Joe Junfola: Manipulating Amazon's Search Rankings

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Hey, fastlaners. Welcome to a special geek episode of Freedom Fastlane. Today, my buddy Joe Gianfola and I are going to be geeking out on manipulating Amazon's search results. Now here on Freedom Fastlane, we talk about all kinds of different types of businesses. But as most of you know, most of my businesses are based on Amazon.com as nucleus of gathering customers. It is the beginning stage of any physical products business. If you are selling physical products online, you should be on Amazon.com because it's a great and affordable place to get customers that then fund and fuel all of your other efforts. And today, Joe comes back onto the podcast to geek out with me on manipulating the search results in an ethical way. We talk about that word manipulation. Is it even ethical to be gaming Amazon search results? Or is it actually the most ethical thing that you can be doing? Now, I brought Joe back on the podcast because a lot has changed since the last time he was on. About seven months prior to this episode, when we first recorded that last one, Joe and I talked about the benefits of going into the red when you're starting a business. We talked about what it looks like to get a product up and ranking and selling. But a lot has evolved over the last seven months. So Joe and I go really deep into what it looks like to get something really profitable on a site like Amazon.com Now, Joe runs a service called Zonblast, which is basically the fast lane to getting a product up and ranked and making sales on Amazon.com and in the last seven months, he's serviced about a thousand businesses, a thousand products through his service Zonblast. And as a result, he's seen a lot of people do really well, and he's seen a few people not do well at all when trying to rank on a site like Amazon or trying to get a physical products business up and running. So I also ask him to talk about the differences that he sees between those who are really successful and those who are not successful at all. This is a rare episode of Freedom Fast Lane that is specifically about Amazon.com for those of you who have that type of a business. You'll go really deep into this topic if this is not something you're into. Well, my geekism is really just probably gonna scare you away from listening to any more Freedom Fasting episodes, so you might wanna tune this one out. But if you do have a physical products business, this is gonna be extremely valuable for you. Cause we will go into what it takes to rank what the people at the top are doing right now. And we also spend a good amount of time speculating and predicting on what we think is coming down the pipeline. It'll be fun to see if we're right. So enjoy today's podcast with Joe Gianfola. Joe Gianfola, Master Joe, welcome back to Freedom Fast Lane.

Thank you for having me.

Dude, I had to have you back because you are besides. Besides my own podcast, 12 months to 1 million, which is the most popular podcast that's ever happened. Joe Gianfola is the most popular podcast in Freedom Fast Lanes history. So congratulations.

Thank you.

I'm a little bit afraid that you're nipping at my mom market share here. You're gonna become the most popular person on Freedom Fast Lane, which is not okay.

Well, you'll still be the best looking.

Well, I, I appreciate that. Thank you. Nobody is nipping at my handsomeness title, so. But since the last time you were on your businesses have, from what I've calculated like either doubled or tripled or hundred it or, or whatever. So would you give us a quick update on, on what's going on and quick recap, by the way, for any of you crazy people haven't listened to the. The interview with Joe John Fola previously is Joe and I had a nice conversation about basically hacking Amazon's algorithm, what it takes to rank on Amazon. And that was the reason why Joe had been so successful in his physical products businesses. And now they've exploded since then. So give us a quick update.

Wow. Yeah. So, you know, my brands have basically, I believe, tripled in revenue. And that's, you know, that's even despite the fact that I, that I haven't rolled out products at the rate at which I desired. And that's primarily because I've been devoting a lot of time towards Zomblast, which kind of actually, I think it launched officially as Zomblast around the time we recorded our first call. And you know.

That'S been absolutely stellar. I mean, at this point we've blasted over a thousand products. At this point, several hundred customers.

Tons of listings going from page 20, page 10 to page 2, page 1. So my brands are doing really well. Zomblast is kicking butt. I have a few other things cooking in the background.

