#429 – How to Outrank Competitors on Amazon with Alina Vlaic

#429 - How to Outrank Competitors on Amazon with Alina Vlaic Kevin King: Welcome to episode 429 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week we're talking about everybody's favorite subject, how to rank on page one. On Amazon. That's right, I've got Alina Vlaic from AZRank on the episode this week. We talk strategies about how to create your listing, what you need to do, how do you target your keywords, which reports you should be looking at on Amazon. Everything you need to know to actually get on that first page and start making some sales. Alina's gonna walk you through a couple things and even talk about how AI is affecting everything right now. So enjoy this episode with Alina. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Kevin King: Coming to you all the way from Austin, Texas and Romania. That's right, Romania. Alina Vlaic, how are you doing? Good to have you finally on the AM-PM Podcast. Alina Vlaic: Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm good. Thank you. Kevin King: When it comes to e-commerce, there's a big e-commerce community in Romania, a lot of people selling on Amazon. Some of that's due to Alex and a couple other big courses, right? Why are there so many e-commerce sellers in Romania? Alina Vlaic: I think there are a couple of reasons. Romania has always been very potent, very high on everything IT and programming in terms of very good schools. Recruiters still come nowadays, big IT companies to recruit from Romania because we have good people. That's leading to a lot of websites, I mean online websites. We don't have Amazon here. We have a similar one called EMUG, which is an international. It's also in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, everything from the same marketplace. They're copying a lot from – not copying, okay. They're inspiring themselves from Amazon quite a lot, but it's big. We've been with them, I think, Costin was one of the first 10 sellers to sell on this marketplace and this was like many years ago, 2007, something like that. Yeah, e-commerce is big here. Younger people started to embrace this but also I think the IT had quite a lot of importance and also it's not a huge country but it's not – I mean we're 20 million in quite a small country. Landscape. So, yeah, I think that's pretty much it. A lot of young entrepreneurs starting their own businesses and everybody, of course, went online. It doesn't matter if it's actually selling physical products or services or whatever. Kevin King: The average wage in Romania for the average worker is not real high, right? So a lot of people in e-commerce can like what we might consider in America to be just pretty good wages or pretty good earnings from our Amazon store would be considered very wealthy by Romanian standards, right? Alina Vlaic: Yes. Now we're not that We're not that far behind as we used to be. It's starting to be similar to Eastern European forum. like the smallest or average. 1,000 euros we have here, let's say. $1,200 to $1,500, something like that, which is... Kevin King: Per month? Per month. So that's about $25,000... About $25,000 to $30,000 U.S. dollars per year. Okay. That would be like a good wage for a middle-class worker? Alina Vlaic: Yes. Kevin King: Or is that more like a doctor's wages? Alina Vlaic: Not doctor's wages, no, they are a lot. Like, I don't know, maybe school teacher, corporate, low to middle management, not management, like level in a corporation, something like that. Kevin King: So how did your husband Costin get into being one of the first 10? In e-commerce, was he already running some stores or he had some distribution and this came along and they like, they invited him or he saw the opportunity or how did that, were you all together then? Alina Vlaic: He's been in, he started his own company in 2005. We've met in 2006. So it's, next year is going to be 20 years. He was always this type of entrepreneurial guy, wanted to do his own thing. The first products he ever did import from China and I'm sure you know them, probably Brendan Young knows them better because he's in the toy space, are those wooden puzzles like 3D. They come into a wooden sheet and you take the pieces and then you build the Eiffel Tower in 3D. Those were the first and then we did foam and a lot of others but he started that as a distributor. So he was selling to retail. Online was very thin at the moment. Then Emad came and he literally saw the opportunity and jumped right in. That's how we entered Amazon as well 10 years later. Kevin King: Are you working for him originally when you met? Alina Vlaic: I was in a totally different city across the country and I was in the acquisition department of that particular company and he was calling as a supplier. That's how we actually met. So he pitched me his products technically and then we started talking more. When I moved here one year later towards the end of 2007, I had a different job in also a distribution company and our two companies worked closely together. The company is still here. We still do distribution to retailers but not so much into toys, not so much toys. We're trying to expand a little bit the range to other products because toy market has become very difficult. A lot of people don't buy too many toys right now, especially for older toddlers because we have tablets and smartphones and video games. We're still