#256 – An Amazon Seller’s Journey from Beginner to Over 100K a Month

Google ads, working with influencers, and a whole lot of Matcha!

Join Bradley and PPC marketing veteran Natali Petrova as they explore the ins and outs of Google Ads (and when to use them), tackling a first product launch (while figuring it out as you go), and how embracing influencer marketing can take an ordinary Amazon brand from floundering to flying high.

If you’re a fan of Matcha tea, you won’t want to miss this episode. If you’re a fan of selling your own matcha tea, you CAN’T miss this episode!

In episode 256 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Natali discuss:

• 01:50 – How Natali Got Started on Amazon
• 05:20 – When Should Amazon Sellers Consider Google Ads?
• 07:05 – Natali’s Ideas for Project X
• 08:45 – Natali’s Early Days Working for an SSP Legend
• 10:10 – After Her Boss is Sidelined by a Car Crash, an Amazon Product Launch
• 13:50 – Learning How to “Go Figure it Out”
• 16:25 – How Did Natali Pick Her First Product?
• 19:30 – Natali’s Matcha Tea Pricing Strategy
• 21:45 – Losing Amazon Reviews (Then the Listing Itself)
• 23:50 – Working with Influencers
• 26:50 – A Food Blogger’s Review Gives Her Product Wings
• 30:50 – Natali’s Top Amazon Strategies
• 35:10 – How to Reach Out to Natali 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got an inspiring story of someone who, when she first started on Amazon working for somebody else, she was so new. She had no idea how to use FBA. Plus she thought it was okay to just copy other people’s listings. Now, she started her own Amazon business, selling something made in Japan that grosses over a hundred thousand dollars a month. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon world. And we’re on different parts of the world right now, Natali. I’m in Mexico right now. And where are you? Are you in Orlando?

Natali:
Yes, I am in Florida, Orlando.

Bradley Sutton:
All right. That’s what one thing I love about the e-commerce and Amazon world, we can be from anywhere we could be anywhere and we could all have just a good time talking about the thing that we all love, which is Amazon, but you haven’t been your own Amazon seller for too long. So, I want to walk a couple steps back before you started. And actually, probably before I met you, I remember I met you at one of these meetups I did there in Orlando, but when you came to America, did you move initially to Florida or was it somewhere else that you lived?

Natali:
No, originally we moved to Florida. We lived in Jacksonville for a few months, and then we moved to Orlando.

Bradley Sutton:
What brought you to America?

Natali:
Well, we just decided to try, it was a lot of bad things happening in Ukraine and my husband’s family lived here, so he said, let’s try and see what happened. We can always come back.

Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And so you came here and then did one of you start working right away? Were you guys ever able to find work?

Natali:
It was hard, of course. In the beginning, I was freelancing, I was a Google ads certified specialist, so I was keep doing it online. Back in Ukraine, I was working in agency. So when I came here, I signed up in all as a freelance lead forms and started just looking for clients and working with them.

Bradley Sutton:
Were you looking for like Russian speaking clients or also–

Natali:
No.

Bradley Sutton:
So, how was that? I mean, I would imagine that at that time your English might not have been that great, right?

Natali:
It was horrible, but I have like, I’m so lucky. I found such great clients at the moment. Some of them were helping me, they were even editing my ads. So, they were trusting me in my keyword research and set up. They would help me editing my ads, like fix things on my grammar problems.

Bradley Sutton:
Well, I think that’s actually an important part though. Like I think some people who are from other countries or vice versa, some people who are from America and now they’re trying to expand in e-commerce to Europe or to Asia or something. They might think, well, I don’t speak a language I’m going to fail, but here you were at the time your English obviously is great now, but at the time, your English, wasn’t great, but not only could you succeed in a field, but you were actually helping, you were the agency, you were helping people in Google ads. So, what was your, I don’t know what somebody who specializes in that kind of thing does, so like talk to me about what that kind of job even means.

Natali:
Mostly it’s running ads on Google search and display network, and sometimes I was doing Facebook ads. And let’s say, Google analytics, for sure. It’s like really important part to set up all analytics stuff.

