February 25, 2026 • 24 mins
Newsflash: Your Amazon growth doesn’t start on Amazon anymore.
In this solo episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff breaks down how TikTok, SEO, email, paid ads, and DTC traffic now fuel Amazon rankings, and how smart brands turn every channel into a unified growth engine. Learn how to scale profitably without relying on one platform.
What You’ll Learn:
- How off-Amazon marketing drives Amazon sales
- SEO and backlink strategies for listings
- Using Buy with Prime and DSP for growth
- Building platform-independent revenue
CONNECT WITH US
📱 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlueTuskr
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluetuskr/
📻 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bluetuskr/
🐤 X: https://twitter.com/bluetuskr
📧 Email: info@bluetuskr.com
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Andrew Maff (00:02):
You're going to have people that go to your
website and leave and go toAmazon, like it's just going to
happen almost all the time it'sgoing to happen. So allowing
them to just go ahead and dothat is is fine, because you're
really doing nothing butimproving the customer experience.
Narrator (00:15):
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host.
Andrew Maff, owner and founderof BlueTusker, from
groundbreaking industry updatesto success stories and
strategies, get to know the insand outs of the e Commerce
Industry from top leaders in thespace. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff (00:29):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E comm
show as usual. I am your host,Andrew Maff, and today I am
going to be running solo againbecause I wanted to talk to
everyone a little bit about offAmazon Marketing and how you can
use different elements from thatto grow your Amazon business, as
(00:49):
well as how you can use theAmazon business to grow your off
Amazon business. It's a littleconvoluted, but here's here's my
thought process, right?
So when you look at your averageconsumer, they have, especially
after covid, they learned how todo some serious due diligence on
their shopping habits. And sowhat that basically did is it
(01:10):
taught the average consumer,when you're seeing an
advertisement, you can learn alittle bit more about the
business before you make thepurchase, right? What they tend
to do? And let's say they starton Tiktok. They see an ad. They
like the ad, they go to theTiktok profile to see what this
business has been posting. Thisis often why we suggest you have
to make sure that you areactively posting on whichever
(01:33):
social media platform you'reutilizing, because they want to
know that you're not a scam, andthey just didn't get hit with a
random ad. Sometimes it can beargued to do the same on other
social media platforms, becausesome people like Tiktok and
Instagram pretty equally. Sothen they'll go to Instagram to
see what you post there. But ifthe ad is taking them to a
(01:54):
website, let's say a lot ofusers will actually leave the
website and go to Amazon. A, tosee if they can get your exact
same product at the exact sameprice, but a little bit faster,
or is it less expensive? Orthey'll just go there to learn
about your reviews. There's atheory, which I've seen my wife
do this verbatim, is usersbelieve that the reviews on your
(02:14):
DTC website can often bemanipulated, especially if you
have like, a flawless score. Ifyou've got like five stars
across the board, it's usuallybullshit. So they want to go
somewhere else where they knowyou can't control the reviews
and learn more about you fromthere. So they go over to
Amazon, they learn about it, andthen it depends. Then it's just
a price game, right? Sometimesit's a time game, but it's
(02:37):
typically a price game. So theuser has learned how to do all
this due diligence and a lotmore. And so one of the things
that that basically taught us todo is we have to make sure that
we understand that it's therising tides lift all boats
concept, right. Wherever you'readvertising, it's growing more
and more brand awareness andknowledge into your product
(02:57):
line, and is allowing theconsumer to understand that this
product exists, and if they wantit, they're going to go wherever
they're most comfortable to shopto get it. A lot of times,
that's Amazon, depending on thesituation, on your website, that
could be your website. Sobecause of this, if you're
running ads on Facebook andInstagram and Tiktok, or if
you're doing Pinterest orwhatever, no matter what you're
(03:20):
doing, it can really incentivizethem to go to Amazon as opposed
to your website, or vice versa.
There's definitely been somepeople that have been frequent
purchasers we've seen on Amazonfor certain brands, and then
they realize I'm becoming prettyloyal to this brand. Maybe I
should go to their website. No,they have a pop up, or 10% off
his discount, or maybe I gothere, just so that I can get
(03:41):
coupon codes all the time. Sothere's a dozen different
reasons that they would do it.
So because this user's customerjourney is becoming so fluid,
you have to make sure that yourmarketing pertains to that too,
pertains to that pertains. Isnot a word, I don't think.
But that's where you have tothen think, okay, how can I use
(04:02):
all of my different data points?
How can I built all theseassets? Right? I've built this
business on Amazon. I've builtthese ads on Amazon. I've built
these users coming to mylistings. I've built all this
information on Amazon, then onyour website. I've built all of
this organic traffic, I've builtall these social media
followers, I've built this emaillist. You've you've developed
all of these assets, and thequestion becomes, how do you
(04:25):
leverage those assets? That'swhere it becomes very
interesting. So first I want totalk about how you can grow your
Amazon business, leveraging offAmazon Marketing Strategies. And
there's some standard ones,right? Yeah, you can run an
email and send people straightto Amazon. Done. You can run
Google ads and meta ads, Tiktokads, or whatever, send them
straight to Amazon. Easy.
(04:47):
There's a few that it gets alittle convoluted, and that's
kind of what I wanted to talkabout today, the ones that
aren't as obvious. And then I'mgoing to talk to you about doing
the vice versa. The reason I'mgonna talk about the Amazon one
first is because. I know mostpeople listen this podcast or
Amazon sellers, and then theyalso have a D to C site, and
they tend to look at themsiloed, individual sales channels.
