On today’s episode, we talk with return guest, Norm Farrar, about moving into the world of PR. Norm loves to create standard operating procedures for even the simplest of tasks, but finds that it streamlines life significantly.He owns a company called PR Reach and uses various SOP’s to run his business. Today, we discuss how to get more organic traffic through PR.
Tune in to hear our discussion with Norm.
Topics:
- Norm’s experience with Ecommerce.
- Why his company still does press releases.
- The benefits of a press release for Amazon sellers.
- The importance of consistent press releases.
- The popularity of his webinars.
- Blogging and keyword stuffing.
- Brands for which PR works best.
- What to do when your keywords drop in ranking.
- Checking in on competitors.
Transcription:
Mark: For a long time, Joe, I had a number one podcast recording that we've done on our list of all time. It was with Shakil Prasla and so I thought I would have a reprise and I would bring back Shakil and it didn't do as well. I mean it's still a really good episode and I recommend people listen to it. It was on how to hire CEOs. Your challenger to my number one episode back then; I know that you have the number one right now, but your challenger was Norm Farrar, who had an amazing story, and you brought him back on to talk about moving into the PR world and over the traditional world.
Joe: Yeah. Let's just get it clear that a long time as in your case, it was, what, two or three days. So in your world, that's a long time. But in the rest of the world, that's not very long at all. Shakil Prasla, a great guy, if you haven't listened to that podcast, folks, please do. Shakil is a longtime friend of Quiet Light’s and just a good all-round human being. But yeah, Norm Farrar came on to talk about SOPs. Who would have thought that the audience would have gravitated so much to SOPs? And Norm is in the top 10 for a long time. He had SOPs on how to make coffee. He has SOPs on how to create SOPs; SOPs for VAs to hire other VAs. It was very, very thorough, made his life and the ability to run multiple businesses much, much easier. And Norm is an old school type of individual. He helps a lot of eight-figure Amazon sellers and seven-figure Amazon sellers with a third prong approach to rankings. The first being, people do sponsored ads, second, a lot of folks do search, find dime, many chat, things of that where you get into a little gray or blacked out stuff. But Norm does PR for a lot of folks. He owns a company called PR Reach and he finds that the third approach really helps when somebody has a listing that's doing incredibly well and somehow gets hit by competition and the organic ranking start to fall. And they go on to on a monthly subscription to do PR work to keep that organic ranking up. And he finds that it works with social media influencers; they reach out to social media influencers to get links and even online magazines and news outlets as well. It's a great story, great information, and it's a bit of throwback. People think, hey, this is an online world, online business, we shouldn't; we don’t need PR, but it definitely works and Norm talks about it quite a bit in the podcast.
Mark: You know, I think this whole idea of PR, especially from a buyer standpoint, is really important because when you buy a business, there's so many opportunities in that first year or two years for PR opportunities to be able to go out and get some really good juicy links, help out the SEO get some natural exposure and get that ROI back up. So it's an exciting and very relevant topic to be talking about for anyone who's looking to buy a business or recently has bought a business, use that, and use all the changes that you're making to get PR. Let's listen to what Norm has to say about that.
Joe: Hey, folks, Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage. And today I have somebody on the podcast that's been with us before. Norm Farrar covered SOPs and he was in the top ten for a long time in terms of listeners on the Quiet Light Podcast. Norm, welcome back.
Norm: Hey, thanks for having me.
Joe: It’s good to have you here. The beard still looks as long as it ever was.
Norm: And it’s filling in from the hamburger burn.
Joe: I remember hearing about that. That's right. Today, we’re not going to talk about SOPs, we're going to talk about something old school or at least what seems old school, which is PR work and your company PR Reach and helping Amazon sellers, e-commerce entrepreneurs, content developers, or SaaS companies all reach more people and get more organic traffic through PR. So let's jump into that just before we do, though for those that didn't hear your epic podcast on SOPs can you give folks a little bit of background on yourself so they understand who you are and what you do?
