Episode 80 – Unique Launch Tips from an 8-Figure Amazon Business Consultant

When my son was younger and it was time to wrap Christmas presents, I would usually wrap an empty box for every one with an actual present inside. To him, it didn’t make any difference. It was the excitement and anticipation that were paramount. 

Little did I know that I was simply employing a tactic that would later be used with great success by one of the biggest, most marketing literate companies in the world. 

Today’s guest explains that the approximately 10 seconds that it takes us to make our way through our new iPhone’s packaging has been very precisely choreographed in advance to both heighten our excitement and raise our level of perceived value.

On this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton speaks with Norm Farrar about everything from the importance of standard operating procedures to his very unique launch strategy.

It’s not every day that Bradley interviews an 8-figure seller and that fact is barely discussed. 

But first . . .

In Canada where Norm Farrar grew up and still lives, a long beard can often mean one thing. 

It means that you play hockey, and your team is deep into the playoffs. 

Norm is not going to the playoffs any time soon. He started the impressive beard he is known for while living in Toronto and supporting the Montreal Canadiens during their playoff push (An almost unforgivable sacrilege). 

Another thing that Norm is known for is his ability to help companies achieve significant success selling on Amazon.  

What we’re interested in, is how he’s able to consistently do this.  

According to Norm, it involves creating and putting into place a set of standard operating procedures that reward his highly reasoned approach to marketing and selling, as well as virtually eliminating crisis management. 

He now has over 400 SOPs and 279 alone having to do with launching a product. 

Norm began by helping his father with a manufacturing company and quickly found that he had a knack for marketing and promotions. 

After starting his own company, his first thought was, “How do I beat the industry leaders at their own game?”

What Norm Farrar did was to mount a two pronged offensive. 

First, he worked hard to create a vertically integrated company by switching from buying from suppliers to becoming his own supplier. 

He bought businesses that did the silk-screening, storage, and transportation that he needed to run his business allowing him to carefully control his supply chain. 

Second, he decided that he wasn’t going to play the game of trying to “out-sell” his competitors.  

Instead, he was going to increase his products’ perceived value.

To do that he carefully crafts everything from the packaging and labeling to pairing his products with charities that speak to his company’s societal involvement.  

And I’ve left the best part for last. 

How would you like 500 of the top media companies linking back to your product?

On this podcast Norm is going to walk us all through his very unique launch strategy that uses press-releases and blog posts to link back to your product.  

In doing so, you’re not only making Google and Amazon happy, you’re also going to be putting yourself on the path that he’s used to great success. 

Listen in and find out more. 

In episode 80 of the Serious Sellers Podcast Bradley and Norm discuss:

• 02:20 – Norm’s Early Manufacturing and Marketing Experience
• 03:35 – Vertical Integration
• 05:05 – Making the Switch from Buying to Owning
• 06:32 – A Perfect Storm and Business Skill Acquisition
• 08:05 – 279 Standard Operating Procedures for Launch Alone
• 10:38 – One SOP a Week Will Make You an Expert  
• 14:40 – He’s Not About Volume, Perceived Value is Key
• 17:13 – Norm Ruins Heinz Catsup for Bradley
• 19:00 – Packaging and Social Proof
• 21:07 – A Simply Unique Launch Strategy
• 23:50 – Press Releases?
• 25:00 – Long Tailed Keywords and Helium 10
• 26:58 – Fewer Giveaways AND Ranking Magic
• 29:17 – Link-Backs and Blog Posts 
• 35:50 – Norm’s 30-Second Tip  
• 36:47 – How to Contact Norm  

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: How would you like 500 of the top media companies linking back to your products? Say what? Listen in as today’s guest, a sought-after business consultant and expert on Amazon tells us how to do just that.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10.  I’m 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 eCommerce world. And guys, I have a special guest today, Norm Farrar has joined us on the show. Norm, how’s it going?

Norm Farrar: Really great. Thanks for having me on.