(05:10):
I like to look at them a littlebit more holistically, because
if you look at and I know I dida podcast about this, I think,
last month, where I like to lookat ad spend across all sales
channels, and then start tobreak it down, because it helps
me paint the picture of how muchnet new customers am I building
on any of these sales channels,how much brand awareness Am I
(05:32):
developing on any of these saleschannels. But let's talk about
the marketing side, right? Sothe first one I want to talk
about the SEO side. I know I dida podcast on this, I think a
couple months ago, probably oneof my favorite topics to talk
about. So if this interests you,I would highly suggest going
over there and checking it out,but leveraging traditional SEO
(05:53):
strategies to grow your Amazon business.
So every high level to make thisrelatively quick for you, every
website has a domain authority.
Amazon's is effectively perfectat 100 right? Every page,
though, has its own pageauthority. And when you first
launch a page, it starts offwith its own page authority. And
so if you have a website withlike, a 20 domain authority, and
you launch a new site on, I'msorry, you launch a new page on
(06:15):
this website, it's going to takeyou a little while to get a
tolerable page authority,because your domain is only
going to allow you to go so far.
Amazon's is effectively perfect.
So when you launch a newproduct, it can start to rank
relatively quickly, but youstill have to give it some love
to get it up there and get ithighly, more highly ranked. So
what you have to look at astraditional SEO approaches, but
(06:36):
target them towards your Amazonlistings. So backlinking,
getting backlinks to your Amazonlisting is fantastic if you're
doing affiliate marketing andthey're linking on a blog or
something that's already acheckbox, but you can do
traditional backlinks. You canhelp create content, or do guest
posts, or even create your ownblog and actually make sure that
you're linking back to Amazon,and the more and more backlinks
(06:59):
that you grow, and the more andmore content that you're
developing, the more thatlisting is going to start to
rank better on Google. And then,as you know, if it ranks well on
Google, you're getting up to,let's say, page one in a perfect
world, and you're in positionone in a perfect world, you're
now getting all this organictraffic to your Amazon listing.
And there is nothing Amazonloves than off Amazon traffic.
(07:21):
And the more that that's comingin, for an audience that already
has a high intent, they're morelikely to purchase, which means
your conversion rate is going tobe high, which means not only
you're going to get morerevenue, but your BSR is going
to improve.
You can do this same thing withPR elements, listicles, things
like that. Anything you can doto start getting your product
(07:43):
even mentioned, or your brandname even mentioned, you're
starting to go and see more andmore improvements on Amazon,
even though you're doing offAmazon Marketing from that all
the llms, your Chatgpts of theworld. It's the same thing. The
thing that they really look forwhen you ask, like, hey, what's
the best of this type of thingis backlinks, because it's
proving that people arereferencing you more and more,
(08:06):
and then just mentions, justgeneral mentions, even if it's
not linked to you, people thatare talking about your brand
name. Is fantastic. LL ChatGPTused to lean in really heavily
on Reddit, and it's not doing itas much anymore, but so was
Google. Google was reallyleaning in heavy on it, but not
as much anymore, but they'restill referencing people's
opinions outside of just fact orstuff that maybe you made on
(08:28):
other people's websites. So froman SEO perspective, that's
easily one of my favoritestrategies. There's some other
things you can do in there whereyou can use like Google ads to
drive traffic to a blog page, toget the blog page to rank really
well for a certain keyword, andthen you make sure that your
Amazon listing is in that blogand the keyword, it's linked for
(08:49):
that keyword that you're tryingto target, and that really helps
your listing over to like,there's some, like, convoluted
stuff that, like, my SEO teamwould have to, like, really take
that explain better. Maybe I'llbring them on the show next
time, but that's a strategy thatI absolutely love.
Paid advertising side. Thisone's a little hit or miss.
There are companies out therethat claim that they can track
(09:12):
sales coming from Amazon anddirectly attribute them back to
things like Google and Meta I'mcalling bullshit. I've seen
them, and it's usually like, not100% accurate. And I like, I
don't really like things thatare 100% accurate. So the issue
with running Google ads and metaads is you're running those ads
directly to your Amazon listing,and the only thing that you can
(09:35):
do, because Amazon doesn't talkback to those platforms. Is
optimized for maximize clicks orin for Meta. It's like landing
page views or link clicks,right? The problem is, is that
basically tells both platformsget me as much of people that
are willing to click on shit,and that's it. So not
necessarily more likely toconvert and what that does is
(09:57):
that drives a lot of traffic toyour listing, which is great,
but typically unqualifiedtraffic, so it's just tanks your
conversion rate, which obviouslyis going to tank overall sell
through, and so your BSRactually starts to fall. So you
can have the opposite problem.
Now there are some scenarioswhere you can get a little bit
more, a little bit more creativewith it, where you can create a
(10:20):
landing page, send them alanding page first, and have
them educate themselves there,and then have the conversion be
a button click over to, let'ssay, an available on Amazon,
button that then sends them toAmazon. And obviously, if you're
using the affiliate link, youcan track that so you so it's,
it's nice, and it's betterbecause you can track it through
(10:42):
the affiliate link. But thatdata is still not kicking back,
so it's still not perfect, but Ido, I do like it. I prefer to do
that actually on DTC sites. Iknow it's if you're, if you are
really sick and tired of Amazon,and you're trying to grow your
actual like DTC, your own ecommerce website business. You
you will hate this idea, but Ipromise you, it works really
(11:05):
well, putting an available onAmazon button on your PDP, and
allowing people to just gostraight to Amazon if that's
what they want to do. I know youhate it, but a you set up the
affiliate link so you get the10% commission on it. It's not
entirely trackable, which ispart of the problem, but you can
put an event code on it, and soit helps a little bit.