Norm: Yeah, sure. I am an old dog in the e-commerce game. I go back to the early 90s. And by the mid-90s, the first website was up for a Fortune 500 company that we developed; helped develop and then got into some manufacturing and manufacturing facilities were in the US, and Canada, Taiwan. We outsourced in India back in the 90s. And then now we have a factory that we own and operate in China. So you can't own it, but we have a general manager and people working it for us; it’s all our equipment. And that right now, by the way, we're producing travel wipes. So just coincidentally, it wasn't planned that way. We've had it for about a year; a year and a half, but we're working with that right now. I got involved with sourcing and logistics and Amazon like this was a perfect storm. So what we're talking about today actually is everything, it's the logistics, it's the e-com, it's all elements of getting onto Amazon. And one of the components; very important components is the press releases. So when that happened and when I got involved with Amazon brands and helping other brands, I always used press releases, nobody really were; unless I think it went back a few years ago at Amazon and press releases went hand in hand. And then there was some bad press and people just weren't using them right and they kind of dissolved. But I kept using them. I did it properly and kept crushing it so I bought a press release company.
Joe: Just the introduction and the old school that you're an old dog in this business, it feels very much like there are not enough old school techniques that are in play today. Having an 800 number, having the ability to have your customers call you and communicate with them and especially when they're checking out and they're confused and things of that nature. It works and that's; I'm old school, I used to own a radio direct response media buying agency to market all my products on radio before I went 100% online in 2005. So I'm an old dog as well. The PR stuff just feels like and seems like old school but it's important in many ways that I think a lot of online entrepreneurs are not using today. So why don't you explain what the heck a press release really is and who sees it and how it works and it's not just, again, for Amazon sellers necessarily, but it can help people with an online business or any kind of business, for that matter? But go ahead and define what it is and how it's out there and who it reaches.
Norm: Sure, so it's not a public relations company. We'll get people calling us and wanting us to promote their event or create something for them; earned media, that's not us. We work with those types of companies. So a lot of people get those mixed up. We have press releases and it covers an event or a benefit or a feature or something newsworthy about a product or service. And what happens is a press release is written and then it's put through a distribution channel. The distribution channel could be to; right now, it's usually online media, search engines, content providers. It could go through print channels like periodicals, news magazines, trade magazines. But in today's society, we have a lot of influencers and bloggers and journalists that get on the bandwagon and two and pick it up through maybe a Twitter feed or something along those lines. So it's completely different. If you were to take a look at it, there are really three types of press releases. There's the traditional press release which takes care of all the online, but it also goes out to the print magazines, periodicals. Those are typically more expensive and I would only use those if it's a launch or if it's something that you need to have out there. It will get you the most exposure however, it's the most expensive. You're looking at around $750 to $2,500 for that type of exposure. And then you have which most people know, which is the online press releases, well, depending on the service, it's strictly that. It’s just online. It's going out to inaudible[00:09:52.9]. And there's the third type and this is the one I recommend and that’s…
Joe: What kind of businesses are going out to the second type?
Norm: Oh the second type is going out to, it could be Washington Post but it's there online. It could be CNN, Fox News, any of the NBC affiliates. So it's everything online and it will go out to the search engines so they'll pick it up. Google will pick it up; Bing. The next one just adds an extra element and that's the social component. So it will take it. It will share it with Twitter, Facebook. That press release will also pick up a lot of journalists so you can go through typically, HARO, they have 55,000 journalists. So a company like ours has that on the list. We’ll push it out to HARO we'll get the response back. We'll push it out to influencers and bloggers. So if you're in a specific niche, usually it's typically fine to do the social media press release and that's very inexpensive. It could be $100, it could be $300 but what you're getting is national exposure. And if you get the right press release company with the proper distribution; I'll get to that in a second, that's really important, but if they produce a video. A video allows you to repurpose everything, so just…
Joe: The videos are linked within the press release or its part of it itself?
Norm: Yes. Usually most press releases you can embed a YouTube video but I'll get to that in a second.
Joe: Okay.
Norm: With some press release companies, you can do a video, just a regular video that it's a second script. It's not what's written, but it's for an anchor to read. So it looks very similar to what you would see on the news. And then you can take that and you can make that your third of link. So the problem with microbrands in e-commerce is that they have no authority.