One of them being a child that just got done cooking and, and popped himself out. So I want to talk about Zon Blast quickly because this is something completely different than from your traditional direct response or Amazon type of business, where it's not quite a tech Company, you're really a service based, almost tech company. And this started as an idea and it served a very, very specific audience and it exploded. So this type of a business that spawned out of kind of what you were doing in the, in the Amazon world being I have this need, I want to solve this need. I'll make this, this, the solving of this need available to other people. Started as, you know, two customers and five and 10 and now a thousand. Talk us through that process of kind of idea to monetization, to taking over the world.

Yeah, as you know, I put out in the tribe.

A mini service. I didn't think of it as a service, but basically lending my list, my responsive community to the tribe as a means of being able to spike BSR quickly and efficiently turned into Zomblast. In fact, I think the tribe named it. As a matter of fact, I put a poll in the tribe as I recall.

And.

I don't think I saw where it was going.

Until probably late 2014. Going from this small kind of a niche kind of a service, software as a service, it's kind of a hybrid I think because there's some automated stuff on the back end. But.

I didn't see where it was going until late 2014 and it's blown up. It's been pretty crazy. I think people are seeing the value in what we do.

We basically automate a lot of what you as a seller would have to do manually and most likely spend an exponential amount more doing with your own promotions and such.

From here it's a matter of expansion into other areas. Not to go off too off topic, but.

An example of another area we've expanded into is optimization services. Zon Optimize is, you know, an awesome service headed by Anthony, my lead copywriter and.

An all around cool guy.

Now before we get too deep into this, what I really want to hear about is this business is something completely different than anything you've ever done before, right?

Oh yeah, definitely.

And it spawned out of like an idea that you personally needed and were using, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

What did that monetization transition process look like, feel like? Because there's a lot of people listening who have an idea who. And it might not follow the traditional like put product in get cash out process and yours certainly didn't. It was I've got this thing that I'm using and if you want to use it, PayPal, me a few bucks or whatever it was, then it's when it started and now it's, you know, taken over the world. But what did that initial process of I'm monetizing this, what did that look like, feel like? And why do you think that it's grown the way that it has?

Well, the precursor to the monetization was more or less beta testing, I guess. And I put it out to probably 10, 15 different people in the tribe and they had amazing results and I saw the value there and I saw that they wanted more. And you know, that spawned the idea of charging for the service. You know, I'm happy to provide services, I'm certainly not going to do it for free. So.

I started charging for it. Like I said, I think around the time we last chatted and.

That was kind of a light bulb moment.

It.

Became very clear that I had something good going here and something that I actually wanted to always have for the past six years that I've been online and that is some kind of a service as opposed to having an e commerce shop or a product or cash flow site like Adsense or something like that. This was an actual service that provided real tangible value to individuals. And that was, that was probably the most attractive part to me.

So just from a, like if we were to zoom out on this and talk about what this means, like the process for a business as a whole, you had an audience for you, it was our little intimate group called the Tribe, but you had an audience and then you tested the idea and then you took the feedback that other people had and you had them start to talk about it and then you charged a little bit of money to get customers and cash flow in. That's how it started. Right? Not like this big scary. We're going to have a business plan or a business model. It was an idea. Let's test it now. We'll take a couple bucks and we'll refine from here.

Yeah, that's 100% accurate. You said it more eloquently than me.

But yeah, it was kind of a snowball effect. You know, started small and you know, today. Today what, seven months later.

It'S a full on legit business, if you will. Right.

And what do you think? My interpretation of why it's grown so fast has been just the fact that it creates real tangible value. It's not, it's not based in a kind of a. You're not selling an info product where it's kind of pie in the sky will make your dreams come true. Vote for me and your wildest dreams will come true. It's more like we'll provide this service when you pay Us, you get this result, here's what happens. And people are thrilled with it, so they talk about it and they share it. And so that's my interpretation of why this business, and probably most businesses have that hockey stick type growth. And it's been a real kind of a learning experience for me to watch your meteoric rise, to just see what happens when you give people exactly what they want and it just comes out of exactly what you wanted to begin with. So would you comment on that?

Yeah, that's a good point. On the topic of people talking about it, I didn't really advertise on Blast that much.

In fact, I think I could probably Safely say under $1,000 in ad spend on Facebook. That's the extent of any advertising.