here. Technically, it was an opportunity. We're still selling on the marketplace. We also are on the vendor side of the platform, but this is a whole different business, nothing related to Amazon, not even the same products. This is just for Romania. Kevin King: When did you all branch into Amazon itself? Alina Vlaic: Amazon came to our attention. Actually, Carsten was the one who discovered it. It was late 2016, early 2017, something like that. We were with them, started to explore a little bit what does it mean. We both realized it was pretty complex and we decided to buy a course. It wasn't Alex's because you know Alex. There were two other guys. I don't know if you ever talked to them. They were called Mava Sports, very good sellers, very smart. They exited their business successfully a couple of years ago. Then we took that course and started learning. This is something that I have never told you in none of the time that we've met, but the actual video that made us Sales on Amazon was yours. It was 15 minutes. I think I have it somewhere. It was on a black background and I remember it was related to Helium 10 and you were explaining that it's better to have 50 products that sell 5 units a day rather than one product that sells to 50 or 500 units a day because of course you then get hijacked and things like that. This was 2017, 2018. No, 2017 because we started the end of 2017. So that and the course and then we started to look into Helium 10. There was a lot of content there. Well, Helium 10 back then had only like three tools. Kevin King: It was Helium 3. And now it's like Helium 27. That's who counts. Alina Vlaic: I love to count. Kevin King: Yeah, exactly. Alina Vlaic: Around 15. Kevin King: So you started selling in the US marketplace. Do you also sell in Europe or just US? Alina Vlaic: We started in Europe. Kevin King: We started in Europe, okay. Alina Vlaic: This is actually a piece of advice I would give anyone trying to enter or to give it a try to Amazon in 2025. If you already have a business similar or if you can relate anyhow to my story, I mean with our story, because we We had physical products in the warehouse and we said, okay, let's use these products rather than to place an order for a container or I don't know how many pallets in China since we don't know the business very well. So we found a brand that we were already selling. There were garden slides for kids, pretty compact but you used to unpack it and put it in your garden, not huge but still 1, 2, 3, 4 meters long. Kevin King: These are the slides like you put water on, they slip down them? Alina Vlaic: Yeah, some of them had water. The plastic ones that had a few stairs and maybe some other accessories in there, but the main thing was the slides. Some of them had the hose to put the water and slide over. We spoke to the brand. We had some listings on Amazon. You could find it, but none of them were available, so they weren't focusing on that business. We asked for their approval to sell those on Amazon UK and that's how we started. Basically, it was kind of a wholesale model, let's say, in today's words. We did pretty well for a couple of years. I think it was one summer and then the next whole year we sold, I don't know, two or three containers but remember we were doing FBM from Romania because they were so big. It wasn't worth it to send them into FBA so we were doing FBM from Romania and then we started to explore Germany and I think that's all. Germany, that's all we had back then. Germany was recently opened. And then after this, we tried another brand. It was Swings. In the same scenario, we did well. And then we said, OK, now it's time. Now we know Amazon, right? We know how to do a listing. We know how to do PPC. We know this and that. We know some tools. And then, OK, so we're ready to do a private label. And we did. That's when we launched. It was 2018 when we first launched in the US with a baby brand. Knocked it out big time. Failed it successfully. Yeah. It was our very harsh lesson that we didn't know nothing. I don't know if you're allowing nasty words so I say nothing. No, just kidding. So, no. We realized, yeah, we knew some stuff but we really need to learn because it's a completely different competition, completely different market. Pretty much normal. I mean, if I'm looking back now and saying, how could you be so naive to compare UK and, well, my mind. Kevin King: It's much more competitive market for sure. Exactly. It's the biggest. So you're still selling today, right? Still operating? Alina Vlaic: Nothing of what I've spoken here. So the first, the baby brand, we closed it after We sold out. Actually, we didn't even sell out. We brought the last couple of hundred units. There were some blankets, some baby blankets. We brought them to Romania and managed to sell them here. We have different brands. We have a brand in industrial scientific, one in sports. We have a few products on Walmart that we're keeping them separate because Walmart is a little bit different in terms of what people want and how much people afford to pay and how premium the products should be and is also full of Chinese sellers and hijackers. We recently bought another brand. It was our first time. It is our first time adventuring into this. It's a single ASAP brand that we want to grow and also use it for the agency to create a few very interesting case studies. To success with all the partners that we have here