Joe: What's a micro brand?
Norm: A microbrand is these small private label brands that are trying to be something on Amazon.
Joe: Do you mean they're doing 25,000 a month in revenue, 100,000, a million?
Norm: They can even be a million dollars a month, these are just brands that are…
Joe: They’re not a Nike, okay.
Norm: And they don't have that type of money behind them, but they have to get exposure. And the problem is most microbrands; and you could even say, you can expand this out to law firms or dentists or chiropractors who are just getting into the business, but they don't have a name. So they need to get that authority. So how do you do it? You do it through a press release. And you can take that press release and repurpose the written press release through social media. You can take the video and put it through social media or put it on your YouTube channel. But get this, you can write an article; a blog article that's going to get Google exposure, and you put that into your content in the blog article. So when people come to it; when you go to a blog and you're on somebody’s site, you don't know these people. You don't know the company. But if you see something that's even showing that it looks like it's authority; some sort of authority, people will take it as they will start to feel trust.
Joe: I got you. Well, let me ask sort of a silly question here, but what is the ultimate purpose of the press release? So let's just say we've got and let's target it, so I'm an e-commerce entrepreneur, 50% of my revenue is; I've got one of these microbrands, but I'm selling both on shops via Amazon. What's the purpose of a press release? What's it really going to do for me?
Norm: Okay, so it depends if you're an Amazon seller or an e-commerce seller. First, there are two different types. The first thing it’s going to do is build trust and authority. You're going to be able to take your store and you're going to be able to show it on 500 different media outlets. This is if you get a good one. If you get a good press release distribution company, they're going out to the CNN, the FOX News, the FOX affiliates, the NBC affiliates, they're going to get you the content placement like on Market Watch or through Reuters or through Yahoo! Finance.
Joe: But it's out there and then they choose to pick it up and it becomes a link on their site or something like that. They could ignore it completely as well, right?
Norm: Yeah, if they find it spammy they can ignore it and if you've got a crappy, cheap, free press release distribution company, you're going to get what you pay for.
Joe: Okay.
Norm: You're going to go out to small town USA and nobody's going to see it.
Joe: Okay. So the purpose, again, is creating authority and creating influence and credibility with your brand?
Norm: Yeah, I was doing a webinar and the night before I was looking and doing some keyword research and we were working with this pet product and the whole from Chewy Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Press Advantage at that time; that's another press release company, every single spot on Page 1 was filled up with our brand.
Joe: Wow.
Norm: On Page 2 every single spot except one spot was filled with the brand.
Joe: From the press release that you created?
Norm: Yeah.
Joe: Okay.
Norm: So it's not you can't do one press release. It's like one radio advertisement, it just doesn't work. I put out a press release; a minimum, and this is before I bought the company. I put out a minimum of one a month and if you're not doing at least one a month, then you're missing out on it.
Joe: And how much is that going to cost somebody that's doing the social media and the newer stuff or really somebody that is trying to just build more organic traffic and authority and their own reputation with a micro brand, as you call it?
Norm: Yeah, you might not even get a lot of traffic, but what you're getting are those links and you're going to rank on Google for this. I’d give you an example. So just like the press release I was telling you about just a second ago, we went out and we were looking at launching a press release 24 hours before this webinar. And by the time the webinar started, 279 keywords; ranked keyword phrases were ranked on Google, and 179 were on Page 1 and 131 were number one. Now there were a lot of horrible combinations, but there were some beautiful ones that's not true. And I'll give you an example, those people that are in the pet niche, Bully Stick. So Bully sticks launched Bully Sticks Amazon Number 1 and it lasted for quite some time.
Joe: I’m sorry to interrupt, an example of a webinar where you are talking about your product or helping people understand what to do with their pet in this case, the ultimate goal is to get more people to attend the webinar, isn't it?
Norm: Well, the webinar was just showing people about press releases.
Joe: Okay, I got you.
Norm: How it affects and so now going back…
Joe: But you had more people come to your webinar to show them about press releases because of the ranking system.
Norm: No, this was just another webinar. It was another webinar group that wanted to talk about launch and rank on Amazon.