For the service. Everything else has been word of mouth. And yeah, there was a lot of people from the tribe, but a massive proportion came from outside the tribe and outside of ASM and from communities like Reddit. And I get random, I get, well, maybe not so random authors that want to blast their Kindle book. Which, by the way, if you're listening to this and you have a Kindle book, hit me up. I want to blast your product just to try it out, just to get a book under my belt.

I'll be hitting you up for that when my new book launches here soon. But there's my little plug for the day. But, but I've noticed just this, this, this case study of Zon Blast has been fascinating for me, not only because I've kind of been involved, because it's kind of been born out of our community, but, but mostly just from the business fundamentals that it matched, which was you have a hungry crowd and a loyal following of an audience, and what happens when you give that audience exactly what it is that they want, and it spawned off of what you needed personally. And so many people complicate the process, right? They complicate what business has to look like. You know, what's my billion dollar idea? Well, what do you want? You know, I. Earlier today, I recorded a podcast, My best friend in the world, Mark Jenny, who said, you know, my, my business philosophy now is I don't make something that other people want. I make what I want. And that makes it much, much simpler. And that's exactly what you did. And it was exactly what other people wanted. And it just happened to be connected to a very tight, hungry community. And as a result, the two came together and there was an explosion of value.

Yeah, yeah, I didn't, I didn't even think about it like that at the time in terms of creating what I want as opposed to. But yeah, I mean that makes perfect sense and I would agree 100% with Mark.

So let's transition a bit. I want to talk to you about Amazon and this, this crazy storm that really you've created, which is you made the, the ranking process so simple. Yeah, I would, it's like anybody can do it now. I was, I was talking to.

Actually a mentor of mine recently who is, I'm now mentoring him in an Amazon business and he says to me it's like Zon Blast has become a cost of business at this point because it's so effective. So you've created kind of a blessing and a curse where now anybody can rank on Amazon but now everyone is using your service. So Joe, you've kind of created a problem and the solution, it's kind of this weird thing. Where do you see the market going now? You're on the front lines of a bunch of Amazon businesses. So where do you see the market going now? And what do you think is changing or going to change based on the fact that the firepower behind something like a Zon Blast exists now?

Well, I, I think at some point in the, well, let me, let me preface with this. I think Amazon is in terms of their ranking algorithm, their, their search rank algorithm. I think they are now where Google was a decade ago.

I didn't think about that, I didn't rationalize it like that. When we chatted last time. I just kind of knew that my style worked. But I think it's super easy right now. It's going to get harder.

They may, for all I know, and this is purely.

Half brained theory, but in terms of where this is going, I think they may at some point implement some kind of a protection, if you will, against Blast like effects. But we've got, you know, we've got things in the bag for that to.

You know, prevent that from hurting, you know, hurting people who want to run promos with us. But I think they're going to get smarter over time and I think the ease with which to, with which we can manipulate the algorithm because that's what we're doing. We're an algorithm manipulation tool basically. I think it's going to get harder over time and you know, I.

Right now I think it's super easy. But on the topic of.

You know, everyone, quote unquote, everyone using us, there's, and I don't want to segue into too off topic, but I think there are people who handle their listing correctly. I think there are others who don't. And that's kind of what spawns the creation of Zon Optimize. There are those who are going to reap tremendous benefits from a blast or a wave or something that's going to be coming out pretty soon. I'm going to keep the name in the bag.

I think most people are going to see a good effect for, if I had to guess, probably another year or two years. Using the spiking of bsr.

Yeah. I think, first of all, you're an ethical algorithm manipulator.

Absolutely.

Because you're giving it what it wants. First of all, you're giving people what they want. You're just giving them a lot of it.

Yeah.