in space and there are so many good sourcing agencies, marketing agencies, things like that to show a little bit all the behinds, all the backstages of the agencies as well. Kevin King: So how did you evolve? So you started off selling in Romania, then expanded into Europe and then came into the U.S. Then regrouped and now you're doing good. Then somewhere along the way you decided, you know what, I'm going to start a little service on the side. Maybe you saw an opportunity or maybe it's like we need some money for inventory, how can we do this? We need to figure out a way to raise some more money. So you started AZ Rank. When did that happen and what led to you starting AZRank? Alina Vlaic: It happened in 2018 and it was right in the middle actually. We still had the baby brand and we were struggling with it. I came to one point when I was literally trying everything, so from Facebook ads, Instagram, Pinterest, Google, you name it, whatever it was, whatever people said, it worked for them, I was willing to try. And of course, like all products, launches back in those days, I did giveaways. I used Isabella. You know Isabella. She's your friend. She's also from Romania and she was the only one everybody was going to her. Everybody was using her from Romania. Kevin King: Just to explain to those listening that might be new to selling on Amazon, back in 2015, 2016, you could actually give products away to people in exchange for a review. You could just give someone a product on Amazon, 100% discount. And they would get the product and then they would leave a review and they had to put a disclaimer that would say something to the effect of I received this product in exchange for my honest opinion or something like that. In October of 2016, Amazon I think it was October 2017, October 2017, Amazon banned that. And so then what happened is there were several websites at that time that were actually many websites all over the world that specialized in like free giveaways. So you go to the website as a seller, we would pay a fee. They would put us on the website. They would connect us with people. They would have Facebook groups. They would have all kinds of different ways. And you just go on there and people are getting free stuff. And the promise was they would order it on Amazon with a coupon. That would give it to them for free. They would get it and then they were incentivized or required to leave a review. Otherwise these services would cut them off and say, you can't have any more free stuff from us because you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Amazon gotten a lot of heat in the press. They banned that activity. So what happened is a lot of it went underground. A lot of these software companies went away that were offering these platforms, that were offering this stuff. You had the emergence of like rebate key, which Ian Sells did, the guy that has joint brands now. And he started that where it's like, well, people have always given rebates. We can do it a different way. Then there was companies that started doing what was called search, find, buy, where they would have groups of people that would go out and buy the product, not through these websites, not publicly. And then they would get reimbursed by the sellers. And then there were agents that would charge a fee for coordinating that connection. And so around that time, there were several companies. Isabella had one of them. There was a couple of others. And then you saw an opportunity and you started AZRank that was helping. This was allowed. This was actually allowed. It was the way people were ranking. Alina Vlaic: Yes. Why did I see an opportunity? Because as I was telling you, I was trying Facebook ads, Google ads, micro, nano, influencers, whatever you call them, because I was selling the baby items. They were like Let's say easier to find in Facebook groups or Instagram. You could easily find new ones or months to be that would be willing to try a product. So that's how I started from these ladies, the influencers. I started, I don't know, I had something like I have a 50 to 100, maybe 150 people database of moms that help me with my product and then Actually, the day I realized this was the day one of my friends who was starting on Amazon back then, it was some trainer or something like that, and she said, I know you have a few people that help you with your brand. Do you think that if you ask them to get my product, they would want to do that? And that was the moment when I said, hey, I can use these people. I mean, okay, it was like 10 units, 20 units, 30 units. That's how we started for this friend and then from another friend and then And then it got big. I mean big in the way of, you know, everybody was in need of this type of services. Kevin King: Just word of mouth basically and then you got a few people, a few mastermind groups like Tryan, a few people like that mentioned you. And then it was Helium 10. And then Helium 10 and then you actually, a lot of people don't realize this, you worked with Bradley and Helium 10 To actually come up with, I forget the exact name of it, but they had a, what was it called? Alina Vlaic: The CPR. Kevin King: Yeah, the CPR. It was basically, Manny, when he started, they had come up with some sort of formula, him and Boyan, this is about how many units you need to give away to rank. You need to sell X number of units per day or over a period of time to actually rank