Bradley Sutton:
Well, what kind of companies, like just.com companies or just people had brick and mortar and they had a website or what?

Natali:
Mostly it was small businesses, some like furniture store, or some small e-commerce stores. So, mostly small business.

Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And for people like myself who might not know what the, maybe the point is or what the potential is, can you give any examples?

Natali:
Yeah, one of my favorite companies was they were doing technical support. They were ready to spend like tons of one click on a Google search costs about like 10, 15 boxes at the moment. But like we were spending around like three, 400,000 bucks per month with them. So, it was kind of like a small business, but it seems their services are really expensive. And since when you start working with them, you come back again and again, as a client, because they were ready to spend a lot on Google search and this kind of services were converting really well.

Bradley Sutton:
You’ve been now on both sides and we haven’t got to your Amazon story yet, but just right now, one question I can think of is, now knowing what you know of a typical Amazon business, how many Amazon sellers do you think should have a Google ads strategy? Obviously, a brand new seller from day one. I would assume that, you know what, probably not, don’t go hire Natali and pay for Google ads on day one of your launch. But is it a certain revenue of what you would think somebody would need to start looking into Google ads? Or maybe is it a matter of if they’re only trying to build a brand, or can you talk about that a little bit?

Natali:
I believe that Google ads, not just Google ads, I would say a lot of different paid ads from like external traffic ads works the best for products where people buy and when they can subscribe, when, say, for example, it’s like food, it’s like cosmetics. It’s some, like, I don’t know, stuff for dogs like kits, something that people not just buy once because brass brick leaks on Google are pretty expensive and this traffic is not converting really good comparing to Amazon PPC. So it makes sense to lose money on your first sale, but to make money on your future sales.

Bradley Sutton:
Let me give you a sample scenario. Project X is this case study that we did where we made just a couple random products and we did it on YouTube and one of them was a coffin shelf, and one was an egg tray. Now, let’s just take the coffin shelf example. Now that product, I think in 2020 generated, I don’t remember like maybe $200,000 worth of sales. All right. It’s a shelf shaped like a coffin and very niche and kind of spooky decor kind of thing. Until now, we have just 100% been doing PPC on Amazon and just doing on Amazon traffic. Now, would you suggest that I could supplement that with some kind of Google ad campaign? And if so, what would the angle be? Would I be trying to target people who like spooky decor and then just bring people directly to my Amazon? Or would I be trying to just build an outside audience? What would your strategy be?

Natali:
Well, first of all, I would be able to store it. So it’s not just one product, right? So people can buy not only one product at a time because it most likely will not be profitable if they buy only one thing from you. So yeah, I would make a store and I would send people to that store so they can buy more than one product. This is the first thing and I would target people who would search for spooky decor Amazon. So is there a keyword that should contain word Amazon, not just spooky decor because spooky decor with cost a lot. It might be pretty expensive, but worth looking at core Amazon, most stuff, people who own stores, they would use Amazon as a negative keyword. This is why assist spooky decor Amazon keyword will cost way lower compared to just spooky decor. So, you can get like really low price clicks, like costs for keywords compared t–

Bradley Sutton:
What’s the goal? What does that ad– they click on the ad. What does it take them to? Just like a Shopify website or to Amazon itself?

Natali:
We’re talking about Amazon. I would send to Amazon because yeah. Especially with a store you can track right now. Right? Amazon attribution, you can even set up, is that the way that you can track each keyword, you can see stats for each keyword in your ads, so you can see which exactly keyword brings you conversions.

Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Cool. Good to know. Now, you actually had a life-changing event, I guess when you met this guy named Steve. So, Steve, for those of you who have been listening to the podcast for a while, he had the podcast entitled Lamborghini’s DJs parties and a product launch strategy for the 1%. So, if anybody wants to find out Steve’s story, make sure to go to episode 85 of the Serious Sellers Podcasts. But anyways, you just– Steve hired you to take care of the Google ads. But tell me some of those crazy things in their early days about how crazy it was working for him.

Natali:
Yeah. Steven’s an amazing person who I would say has completely changed my mindset and of course my life. Yeah. When I started working, we were working on houses where old people leave.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Like old age homes.