Joe: I got you. Okay.
Norm: Anyways, if you do that you're going to start to see; if you do this once a month, you're going to start to see your brand more and more and more out there. You can start targeting more keywords. And so that's the brand side and that's just like listening to a radio ad. If you hear it once, you're only going to remember it slightly.
Joe: So for a company like Quiet Light Brokerage; I'm going to get selfish and I keep interrupting, I'm sorry. I’m going to get selfish on this Quiet Light Brokerage should we be doing a press release every time we sell a business, should we be doing a press release every time we publish a new podcast?
Norm: You should be doing more than that.
Joe: Okay, which should we be doing?
Norm: There is a way to get sort of a one-two punch and that's you create a blog article, you put that onto your website and this is for e-commerce as well, you talk about; now you write it as a blog article which is completely different than a press release. Press release has to have a newsworthy title, blog article are the five reasons why.
Joe: Okay.
Norm: So you launch the blog article first about what you just did, then you take the press release; you have the writer or whoever is doing this for you, link over to your blog article. So now the press release goes out and it's linking back to your website. It's linking back internal link over to your blog article. Google loves it because they love knowledge and education and it's a newsworthy item. They love it. And you've got the extra juice coming in from the blog article, which, again, it's not a sales-y blog article. It's talking about the five reasons why. So to give you an example for Amazon, you've got a natural, healthy, grass-fed bully sticks; keyword stuffing. Healthy, grass-fed, natural bully sticks provide nutritious snacks for elderly dogs. On your blog article, it's five reasons why bully sticks provide or why you should be feeding elderly dogs bully sticks or something along those lines; completely different angle. When you do that, you get a one-two punch.
Joe: It reminds me of link building really but you're getting organic or legitimate links that are related to the article that you're publishing and the information that you're sharing. Okay, so when it comes to the press release itself who writes them?
Norm: Usually most people try to get it on the cheap thing inaudible[00:20:34.1].
Joe: How do we; who writes it, when it's written well who writes it? Does your company have writers? I mean I've written an article. When I first launched my e-commerce business back in 2005, I wrote every article every month and they were just horrible until I had enough cash flow to hire a professional writer. I'm not going to write a good press release. So is that part of a service that's out there, do we have to find somebody on Fiverr or Upwork or something?
Norm: You could but usually the press release writers that you'll get are article writers who say that they can do press release. They don't understand how it works. So yeah we do have about 20 writers.
Joe: It's part of our service then as well.
Norm: Yeah, it's part of the service. If you do want to submit a press release that you've written we’ll distribute it for you. But if you do that, you want to make sure that your title is optimized. It's not the links; like there's a lot of press release and we have no links. It's the title. And if it's properly optimized, that's where you get about 80% of your ranking.
Joe: Okay.
Norm: Just in the title.
Joe: And when it gets to the companies that are out there that may pick it up, the news agencies, for instance, do they actually have human beings looking at these press releases and looking at the titles, or is there some sort of botnet scrapes and picks the ones that makes sense for them and whatever's newsworthy?
Norm: I'm pretty sure that it's just some sort of algorithm that allow them to; I mean they would be bombarded. There might be, I don't know. But if you're going over to some of the majors, I know that we get a lot of kickback whenever; for example, some people will try to sneak through a promotion. You're not allowed to promote so they'll have a delay on their website. So we capture their website and five seconds into it, 10% off will pop up. Well, that'll automatically get you kicked off of a lot of the majors out there. And it also depends on the category. So Amazon sellers have abused supplements so a lot of the premium networks are either it's hard to get a supplement published. You can, but you're going down to the second tier networks now. And you're seeing that with; oh, what's the other big one? It just happened. There are; like supplements is the biggie that we're getting kickbacks on right now and we've got other networks that we can use but because it's been abused, they're very cautious on them. And they're also cautious on like if you're doing a reverse mortgage like there's a whole list that you can see.
Joe: Okay, what type of microbrands work really well with PR? And I understand it's one part of the marketing department, so to speak, doing PRs but what kind of brands or micro brands work best?