your product on the first page, ideally in the first spot. And so they were trying to figure out how many units is that based on each keyword that you need to do. And they had a formula and it worked in the beginning and then it was starting to, Amazon was changing the A9 algorithm and it wasn't very accurate anymore. So they actually came to you and you guys did like a year long test or something like a project. Alina Vlaic: A year and a half and around 2,500 launches. Kevin King: 2,500 launches and these were like, your clients or Helium 10 was helping you? Alina Vlaic: No, no, no. Only mine. Yes, and we were keeping track of the data together with Helium 10 in order to see patterns, to, you know, to define some averages in order to get the formula. Kevin King: So after a year and a half of analyzing all this data and working with the data guys at Helium 10, you guys figured out, okay, here's a formula that's, it may not be exactly, but it's pretty close based on all this, all this data. And then they changed the CPR to actually show, This is basically how many you need. And that has now evolved and it's changed a little bit now. And there's some other tools that are out there that private tools that people have that can do some crazy stuff too. So what happened? The search find by was everybody was doing that for a while. Then all of a sudden, a couple of years ago, Amazon said, Oh, you can't do this anymore. They went after rebate key. They went after everybody else. And so people quit. Well, I know it still exists but people quit advertising it as that and now they switch to a model of testers. We're going to get feedback and we're going to get testers instead of surveys and we're going to have them shoot a video of them surfing on the page and there's all these things that it was couched in a different way. Still basically the same thing, but it's just some extra steps and some extra things. So what, where has the rankings now with all the AI and with all the new stuff that's happening and the A9 and you know, there's people out there will say, oh, there's a new A10. There's no such thing as an A10. So anybody that says there's an A10, shoot them in the head and run away. That's just marketing. There's only an A9. It's always been the A9. It does evolve over time and they do tweak it and change it. What are you seeing now with, The evolution from just the straight up giveaways to the SFR to the testing to now where's it at? What do people need to know when it comes to ranking now? What are some techniques or strategies that they need to keep in mind? Alina Vlaic: So first of all, I would start with something that is one of my favorites, let's say, in the last couple of years. So Amazon changed in November 2021. This was the major change. That changed the old Search, Find, Buy into whatever we're calling it right now. But together with that, the most important and major change we have seen in all this A9 craziness, except the AI, we're not talking AI right now, is relevance. So back in the days, if you would do 1,000 giveaways or Search, Find, Buy on a keyword, I think I could say that it doesn't even matter if your product is that keyword, but you could rank on it. Somehow, eventually, with a lot of velocity and a lot of maybe other tricks and tips, you could rank any keyword. Now it's not happening. Kevin King: You're saying that if I had a product that was a soccer ball and I sent out a lot of special links because you could embed the keyword in a link back in the day and you could do all kinds of stuff. For the word baseball, baseball, I can have my soccer ball show up because it wasn't, it didn't matter. You just got a thousand sales on that keyword. So I just said, okay, this must be relevant. This must be good. No relevance. Right. I just want to explain that to people listening. Okay. Alina Vlaic: Exactly. Yeah. So, um, Amazon, I think it was, they were aware of this, but not up to that point when they wouldn't show. So, they showed your product for whatever keyword they had velocity on. Nowadays, it's much more complicated than that. We have clients and brands we work with that They have marvelous, excellent listings, very well thought images, immaculate and they still sometimes cannot rank on specific keywords because somewhere, somehow Amazon made a change to the browsing notes, to this or to the categories or whatever and they find the product irrelevant. They don't find the product to be relevant for that specific browser or category or subcategory they want and that's the end of the day. You cannot do anything in terms of ranking. If you're not relevant, you cannot rank. That's my main... Kevin King: Was that humans at Amazon actually typing in a list of things, do you think? Do you think... In 2021, Amazon had a bunch of people going through and looking at every product. Okay, which keywords actually are relevant for this? Which ones aren't? Or do you think that was machine learning that did that? Alina Vlaic: I think it was machine. This is just like a personal opinion. It's hard to say. I don't have any insiders or things like that, but I think it's machine because there are so many millions of products on Amazon. It would be pretty complicated to To be done manually and on top of that, they are still doing this even to this day in 2025. They are still doing a lot of changes every day. For example, I have for one of my brands, I have a lot of parents with