Narrator (11:29):
Is your E commerce business experiencing falling
revenue. Bluetusker has helpedmany brands like yours excel.
Unlike other marketing partners,bluetusker leverages a team of
specialists to ensure everystrategy is created and executed
toward your business growth. Asan extension of your marketing
team. Bluetusker prides itselfon helping to fill in the gaps
and develop strong omni channelstrategies to diversify your
(11:52):
business from the rest. Ready toscale your marketing
initiatives? Visit theirwebsite. Bluetusker.com, that's
B, l, u, e, t, u, s, k, r.com.
Andrew Maff (12:02):
You're going to have people that go to your
website and leave and go toAmazon like it's just going to
happen almost all the time. It'sgoing to happen. So allowing
them to just go ahead and dothat is is fine, because you're
really doing nothing butimproving the customer
experience. Plus then they'renot going to Amazon searching
for you and then actuallyfinding some competition that
(12:23):
maybe was better priced and nowyou lost them, right? Or the Buy
with prime side. I also love theBuy with prime side, because you
get to keep all that data thatobviously helped, that does help
grow. So this is actuallysomething, by the way, I learned
this, unfortunately, toorecently. This was in September.
I spoke at Innovate, did alittle bit of a presentation
(12:44):
around something similar tothis, and talked about some buy
with prime stuff, and one of theBuy with prime reps pulled me
aside after the show and go,actually, that's not entirely
true. It's like, oh, cool,great. I lied to everyone. But
basically, I've always said thatone of the biggest problems with
buy with prime is that itdoesn't it doesn't affect your
(13:04):
ranking on Amazon. So what'svery interesting is the Buy with
prime team on Amazon is veryseparated from, like pretty much
other teams. So like people thatare involved in how the
algorithm runs and things likethat, they have, they don't even
know to begin on how to cut, howto get in touch with them. So
the interesting thing is, therethey ran a bunch of tests, and
(13:25):
they can't say for sure, becausethey would just, obviously,
there's no proof behind it. Butthey ran a bunch of tests, and
in almost every instance, forthe most part, they saw brands
really leveraging buy withprime, saw improved bsrs on
Amazon only because the theoryis, on Amazon, you're obviously
fulfilling at FBA in thatscenario. If you have buy with
(13:45):
prime and because you're seeingmore sell through, that's all
the the algorithm likes to see.
So it's improving your BSR overtime because you're getting more
sell through. So there's anargument for buy with prime to
actually also improve yourAmazon business as well. Email
is another great one. I loveemail. I think that sometimes
giving, depending on thesituation, giving users the
(14:05):
ability to go to either yourwebsite or Amazon is another
fantastic way. You can also lookat how you can generate emails
through Meta and then just havea newsletter. And do it that way
if you don't want to have, ifyou don't want to have a
website, which I don'trecommend. I recommend. There's
really like, there's countlessways to do it, and if you start
to look at it, the strugglealways becomes, and it's always
(14:29):
the biggest issue I have withhaving this conversation with
brands is unless you're willingto look at your entire business
holistically, these strategiesare very difficult to prove
right, because you're sendingthe traffic to Amazon, and then
you have the black box ofAmazon. You could use affiliate
links, but they're glorified UTMcodes, so those things break.
(14:49):
People start shopping on theirwebs, on their phone, then they
move to desktop. Like it's notperfect, but it can work really
well in some scenarios.
So every brand is different.
Every product is different. Someproducts require a ton of
education, and sometimes thesales cycles on them a little
bit longer. So it's not alwaysthe best approach, but I
digress, I still think that itcan be a fantastic way.
(15:12):
Realistically, there's almostanything right, like there's we
work with brands now where theywill do really big sales on
Amazon, and we'll use their Metaads. We'll use Google Ads pop
ups on their website. We'll useemail and tell people like, hey,
go if you want this go to Amazonand buy it, because we're having
a big sale there. Helps fromsell through perspective,
sometimes that they've got toomuch stock or anything, but
(15:35):
that's one of my favorite waysto kind of look at like, how can
we use all of the assets thatyou've developed to grow the
business, wherever we need to atthat time. You could have too
much stock at FBA. Let's push itthere. You could have a new
product you launched on Amazon.
Let's push everyone there first,because then new product
launches are fantastic. You getthat snowball effect. Things
(15:58):
work out fantastically. Sothere's a lot of different
directions in how you can kindof use your off Amazon Marketing
to grow on Amazon.
Now, I kind of want to look atit the other way though, right?
Because this is always the bigquestion you end up with. You
end up with these brands thatare just tired of Amazon, right?
Like competitions getting wild.
It's a lot of overseas sellers,at least in the US, so you end
(16:21):
up with basically a race to thebottom that, like, frankly, like
a lot of brands just can't do.
And so they have to look at, howdo I grow my business from an
off Amazon perspective? And soI'm not so reliant on this. I
think that there's a lot ofbackdoor ways to still grow your
Amazon because checkout isseamless. It's so easy for
(16:43):
people to just hit a button andcheck out on Amazon, so That's
often why people like it aswell, because it's quick and
painless. So the question is,can your website do the same?