I actually agree with your window of about a year to two years before any major algorithmic changes. Yeah. But I think the only. My prediction is, and I was talking about this with our mastermind earlier this week, I think what you see in any marketplace or what you see in any channel is that you have a competition of what works the best and just who can be the most aggressive to get there. So a natural consolidation, which I talked about in the episode, which is called the consolidation, a natural consolidation is when you have people at the top who can bully their way to the top the most aggressively and the people who are under that can't afford to reach their level. That's. That's a consolidation. And then you have changes or Amazon makes a change and that's. Yeah, still. Still ways away. What I want, what I'm curious about is do you. Do you foresee this in Amazon's mind as a problem of their customers getting products and it impacting their algorithm? Because I don't think. I don't know that it's a problem as much as Amazon is just gonna do a shuffle at some point. But I'm purely speculating like you, but it's kind of fun to play this game. So do you. Do you think Amazon is gonna come in and like, make a bunch of changes from people who use this like an aggressive way of. Of ranking or is. Do you see any reason why they would say it's a problem?

I've noodled on that, as my friend Brian would say. I've considered that. But real quick, one comment. When you said.

An ethical tool, one thing I always like to point out to people who message me through support is they might ask the question, is this going to get my product banned or am I going to get violation for this? It's a classic launch strategy. It's, it's like a grand opening sale. Right. It's a Black Friday promo. It's, you know, it's clean. It's white hat and Zon, you know, Zomblast will always remain white hat. That being said, in terms of, excuse me, in terms of what they could do, the easiest thing they can do is filter for a blast like effect. A sudden outlier of sales, a sudden burst of sales. We answer that with a wave and another product that's going to be coming out soon. But even then I'd be suspicious of them trying to penalize or harm listings in any way because, I mean, they're sales. Amazon is a sales engine. It's a sales site. You're gonna, I mean they would have to penalize or they would have to decrease the effect of, you know, like I said, Black Friday promos. I mean, how many retailers on Amazon are gonna do that? So I'm kind of a plan for the worst, hope for the best kind of a guy. And so I'm planning for one day them penalizing or decreasing the effectiveness of, you know, of the blast like effect of that severe spike in bsr. And you know, with that in mind, we're going to keep running until. We're basically going to keep running the blast.

Until it stops working, in which, you know, in which case we move over to waves and a couple of other stuff that's, that's in the works.

Yeah. So there's a reason why I belabor this point, Joe. And, and it's because you and I both get these questions all the time of, you know, something is easy, when's it all going to end or when, you know, and, and that it doesn't. Just because something is successful or successful quickly does not mean that there's one day going to, one day fry up and, and fly in your face. If your business is made to produce value and people like it and you're working within a channel to spread the word about that, whether that is an audience or something like Amazon, that is business 101.

Absolutely.

And when, when changes and tweaks happen, you adjust and you're already like, if there's, if there's, something that changes or is, or moves, I'm prepared to adjust. And that's the difference between people who are thinking long term and people who are thinking very short term and very fear based is I can pivot when something changes a little bit. Yeah. Would you, would you comment on that?

I agree 100%. I think that it comes down to a mindset. Like you just said, it comes down to the group of individuals who know that they're building a business. They're not just selling a product, they're building a business versus those who are just trying to generate a cash flow entity.

There was a comment on your podcast that was put out, I guess today or yesterday or something, and you had responded with, I forget the exact phrasing of the question, but you had responded with, if you're asking if something is going to be easy, you've already got the wrong mindset from the very beginning. And I agree 100% with that. It's not going to be easy all the time. It's not even easy now. I mean, look, I can launch products pretty quickly. I can rank them pretty quickly. I just launched one with a partner, launched a brand new brand. Brand new brand. How's that?

And within three weeks, he's now mid page two and he's 100 bucks, 150 bucks a day. Not a lot, but once we hit page one in another week, which I can pretty much guarantee we're going to be doing pretty well.

But.

It comes down to mindset. I mean, there's going to be people who kind of.

Try to penny pinch as a means of, you know, of trying to generate cash flow as opposed to those who recognize that there's going to be investment, substantial investment to get to where you want to go. I can tell you some of my favorite customers with Sandblast, typically VIP4 folks who have multiple products and are super aggressive with it. There's one that comes to mind that's also in the mastermind. I'm not going to mention him by name, but you no doubt are familiar with him and his brand. He's super aggressive and I love his style.