multiple variations. Some of them have 10, some of them have 20, some of them have 2. They're messing them around every day. So I have a person who pretty much 4 hours a day probably checks all the variations because they change a browsing note here or a little bit of something there. You get an error, the product, the variation gets out of the parent and they say it's not relevant. How can it not be relevant since it's the same product, just a different color? You know what I mean? I'm just trying to make it more. But this is just like a row example or a broader example. Long story short, Relevance is the new name of the game together with the AI. Kevin King: How do you figure out relevance? When I'm building my listing, you just said some of your clients have beautiful, well-done listings, but they still can't get that relevance. So what are some things that influence the relevance? What are some things I need to do to try to, is it checking the browse node? Is it checking, making sure I have all these semantic keywords and intended use and all this kind of stuff? Or what are some things that I need to do? Alina Vlaic: So, first of all, of course, we start from where we know and that would be our competitors. So we look at them and see what they do. Now, we don't have the information in the backend, of course, but we see the keywords they rank on because we have a lot of tools. Helium 10 does that. We see the keywords they rank on, one, two, three. When you look at 10, you will realize that there is a pattern or even more. There is a pattern. They go into one direction, for example, if it's a broader keyword or a broader category. Look at competitors. Make sure to fill every possible cell and field in the flat file. This is something a lot of sellers Don't pay enough attention to, and this is very important because first of all, one, you are safer, let's say, in terms of hijackers if you have all your products, all your fields checked. If everything is checked, they cannot go and make contributions to your listing through their hidden channels. They used to do it. That's number one. The more you feed the flat file and the whole listing with data, the more you'll get from the algorithm. Sometimes it's trial and error. You sometimes need to go back, change something. Give it some time, see if it's better or not because we don't have exact formulas for all the fields. I mean we know what to put in some of the fields but you know, flat files are huge and in today's landscape of Amazon, in my opinion, in our opinion, flat file is one of the first places for AI and for everything algorithm, let's say. So the first place they look, it's not the front end or the back end that we see in service center is the flat file. Kevin King: So if I'm launching a new product, I just came up with a new idea. I went to Helium 10, did my research and I figured out that, I don't know, a slow feed dog bowl is a good opportunity right now. And I've got my list of 20 keywords. There's maybe 200 keywords that are applicable, but I'm going to target these 20 because I think I can compete on them. Maybe the people have less reviews or whatever, all the other requirements. There's less people on those keywords and maybe it's not the big keywords. They're the middle of the pack keywords. Then I come to you and I say, Alina, I need to launch this product. I'm gonna start running some PPC ads and I'm gonna, I don't have a list of customers though, of my own customers I can go out to and say, hey, my brand just launched a new product, check it out. What do you do? So you do your own analysis using Helium 10 and some other proprietary stuff that you have. And then what do you tell me? Like, okay, Kevin, you got this dog bowl and I gave you my 20 keywords. I think you're going to tell me, no, Kevin, those aren't the right ones. You should do these based on your analysis. And then what happens next if I come to AZ-Rank and I say, I want to I want your help to get this thing going. Alina Vlaic: This can go for like one hour, you know, just this question. Kevin King: Just give me the short end of it, the short end so people listening can get the gist. Alina Vlaic: Okay. So yes, we do our own analysis based on not only tools, but now we have information inside Amazon, which is true. It was formed out of two things called Product Opportunity Explorer which gives you the best keywords of each niche, each category. Basically, those are the keywords that Amazon sees relevant for your product. That's number one. Number two is SQP, Search Query Performance. Kevin King: Those two reports are the two reports that people need to pay attention to, the Search Query Performance and Product Opportunity Explorer. Alina Vlaic: You, Kevin, are launching a brand new product, right? So you don't have any data in SQP, in Search Query Performance because it's a new product. There is an episode of my newsletter a couple of weeks ago when I was saying how can you get data for a new launch with doing a test launch. I'm not going to go too much into that but it's a very interesting concept. You can actually spend like $50 or $100 and get this SQP data for your brand new product. So you can have both to look at. Kevin King: So I take my brand new product and do a test with it or I buy a competitor's product and just kind of... Alina Vlaic: No, no, no, it's you make a listing, a true Very real product and that for example, you are going to sell your