Natali:
Yeah. Yes. We were working on that project, but wait a sec, is that we went to the conference called commerce– how was that in San Diego– traffic and conversion, yeah. And they were talking about this e-commerce strategy is, um, um, like a lot of fun stuff about e-commerce. So, we just decided to just switch and we changed everything and re-launch another project about yoga. And as soon as we bought tons of stuff or there’s a lot, like a whole warehouse of products, he did a huge research. He found really great products, high-quality, and he ordered a lot, like really a lot. Our plan was to sell and it’s through Shopify. And I believe when it was on its way to USA, he got in his car accident, like horrible car accident. We realized that we won’t have our boss next to us for a while. And we have all this stuff. So we had to find out something, figure out something. We couldn’t just like, let it go– this company with all this stuff. So, at that moment I learned about Amazon and we launched. Then it started working and we were fulfilling from our warehouse. I was fulfilling by myself.

Bradley Sutton:
Not FBA, then?

Natali:
No, I didn’t understand FBA at that moment.

Bradley Sutton:
Well, wait, what year are we talking about?

Natali:
Five years ago.

Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so you didn’t– that was why there was no Helium 10 maybe, or not much Helium 10 in those days, that’s why you didn’t know what to do with the listings, but you didn’t even know what FBA was. You didn’t know how to make a listing. So you just copied others and then you didn’t even know about FBA and like how many units a day were you fulfilling?

Natali:
Well, it’s at the moment we’re fulfilling, maybe like 20, 30, but [inaudible] told me, like, why won’t you use FBA? Just go and do it. It was so hard for me to figure it out. I couldn’t understand it because like, imagine I was only no Google ads at that moment, the English is horrible. I don’t understand like Amazon interface. So, it was pretty hard to figure out this shipping things like shipping in America. It’s crazy for me. For you to understand, the first shipping I did, I wrote address by hand on the envelope. And they wrote it in her own way that she became bad. So I was so bad. I had to figure out all this thing’s from like zero. So yeah. So it was that I figured out FBA, and SNS we started there. We started selling around hundreds of units a day. It was crazy. Yeah. We were just like ordering and ordering.

Bradley Sutton:
What you just said there is very similar to– for those who know my journey of when I was working for this company who was doing cell phone cases and they had not the slightest idea. And actually they came from a similar background as you, they were Google ad experts. And they’re like, let’s try these cell phone cases on Amazon. And they were selling hundreds of units a day and they had no idea what they were doing, but the problem with them is they didn’t go and try and learn the real way. And then when all the competition caught up, they were kind of just stuck behind it and went to almost zero. Now, what was the next few years like, as you were working with Steve, like how did you expand your knowledge or that you knew, you know what, it’s probably not good to copy listings from other people and stuff like that.

Natali:
Yeah. A few days after we launched the product, actually Amazon blog that releasing of course, because of copywriting thing. And then we changed it, the main image, but yeah, but I would design or made the really great picture. A really great first picture actually is being everywhere. Seems at time. It’s done all over eBay. It’s all over all Chinese stores. It’s like really good image, which everyone took off to us. Yeah. So then, we were launching different products and we started selling on Shopify and then we just did too much. We launched our blog and we hired videographers, and we were doing some YouTube reviews for products. It was like a whole journey.

Bradley Sutton:
Wasn’t Steve so crazy that he didn’t just buy a house just to be able to film videos about the yoga brand or something crazy like that, if I remember?

Natali:
What’s super fun working with him, it’s an amazing opportunity for me to learn. I’ve got so much knowledge from working next to him. Like the most important thing is the mindset in a lot of situations, I would come to him and ask him what to do. And he would tell me, go figure it out. I’m like, okay. So, I learned a lot how to figure it out, it’s like the most important lesson I got from him. And I believe this is exactly what changed my mind and changed me from being a person who would do services for other people to being an entrepreneur. So, it’s a mindset like it just shoots switch in your head, it’s like, you can just burn what’s up.