And he wins.

And he wins. Yes, he's super. He's more aggressive than I am. He's way more aggressive than I am. And he, and he kicks butt and.

He makes more money than both of us as a result, probably combined. Well, you bring up a good point that, that it is, it's, it's simply that fact of going into something with a long term mindset and, and you, you helped me kind of realize the, the value of being willing to go into the red when you're first beginning with the black in mind later on. And the, the more aggressive that you are at the, doing what you know will, will ultimately create the result that you want and being aggressive with that and the more aggressive you are, the Better that it is on the other end. And that mutual friend of ours who is more aggressive than both of us has gone way into the red on a lot of things and as a result has been extremely successful on, on many of his products, many of his brands. And that, that has been the difference maker. Whereas so many people, I'd say the 80% of people who, who are not as successful or Wonder what the 20% or even the 5 top 5% of people are doing, what they're doing differently is that they're holding onto as much as they can and they're not willing to let go and invest into what they know will produce the result. And this is true no matter what kind of a business that you have. Heck, this is true in physical body. The more you can go into the red of sweating and being sore, the better the result is going to be. The more, the more aggressive you can be into the investment that you have. The more the opportunity is going to benefit you in the end. And you have seen that in a business sense and specifically in the Amazon thing sense over and over and over again. So is there anything else that you've seen? The most successful people, do they.

Well, there's a, there's a theory that I've, that I've seen work in practice, and I didn't really come, I didn't really bring this theory to fruition, you know, until maybe two months ago. And that is that.

There'S an interior and there's an exterior to your product and to your brand. The interior side of it is the optimization side. What your conversion rate is, how your listing looks to the outside viewer, how it looks to Amazon, management of certain elements on the page and behind the scenes on the page. The other side of it is the exterior. Zomblast, until we launched the Zon optimized service, it covered solely the exterior side. And the exterior side is promotions. It's juicing the algorithm, if you will. It's bullying your way to the top. It's giving Amazon what it wants. That's the exterior side. The interior side is, like I said, the optimization. How well your listing is optimized. And the people that do it right consistently are those who manage both sides. Well, there are those who manage the interior side, the internal side, if you will, pretty well. But they may not necessarily run promos. They may not run promos the right way. They might target the wrong keywords and they'll eventually get to the top, but they'll take a little, they'll take a lot longer. Usually depending on the competitiveness of the niche. Likewise, there are plenty of people who don't have an optimized listing who run promos. And they may run them the right way, but they may not get to where they were. Or as I like to say most recently is they won't stick the landing of a blast if they don't have the internal part of the equation in check. But in sum, the people who consistently rank, the people who consistently do well and do well with multiple products, they complete that circle. They handle the interior, the exterior of the listing. And that's been probably the biggest realization that I've had over the past couple of months after blasting a thousand products.

At this point, I'm sure in after working with a thousand people who have Amazon business, you've also seen people who did not see the results that they were hoping for. Even if they had made up in their mind that it was going to be successful, it didn't go the way that they wanted. Have you seen any common threads between the people who were not successful?

Yeah, there's basically three outcomes. And this is another thing that I've come to realize over the past couple of months. There's basically three outcomes when it comes to the results of a Zomblast or wave or whatever service you're on. The first is obviously, the blast works and you stick the landing. I'm using that phrase regularly with customers. This indicates to me that, number one, you have an optimized listing, and number two, you targeted the right keywords and you did so in sufficient quantities.

The second, and the Caveat here is 80% of products that we blast, they stick the landing. They do well post blast. The remaining 20% are probably split between two groups. One is I'll blast them up, but they won't stick the landing. So they'll go from page five to page, you know, to page two or bottom of page one or something, but they'll slip back over time to bottom of page two or top of page three. They're still in a better position, but they didn't stick that landing. And that indicates to me that they have optimization issues. Their conversion rate, more specifically, is not competitive enough.

For the Amazon algorithm to keep them at that position.

That's an important realization that I've come to consider. The higher you get in search results, the higher you move, the more important conversion rate comes into play. So in that case, not being able to stick the landing, it's a conversion rate issue. The third case is nothing happens. Nothing happens on the listing in that case.