products for like 20 bucks. You would price this of 200 bucks. So you make sure nobody sells it. Kevin King: We used to do that in the old days. I used to do that exactly where nobody would normally buy, but I just want to see how the PPC was going to run against it and stuff. Okay. All right. I got you. Alina Vlaic: Now you can use it for SQP and it gives you some really good, good data that otherwise you don't have. So you have the product... Kevin King: Then you get rid of that product. Then you just close that listing down and then... Alina Vlaic: If some crazy person buys it, you just... Kevin King: I had that happen one time. I did dog treats and this is like five years ago. I did exactly what you said. I went to Walmart and I bought my competitors dog treats. Just so I had, and I sent it in because I wanted it to be FBA. So I had to have inventory in stock and I put it at, these were like $7.99 or something. I put it at $213 or whatever so no one would buy it. Somebody bought it. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. And I felt bad. I canceled their order because I was going to cancel the listing. But yeah, it was crazy. That's a good technique. Unknown Speaker: Sorry, go ahead. Kevin King: Continue. Alina Vlaic: Yes, so now we have some data from Helium 10 or some other tool, right? We have the product opportunity explorer. We have some data from SQP. All this data and I have your list of keywords because you brought them to me. Now we take all this together. I cannot give you an exact recipe. We don't have an exact recipe because we analyze them manually even to the day. Each campaign is different. Even if you are launching the same product as I will be launching. In the same category, there will still be two different launches, two different sets of keywords because we have different budgets, we have different approaches, we have different goals. What I would say, to keep it short as I said, from the list of keywords that we have, we'll make a top. Based on your goal, right, because if your product is in a less competitive niche, I'm going to say, Kevin, let's do some surveys or giveaways or however you want to call them in today's language with our model the way we do them right now and I would say, okay, 15 days and this group of keywords and you will be in a good place. After these 15 days, we're going to focus on the big keywords and then we're going to be talking about It's a different story. Or you might be a seller that wants to bring it all in and just win the niche after 30 days, which I don't recommend, but there are people who do that. Then it's a different story. So depending on your goal, depending on your budget, depending on how competitive the niche is and everything that I've mentioned before, we come up with a strategy to you. Then we discuss that strategy and put it to life. Kevin King: What does this cost me? What am I looking at if I'm not going to be aggressive, if I'm not going to be the guy that wants to own it in 30 days? Alina Vlaic: Like you said, your keywords are right in the middle. We usually recommend to go with a bunch of keywords, not just one. Minimum of three, ideally five to six keywords during the launch, but small ones. It's relevant and related. That's also a very important thing. Your keywords should ideally have the same root. Keywords all six or maybe three and three and the root keywords inside them will be your main keywords in the next phase. Kevin King: Can you explain what root keyword is for those listening that might not know? Alina Vlaic: For example, garlic press which will be found in a long tail keyword which is garlic press stainless steel or red garlic press. And based on these keywords and your product costing like $20, I would say all in all together with our fees and everything, $2,000. And for $2,000, then is there any promise or guarantee or are you just saying that I'll get you ranked on page one? I wish I could guarantee and sign something but no, there aren't any guarantees. However, what I can guarantee and what we constantly do is come to you and say after a couple of days and I would say, Kevin, something is not doing well. This is what we should do or everything is going extremely well. You're already where you're supposed to be. Let's reconsider. Let's readjust. This is something that we do. And this is the most complicated part of everything, to keep adjusting the campaign as you go in order to get the best bang for your buck. Kevin King: How long do I have to maintain this because if I, this is all dependent on I have a good product because if I do all these steps and spend this $2,000 and the reviews start coming in and they're all bad or there's a lot of bad reviews, it's going to derail the whole thing. And basically I just, I just spent a lot of money and I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna be spinning my wheels. But also you've got to maintain, so, You're doing your magic to help get the ball rolling, but I've got to actually start converting on, you know, so I've got to have good images or I got to have a good listing and I got to be, I got, because when you're doing your part, the conversion rate is going to be skewed a little bit because of the system. But once, once quote unquote real orders start coming, I got, you got to have a listing that converts. Otherwise you might get me to page one and I'm just going to slowly fall back off. I'm a. Alina Vlaic: When people shout at you or images that are not as they were supposed to be, we always tell the people. Some of them trust us, some don't. However, this is a point very well touched by you. We can get you ranked, yes. You don't have to come to me. You can spend a fortune on PPC and get the same result. But eventually, if the product isn't good enough and the listing isn't competitive enough, and now it's a lot of other things. You have Rufus to consider to rank for Rufus. You need UDC. You need to have UDC on your listing. You need to have a bunch of stuff right now. But the most important thing is There are basics. Listings, images, A+, it has to be good. Kevin King: How do you see AI changing all this? I mean, I know in your newsletter, which is called the RankingPill, is it therankingpill.com? If you wanna sign up, she puts out a newsletter every, it's weekly, right? Every week? Alina Vlaic: Bi-weekly. Bi-weekly. Sorry for interrupting. It's just on our website. I don't have a, it's on website yet. So it's azrank.com and they can find it. Kevin King: Okay, yes. You go to azrank.com. You're hosting it, I think I saw on Beehive, which is a good platform. That's what I use for my newsletter. You just did something for how to actually, Ruthless, can you tell us a little bit about that? Alina Vlaic: Basically, that was based on Trion's idea. Trion, I read something related on one of his courses a couple of months ago. Long story short is how to reverse engineer the AI, Rufus, in order to get data from Rufus about the product you are willing to sell so that you build your listing Two words, Rufus, so then when I am going to go and ask as a buyer, right, what product were you launching? I forgot. Kevin King: Slow Feed Dog Bowl. Alina Vlaic: Slow Feed Dog Bowl, right, and I go to – I don't have time, right? I'm driving my kids to school and I go to Amazon and I say, hey Rufus, which is the best slow feeding dog bowl? I'm on Amazon and you should give me yours or at least to be on the list. The way to do that is starting backwards and asking right now, Rufus, hey Rufus, which is the best slow feeding dog bowl and you get a list of answers. And then you go and ask a couple of more questions and you build a list of, they're not keywords, they're characteristic attributes, things that people look at because otherwise Rufus wouldn't know them, right? And you build all that together and then go to ChatGPT or Claude and draft one or several listings. Ideally, I would see this – I didn't mention this in the newsletter but I think I should have – I would see this done as a split test to actually realize whether it's an improvement. It's a real improvement in conversion because yes, I've seen done. I've seen something but I cannot give you like the real data or numbers because we don't have any from Amazon yet in terms of what's your position. Kevin King: In Rufus, I think one of the things you did is you asked it like on the Slow Feed Dog Bowl, like what's important? What are some important features I should look for in a Slow Feed Dog Bowl? And then you did some, I think you showed it like an intent, like what does a Slow Feed Dog Bowl do? How does it help a dog? And it spits back a bunch of answers. And then you keep reverse engineering it that way. And then you look at those answers. And then you're like, okay, now I need to make sure this is what it, what Rufus thinks is important. I need to make sure that stuff is now in my listing or I'm mentioning it or I'm relevant for this, these types of phrases or this type of content. Um, and that then, then you should start appearing more in, In Rufus, when someone asks the question, what's the best dog bowl, because you meet all those requirements of what it thinks the best dog bowl should have. Alina Vlaic: That's pretty much how I see the AI nowadays, especially on Amazon. We have to think backwards. We have to, as sellers, we have to feed it what they want to see in our listings in order to get better results in order to beat the competition, technically. Kevin King: When it comes to images, there's a lot of talk that Amazon, with Amazon Recognition and Comprehend, they're actually taking a look at images now and the context of your images makes a difference in how you rank too. Alina Vlaic: I remember with the baby blanket back in the days, the meta description in the Photoshop, it was a thing. From what I've seen, it's coming back. Kevin King: It's not just the meta though, it's actually what they're analyzing the photo. Alina Vlaic: Now they're analyzing the photo. They're getting there, yes. Kevin King: I was giving the example of a beach umbrella. If I need an umbrella, I'm going to the beach and I want an umbrella to put over me when I'm sitting on the sand to keep the sun away. If my pictures, at least one of my lifestyle pictures, doesn't have someone sitting on the beach with an umbrella over their head, it's just people walking down the street in the rain with an umbrella, which the same umbrella might be fine, or they're sitting at a barbecue around the pool or something, it's not going to have as high of relevance because it's not in that. So Amazon's not just looking at the metadata, the keywords and the phrases you put, but they're also looking at the context of the image and analyzing the image and does this image convey that this is for use on the beach? Alina Vlaic: Yes, and I think the next step is going to be the videos, all the