But there are ways to grow youroff Amazon business, leveraging
Amazon's own data, and some ofthem are gray areas TOS may not
be a fan of what I'm going tosay in some scenarios, some of
(17:06):
them are completely white hat,and Amazon encourages it. One of
the things that's always a grayarea is the concept of doing
inserts in your products. I likethem. I've never seen anyone get
flagged for them. There's kindof some things that you have to
do to make sure that you don'tget flagged for them. But I'd be
lying if I didn't tell you,probably two in every five boxes
(17:30):
that show up to my house havesome type of insert in them, and
they're still shipping. I thinkthat Amazon frowns upon it. But
if it's inside your package,it's effectively part of the
product. And so if you'reencouraging people to register
their product on your website,or you're encouraging them to
come back to your website to getX percent off next time, that's
(17:52):
a fantastic way to use Amazon asmore of a customer acquisition channel.
The other side of it is a lotmore white hat, and this is my
favorite. But I actually justspoke with my Amazon rep
yesterday, actually about this.
It's, it's leveraging DSP. So ifyou have, if you, if you use
MCF, even if you just use it forone product, handful of
products, whatever, or if youbuy with prime and same thing,
(18:15):
one product, handful ofproducts. Amazon allows you to
run ads from Amazon back to yourwebsite. So don't think about
like, okay, I can use all ofAmazon's data to run ads.
Because while that soundsfantastic, that's a huge
audience, and you don't entirelyknow their intent. You can
figure that out within DSP, butI like to stay let's go low
(18:36):
hanging fruit. Let's go afterthe obvious. Let's go after your
customers, people that purchaseyou on Amazon. Let's wait 30
days, run ads to them and tellthem to go back to your website
for the next round. Or maybethey bought something and you
can upsell them on somethingthat you don't sell on Amazon on
your website. Or, you know,maybe you, maybe you don't want
(18:58):
to buy anything, maybe you wantto encourage them to register
for something. There's, there'sso many options, right? You can
do it for your competitors too.
So they bought with yourcompetitor, or they visited your
listing and didn't convert.
Like, stay middle of funnel.
Focus on that audience goingback to your website, and is a
(19:21):
fantastic way to use Amazon as acustomer acquisition channel and
incentivize people to shop withyou on your website for the next
time, or at least give you theirinformation so you can start to
earn your data back from Amazon.
The issue with this was what Ispoke to my rep about, was like
Amazon, uh, by the way, and ifanyone wants this, let me know,
MCF, DS, MCF, and buy withprime. Even if you try it for a
(19:44):
while and you don't, you don'thave to keep it. They will give
you a $20,000 ad spend credit,but it's matching on DSP, so a
lot of people. People like,their ears perk up and they're
like, Whoa. You're going to giveme 20 grand to do this, yes, but
you got to spend 20 grand on DSPto do it. And if you ever run
ads on DSP before, you'retypically, most brands are just
(20:07):
they're not playing in thestreaming world as much as I
think they should. And sotypically they're mostly display
ads, and those can be kind ofhit or miss. So they have to be
creatives got to be flawless,otherwise it's going to suck. So
you got to work with a reallytalented agency plug.
(20:29):
So you got to work with someonethat, like really knows how to
do it correctly, to get it towork well. And I think that not
as many people have adopted DSPnearly as much as Amazon would
like them to. Maybe that's whythey're doing the matching
credit, I don't know, but I loveit. I think it's a fantastic
process. I love the idea of Ilove the idea of not being so
(20:49):
reliant on Amazon, but I alsohate the idea of Amazon not
existing because I think it's afantastic customer acquisition
channel. So the questionbecomes, how do you leverage
your assets from an off Amazonperspective to grow on Amazon,
and how do you leverage theassets that you have on Amazon
to grow off Amazon? And then areyou willing to look at your
business from a more holisticperspective and looking at your
(21:13):
overall revenue? Because at theend of the day, it matters how
much money is in your bankaccount, and you're not going to
tell me, okay, that dollar camefrom Amazon, that dollar came
from Walmart, that dollar cameNo, you're gonna look at one big
fat number in your in your bankaccount, and you're gonna be
like, awesome. So that's all yougot to do. That's, that's my
(21:33):
thought process around bothAmazon and off Amazon and how
they can work together. Because,you know, you get brands that
are solely DTC, and they kind ofwant to get onto the Amazon
train, but they're a littleworried about it, but I think
that there's a correct way to doit. And then you have brands
that are on the Amazon train andthey want to get into E
(21:53):
commerce, so they're not soreliant on Amazon's ridiculous
crap that happens all the time,but like, it's a different
world. It is. It is twodifferent worlds that when they
work together, it can befantastic for brands, but you
have to make sure that, not onlyfrom a marketing perspective,
but from a fulfillmentperspective, you have everything
cohesive so it can all be donecorrectly. Another thing that
(22:16):
you can do which is relativelysimilar, MCF, will fulfill
directly at a Tiktok. So if you,even if you don't want to build
your own ecommerce website justyet, you can start selling on
Tiktok and just have Amazon doall the fulfillment. So if
you're shoving stuff into FBA,you can do the exact same thing.
Let Amazon ship it all out andlean in on Tiktok. And it's a
(22:37):
great way for you to, like, kindof test out the off Amazon world
and see how it does for you, andif audiences are willing to be
interested in your product, ifyou only do it that way, you're
kind of limiting yourself tojust the audience on Tiktok,
which I don't care what anyonesays, it's still the people that
are pulling the trigger on salestip or on any purchases are
(22:58):
typically still younger andthey're usually lower price
point stuff. Yeah, but that wasa that was my my rant for today.
That's my theories on on Amazon,off Amazon, and how you can
benefit both worlds as usual.
Thank you all so much forjoining me. Please do the usual
rate review, subscribe all thatfun stuff, or head over to the
ecom show.com to check out allof our previous episodes. But
(23:18):
usual. Thank you all for joiningand I'll see you next time. Have
a good one!