Bradley Sutton:
Now, as the years went on, you were still working for Steve and launching different products and things on Amazon. And that was kind of like when I met you was the first time I had met Steve also in person, was that one of these random meetups in Orlando there. And then, I remember you were pregnant at the time and then correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you like when the day you had your baby, like, I don’t know if you were in labor or it was right after baby was born, but weren’t you like messaging me Helium 10 questions, like from the hospital bed?

Natali:
Yeah. I was in a hospital. My delivery was like 48 hours.

Bradley Sutton:
48 hours?

Natali:
Yeah. It was really bad. And they were doing all of the stuff to make it happen, foster, but it didn’t work. So I was just laying down in a bed and waiting for it to happen. So I had my laptop with me and I was working.

Bradley Sutton:
I love it. The only person to be working on Helium 10 while in labor to deliver a baby. That is great. Now Steve, over the last couple of years has kind of pivoted away from Amazon a little bit. At what point did you decide? Like, you know what, I really like this Amazon thing, whether or not I continue with Steve, I want to start my own thing. When was it that you first had that goal?

Natali:
That was not really me. That was more my husband. And it took a while for me to be ready to like, I don’t know. I was more like afraid of it. I don’t know why I think this is because I still didn’t have that entrepreneur mindset, but for a long time, my husband wanted to launch Amazon and I was like, no, I’m not ready. And then we had our baby and my husband was staying home with baby. I was working and he was staying with her and he sat here really want to do it. Like he really wanted to business. So I decided that, yeah, we need to try it.

Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, how did you pick your first product? It was going to be your first own product instead of something for Steve.

Natali:
Yeah, our product is matcha. Matcha green tea. And when we tried it first, we didn’t like it at all. And then, one day someone–

Bradley Sutton:
When you tried it as in like you got a sample and tasted it or something?

Natali:
Yeah, yeah. It was horrible. It was really bad matcha. Someone gave it to us.

Bradley Sutton:
A lot of people think, oh, the only place to find inspiration for product ideas is if I’m using Black Box in Helium 10, or I’m looking on Pinterest, or I’m looking at Etsy sometimes just everyday life, you can get an idea that could come into something. So that sounds like this is one of those cases. So, just randomly, you got some samples of macho. You didn’t like it and then what’s next?

Natali:
Yeah. And what I actually want to tell you, is that I really believe that you should sell product which you love. I am one of those people who are not selling products by like, I’m not researching much of product. I think that you can create your product, which you love. And if you can make it high quality, it should work. I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I hundred percent agree. And like, if you can do something you love, that’s great. But a lot of times you don’t, you might not love it at the beginning, but here’s the thing, guys. Make yourself love it. I didn’t love coffin shelves when I first launched, I was like, what the heck is this? But guess what? I became an expert in coffin shells. And I was fascinated by coffin shelf. I started researching the kind of people. Now I can say, you know what? I do love coffin shelf. So, that’s a great point. But if you can start from day one with something you love, then it’s a no- brainer, for sure.

Natali:
Actually, my husband was looking for some products on Amazon and he was researching on Helium. And he was noticing that matcha is growing. He was looking for different teas, not just matcha, just because we love teas. I know people in the Ukraine drink tea a lot. He was noticing that matcha is growing and growing and growing. First time we ordered from Japan, we observed that it’s important that matcha should be from Japan, way more quality Matcha is in Japan. So, that’s what we need. And when we received those samples, we actually, we tried, I guess, around like 30 different samples before we chose the one we love. But even the first we received, we are shocked how good this product can be compared to the one we tried before. That it should be like greens and it should not have the bitterness.  And I was at, it’s like really great product for you for your house. And that it can be tasty. That it’s really good.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I mean, guys, if you’re a matcha fanatic like me, yeah. There you think you’ve had matcha. No, you haven’t had matcha unless you’ve had Japanese matcha. It’s nothing like the kind that you get in American stores.