videos, which when I say all the videos, I'm talking about the videos in the listing below the photos, the videos in the reviews, what people say and the video in the related video section, the other videos. Should speak about the same thing. We're back to relevance. Kevin King: See it's all about relevance. It's right. It's all about relevance Now you so you did you did the ranking stuff and then you like you saw an opportunity you you branched off and you're doing Press releases and some other stuff too, right? Alina Vlaic: Yes, so we We have a big community of people mostly in the US because some of these other solutions that we have for sales are in the US. We have some talented people in our pool of people, let's say, and we started creating some UGCs for some brands. It's not an influencer type of UGC. It's literally UGC that you need to have on your Amazon listing before you launch. I'm going to repeat this in capital letters, before you launch. When you make your product live, make sure you have even one or two videos is enough, even if you have to do it yourself. It's so important because if competitors come and upload videos on your listings, which they can do, Then when you wake up and realize that you didn't put any and you want to put them, you might never win the first spots in those other videos. That's something that can easily be prevented. So yes, we're doing this type of UDCs, lifestyle photos and videos, real people, not influencers, only dedicated to enhancing Amazon listings and optimizing them. Yes, we do some press articles as well, which is quite a different model than others. It's a CPC-based model. Basically, we feature your product or your brand. It's not going to be charged. We don't charge anything if there isn't traffic and the main goal of these press articles is driving traffic to the listing, not necessarily converting or giving sales. Of course, that's a bonus because we're putting the attribution link inside the articles but the main goal is traffic. Kevin King: Just sending social signals basically, backlinks and social signals at SEO. Alina Vlaic: Exactly. Amazon rewards that. Amazon rewards high quality external traffic even if it doesn't convert. We've done some tests and we've seen this. Empty clicks, let's say, they're not empty but they didn't end up with a purchase but they helped rank That product on specific keywords without any other additional action, so just the traffic coming from a good domain. Kevin King: Now, are you just doing all these services just in the U.S. or are you also helping European sellers with AZ and ranking requests in the UGC? Alina Vlaic: The ranking, we do it all across Europe and Canada. Now, we're trying to go into Japan and Dubai. This is a project for this year. And press articles, we have US and UK. UDC for now, it's just US, but it's probably in Q2 of 2025, we'll have Europe as well. Kevin King: So what's next? What's your next big project or big secret that you want to let the cat out of the bag on? Alina Vlaic: The biggest project we have for this year is, as I told you, Japan and Dubai in terms of ranking. I think there's quite an interesting approach there, but also this brand that we recently bought and I want to transform it into, I don't know, if you remember how Project X was in the day, but even more than that. Kevin King: You're going to have your own coffin shelf. Alina Vlaic: I'm not going to do a coffin shelf. Kevin King: Everybody's going to copy. You're going to come up with something and then everybody's going to go, oh, that's a good idea and there's going to be like 700 of them. Alina Vlaic: It was so funny. Bradley was doing the Project X at one point of it. I don't remember and we were discussing Coffin Shelf and he was presenting it everywhere and I was getting requests from people launching Coffin Shelf and I said, seriously? Kevin King: I think that happens anytime something's featured somewhere in a webinar or someone's, it's like all of a sudden all the services start saying like a bunch of weighted blankets or a bunch of dog leashes or whatever. Alina, this has been great. I really appreciate you coming on and chatting today. We're both fighting a little bit of a cold. I think that's been some pretty cool information for everybody. If people want to know more or find out more about your company and what you're doing, what's the best way? Alina Vlaic: Well, either message me. I'm on all socials with my name, which is on the screen, Alina Vlaic, or find us on azrank.com. Just shoot us a message in the contact section. We'll be happy to just talk or exchange ideas or debate. Some subjects I would love to connect. Kevin King: Awesome. Well, I guess we'll connect again probably in Iceland, right? See you at BDSS in April. Alina, I appreciate you spending some time today. It's been great. Alina Vlaic: Thank you so much. Kevin King: Be sure to follow Alina's newsletter, The Ranking Pill, which she said you can get at, if you go to AZrank.com, A-Z or A-Zed rank.com, you can find how to subscribe there. Be sure to also subscribe to my newsletter, BillionDollarSellers, BillionDollarSellers.com. It's free every Monday and Thursday. We'll be back again next week with another awesome episode. In the meantime, keep crushing it and remember that fear is the biggest thing that holds people back from success. Fear is the biggest thing that holds people back from success. See you again next week.