Bradley Sutton: Thanks for being here. Now usually we start with the origin story. I like hearing your origin and we are going to get to that. But first I need the origin story of that amazing beard you have. Like when, when did you start growing that? Has that been since you were in college or a recent thing or what’s going on there?

Norm Farrar: Yeah, that was about grade six. But you know what, in Canada, people get this. This started during Movember about three years ago.

Bradley Sutton: Oh, so recent. Relatively recent.

Norm Farrar: Yeah. You know, when I never had really a beard before, but you know, three years ago the playoffs were on and hockey players don’t shave until after the playoffs. And I decided to wait a couple of years before I shave.

Bradley Sutton: Who’s your hockey team?

Norm Farrar: Oh, you know what? People are going to hate me, but I live in Toronto. I love Montreal.

Bradley Sutton: Oh no, that’s almost sacrilegious. All right so now let’s get to the real origin story of you. Like again, for those just tuning in, the reason why I always love doing the origin story of our guest is because the point is, it’s been now 60, 70 episodes. I have not had two guests with anywhere near remotely the same backstory or same origin. And again, this just proves the point that guys, it doesn’t matter what your education was or what your background is in, people can become entrepreneurs from every background. So Norm, what’s your background like? Did you grow up in Canada first of all?

Norm Farrar: Yeah. started out in Montreal, came down to Toronto and I started working with my dad. He had a manufacturing company and basically, we were making shoe component parts, but that’s where I got my start with manufacturing. I really started to understand the process and then I got into, some promotional marketing and we were just selling sort of chotchkies, you know, pens, key chains.

Bradley Sutton: Just like out of high school or?

Norm Farrar: I went to college, I dropped out, I was in the film and, and, filming radio and dropped out my last semester, so an opportunity came and it was too good to pass up. I started doing that. And then, it, I, I just, I ended up talking to some guy that had a very successful, promotions company, but I found out very quickly I couldn’t work for anybody, no other than my father. And so I left a couple of months after that and started my own promotions company. And it just, it, it expanded very quickly. We were actually the first publicly traded promotions company in Canada.

Bradley Sutton: What are promotions? What does a promotions company refer to?

Norm Farrar: We weren’t just cups and key chains. Usually, people call it they, you know, the incentive business. Well, add specialty business. But we, we created something that was really vertically integrated. So we said, okay, look, there are 16,000 people selling pens out there or coffee mugs and they’re  Bic pens and they cost 23 cents. And we knew that the profit margin was rough, 23% at the time, gross are across the board for these 16,000 people. How do we beat that? And what we became, what we, what we decided about is to increase perceived value. And I always talk about this on Amazon. I mean, this goes right back 25 years ago, about perceived value. How could I get a 23 cent pen to sell for 40 cents? Or how could I get a tee shirt for $3 to sell for $6 or a hat? And it was all in perception. If it was packaged nicely or like with t-shirts, for example, we would put a label in the tee-shirt,  that had our company in it. We would polybag the tee-shirt, put it into a really nice clean white box with our logo. And then we put these fragile stickers on. I mean, when it, when it arrived at the company, they loved it. And Fortune 500 companies loved it because we knew that our quality control was there and that, that they would get what they needed. As long as it was, you know, on time, every time exactly as they ordered it, we could demand our price. And we ended upbringing that, margin from 23% up to 43%. But what we did at the time was we decided that we were going to do some vertical integration. Not only do we buy from all these suppliers, but we were also going to own them. We bought screening companies, embroidery companies, courier companies, storage companies, and we started doing it all ourselves. Which really helped out with the cost. It got me to understand, you know, the different businesses in general. And it really got that sort of serial entrepreneur feeling that I mean, I’ve, I love startups, I want to get into startups. You know, I don’t want to get bored. I think I just, you know, cause I love being able to go in and help companies grow so that started that so it was a promotions company I ended up, which is this one’s kind of cool. I ended up with a Fortune 500 company that was looking to do a dealer promotion, with their, their dealer network. IT telecommunication Fortune 500 company here in Canada. And they asked me if I could do a, a website for them back in the early nineties, mid-nineties. And I had none. I had no idea about the internet, but of course, being an entrepreneur, I said, Oh yeah, we can handle that. And that was my first kick at the can internet marketing.  I learned the hard way, but because we launched that and we were one of the few companies out there, so many other companies came to us and asked us if we could do work for them. So got thrown in the fire and then ended up with a branding company, got involved with specialty manufacturing company. We opened up two factories in China, in Taiwan and that was a learning experience. Had a sourcing company, fulfillment company and then Amazon kind of came around, you know, a few years ago and it was like a perfect storm. If, you know, if he knew, especially about the perceived value you, so perceived values. One thing, negotiating with suppliers was another thing, putting it into a nice pretty package box. It was another getting the logistics done, you know, next step. And then finally getting them to reorder from you again. And you know, this, this experience I had, this life experience just came back and it was like this is my, my perfect storm. That’s how it started.