Narrator (23:24):
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over
to Ecommshow.com to subscribe onyour favorite podcast platform
or on the BlueTuskr YouTubechannel. The E comm show is
brought to you by BlueTuskr, afull service digital marketing
company specifically for Ecommerce, sellers looking to
(23:47):
accelerate their growth, go toBlue tusker.com now for more
information. Make sure to tunein next week for another amazing
episode of the E comm show you. The.
You're going to have people that go to your
website and leave and go toAmazon, like it's just going to
happen almost all the time it'sgoing to happen. So allowing
them to just go ahead and dothat is is fine, because you're
really doing nothing butimproving the customer experience.
Narrator (00:15):
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host.
Andrew Maff, owner and founderof BlueTusker, from
groundbreaking industry updatesto success stories and
strategies, get to know the insand outs of the e Commerce
Industry from top leaders in thespace. Let's get into it!
Andrew Maff (00:29):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E comm
show as usual. I am your host,Andrew Maff, and today I am
going to be running solo againbecause I wanted to talk to
everyone a little bit about offAmazon Marketing and how you can
use different elements from thatto grow your Amazon business, as
(00:49):
well as how you can use theAmazon business to grow your off
Amazon business. It's a littleconvoluted, but here's here's my
thought process, right?
So when you look at your averageconsumer, they have, especially
after covid, they learned how todo some serious due diligence on
their shopping habits. And sowhat that basically did is it
(01:10):
taught the average consumer,when you're seeing an
advertisement, you can learn alittle bit more about the
business before you make thepurchase, right? What they tend
to do? And let's say they starton Tiktok. They see an ad. They
like the ad, they go to theTiktok profile to see what this
business has been posting. Thisis often why we suggest you have
to make sure that you areactively posting on whichever
(01:33):
social media platform you'reutilizing, because they want to
know that you're not a scam, andthey just didn't get hit with a
random ad. Sometimes it can beargued to do the same on other
social media platforms, becausesome people like Tiktok and
Instagram pretty equally. Sothen they'll go to Instagram to
see what you post there. But ifthe ad is taking them to a
(01:54):
website, let's say a lot ofusers will actually leave the
website and go to Amazon. A, tosee if they can get your exact
same product at the exact sameprice, but a little bit faster,
or is it less expensive? Orthey'll just go there to learn
about your reviews. There's atheory, which I've seen my wife
do this verbatim, is usersbelieve that the reviews on your
(02:14):
DTC website can often bemanipulated, especially if you
have like, a flawless score. Ifyou've got like five stars
across the board, it's usuallybullshit. So they want to go
somewhere else where they knowyou can't control the reviews
and learn more about you fromthere. So they go over to
Amazon, they learn about it, andthen it depends. Then it's just
a price game, right? Sometimesit's a time game, but it's
(02:37):
typically a price game. So theuser has learned how to do all
this due diligence and a lotmore. And so one of the things
that that basically taught us todo is we have to make sure that
we understand that it's therising tides lift all boats
concept, right. Wherever you'readvertising, it's growing more
and more brand awareness andknowledge into your product
(02:57):
line, and is allowing theconsumer to understand that this
product exists, and if they wantit, they're going to go wherever
they're most comfortable to shopto get it. A lot of times,
that's Amazon, depending on thesituation, on your website, that
could be your website. Sobecause of this, if you're
running ads on Facebook andInstagram and Tiktok, or if
you're doing Pinterest orwhatever, no matter what you're
(03:20):
doing, it can really incentivizethem to go to Amazon as opposed
to your website, or vice versa.
There's definitely been somepeople that have been frequent
purchasers we've seen on Amazonfor certain brands, and then
they realize I'm becoming prettyloyal to this brand. Maybe I
should go to their website. No,they have a pop up, or 10% off
his discount, or maybe I gothere, just so that I can get
(03:41):
coupon codes all the time. Sothere's a dozen different
reasons that they would do it.
So because this user's customerjourney is becoming so fluid,
you have to make sure that yourmarketing pertains to that too,
pertains to that pertains. Isnot a word, I don't think.
But that's where you have tothen think, okay, how can I use
(04:02):
all of my different data points?
How can I built all theseassets? Right? I've built this
business on Amazon. I've builtthese ads on Amazon. I've built
these users coming to mylistings. I've built all this
information on Amazon, then onyour website. I've built all of
this organic traffic, I've builtall these social media
followers, I've built this emaillist. You've you've developed
all of these assets, and thequestion becomes, how do you
(04:25):
leverage those assets? That'swhere it becomes very
interesting. So first I want totalk about how you can grow your
Amazon business, leveraging offAmazon Marketing Strategies. And
there's some standard ones,right? Yeah, you can run an
email and send people straightto Amazon. Done. You can run
Google ads and meta ads, Tiktokads, or whatever, send them
straight to Amazon. Easy.
(04:47):
There's a few that it gets alittle convoluted, and that's
kind of what I wanted to talkabout today, the ones that
aren't as obvious. And then I'mgoing to talk to you about doing
the vice versa. The reason I'mgonna talk about the Amazon one
first is because. I know mostpeople listen this podcast or
Amazon sellers, and then theyalso have a D to C site, and
they tend to look at themsiloed, individual sales channels.
(05:10):
I like to look at them a littlebit more holistically, because
if you look at and I know I dida podcast about this, I think,
last month, where I like to lookat ad spend across all sales
channels, and then start tobreak it down, because it helps
me paint the picture of how muchnet new customers am I building
on any of these sales channels,how much brand awareness Am I
(05:32):
developing on any of these saleschannels. But let's talk about
the marketing side, right? Sothe first one I want to talk
about the SEO side. I know I dida podcast on this, I think a
couple months ago, probably oneof my favorite topics to talk
about. So if this interests you,I would highly suggest going
over there and checking it out,but leveraging traditional SEO
(05:53):
strategies to grow your Amazon business.
