, you know, 15, 20 minutes a week because it's just that much more simple.

So one of the things that has become noticeable to me in the last, really, the last year or so is there's an emphasis on sponsored products becoming more of a focus of businesses that take a lot of sales on Amazon. And then there's also like the management piece of constantly running split tests and managing giveaways and all these different things that we know we have to be doing. And one of the things that I thought would be really big by now is services and management companies that take that off the entrepreneur's plate so that they can do exactly what you're doing, which is pivoting into building audiences and hiring teams and focusing on multipliers. And I've been really surprised that there have been fewer entrepreneurs going into this space because it's such a, I think, an obvious opportunity for entrepreneurs to get free of the stuff they don't enjoy doing, so they can start building the things that actually matter. So if somebody is using ppc, Entourage as one of the options that is automating their campaigns, how and what is different than if they're doing it manually?

So one of the main things is we can find certain keywords and search terms that are really, really draining your bank account. We can find them right away. So we also have what's called a bulk edit feature, which means you can go in and find all of the search terms and all of the words that are draining. You can find them in like 5 seconds, 10 seconds, and then opt to pause them or shut them or do a negative exact, which means you won't get traffic to those search terms anymore. This way you can put more money and more of your ad spend towards what is working right. So if you're going to have a budget, might as well steer that budget in the right direction. So the other thing is, we have an expansion module where you can find the search terms that have connected to your audience already and look into those search terms and bid on those search terms, and also use those search terms to go into new products and find new product ideas and learn about your audience and use them for headline search ads. We do that all the time too. We take the exact search query that somebody puts in, we know that in the search term report, and we put that into a headline search ad and now it matches up, we do an exact match and boom, you get a lot better conversion that way. So there's a lot of ways to leverage the data. We make it very simple to, to understand your data, to save money to expand into other audiences. And also we have a blueprint that's available that basically teaches you guys, teaches everybody what we've done to scale the business through sponsored products.

Cool. So with that out of the way, I'm obviously super high on what you guys are doing at PPC Entourage. But what's really fascinating to me, and really the reason I wanted to have you on specifically is because of what you have been kicking around as far as testing outside traffic, traffic tracking, and putting some energy into examining how that could be part of the total promotion strategy for an Amazon product. And it's something that nobody's been bold enough to go into. So I know it's still in development, but I was hoping you could give us a carrot here of what you're developing over there.

Hell yeah. Yeah. So we are working with a developer of a tool who actually has learned how to track traffic from Facebook over to Amazon and track the sales. So when I heard about this, I reached out to him and I said, listen, this sounds awesome and this is obviously a great next phase for our business. We wanted to leverage Facebook, but we never could do it profitably because I don't think people are able to track the sales. And his software can do it with about 80% accuracy. So we're teaming up and we're building out different campaigns right now, whether they be like manychat campaigns or direct campaigns over to Amazon or sort of like an article cold traffic campaign where you get them to an article first and then retarget them with an ad. We're testing out different campaigns right now, but now we're able to track the sales with that tool, which is a big differentiating factor for us. And we should have results in the next 30 days. We're currently still testing, but it's exciting because now that could be a great new way to launch a product.

Yeah. And that's a huge nut that a lot of entrepreneurs are struggling with right now. So I'm tempted to go into how the heck do you track the sales? But I'm. I will wait until we have some more data over the next 30 days. Is there anything else that you're developing over there? Because I mean, my initial reaction right now is like the big braingasm I've had is 30% of Amazon's traffic coming from Google. This is a huge opportunity for us to go into. That's 10 times what's coming from social media. And I want to go in so many different directions. Is there anything else that you're working on on the traffic side of things that's coming or you would suggest people pay attention to until there are solutions developed to help entrepreneurs scale them.

One thing that I'm really excited about is Amazon released what's called Amazon Extended Ad Network. It's still in beta, which means if you do an automatic campaign, if you were accepted to the beta group, you could potentially get your ads served on other networks, either networks that Amazon owns or third party networks. So that potentially gets your way more vis to your product across the web, which is really, really cool. And I was not selected to be part of that, but I'm Excited to be a part of that. And what I'm really excited about kind of geeking out on is that just the term Amazon Extended Ad Network and where that's going to go. Because one day Amazon Extended Ad Network could be getting into physical stores. You can extend your ads to physical stores or Amazon Alexa or various different things. Even Whole Foods. Like I was at Whole Foods the other day and they were trying to get me to download an app and save 10 bucks on Prime. That was their whole thing. Download the app, you get 10 bucks. And even with Amazon Alexa for the echo, it's get 10 bucks for prime day if you download the app. You know, they are gearing towards all of that. And I'm excited about this extended ad network and where it's going to go outside of this, the internal traffic. Now it's going to go extend past that into external traffic.

Yeah.

So that's what I'm geeking out on. Yeah.

If we think about the traditional sponsored ads, you think about good Amazon organic rankings, you think about driving traffic from Google and you think about the extended network and you think about influencers. We have this web of traffic that can just blow up any business really, really quickly. Now, obviously it takes time to get all those. Sometimes it takes teams to get all those. Sometimes it takes solutions to get all of those. But when you have that kind of moat of traffic, that's when you are essentially invincible and that's when you are running a real brand and a real business. Mike, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you wish I would?