Norm: Okay, so I'm going to back up a bit. We started talking about the branding side of e-com. Well, now let's talk about how the Amazon seller can use it to promote themselves. How can we get them to sell more and get recognized? And that's with multiple press releases during a very short period of time. So you've got a product. It doesn't matter what the product is. You put out multiple press releases. The press releases are linked back to rebates. So rebates are effective way right now for any Amazon seller to show momentum depending on the network, high-quality buyer score, it's very natural, verified purchase, and you can rank very quickly.
Joe: A rebate for those that are not as familiar as what in the Amazon world?
Norm: It’s a full purchase buy that you're buying either through a network or through an ad on Facebook or there's a lot of ways of setting it up but people are getting 100% free merchandise.
Joe: Okay.
Norm: And typically they'll be told, hey, go search this keyword. They go search the keyword, they buy the product, and then they get reimbursed somehow by either an Escrow account, PayPal account, or something like that but by doing that with the press releases, I find that the stickiness of the rank is probably double, if not triple.
Joe: Is the rebate talked about in the press release?
Norm: No. The rebate is done separately and then the keyword that's talked about or is being used in the rebate is in the press release.
Joe: Okay, so how do you avoid potential penalties from Amazon? That's kind of the search, find, buy methodology, that's against terms of services. How does this get played sort of above board to make sure that somebody’s seller account is not going to be suspended or shut down?
Norm: It's not against terms of service to provide the product. So I was at a conference and there were Amazon execs in there and we were talking about this before I did my presentation. So every brand does this type of promotion. Every single big brand does it. Amazon provides free products. So all we're doing is providing free product. We’re not talking telling them to go and leave a review. We're not telling them to do anything like that. They're just buying the product.
Joe: Okay. So they're searching for a keyword, they buy the product, they’re going to get 100% rebate on that purchase and they get to keep the product so it's kind of nice for those folks. But those particular purchases or the searches for that keywords is stickier and it helps the organic rankings inside of Amazon.
Norm: Yeah, and we've seen it. We've done it with a knife; a chef's knife, and we did three different ways. We did it with just rebates, rebates and press releases, and just press releases. Each time we got them to rank with each of them but the best by far was with rebates with press releases. And the reason why that also works, I think Amazon; I don't have the actual reason, but I think the reason it works is because Amazon loves the authority links that you get from a press release. So your press release is going to link back to your product listing. You're going to put your product listing in there and all of a sudden CNN is linking to it, Washington Post, Boston Herald, Miami Globe.
Joe: Can you give me an example of a keyword that somebody would be searching for in terms of Bully Sticks?
Norm: Yeah, sure, natural Bully Sticks. So in the press release we would have natural Bully Sticks, in the rebates we would tell people to go and type natural Bully Sticks. They would go see it and then they would buy it. Now, in the press release, we're talking about natural Bully Sticks and the natural Bully Sticks, that press release is linked back. There's one link that's going back to your Amazon product page. So as long as you have a link back to your Amazon product page, you're getting all these links from all the media companies. That's why that works.
Joe: Okay. All right on to the other question, which is are there any particular brands and categories that work best for press releases or certain types of press releases, or does it not really matter?
Norm: It really doesn't matter. If you're local, it works the best. If you want to geo-target something; again, it could go back to Amazon and they notice that there's lots of sales in areas around Fort Lauderdale that are under 350,000 people. You can target that press release by putting let's say natural Bully Sticks provide healthy digestion for elderly dogs in Fort; or not Fort Lauderdale but something that has some city that has under 350,000. If you do that, you can nail it. So you could do that with a chiropractor, you can do that with a lawyer, any service that's out there. If you've got a charity or you're trying to get the word out about something and it's in a specific area. Oh, it's golden, you'll be able to reach number one in all sorts of search terms very quickly.
Joe: Are you finding micro brands, when they launch new products, which hopefully they're doing on a regular basis to keep their business growing, is doing PR something that they should or can be doing with each product launch and it's going to help those keyword rank?