So every high level to make thisrelatively quick for you, every
website has a domain authority.
Amazon's is effectively perfectat 100 right? Every page,
though, has its own pageauthority. And when you first
launch a page, it starts offwith its own page authority. And
so if you have a website withlike, a 20 domain authority, and
you launch a new site on, I'msorry, you launch a new page on
(06:15):
this website, it's going to takeyou a little while to get a
tolerable page authority,because your domain is only
going to allow you to go so far.
Amazon's is effectively perfect.
So when you launch a newproduct, it can start to rank
relatively quickly, but youstill have to give it some love
to get it up there and get ithighly, more highly ranked. So
what you have to look at astraditional SEO approaches, but
(06:36):
target them towards your Amazonlistings. So backlinking,
getting backlinks to your Amazonlisting is fantastic if you're
doing affiliate marketing andthey're linking on a blog or
something that's already acheckbox, but you can do
traditional backlinks. You canhelp create content, or do guest
posts, or even create your ownblog and actually make sure that
you're linking back to Amazon,and the more and more backlinks
(06:59):
that you grow, and the more andmore content that you're
developing, the more thatlisting is going to start to
rank better on Google. And then,as you know, if it ranks well on
Google, you're getting up to,let's say, page one in a perfect
world, and you're in positionone in a perfect world, you're
now getting all this organictraffic to your Amazon listing.
And there is nothing Amazonloves than off Amazon traffic.
(07:21):
And the more that that's comingin, for an audience that already
has a high intent, they're morelikely to purchase, which means
your conversion rate is going tobe high, which means not only
you're going to get morerevenue, but your BSR is going
to improve.
You can do this same thing withPR elements, listicles, things
like that. Anything you can doto start getting your product
(07:43):
even mentioned, or your brandname even mentioned, you're
starting to go and see more andmore improvements on Amazon,
even though you're doing offAmazon Marketing from that all
the llms, your Chatgpts of theworld. It's the same thing. The
thing that they really look forwhen you ask, like, hey, what's
the best of this type of thingis backlinks, because it's
proving that people arereferencing you more and more,
(08:06):
and then just mentions, justgeneral mentions, even if it's
not linked to you, people thatare talking about your brand
name. Is fantastic. LL ChatGPTused to lean in really heavily
on Reddit, and it's not doing itas much anymore, but so was
Google. Google was reallyleaning in heavy on it, but not
as much anymore, but they'restill referencing people's
opinions outside of just fact orstuff that maybe you made on
(08:28):
other people's websites. So froman SEO perspective, that's
easily one of my favoritestrategies. There's some other
things you can do in there whereyou can use like Google ads to
drive traffic to a blog page, toget the blog page to rank really
well for a certain keyword, andthen you make sure that your
Amazon listing is in that blogand the keyword, it's linked for
(08:49):
that keyword that you're tryingto target, and that really helps
your listing over to like,there's some, like, convoluted
stuff that, like, my SEO teamwould have to, like, really take
that explain better. Maybe I'llbring them on the show next
time, but that's a strategy thatI absolutely love.
Paid advertising side. Thisone's a little hit or miss.
There are companies out therethat claim that they can track
(09:12):
sales coming from Amazon anddirectly attribute them back to
things like Google and Meta I'mcalling bullshit. I've seen
them, and it's usually like, not100% accurate. And I like, I
don't really like things thatare 100% accurate. So the issue
with running Google ads and metaads is you're running those ads
directly to your Amazon listing,and the only thing that you can
(09:35):
do, because Amazon doesn't talkback to those platforms. Is
optimized for maximize clicks orin for Meta. It's like landing
page views or link clicks,right? The problem is, is that
basically tells both platformsget me as much of people that
are willing to click on shit,and that's it. So not
necessarily more likely toconvert and what that does is
(09:57):
that drives a lot of traffic toyour listing, which is great,
but typically unqualifiedtraffic, so it's just tanks your
conversion rate, which obviouslyis going to tank overall sell
through, and so your BSRactually starts to fall. So you
can have the opposite problem.
Now there are some scenarioswhere you can get a little bit
more, a little bit more creativewith it, where you can create a
(10:20):
landing page, send them alanding page first, and have
them educate themselves there,and then have the conversion be
a button click over to, let'ssay, an available on Amazon,
button that then sends them toAmazon. And obviously, if you're
using the affiliate link, youcan track that so you so it's,
it's nice, and it's betterbecause you can track it through
(10:42):
the affiliate link. But thatdata is still not kicking back,
so it's still not perfect, but Ido, I do like it. I prefer to do
that actually on DTC sites. Iknow it's if you're, if you are
really sick and tired of Amazon,and you're trying to grow your
actual like DTC, your own ecommerce website business. You
you will hate this idea, but Ipromise you, it works really
(11:05):
well, putting an available onAmazon button on your PDP, and
allowing people to just gostraight to Amazon if that's
what they want to do. I know youhate it, but a you set up the
affiliate link so you get the10% commission on it. It's not
entirely trackable, which ispart of the problem, but you can
put an event code on it, and soit helps a little bit.
Narrator (11:29):
Is your E commerce business experiencing falling
revenue. Bluetusker has helpedmany brands like yours excel.