No. You know, one other thing I'm really excited about is international traffic. We didn't discuss that. That's on the rise as well. So especially UK and Germany, they're really going well right now. So if you guys are considering it, we've had a lot of success there. My one little thing is get your VAT numbers done right away. Don't make the mistake I made, please. But the traffic is increasing like crazy over there as well. That's the last thing, right? Yeah.

Is there anything that we should know about international sponsored ads since that there's a. I know there's a lot of space in terms of organic rankings, but with international, the nut that people have a hard time cracking is how do I get movement? It's more difficult to advertise internationally. It's not impossible, it's just more difficult. And sponsored ads is kind of the. The fast way to be able to do that on Amazon. So do you have any insight about Sponsored listings, specifically internationally.

Well, if you're trying to crack the Japan nut, I could not do that because it was just the language barrier was too challenging for me. But I think your best friend, or if you're a seller, the best friend is going to be the Search Term reports. Because inside of the search term reports, if you pull an automatic campaign and you do a search term report, you pull your search term report and you look at what people are actually looking for internationally and you learn the language that way and use that language in your listing and then hire somebody who's native to that country to build out your listing, give them the information from the search Term report that has already connected profitably to your product. It's really not too hard to fail if you do it that way. Granted, it takes a little bit longer, but the Search Term report, I feel, is one of the most underutilized tools that Amazon sellers have at their disposal that just, I mean, it's like literally it's loaded with golden nuggets everywhere, especially internationally, because you get to learn their language, much more valuable.

And is Entourage set up to manage all that in other countries as well?

Absolutely. Yes, it is.

Yeah. Very cool. Mike, tell us a little bit about PPC Entourage. Tell us about where people can follow you and if they want to follow what you're up to, either as an entrepreneur or as a company, where would.

You send them cool guys? Yeah. So PPC Entourage was born out of total frustration of sponsored products. And we help Amazon sellers leverage their sponsored products in a fast, simple, easy to use solution. We have a blueprint that goes with it and everything inside of Entourage goes with the blueprint. So it's very easy to follow. We're also super pumped and excited about Spotlight, which is going to be our headline search ad solution, which is coming out soon in the next, I believe in September, but I can't put a date on it right now. But that's going to be like split testing headline search ads because there's so many different variables. So we are coming out with like almost like the ad espresso version of headline search ads, where users can find, you know, the best headline, the best image to use, the best keywords, all of that stuff in one platform. So we're geeking out about that. And we have a bunch of other tools too that are coming out as well. You can go to our website, PPC entourage.com We have a brand new free tool if you guys are interested in coming out with really cool headlines. It's a swipe File for headline search ads. It's available on our website. Just go to the academy tab under PPC entourage.com and it'll be right there.

Mike, I love what you're up to, man. I'm really high on this idea of automating everything except for genius, which is a phrase I learned from Dan Sullivan. And I really like this trend that I'm seeing of people using solutions, people using teams to free up entrepreneurial bandwidth so that you can do the things that actually move the needle. I've always said publicly, you know, I have no idea how to print a shipping label on Amazon. I don't even consider myself an Amazon guy. I consider myself a business guy who uses Amazon. And I partner with people like you to manage the sponsored ad side of things. I partner with people to handle all of the things that would require me to spend energy to figure out so that I can go build the business, which is things like audience building, conversions, launching new products, building the team, which is is the pivot you've made and the pivot you're now helping other entrepreneurs make. So I salute you. Keep on changing the world, buddy. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate it very much. Thanks guys.

Oh man, that was fun. So my big takeaway that I want you to get out of this is you as the entrepreneur need to be focused on the things that drive growth, growth the most. And sometimes that means you need to pioneer new activities or new areas so that you can figure it out and then go hire or automate someone or something to be able to take the reins from you. Too many entrepreneurs get stuck in those things that are producing results, but they're sitting there playing around is taking up all of their energy from pursuing those new opportunities. If you're not building audiences, if you are not launching new products as quickly as you'd like, it's probably because your time is being monopolized by other areas. So do you have tools, do you have solutions to be able to take that off your plate so that you can focus elsewhere? We use PPC Entourage. I recommend PPC Entourage. You can use whatever solutions you like. We use management teams. We use all kinds of solutions to be able to free up up everything except for our genius. That's your job as the entrepreneur, to be continually pursuing more and more freedom so that you've got more and more bandwidth to put into more and more growth. In fact, I like the quote that your job as an entrepreneur is to create the environment to where work and growth is effortless and easy. Because you're energized and you have the bandwidth to pursue new opportunities to pursue your next next breakthrough. And if you are in the details of things, that's a problem. So if you're excited right now by some of the new opportunities that are coming out, that's a good sign. It would be dangerous, though, for you to then book up all of your time trying to manage Google SEO on your Amazon listings. To me, it's dive into that, figure it out, figure out the system that you want to test and follow and then find the solution and the people who can manage that for you. Same thing with sponsored listings, same things with all new opportunities that come up. So that's the takeaway that I want you to have. I hope you found value out of this. I'm super stoked. You can tell by my energy. If you found value in this, please post it into a Facebook group of Amazon sellers and physical product sellers that you would know would find this interesting. Hey, thanks for hanging out with me on Freedom Fast Lane. I got some really cool stuff come down the pipe for this podcast. I think you're going to be surprised by some of the cool things we're going to be talking about and changing over here, and I'll have those announcements for you shortly. Thanks for listening. I appreciate you all. Talk to you on the next episode.