Typically your listing itself has optimization issues. It's not optimized for the keyword that you target or keywords that you targeted for that blast. Amazon doesn't think that your listing is suitable for that keyword. So if you're targeting blue widgets and maybe your listing is targeted for.

Red hamsters, I don't know where I came up with that. Let's say red hamsters.

There's a big. A lot of money to be made on red hamsters. If you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking about going into Amazon, Red hamsters, according to Joe Gianfola, is the market in 2015 to be in.

You just outed my niche. Okay, but if Amazon thinks your listing is not optimized for that keyword, it's not going to move it. It may move it a little bit. You may not, you know, you may budge five spots. You may not budge at all. You may even drop a couple spots.

That's kind of the. Those are the three cases that I've seen consistently.

At this point. It's never a case where I don't know what's wrong with your listing. If somebody comes to me and says, hey, Joe, we had a blast last week. Incidentally, on the topic of blast, I do want to put this out there. It's a delayed response with the Amazon algorithm. It's a two to five day, in my experience, delay in terms of search results. So if you're optimized and you target your keywords well.

You'Re probably not going to see movement within 48 hours. Occasionally I have people who, like three hours post blast. They'll be like, yo, why am I not number one, page one? It's because there's a substantial delay.

Well, let's talk about kind of manipulation of the algorithm. Let's talk. Let's talk about what this actually looks like. Because, you know, I try as I might to avoid being the Amazon guy. Here we are talking about Amazon, and people keep asking me for advice on this. And when they ask, you know, I want to start this business, what does it look like? And I basically say, two steps. Step one, create a really, really great product that has a lot of demand. Step two, go give Zonblast as much money as you have in your bank. I'm sure you love that. That's the second piece of advice. But I would like to kind of get into the nitty gritty of what that looks like, because as it is getting harder, as we are consolidating it's, it's a little bit scarier for the new person to come in. And that is only going to go up in, you know, six to 12 months. That is only going to increase the difficulty of ranking. So as it is right now, let's, let's demystify it. Let's make it unscary of what that ranking process looks like from a numbers perspective. Right now in 2015, how many units is it taking to rank on first page? And what about reviews and conversion rate? What conversion rate needs to be there? And how can we maximize all of those things? Is there a way to decrease the amount of cost that goes into one of those big launches? So we're not giving away.

A billion products at a dollar and losing a bunch? I know I just asked a lot of questions, but what I really want to know is can you demystify the process so that we take the scariness out of it? What does it really take to rank on Amazon today?

It takes an optimized listing and it takes your willingness to make available a decent amount of units. And, and that that amount varies by niche.

What are you seeing as the average right now?

Well, I give people basically three guidelines. In the case of a low competition niche, I like to see 75 to 150 units. I think that's a good amount for a low competition niche. Now that doesn't really fit most of us. Most of us are in mid competition or high competition. In mid competition niches, I'd like to see 100 to 5, 150 to 250. And this isn't exact, I mean, this is ballpark, but 150 to 250 units made available. High competition niches. This is your, you know, popular supplements, your saturated, saturated, you know, kitchenware stuff. I like to see 250 plus. Now there is a point of diminishing returns. I think it's unnecessary to do. And I've actually shifted my opinion on this a little bit. In the fall, I was of the opinion that the more you can do, the better. But within the past few months, I think I've come to the realization that there is a point of diminishing returns. I don't think you need to blast 1,000 units with, you know, silicon kitchen gloves, which we've done countless times and I'm getting sick of. So please don't.

You know. So I think in high competition, it's just probably in the 250 to 400.

So when you say there's diminishing returns, does that mean that you do blasts more often? Does that mean that other factors start to outweigh the number of sales that are going in?