Norm: I talk about press releases and content marketing a lot and I'll go and I know there's one event that I went to, it was a small event. It was about 50 people. So we were saying that, hey, look at this, it’s what you can do. These are all smart people. Show them examples. Example after example what we were doing and how we achieved it. And I think one person took us up on the offer to get them going on a press release. And this is what I find is the norm. It's not the shiny object. It's not that app that everybody wants to talk about. So people forget about it and like we talked about just a second ago there's no one specific service or product. It really benefits everything. And the people that are doing it properly have always been doing it have always succeeded. The people that do it wrong and go for the cheap and just don't listen to the guidelines they do it wrong. They're the loudest. They’re the squeakiest wheel. New sellers or new businesses come online and they say oh press releases don't work. I didn't spend money on a company because it doesn't work.
Joe: You bought it because it works and it's profitable.
Norm: I bought it because I do it every single time and for the last 20 years, I've been using press releases.
Joe: And you're helping other Amazon entrepreneurs succeed as well. And so is the answer yes that when somebody is launching new products, that they should consistently do press releases or should they be doing is it yes and that they should just be doing press releases all the time.
Norm: Well, you're hitting; I say, yes, I'm a little biased because I want to build my brand. But if you're doing the product launch yes, of course, you do that with the rebates. And then you continually grow it if that's what you want to do. Like, let's say you're looking at natural Bully Sticks and you noticed that it starts to drop, you're in Helium10, the keyword drops. What do you do? You launch maybe a couple more rebates, maybe one press release until you see it come up again.
Joe: And that works well, consistently.
Norm: And we're talking about high eight-figure salaries that are using this technique that are working it all the time, they're maintaining it. So once the campaigns are done, they're watching it, maintaining it, and hitting the keywords when needed.
Joe: So if it's working for high eight-figure sellers, is it going to work for high five or six-figure sellers as well or seven-figure sellers?
Norm: As long as they use the formula and the formula is very simple. So, again, on a launch and rank, we can figure this out for you but if you go over and you use a tool like Helium10 and it gives you like the Cerebro module that they have you put in, it's called a reverse ASIN tool and you get the information, you take a look at buying keywords. It's not browse; I should explain that. Browsing keyword is like dog treat, dog chew. Pet owner doesn't know what they want but in Bully Sticks they know exactly what they want. The Bully Sticks is really high. There are 200,000 searches a month; hard to work with. But if you go to natural Bully Stick or organic Bully Stick, then you've got keywords that are manageable and you can start applying the rebates to. When you look at these; if you take a look at the giveaway side of it, you take about one-third of it. So in Helium10, there's a column that says giveaways. If it says 100 then do 33 and see what happens. And there is another trick to this and I don't want to overcomplicate it, but we take those keywords, natural Bully Stick, we call that a primary long tail and we create a silo from that. And let's say it says a thousand giveaways, which you probably would, we'll go and we'll take the natural Bully Stick, we'll put it in to find more. So again, in Helium, it's advanced filters. We put natural bullies. We hit apply and then we'll see every term, keyword term that has natural bully, six-inch natural bully, 12-inch natural bully. That way we only have to take a fraction of the amount that has natural bully in it. Those keywords, those long-tail keywords move up almost instantly and it bumps the natural Bully Stick primary.
Joe: Yeah. Then you're not spending as much PR dollars, I would imagine.
Norm: Not either.
Joe: Yeah, that's just what I used to do in my old paperclip days back when it used to cost 26 cents to rank on a keyword like colon cleanse, and by the time I was done inaudible[00:34:18.5]. Hell no, it’s probably $10 now. I sold it. Who knows? Yeah, there are different approaches for sure. Cost-wise, look, you're talking about eight-figure sellers doing this on a regular basis. They've got people that focused on keywords and look inside a Helium10 using Cerebro as you talked about. But for somebody that's really just starting out or somebody that; I recorded another podcast yesterday with somebody that had an exit and our original call was 24 months ago and I had to be the bearer of bad news, which is, listen your business is not worth what you think it is because it's trending down. You've got to hold on. You've got to fight here. And one of the things that they can potentially do is PR and fight. But if they're trending down and money's tight and they're worried about it, is this something that somebody can afford if they're doing a million dollars a year in revenue and they've got 15% to 20% profit margins?