Unlike other marketing partners,bluetusker leverages a team of
specialists to ensure everystrategy is created and executed
toward your business growth. Asan extension of your marketing
team. Bluetusker prides itselfon helping to fill in the gaps
and develop strong omni channelstrategies to diversify your
(11:52):
business from the rest. Ready toscale your marketing
initiatives? Visit theirwebsite. Bluetusker.com, that's
B, l, u, e, t, u, s, k, r.com.
Andrew Maff (12:02):
You're going to have people that go to your
website and leave and go toAmazon like it's just going to
happen almost all the time. It'sgoing to happen. So allowing
them to just go ahead and dothat is is fine, because you're
really doing nothing butimproving the customer
experience. Plus then they'renot going to Amazon searching
for you and then actuallyfinding some competition that
(12:23):
maybe was better priced and nowyou lost them, right? Or the Buy
with prime side. I also love theBuy with prime side, because you
get to keep all that data thatobviously helped, that does help
grow. So this is actuallysomething, by the way, I learned
this, unfortunately, toorecently. This was in September.
I spoke at Innovate, did alittle bit of a presentation
(12:44):
around something similar tothis, and talked about some buy
with prime stuff, and one of theBuy with prime reps pulled me
aside after the show and go,actually, that's not entirely
true. It's like, oh, cool,great. I lied to everyone. But
basically, I've always said thatone of the biggest problems with
buy with prime is that itdoesn't it doesn't affect your
(13:04):
ranking on Amazon. So what'svery interesting is the Buy with
prime team on Amazon is veryseparated from, like pretty much
other teams. So like people thatare involved in how the
algorithm runs and things likethat, they have, they don't even
know to begin on how to cut, howto get in touch with them. So
the interesting thing is, therethey ran a bunch of tests, and
(13:25):
they can't say for sure, becausethey would just, obviously,
there's no proof behind it. Butthey ran a bunch of tests, and
in almost every instance, forthe most part, they saw brands
really leveraging buy withprime, saw improved bsrs on
Amazon only because the theoryis, on Amazon, you're obviously
fulfilling at FBA in thatscenario. If you have buy with
(13:45):
prime and because you're seeingmore sell through, that's all
the the algorithm likes to see.
So it's improving your BSR overtime because you're getting more
sell through. So there's anargument for buy with prime to
actually also improve yourAmazon business as well. Email
is another great one. I loveemail. I think that sometimes
giving, depending on thesituation, giving users the
(14:05):
ability to go to either yourwebsite or Amazon is another
fantastic way. You can also lookat how you can generate emails
through Meta and then just havea newsletter. And do it that way
if you don't want to have, ifyou don't want to have a
website, which I don'trecommend. I recommend. There's
really like, there's countlessways to do it, and if you start
to look at it, the strugglealways becomes, and it's always
(14:29):
the biggest issue I have withhaving this conversation with
brands is unless you're willingto look at your entire business
holistically, these strategiesare very difficult to prove
right, because you're sendingthe traffic to Amazon, and then
you have the black box ofAmazon. You could use affiliate
links, but they're glorified UTMcodes, so those things break.
(14:49):
People start shopping on theirwebs, on their phone, then they
move to desktop. Like it's notperfect, but it can work really
well in some scenarios.
So every brand is different.
Every product is different. Someproducts require a ton of
education, and sometimes thesales cycles on them a little
bit longer. So it's not alwaysthe best approach, but I
digress, I still think that itcan be a fantastic way.
(15:12):
Realistically, there's almostanything right, like there's we
work with brands now where theywill do really big sales on
Amazon, and we'll use their Metaads. We'll use Google Ads pop
ups on their website. We'll useemail and tell people like, hey,
go if you want this go to Amazonand buy it, because we're having
a big sale there. Helps fromsell through perspective,
sometimes that they've got toomuch stock or anything, but
(15:35):
that's one of my favorite waysto kind of look at like, how can
we use all of the assets thatyou've developed to grow the
business, wherever we need to atthat time. You could have too
much stock at FBA. Let's push itthere. You could have a new
product you launched on Amazon.
Let's push everyone there first,because then new product
launches are fantastic. You getthat snowball effect. Things
(15:58):
work out fantastically. Sothere's a lot of different
directions in how you can kindof use your off Amazon Marketing
to grow on Amazon.
Now, I kind of want to look atit the other way though, right?
Because this is always the bigquestion you end up with. You
end up with these brands thatare just tired of Amazon, right?
Like competitions getting wild.
It's a lot of overseas sellers,at least in the US, so you end
(16:21):
up with basically a race to thebottom that, like, frankly, like
a lot of brands just can't do.
And so they have to look at, howdo I grow my business from an
off Amazon perspective? And soI'm not so reliant on this. I
think that there's a lot ofbackdoor ways to still grow your
Amazon because checkout isseamless. It's so easy for
(16:43):
people to just hit a button andcheck out on Amazon, so That's
often why people like it aswell, because it's quick and
painless. So the question is,can your website do the same?
But there are ways to grow youroff Amazon business, leveraging
Amazon's own data, and some ofthem are gray areas TOS may not
be a fan of what I'm going tosay in some scenarios, some of
(17:06):
them are completely white hat,and Amazon encourages it. One of
the things that's always a grayarea is the concept of doing
inserts in your products. I likethem. I've never seen anyone get
flagged for them. There's kindof some things that you have to
do to make sure that you don'tget flagged for them. But I'd be
lying if I didn't tell you,probably two in every five boxes
(17:30):
that show up to my house havesome type of insert in them, and
they're still shipping. I thinkthat Amazon frowns upon it. But
if it's inside your package,it's effectively part of the
product. And so if you'reencouraging people to register
their product on your website,or you're encouraging them to
come back to your website to getX percent off next time, that's
(17:52):
a fantastic way to use Amazon asmore of a customer acquisition channel.