Yeah, when I say diminishing return, I mean the value to the algorithm manipulation, which sounds fancier than it is, but the value to the algorithm manipulation becomes less at, you know, that thousandth unit. I don't think it's necessary. I think generally I think it's a good idea to target top 50, top 20, top 10, even BSR to hit that BSR. Now, some people who sell on Amazon, they'll be like, well, there's no value in bsr. Well, I agree it's a trailing indicator, but to us it indicates the effectiveness of, of a blast. And I think for the purposes of a customer, it shows that you manipulated the algorithm enough to pop.

Inside your main competition, even if your competition isn't necessarily even in the top 50 or top 20. But I think being able to target, for example, in kitchen, you know, 150 to 250 units should pop you inside top 50 or so. I think that's a good target.

What about from a rankings perspective? So can somebody just drop 250 units to a giveaway list like is on blast and expect to rank on the first page of Amazon for our main keywords in three days?

I cannot and I do not guarantee that kind of precision. I wish I could, and if I could, I would charge a whole lot more.

And hey, to be honest, I'm working on it. I'm always working on that kind of strategy. But no, I guarantee movement.

You will move in search results if you give Amazon what it wants, and that is sales, and you do it quickly. So I don't like to say someone will hit a certain page or move a certain number of spots, and that's primarily because there are so many variables, most of which we can't even evaluate or test. But some of the variables that we can test and can at least guess on is competitiveness of a niche, how many products you have in your account, your account history, the listing optimization, the conversion rate of listings around you. And that's a big one. As I think I mentioned earlier, conversion rate becomes more important the higher you get. Basically.

I want to ask a question that comes up a lot, and that is, does price matter? Obviously, giving away a bunch of products at a dollar is going to be easier than giving away at $20. So I have my own theories about this. But as of right now, does price matter as far as rankings go in.

Terms of a direct effect on rankings, I don't think so. I've seen, you know, I see similar movement across a $1 blast as opposed to a $4.95 blast, which is what we allow to now. But I will say the $1 blasts, the $1.95 blasts, they, they go quicker and they juice the algorithm in a more fierce manner, if you will. The 495, they might take a little bit longer and we have to blast it to more people because some people don't want to shell out a few dollars more than a typical blast. But in my observation, I don't think the final price on a blast impacts, you know, it impacts ranking. I think it's more so. I think the ranking algorithm is crude. I think it comes down to sales.

And conversion rate, which is mostly reviews and on page factors. Now I think that is going to be if Amazon makes any changes. I speculate that that may be what they change, that, that they might penalize giveaway sales, not, not to the point where they'll slap the person who's, who's giving away coupon codes. But it might not have the impact in the algorithm. But I think they're always going to have sales be the overall factor in where things rank. It'll just be a change on how fast can you generate sales out of the gate versus the guy who can't. Yeah.

I also want to add another factor of the algorithm and I think this may have been modified or changed in the past couple of months because of some movement I've seen on competitors. And this is a theory you put out in, I believe, October or November. And that is the more products that you have, they're all selling.

The faster and easier it is to rank. Now I've seen that on my own stuff. I had launched a product in a pretty competitive space and I ranked pretty darn quickly, much quicker than I had with using a couple of blasts and a wave. I think that's an important element as well. But I still say that conversion rate and raw sales are still gonna, you know, rule the day, basically.

And my theory behind that piece is overall account sales. How many sales is not just what product doing, but is that account doing? If you look at it like Google did 10 years ago, you throw a thousand links at it, it ranks, and then it would start saying, okay, these links are important and these aren't. And here's how we'll determine that. They came up with, with, with page rank and they came up with the authority of your domain. And I, I think that is going to be where Amazon goes as they filter out these sales impact, the algorithm and your overall account matters more because we've already learned to know and trust and value this brand here on Amazon. So we'll give more credibility to that. You can I guess manipulate that by having multiple products that are getting multiple sails coming in.

Yeah. And fortunately I've been planning for that since the fall. I've always assumed that they would go that route eventually and penalize that kind of thing. So that the answer then is longer term lower level sustained blasts in the form of what we call wave. We have the four day wave, we have the seven day wave and we have a little something coming out probably a couple weeks from now that's going to be even longer term than that. But yeah, I think there's always, Sales are always going to be a major factor and we're always going to have, we're always going to have an answer to that, basically.