Bradley Sutton: What year then did you discover Amazon?

Norm Farrar: Probably around 2015.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Then did you try and make your own practice on Amazon or were, or were you still, okay, so it wasn’t just about a service-based business, you’re like, Hey, we’ve got this infrastructure set up because of all these other things we’ve done, sourcing companies and logistics and things like that. It’s just like you said, a perfect storm or a perfect case where you could just jump right in.

Norm Farrar: Right. And one of the most important things when starting an Amazon business, no matter if it’s your first product or your 10,000th product, one of the things that we made sure that we had in place right off the bat we’re, we’re SOPs, so everything that we did from day one, no right on through, even today, if we find something new will turn on the recorder. You know, I’ll get one of my assistants to create an SOP. Like, just for the, our, Amazon business right now, we’ve got about 400 SOPs.  279 for launch and rank or for launching products. Wow. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton: Well let’s talk about that a little bit. I didn’t even realize that that’s one of your specialties here.  At what, I mean is this, is SOP something that you think Amazon sellers should start from day one or it’s more of a thing where, Hey, let’s just wait to see what works and let’s get a game plan going and see what works and then make that SOP. Or at what point should newer Amazon sellers implement? I mean, I doubt that they could get 279 for launch and rank like you, but I’m sure everybody should have at least, you know, a few major ones. What point of the process should this start?

Norm Farrar: If it’s repeatable, regardless, if you think, okay, if you think you’re going to repeat the task, then record it. One of the things you want to do with, with SOP’s is the minor stuff, the daily, the daily routine. If you’re coming in and you’re spending time messages, feedback, reviews, those are easy things too, you know, to get off your plate. Just going through and checking the listings. And very easy things to get off your plate. What you want to do is you want to take those $10 tasks that are a repeat and just record them. You can either just, you know, get Camtasia or you know, a product like that and just press the screen record, go through the process as you do it, and then give it to your VA. What I, it’s literally, I start with the $10 tasks. I see what I’m doing most of the most repetitive tasks that I do on a daily basis, weekly, quarterly, annually, and they get done. And what you’ll find out, you don’t have to do 279 in a week. I find that people have the panic button, you know, once they have to, I’ll put together an SOP. They is it they don’t know the process, so they get worried that it’s taking too long. But while they have to realize is if you do one pro an SOP a week, first of all, you’ll be an expert in a couple of months, but you’re going to have no four, eight, 12, 16 really great processes together and you’ll be able to just farm it out. And like just this week in, in our company, we had one of our key players that ended up in the hospital, unfortunately, and she’s well now, but she was, she was taken out, he was a key player. We had things happening that day. And if we didn’t have the SOPs in place and there wasn’t somebody to be able to pick it up, then we would’ve had a problem. We would have had a really big problem because we’re, you know, we’re a date, uh, a time-sensitive. you know, there’s a, there are deadlines in our business. And it could have been, it could have been a killer for us, but somebody was able to step in because we have a process. And this is all like Bradley. You know, when you’re creating an SOP, it’s not only for your VAs, but you want to make sure that your VA’s have to time off. You want to make sure that you can take a holiday. And if you can’t do that, like you’re checking, I’ve seen this all the time. You go on, you know, you go on vacation and you’ve got these people checking their phones all the time. You know, getting upset with the office because they forgot to do something. It shouldn’t have to do that. When you go away for a week. The only time you should be notified if there’s an emergency if there’s crisis management, but if there’s crisis management, which means there is not the SOP for it to allow you to eliminate probably 95% of all crisis management.