The other side of it is a lotmore white hat, and this is my
favorite. But I actually justspoke with my Amazon rep
yesterday, actually about this.
It's, it's leveraging DSP. So ifyou have, if you, if you use
MCF, even if you just use it forone product, handful of
products, whatever, or if youbuy with prime and same thing,
(18:15):
one product, handful ofproducts. Amazon allows you to
run ads from Amazon back to yourwebsite. So don't think about
like, okay, I can use all ofAmazon's data to run ads.
Because while that soundsfantastic, that's a huge
audience, and you don't entirelyknow their intent. You can
figure that out within DSP, butI like to stay let's go low
(18:36):
hanging fruit. Let's go afterthe obvious. Let's go after your
customers, people that purchaseyou on Amazon. Let's wait 30
days, run ads to them and tellthem to go back to your website
for the next round. Or maybethey bought something and you
can upsell them on somethingthat you don't sell on Amazon on
your website. Or, you know,maybe you, maybe you don't want
(18:58):
to buy anything, maybe you wantto encourage them to register
for something. There's, there'sso many options, right? You can
do it for your competitors too.
So they bought with yourcompetitor, or they visited your
listing and didn't convert.
Like, stay middle of funnel.
Focus on that audience goingback to your website, and is a
(19:21):
fantastic way to use Amazon as acustomer acquisition channel and
incentivize people to shop withyou on your website for the next
time, or at least give you theirinformation so you can start to
earn your data back from Amazon.
The issue with this was what Ispoke to my rep about, was like
Amazon, uh, by the way, and ifanyone wants this, let me know,
MCF, DS, MCF, and buy withprime. Even if you try it for a
(19:44):
while and you don't, you don'thave to keep it. They will give
you a $20,000 ad spend credit,but it's matching on DSP, so a
lot of people. People like,their ears perk up and they're
like, Whoa. You're going to giveme 20 grand to do this, yes, but
you got to spend 20 grand on DSPto do it. And if you ever run
ads on DSP before, you'retypically, most brands are just
(20:07):
they're not playing in thestreaming world as much as I
think they should. And sotypically they're mostly display
ads, and those can be kind ofhit or miss. So they have to be
creatives got to be flawless,otherwise it's going to suck. So
you got to work with a reallytalented agency plug.
(20:29):
So you got to work with someonethat, like really knows how to
do it correctly, to get it towork well. And I think that not
as many people have adopted DSPnearly as much as Amazon would
like them to. Maybe that's whythey're doing the matching
credit, I don't know, but I loveit. I think it's a fantastic
process. I love the idea of Ilove the idea of not being so
(20:49):
reliant on Amazon, but I alsohate the idea of Amazon not
existing because I think it's afantastic customer acquisition
channel. So the questionbecomes, how do you leverage
your assets from an off Amazonperspective to grow on Amazon,
and how do you leverage theassets that you have on Amazon
to grow off Amazon? And then areyou willing to look at your
business from a more holisticperspective and looking at your
(21:13):
overall revenue? Because at theend of the day, it matters how
much money is in your bankaccount, and you're not going to
tell me, okay, that dollar camefrom Amazon, that dollar came
from Walmart, that dollar cameNo, you're gonna look at one big
fat number in your in your bankaccount, and you're gonna be
like, awesome. So that's all yougot to do. That's, that's my
(21:33):
thought process around bothAmazon and off Amazon and how
they can work together. Because,you know, you get brands that
are solely DTC, and they kind ofwant to get onto the Amazon
train, but they're a littleworried about it, but I think
that there's a correct way to doit. And then you have brands
that are on the Amazon train andthey want to get into E
(21:53):
commerce, so they're not soreliant on Amazon's ridiculous
crap that happens all the time,but like, it's a different
world. It is. It is twodifferent worlds that when they
work together, it can befantastic for brands, but you
have to make sure that, not onlyfrom a marketing perspective,
but from a fulfillmentperspective, you have everything
cohesive so it can all be donecorrectly. Another thing that
(22:16):
you can do which is relativelysimilar, MCF, will fulfill
directly at a Tiktok. So if you,even if you don't want to build
your own ecommerce website justyet, you can start selling on
Tiktok and just have Amazon doall the fulfillment. So if
you're shoving stuff into FBA,you can do the exact same thing.
Let Amazon ship it all out andlean in on Tiktok. And it's a
(22:37):
great way for you to, like, kindof test out the off Amazon world
and see how it does for you, andif audiences are willing to be
interested in your product, ifyou only do it that way, you're
kind of limiting yourself tojust the audience on Tiktok,
which I don't care what anyonesays, it's still the people that
are pulling the trigger on salestip or on any purchases are
(22:58):
typically still younger andthey're usually lower price
point stuff. Yeah, but that wasa that was my my rant for today.
That's my theories on on Amazon,off Amazon, and how you can
benefit both worlds as usual.
Thank you all so much forjoining me. Please do the usual
rate review, subscribe all thatfun stuff, or head over to the
ecom show.com to check out allof our previous episodes. But
(23:18):
usual. Thank you all for joiningand I'll see you next time. Have
a good one!
Narrator (23:24):
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over
to Ecommshow.com to subscribe onyour favorite podcast platform
or on the BlueTuskr YouTubechannel. The E comm show is
brought to you by BlueTuskr, afull service digital marketing
company specifically for Ecommerce, sellers looking to
(23:47):
accelerate their growth, go toBlue tusker.com now for more
information. Make sure to tunein next week for another amazing
episode of the E comm show you. The.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.