Well, Joe, if this hasn't already been a 40 minute sales pitch for Zonblast, which please forgive me, like I basically, I like to take credit for some of Zomblast success because I very quickly became a walking commercial for Zomblast because I basically, basically have told everybody who's asked me how do you be successful on a channel like Amazon, it's you go make as many sales as possible. Okay, what's the fastest way for me to make a bunch of sales? Meet Joe Gianfola. He runs a service called Zomblast which will blast it out to a bunch of Amazon sellers. And that has basically that's stuck. So if it hasn't already been a big commercial for Zomblast, would you talk to us a little bit about what the service does, why it works and the changes that you're making to kind of stay ahead of the curve where everybody's afraid that things are going to change and we're, we're all going to. The Amazon apocalypse is going to happen and we're all going to be out of business. Would you comment what you're doing to stay ahead of the curve and what things are going on over there?

Yeah, well, first and foremost, like I said, you know, we're coming out with longer term launch strategies, longer term juicing strategies, if you will. Not to be confused with the steroid.

Stuff in body, only slightly similar, right?

Yeah, we have a lot of stuff in the works in terms of longer term. More organic, there's the operating phrase, more organic looking sales and promotion ideas.

And I want to reemphasize that there's, there's nothing shady about this, there's nothing scary about this. You know, when we say the phrase, you know, algorithm manipulation, it's, it's more, it's more, it sounds larger than it.

Really is working out is muscle manipulation. I mean, if we're going for a result, how do we manipulate the result? Chiropractic is spine manipulation. So it doesn't mean it's, it's unethical. It's just faster.

Oh, yeah. I liken it to basically Best buy putting out 20% off coupons in the Sunday mailer, that kind of thing. The answer is long term, sustained blasts. And like I said earlier, there's two facets. We started with the external facet, the promotions, the promotional strategies, the blasts, the manipulations of the BSR which result in movement and search rank. The other side of it, which we've just touched into, is on optimize listening optimization services.

Beyond that, it's branching out into.

Basically management of your business.

As opposed to management of a promo or management of your listing. It's management of your business. We've got some big things in the works.

Well, I always say that if you can find and model people are getting the results that you want, that you should cozy up to them. And I can't think of a better example of a service like this, which is basically like, this is what gets all of my listings to the top of Amazon's search results. And I'll vouch for the exact same thing as will the 400 or so tribe members who have seen the exact same results. And you can go use the exact same one in something like a Zomblast. So forgive me for being a walking commercial, but the topic of this podcast is manipulating Amazon's search rankings and doing a lot of sales is the way as of right now, to still do that. It's getting more competitive, so you have to be more aggressive in it. And it is more people are coming into the market, so you have to do something in order to outpace those individuals. And it will become more and more consolidated as time goes on. So this is the time that if you're going to build a business on a channel like this to use services like this. So, Master Joe, thanks for hanging out with us here at Freedom Fast Lane. If this show becomes more popular than all the other ones, you will never be invited on to another Freedom Fast Lane episode. But I appreciate you coming on this one.

Well, thank you very much for having me again.

All right, man. Congrats on your success.

Thank you.

Wish all the best to you.

If you are an Amazon seller or you are thinking about starting a physical products business, there are basically three things that you need. You need a really good product. You need a way to distribute those sales faster than your competition through a service like what we talked about today. And you need to have the right mindset. You need to be in this for the long game. And I'd recommend you do that by surrounding yourself with people who are at the level that you want. I happen to run a group called the tribe. The tribe is open for a short window here in April. Rather than answer the same question all the time, which is when does the tribe open? Is the tribe ever going to be open again? I've set up a page for you to get all the details and to find out everything that you want to know about the tribe and how you can get inside. It's@freedomfastlane.com tribe that was freedomfastlane.com tribe. That's where you'll have your opportunity to join the tribe. If you're listening to this episode while it's open, all the details and all your questions will be there. So if you're looking to get into the tribe, if you're looking to get into this business, head over to freedomfastlane.com tribe and I'd love to have you in my mentoring group. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I'll see you on the next show.