Bradley Sutton: Wow. That’s definitely impactful. I think something that more sellers on Amazon and just anyone in e-commerce or business should have more of. And you know, now at my company, I have a lot of, you know, departments under me now. And so like I, I’ve been seeing the value in SOPs for sure where, you know, maybe when somebody’s just starting out, you’re just a one-man show. You might not understand the need, but if it’s going to be repeatable, it just makes sense because it’s going to help with the training and it’s going to help when, when, you know, somebody like Norma said is out for a couple of days, your, your whole, that whole section of the business doesn’t come to a screeching halt because nobody knows what to do. That’s very valuable information. Now, are you still selling on Amazon today?

Norm Farrar: Oh yeah for me, you can’t be a managed service provider or provide any consultation on Amazon if you’re not in the game. You have to know what Amazon’s doing and if they’re changing things up or if you’re experiencing things for yourself, you’ve going to be able to pass that information onto your clients. And if you’re not, then, uh, I, I don’t know, I think it’s a bit of a gamble, so yeah, no, we, we have a couple of brands. And then,, with some of the services that we provide we’re allowed to kind of experiment, which is kind of fun too. We’ve got these larger brands that we play with that allow us to experiment in certain ways with the marketing side of things. Yeah. it’s fun.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. Like what year, you know, since you started in 2015, what year was your peak sales? Like is this you’re going to be your peak or did you guys have, a peak in 2017, 2018?

Norm Farrar: it keeps going up.

Bradley Sutton: Keeps going up. Last year, approximately how much, how much was your just gross sales? we’re all for Amazon.

Norm Farrar: Oh, For Amazon. High Eight figures.

Bradley Sutton: High 8 figures. Wow, that’s impressive. Now for a company that size or smaller, like what, like where were you able to hit your profit margin? Like, or what should somebody expect? Like when you get higher, like high eight figures, does that mean that you guys are okay with less profit margin or, or is it you guys kind of have the same profit goals as if you were just a six-figure seller or how does that work?

Norm Farrar: Nah, I’m not in the moving volume and I do this with my clients too. We’ve got, you know, a bunch of high volume clients, but we go after perceived value. And if, if you, if you present the product right, I always like I, I call it the Brady bunch effect. If you can take your product, put it in the middle and surrounded by your competitors and split test it, basically send it out. You can go to a usability hub or wherever. And if you can get people to press on your item or say that your items better than the rest, more the majority of the time, then you’re great. Then it goes by, basically, it’ll go by the, uh, primary image and then it’ll go by the title. And we, we, you know, we test that out. And if those two things are good, when it comes down to reality, it’s the, I hate saying this, people saying it too much now. The customer journey, right?

Bradley Sutton: Oh yeah.

Bradley Sutton: You’re a hipster Norm, my goodness.

Norm Farrar: Yeah. You know, I got my hat downstairs too. But,  if you’ve got that package, and I think about the iPhone packaging where they made it, where it takes 10 seconds to open. Did you know that?

Bradley Sutton: I didn’t know that

Norm Farrar: Their packaging company made it where it’s anticipation. It takes 10 seconds the open. It’s really cool if you could do the same thing. Like I’ve seen it time and time again where, you know, people were selling okay products, they made some adjustments in their packaging and all of a sudden they’re getting way more profit. Like one example, Dead Sea mud, Dead Sea mud’s an oversaturated product. It’s sold by every, by lots of people. I’ve seen it go from 59 99 when I started to, you know, 24, 1999 for 16-ounce jar. We had a client that was 100% they wanted to do that. Dead Sea mud. I advised against it. They wanted it and we had to figure a way to promote it. Yeah, I came up with an idea that we’re going to sell instead of 16 we’ll sell four ounces and sell it for basically the same price took off.