Natali:
Yeah. And we find out that most of sellers, there are two types of matcha in USA, culinary and ceremonial. It’s not true. Like in Japan, they don’t have culinary kind of thing. They only have bad quality and good quality matcha, but here people may like the marketing of it and say cold bed matcha culinary, which you can kind of use in baking in like smoothie. So you can’t taste it. And they sold that quality matcha for around like 20 bucks for 3.5 ounce and ceremonial matcha is around 25 bucks for one ounce. So, most of the people who’s buying matcha, they want cheap matcha, but good quality of course. Right. So yeah, they all buying like three and a half ounce, matcha for twenty box and they expect it to be good quality. So we learned from reviews is that people are really disappointed. They wouldn’t buy culinary matcha, but they’re really disappointed because they want to drink it in lattes and just water. So we decided that we will do next thing, we won’t have high margin, but we will bring high-quality like, I would say a low grade ceremonial matcha, but we’ll market as culinary grade. And we will give people price around 20 bucks. So, basically people who buy from us, they are buying ceremonial grade matcha. But for as a prize of culinary grade matcha, and this worked, this really worked from day one. As soon as we launched our product, we were number new release.

Bradley Sutton:
What did you do for your launch? Like, was it just PPC or did you do giveaways?

Natali:
We were doing giveaways. Yeah. And it was at times when you could buy reviews. So, we were buying reviews and months after Amazon cleaned everyone who were buying reviews, so we lost other product that was number one new release batch. We had to relaunched it. We relaunched it and we didn’t buy reviews anymore. But we were like, and we were growing low after that. So it took us about a year to get to the level which we had before was our first launch.

Bradley Sutton:
And what’s that level like how many units a day selling?

Natali:
So at that moment we were like, we grow into like 30, 40 maybe units per day. So when we– imagined, when we just launched our first product, first time we were making like 30, we were selling like 30, 40 units a day from day one. But then, we lost that product and started selling from a new listing. And it was like barely selling five, 10 units.

Bradley Sutton:
Why did you lose the product?

Natali:
Because Amazon removed all reviews, all people, like all reviews, rich people were buying from other people.

Bradley Sutton:
And so then, because of that, you decided to start over again?

Natali:
Yeah. Because in any of your reviews, we couldn’t get new reviews. They blocked us from getting,

Bradley Sutton:
Oh, you couldn’t even get, not only did you lose your old reviews, but you couldn’t even get new reviews?

Natali:
Yeah. And for some people, they were doing like a one month block or just like few weeks block. But for us, three months later, it didn’t work. We still couldn’t get any new reviews. So we had to relaunch it.

Bradley Sutton:
I’m sure you did give away some things like that too. But like on the front, things look like it’s marketed the same way. Like, Hey, this is culinary. The others are culinary, the prices are the same. Like, did you put things like, Hey, we’re made in Japan or different things like that? Or how did you differentiate yourself?

Natali:
Yeah, of course we’re saying it’s made in Japan. Of course it’s organic. We are trying to work a lot with influencers, which kind of educate people about it, right. And of course we are educating a lot through our social media and through our articles. And sometimes I even give people a first package for free, because I know that after drinking our matcha for 30 days, it creates a habit.

Bradley Sutton:
What people are already talking about? Because obviously I’m assuming you’re not talking about Amazon?

Natali:
Yeah, just random people wherever I go. And sometimes online, sometimes on different groups, I just give on like Facebook groups or like on Instagram.

Bradley Sutton:
Oh, that’s a good idea. So, you go into like a Facebook group where maybe it has to do with matcha, or it has to do with recipe ideas, and you say, Hey, who would like, first 10 people I’ll give you some free matcha. And then what happens is those people kind of become your ambassadors almost because then they start telling everybody else how amazing your matcha was.

Natali:
And that’s another thing I was working on a lot with different food bloggers. So, tell me more. I started foodtography. And I entered a group of like 30,000 food photographers.

Bradley Sutton:
That’s an actual word? Foodtography? I love it.

Natali:
And I started contacting them directly and just sending them a free matcha to use in their recipes. So, they were doing amazing pictures of our matcha in their beautiful recipes. And some of them were featuring us for free just for package, because we just send them a package. So, all of them would start to use anything on a regular basis. So it was like a whole strategy working with food photographers. And other people like I’m trying to work a lot directly with my target audience, not just through like advertisement, but I love communicating directly with people. And sometimes I would tell them to buy through Amazon and I would send them money back, I don’t know, something like PayPal, and then they might really argue for something like that.