Norm: Well, the first thing for any new seller is they've got to be properly capitalized. So if you're going into this, you have to understand what your marketing budget should be and you should be looking at it as jumping into it with two feet. If you're going into plastic shoe stretchers and you've done your research and you see that most of the plastic shoe stretcher people out, there are three-star reviews that they only can sell $3,000 a month that is probably not a good idea for you to do press releases and rebates. If you go into a competitive product or even a mid-search volume, I'm going into it with two feet and what the clincher is proper competitive analysis. Go and check out what your competitors are doing, see what the search volume is, and then you've got to do an investment. And I don't care if it's; like for us we do three things. This is off-topic, PPC, rebates and press release, and Amazon posts. If you're not doing those three, you're not optimizing your listing for your sales. So anyways then I have to jump into it with two feet. I don't have to spend cash that I have to use for groceries, but I can start by doing a smaller launch. You don't have to go in with 100,000 bucks. You can do a small launch, like maybe four press releases under a hundred, depending on the keyword, but under a hundred units and you're off to the races. And if you continue the momentum going, then you're going to be picking up. So here's what we do. We’d start off with main keywords. So if it's Bully Sticks and then we'll stray; I just did this one for carving knives or for Chef Knives. So we started out with Chef Knives, got them up like number one to number three, number one to number six for chef knife, kitchen knife then we spread it out the next month to sushi knives, carving knives and now we've got this really wide base. And over a period of one year and three months, we've got it rock solid. We've nailed it down for this company because we're constantly spreading and making it wide. Most new sellers, they look at going after the most competitive terms and they spend either on PPC or rebate's just through the nose they're bleeding money because they're just not doing it right. They've really got to know what they're doing. Now for press releases we let people go out and do their own rebates and go out and do their own press releases. And then they come back and they cry that it didn't work, this sucks. Well, let's take a look at your listing. If I had your listing on page one and we got you there and it's terrible and you've got iPhone photographs in your listing; everything is just its terrible. Then you're not doing; you're not winning the Brady bunch. If you can't win the Brady Bunch, which is beat your competitors, go out and use PickFu or whoever and do a split test then you're priming your listing to be optimized. And all what we're going to do with press releases and rebates is get you to the listing. We're going to get people to the listing.
Joe: Can you tell me about your onboarding process in terms of somebody that is thinking, okay look this guy Norm sounds really smart. I want to have all three prongs here and press release is one of them. Do you have an onboarding process for somebody that really has no experience in this whatsoever, what is it like?
Norm: We had to get that going because we were getting that type of experience. So we call it the AMZI concierge. So we'll go in, we'll do a complete listing on it and we'll tell you what you should improve. We can help you. We can help like with the manage listings. We can help with photography. But it's up to you. And then if we look at them there are many listings we look at and go oh, this is awesome. We'll let you know. But it's about a $300 cost and it's the best $300 you'll ever spend because at the end of it, we'll tell you no or we're going to give you the green light. And if we give you the green light, most of the time it works. It works well.
Joe: I got you. Okay, this has been great Norm, how do people learn more about PR Reach and that concierge service and reach out to you to get more information?
Norm: Well, first they have to spell the name right. There’s two R’s in it so it's PR Reach.
Joe: PR Reach.
Norm: Okay, so again I get people telling me that they’ve tried to reach me at Preach but PR Reach and you could reach me at Norm@PRReach and we’ll be; like the whole sales team, we've got an excellent sales team, great customer service. They'll reach out. They'll have an appointment. You get a free 30-minute call with them and they just go over everything just so you feel comfortable.
Joe: That’s great. All right.
Norm: And to make sure you're doing the right thing. Do you want brand, do you want launch? It just depends. And you don't have to be an Amazon seller, you could be that chiropractor that's looking for help.
Joe: Yeah, I think it's one arm of the marketing arms that somebody should be using instead of just one or two. It sounds like a great approach. I appreciate your time, Norm. I’m looking forward to having you back on the podcast again soon.
Norm: Hey, no problem. It's my pleasure.
Resources:
PR Reach
[email protected]
Quiet Light
[email protected]