Bradley Sutton: Hmm.

Norm Farrar: And it was just because of the packaging.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. What are, what are some other things that people can do to really improve that perceived value? I mean, we’ll talk a little bit more about that whole ten seconds with idle. I’m not sure I that might’ve gone over the head or some people. It actually took me a few seconds to understand what you’re talking about, but I think I got it now. But what,

Norm Farrar: Sure.

Bradley Sutton: what’s the, what’s the psychology behind that?

Norm Farrar: This is the whole customer experience when you’re, it goes back to the brand, it goes back to Apple’s culture. It goes back to everything Apple. Just opening it up and having the Heinz ketchup coming out slow, it’s just that anticipation. And all of a sudden it’s revealed the products revealed and it’s just packaged perfectly.

Bradley Sutton: Hold on, hold on. You just blew 40 years of my life right now. I guess kids nowadays don’t know about it cause they all have these squeeze tubes. But the first 30 years of my life was spent with those Heinz glass jars that you could not get it out of and you’d have to stick a butter knife down.

Norm Farrar: Yeah

Bradley Sutton: But then the feeling that you got when it finally came out, it was like one of those, Oh my God, this is so satisfying. Yes. You’re saying that that’s really, Heinz has been psychologically messing with me to manipulate me to have that cool feeling of such happiness when it finally does come out. 

Norm Farrar: You know, it’s a physics thing, right? And, I’m sure they could design the bottle differently, but I’m pretty sure that, you know, that whole anticipation campaign came from that.

Bradley Sutton: Huh? You just blew my mind right now. Norm. What are some simple things that people could do to take advantage of this perceived value concept here?

Norm Farrar: Okay. Very first thing is if you own an iPhone does not make you a professional photographer. You have to get really good images

Bradley Sutton: Even with that iPhone 11?

Norm Farrar: Well maybe with the iPhone 11, but you’ve got to have really good lighting. You know, you still have to have an iPhone 11 item. But, other things that you can do are a lot of people, let’s just take the packaging, for example, we have a company that, we provide soap to third world countries and we provided to the villages that don’t have water. And we’ve, we’ve tied into a company or charity that drills and gets fresh water. And then what ends up happening, it was kind of cool because it just started by accident. But people started sending pictures of their kids in this third world country taking washing for the first time with their kids, which was kind of cool. Now we don’t, we, we like in our boxes you’ll see that we provide, a donation card to the charity, but we don’t brand it, we don’t do anything. We, it’s directly over to the charity and they make it all we even on the product, they make 100%. Those are little things that people love because now you’re, you know, a good corporate company.  You’re interested in the environment, you’ve got the safety and you’ve got trust and your packaging’s outstanding. When somebody else is selling a bar for, you know, 3.99, I’m selling it for 14.99.

Bradley Sutton: That’s awesome. That’s great advice. I hope everybody was taking notes there. This is something that we’ve never gone over really here on the podcast. Quicken. Okay, guys don’t forget that regardless of where you’re listening to this podcast, whether you’re on your iPhone 11 or Stitcher, Spotify, you hit the subscribe button so you can be notified every time we drop a new episode. You don’t miss gems like what you just heard right now. Now let’s talk a little bit about your launch strategy. And I have a feeling that this is going to allow us to segue into one of the main reasons why I invited you on it because you bring some unique strategy that I think probably 99% of sellers would never even think of as part of their lot strategy. Yeah, I’m not going to hint at what it is because I’m, I hope it organically comes out here. But talk to us about how an eight-figure brand like yourself here in 2019 and 2020, what, what, what’s ours, what are some of the components of your launch strategy?

Norm Farrar: My launch strategy is so simple, so let’s take PPC off the table. Lots of people, lots of your guests talk about PPC.

Bradley Sutton: Ah huh.

Norm Farrar: That’s a given. However, this is so simple. I’ll tell it what I do for my launch. And usually, when I tell people my launch strategy, the next question is, well, what’s your launch strategy? It doesn’t make sense. But anyway, this is how simple. We, we’ve changed this over the years. we used to work with, you know, 90% off. coupons are,

Bradley Sutton: Ah huh.