Bradley Sutton:
Just fast forward, at your peak now in the last few months, how many units are you selling or what’s your gross revenue?

Natali:
Okay. So, actually our best revenue was last year in May when everything was on lock down and people were staying home and cooking. So it was more than 100K.

Bradley Sutton:
How many SKUs?

Natali:
For matcha, we have five right now.

Bradley Sutton:
And so it was five SKUs that was generating about six figures a month?

Natali:
Yes.

Bradley Sutton:
And what’s your profit margin for this?

Natali:
So, of course it depends on the product. So we have like low, we have one product, which is making only like a couple of bucks and we have another product which is making like 30 bucks per year.

Bradley Sutton:
$30 profit per unit?

Natali:
Yes. Yes.

Bradley Sutton:
What’s the retail cost of that product or the retail price?

Natali:
79 bucks.

Bradley Sutton:
Wow. Okay. So, let’s talk. I mean, that’s pretty crazy, like this is a start for on Amazon from not knowing how to make your own listing to even generating six figures a month. You mentioned some of your strategies to get there, which are working with influencers and getting photographers to shoot the product and Facebook groups. What other strategies on and off Amazon, have you been using? Not necessarily like a service that you’re using, but just like, what do you think you’re doing differently? Because not everybody can have that kind of success, so I’m sure you realize that you’re probably doing some things that are unique and what are some of those things?

Natali:
Yeah. One of the best thing my husband actually did. So he was doing a lot of I would call it partisan marketing. So he was going to a different web sites for big bloggers who are writing like about matcha, different recipes, matcha recipes, or something like that. And he would leave comments, something, oh, this is a nice brand, but I love Aprika Life more, and this happens that he went to minimalist baker, which is like a huge blog for vegetarian and vegan food. And he wrote, he left his comment on that blog and she has a girl who owns his blog. She responds to all the comments. She’s really great. She has like millions of visitors per month, but she still communicates a lot with her followers. So, when she lands at the comment on her website, apparently like months after she was going to write an article about best matcha, that would probably, we were just lucky, but he decided to try our matcha after his comment. And she wrote a whole huge article about best matcha on a market. And she put our matcha as the best culinary grade matcha on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:
And so like, that blogger must have just bought it organically. Right? Like, it’s not like you sent them something, but they saw the comment and then they must’ve just found it and bought it themselves to try?

Natali:
Yes. And even after that, I was like, I couldn’t believe what’s happening. It’s like one day we started having three times more sales than we usually would have. And I couldn’t understand where they all coming from, we also said that the recipient orders on our website, which before we had maybe like one, like maybe five orders a week we had before, because we were not advertising our website at all. We were all focused on Amazon. And one day we’re starting receiving like five, 10 orders a day and we were like, what’s going on? So I was trying to find some tools which can help you to find if someone mentioned you and then I’m like, wait, why am I doing it? I just need to ask my customers, we’re sending them messages, like, please tell me where you heard from us about us and say started responding that they saw us on minimalist baker review. And then, I found who’s that. I went to our Instagram, they have like a million followers on Instagram and same on Facebook. And they were like advertising this article, and there’s our email. And like, it started showing up on Google search or like first places for like best matcha review keywords and so on. So,it gave us like a huge boost things that time. And even now if you search for like best matcha, you will see her article as like maybe first on Google.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. That’s a great point because I think sometimes people out there think when it comes to influencer marketing, it all has to be like paid. Okay. Yeah. You got to pay somebody to say something or you got to sponsor them or give them a bunch of free things or set up affiliate codes. Sometimes the best performing influencer marketing is when it’s completely organic and you never– what you should do is exactly what your husband did, just start going on a bunch of websites and posted it and you never know what might happen.

Natali:
Yeah. And sometimes you just really need to communicate with some influencers. Once I saw an advertisement for food, it was like bakery or something like baking school, how to bake, school about how to bake like different vegan desserts. It was a huge school. So I thought first my thought was, if I ride her, she will not respond me because she’s huge. Right. But then I decided I would just try why not? So I sent her a message. She had a thing like, which she was sending to all her students was products, which she recommends to buy for baking, for studying. So I sent her a message and I said, if she has okay to put my matcha on her list, that I want to send her a sample so she can try it and see if she thinks it’s good. And if she can add it to her list and she responded me two days after, and she was like, thank you so much for sending me this message. I will definitely want to try your matcha. So, we send it to her. And she added us, at least it was free. So she’s making commission each time someone’s buying on Amazon and she was happy.