Norm Farrar: I hate to say it, but you know, at the time it was, it was okay incentivized reviews.

Bradley Sutton: Ah huh.

Norm Farrar: Now it’s not, it’s taboo, but we’ve changed that to we do different types of keyword strategy. Okay. We go and we research on helium 10, the keywords, we download them, we bring them into specific sort of silos. And then from that, we target rebates. We do anywhere from a 70% to 100% off a giveaway, which the keywords we’re using URLs that we’re using to you are the keywords that we’re using for the rebates are tied in too. Press releases. And I can tell you every campaign that we’ve been doing is it every campaign we do is successful. we’ve worked with some, some companies that, you know, decide that they want to change the number of giveaways. They don’t give away enough cause they want to save a couple of bucks. They don’t do the proper keyword research. they might not do it or you just don’t have any sales volume and you expect a thought spent. You expect to sell a thousand units when you know you’re going to get 25 units. Yeah, that’s, that’s a reality. But the average company or beyond the average company that works with us or it works with this strategy is coming out. And it’s funny because I’ve been talking about my launch strategy. Oh for gosh, a year and a half, probably two years. And I’ve only had literally a handful of people that no contact. yeah, at least the service that we provide and you know, ask us questions. And were there that

Bradley Sutton: But wait for Norm but, but, but what’s your launch strategy? Nah, I’m just playing. Okay, so your launch strategy

Norm Farrar: Yup.

Bradley Sutton: It has to do with, if I understand it correctly, PR releases and just like you just told me, like very few people are even asking questions. They probably just go one in-ear and out the other. I’m not going to be that guy. I’m going to ask you, tell me more about like, I mean, when we talk about press releases, I’m thinking like Reuters, you know, December,

Norm Farrar: Yup.

Norm Farrar: How would you like 500 of the top media companies linking back to your product?

Bradley Sutton: I’d love that.

Norm Farrar: You know, and for national exposure, you know, maybe it’s a 100 bucks, maybe it’s a couple of hundred bucks, you know, certain comp press release companies might charge more. But, uh, let’s, let’s go back. Then, the way that we do it and to ensure that it works, we go back and we create, basically, I’ll call it three spreadsheets, but we call them silos. We look for the main buying or primary keyword, and then we look for the long tail to support it. Very simple.

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Norm Farrar: The sample or the example that I use is bully sticks. Bully sticks is a, is a buying keyword.  their primary keywords are like odorless bully sticks would be a great primary long-tail keyword. Okay? That would be

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Norm Farrar: One column in those three silos, organic bully sticks grass-fed, bully sticks. And then what you’re doing is you’re going into the search field in helium 10, and you’re going in and you’re typing in the phrase Oh, well, first of all, You’ve got to go and figure out your ASINs of your competitors. If you type in five to seven, maybe more uh, competitors, you run it, you get the report, then you go down and you’re taking a look at your top search volume keywords. Then from that, you’re extracting them. Let’s say organic bully sticks, grass-fed, bully sticks are all there. And now what I’m doing is I want to get the long tails from them. I’m putting them into the exact match keyword filter. And so once I do that and I run it, I get, you know, six, 10, 12 long tails. Now it, I don’t have to go and use the giveaways for the organic bully stick, grass-fed, bully stick. I use the much lower rebate or more, more much slower uh, giveaways on the long tails.  Let’s say for example, on the grass-fed bully sticks, I’m only using this as an example. I don’t know.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah,

Norm Farrar: You know, but let’s say that grass-fed bully sticks required 500 giveaways. Okay? And you see that? All right, but six-inch grass-fed bully sticks or organic grass-fed bully sticks, they only require 36 giveaways. I’ll take about anywhere from three to six, I’ll go in and I’ll create a rebate, either, you know, RebateKey, RankBel, you know, whatever’s service that you want to use. And I’ll tie those six keywords into a giveaway campaign. And so what ends up happening is I give away very, very few products. But guess what happens? Because organic bully sticks or grass-fed bully sticks is in the keyword that moves up automatically.