Bradley Sutton:
Cool, cool. Now, you’ve been giving us a lot of good strategies, but let’s close this episode with like maybe like two or three or we call the TST, or the TST 30-second tips. So, I mean, you don’t have to keep it to 30 seconds, but try and keep it fast. Like just give us some rapid fire, different Amazon or Helium 10 strategies that you think have been helping you.

Natali:
Okay. First thing I would suggest you to try editorial recommendations. Amazon shows editorial recommendations article on first page when you search for some keywords and it’s pretty easy to get there. You just need to reach agencies of which to do that. And you can just search for them on Google and finds them, find those agencies and compares their prices. If you are in a top 20 of your category, you can get there. There are some things which limits you, but if you already a good salary, you can do there. And another more for like kind of new sellers. I would say in everyone is to keep reaching influencers and they do respond. You might see things as they are not, but they do respond. They’re real people. And even with ads, having tons of messages, this too might see you. And as more as you reach, it’s more chance that someone will respond to you. Right? I believe that influencer marketing is one of the best thing for Amazon because like Facebook ads and Google ads and the special Amazon ads can be super expensive sometimes for most of products, especially those products, which are not replenishable. If it’s just like gadgets, like kitchen gadgets or something, it’s just too expensive. It’s way better to work with influencers, be on all this leads for like best kitchen gadgets under 20 bucks, his articles are doing great. So work with influencers, don’t be afraid to reach them. They are all people. And also, I do a lot of things on different Facebook groups, especially during like prime days. You can go and, or like Black Friday, you can go to different groups with, for example, moms groups, they are discussing what to buy on Prime day and just leave your comments.

Bradley Sutton:
I’m going to take a quick break from this episode. I do my BTS, Bradley’s 30 seconds. So it’s actually, I want to talk about this because this is something that you and I were talking about at our last meetup that we did in Orlando last month. And it’s people don’t realize there’s actually a way to see how much of your sales come from search as opposed to other places. And so I remember you and I were talking about this, but it’s actually kind of a backdoor way to do it. So Amazon, if you’re a brand registered has this thing called experiments, which is kind of like their AB testing. And normally I would not suggest always doing it because I always say, Hey, do your split testing off of Amazon first, if you can, like using Helium 10 audience or other tools like that. But what I do, if I’m curious, or if a product is getting a lot of its orders from search or not, is I’ll just do something really simple. Like I’ll change like one letter or one word or something in my title. And that qualifies as an experiment or an AB test. And then after three or four weeks, I’m going to have information on all the sales that came through for that product, how much percent was from search, or how much were from other sources. Like, I remember you, you were talking about this. So like, do you do this for all of your products or just sometimes?

Natali:
No, we did it for a few of other products. I was really kind of surprised when we did it and I was present search. It gives us only about like 30% of our sales. Yeah. So at that moment, we realized that we really have to focus on goals, external traffic even more, because that’s what keeps us sales, because it’s so easy to trick people on Amazon search. Like there are so many sellers who sell horrible product and trying to have tons of fake reviews and images, which are not true. And they’re getting tons of sales from search, because people when they search, they don’t know you, right? So, it’s important to educate people from other sources.

Bradley Sutton:
All right, Natali, thank you so much for joining us. Now, if people have more questions either about Google advertising or your unique influencer marketing, or maybe if they want to get a free sample or something of your matcha, how can people find you on the interwebs out there?

Natali:
Yeah. You can just find me on Facebook. Natali Petrova. Natali, without e. This is a weird way of me spelling my name. But yeah, Natali Petrova, you can always text me and I’ll be happy to respond.

Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Well, Natali, thank you so much for joining us. And we will definitely like to reach out to you maybe next year and let’s see where you and your husband are out with your Amazon journey.

Natali:
Thank you, Bradley.

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