Bradley Sutton: Yup, yup.

Norm Farrar: it’s absolutely like magic. And then so, you know, we’ll do that. And then those keywords are tied into the press release. Now, why does the press release work? The press release, first of all, you’re going out, if you have to go to a good press release company if you’re going to a company that’s, you know, free, I’m 40 bucks, it’s going to be crap. Uh, you need to, you really do need to see the distribution that that press release company has. If it has Reuters, if it has Yahoo finance, that’s awesome. if you have like ask them, you know, to, to see a list of the distribution network, do they have Washington post, Fox News, ABC, NBC, CB, CNBC, you know, CNN. Great. and what happens is that press release, well go out to each of those uh, 500 media outlets and they have the choice of whether to pick it up or not. And I can give you an example with, uh, like the service that we have, which is very similar to some other higher-end services, is that a lot of these places aren’t going to give you, unless you have improper grammar or you’re, you’re breaking the guidelines it’s you’re going to get published. And you’ll be surprised at the type of press releases that we have on the, you know, the Miami Herald, you know, and you go the website and it’s there. We’ll give you a report with, you know, 400 links that you don’t have to go and find them there. There, you click on them and you can see exactly what Google picked up that the links, and you can see that you’re being picked up. Now, what’s happening in your embedding a link it back in the press release to your Amazon listing. I usually do between one to three links. I mix it up. On one press release, I might do three on the second press release. I might do one, but I, I take the first blink, my first embedded keyword, I send it back to my product listing. What happens you send her,

Bradley Sutton: So sorry, are you saying two-step URL or?

Norm Farrar: Or you can, we typically are using, we’ve been using the field  that’s

Bradley Sutton: Okay, Okay yeah.

Norm Farrar: And typically what we’ve been using

Bradley Sutton: So then the only one product shows up in the search also sounds like they have to go searching for your product?

Norm Farrar: right now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Norm Farrar: If you want to get a little bit more complicated,  you know, we’ve been experimenting and doing a lot of work with the FB Messenger and doing search find, buy. But you can also do that kind of like if people are doing specific instructions, these rebate companies, you can give specific instructions to them as well. If you were running the Facebook messenger system. What ends up happening is you’ve got this link that the first link going back to your storefront or a two-year product, a listing. And you’ve got the power of 500 major news companies linking to it, which Amazon loves, Google loves. And the other thing that you can do, which nobody is doing, absolutely nobody’s doing, I, I haven’t heard of it, where we’re the only people really talking about it, I think is whatever you’re writing the press release about, we’re writing a 1500 to 2,500 word, really incredible content. a blog article that we post on a website. Guess what happens? The first link goes back to the store. The second or third link goes over to that article in the article. We’ve linked it back to the star. Now they’re getting the juice, we’re getting the juice. Amazon’s getting the juice. Google loves the article because it’s an education and knowledge base. In all of this, there’s no promotion. You know, you’re talking about the benefits, the features, and the ingredients.

Norm Farrar: You’re not talking in a promotional language that’ll, that’ll get you rejected.

Bradley Sutton: Hmm. Wow. Guys, a, I, I hope you guys didn’t zone out there because that was very important. And it looks like norm says, this is something that you don’t hear anybody. We’re really talking about outside of Norm. I have never ever in all my networking heard from people who are using this strategy, but this is something that, you know, he uses it for his eight-figure Amazon business and a lot of his clients as well. It’s something that you guys definitely need to be interested in. Now, before we get going here, a couple of quick questions. I see you a lot of different events around, you know, what’s the advantage, of networking for you? Like wow, I mean, I know it’s not just so that you can go party with us in the club, but what’s the purpose of going to, you know, conferences and networking events,  if you’re talking to somebody who maybe hasn’t hasn’t done that yet?

Norm Farrar: It’s funny, I got a message today from a guy that I met years ago, you used to work with me and he said, you know, one of the things that you said years ago always stuck with me. He says, uh, one of the things I used to do is I used to stay late and while everybody went home, I made the last call of the day. And this is like networking. You’re putting in that little extra effort and the extra effort pays off because first of all, typically I’m not talking, there is some shop talk, but I’m getting to know people and you know, we’re, we’re all there really, uh, you know, for one really one goal, but were there also to have some fun and be able to buy, getting out there, meeting people, getting to know them on a different level, then you can reach out to them. They become acquaintances and then they become friends. And that’s how you create your network. Like over 30 years. I think I’ve developed a really incredible network and it’s one way I go to events. I, I talked to people, I asked for their contact information and one thing I’ll never do is I won’t call them and say, Hey, by the way, you know, here’s, here’s a free whatever or not, or sorry, Hey, can you help me out? Or, Hey, I’m looking like, this is my golden rule of, you know, I won’t do except share information with them. I’ll ask people if they need help. I don’t want to be that guy that’s you’ll know just trying to sponge off of people and people know it. You know, if you are sincere and you go out there, you’ll make dollars down the line and it’ll come back tenfold rather. I mean, if you help somebody out, they remember.

Bradley Sutton: Oh Yeah, absolutely. That’s great advice.

Norm Farrar: I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s the, you know, that’s what networking is all about. I mean, we’ve talked, we’ve gone to, I don’t know how many events we’ve been together. I don’t know. We might’ve spent 10 minutes talking about press releases and stuff like that.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. If that,

Norm Farrar: Yeah.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, guys, uh, again, everything that, that norm is saying is great stuff here, but I can definitely attest personally to this. Now, as you were talking the norm, my mind works in mysterious ways. I literally, what’s the word I’m looking for? Brainstorming. I guess while I was still, you know, I wasn’t zoning out. I literally came up with possibly a new segment that I’m going to do starting this episode for all features serious sellers, podcasts. I don’t know how this came to my mind. I haven’t done this much, but I was thinking, okay now I’m, I’m half Filipino. I’m not sure if you know that. I’m sure you’ve worked with Filipinos before like in you know VA’s and staff and one way that you know, my Filipino mother and grandparents, you know, they would get people’s attention is, is kind of like this noise they’d make. It would go and that’s like to get their attention. If you spell that out, it’s kind of like T S T. so I just thought of a new segment here. We’re going to have it starting with norm here will be the first did you a T S T which stands for the 30-second tip. So you’ve just been dropping us some great unique tips, but now you are going to be the very first who is going to give us a 30-second tip that think you know. It can be about anything that you think is pretty unique but very helpful. Boom, no pressure that you’re the first one to do this segment. But here we go.

Norm Farrar: Oh my Gosh, okay. For me, a 30-second tip is because I’m on, we’re working with press releases. Get a press release, create a blog article, make sure that the blog or the press release links to the blog article and make sure that it’s 1500 to 2500-word blog article if you’re looking for something else on perceived value. One of the things I’ve, I’ve talked before about I think on the other podcast with Manny. Oh is it handwritten notes? They go a mile, they cost a penny. Do you get them done in China? They’re generic. You get them shipped over, do 20,000 at a time and then they can just go into your containers as you go. It’s just a personal note that you can send out.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Thank you for having our first. I hope our first 30-second tip CST. All right. And Norman, thank you so much for the value of knowledge that you brought here. If people want to ask you more questions or see possibly about contacting you in order to run a press release for them, how can they find you on the interwebs?

Norm Farrar: They can go to PRreach.com or they can just email me at norm@prreach.com and you know, if it’s okay with you I could even provide a discount. so people can try them so they can see, you know what they’re all about.

Bradley Sutton: Sure. We like discounts.

Norm Farrar: Yeah. Perfect. Okay, I’ll get you a link.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. What we’ll guys, we’ll have a link if possible, but if not, if you don’t know where that link is or he can’t find it if you’re just listening to this in your car, please don’t get in an accident. Trying to find the link. Just give norm an email on it and he can hook you up to say he found out about it from the serious on his podcast. Norm. Thank you and your amazing beard for joining us today and I look forward to hanging out with you at the next conference.