How We Scaled from $793K to $1.9M/mo in 5 Months

Izabela Hamilton.m4a Isabella Hamilton here from BDSS Market Masters 2 live from Austin. I am so excited to be here with you guys today, specifically because I have never shared what I'm about to share with you guys today. So, I'm super excited. Let's dive in. We only have about 10 minutes, but bear with me, I promise it will be worth it. I founded RankBell 10 years ago, and what I'm about to show you is a combination of strategies that we've applied for our brands that we worked with. So, in this case, I'm going to show you how we took a brand from $800,000 to almost $2 million in less than five months. Amazon is an algorithmic engineering platform. A lot of people think about Amazon as a marketplace and it is. However, what people don't understand is that it's almost like a predictive AI. It's not looking necessarily for the best product, it's looking for what people think is the best product. So if we're treating it just like a simple storefront, we're not going to be able to compete with all these high-level brands. And this is why this is so important. So let's get started. What I'm about to share. The way billion-dollar brands and very high brands, the way they stay on top, because I know you're wondering, you see all these brands and all these products, and I know you're thinking that product is not better than mine. And in a lot of the cases, you would be right. However, again, Amazon does not really care about that. I mean, maybe if they actually compared your product to your competitors, they would find that your product perhaps is better. But when it comes to the actual algorithm of Amazon, is the signals that we send that influence what products stay on top. In the next few slides, I'm going to show you exactly what we did for this specific brand. And I chose this brand specifically because, you know, a lot of people launch a lot of products, but it's hard to find anybody showing what happens after a brand hits a million dollars. Because there is a plateau that happens at about $500,000 a month, between 500,000 and a million a month. And can we take this further? Is there enough? Is there more room to grow? Is there a glass ceiling? And that's what we're trying to shatter. This slide is very important. And if there's one thing that you're going to take from this presentation, I would love for you to focus on this. So what I found out is that there are three hidden levers that actually make Amazon pick the winner. One is velocity control, how fast a product gains traction over time, I see this mistake over and over again, is somebody launches a brand, and they get all their friends and family or maybe they have a list and they push really hard right from the beginning. That's great, if you have more to come, but most brands don't. So you want to make sure that you time that in a way that it gives Amazon enough signals that your brand is worth staying on the top rankings. Shopper behavior signals. This is another thing that a lot of brands don't think of. Amazon's algorithm actually tracks every single thing a buyer does on your listing. Are they just clicking into your listing and clicking right back out? That tells Amazon that maybe your listing is not optimized enough. It tells us so much. It actually tracks how many seconds somebody sits with their mouse on your listing. Are they scrolling down? Are they reading the listing? Are they clicking out of your listing? Are they comparing it with somebody else, perhaps? Are they coming back to your listing adding it to cart and eventually buying it? All of this is telling Amazon data that is beyond important. And the lastこれは one on this slide is traffic authority injection. This is external signals that Amazon obviously cannot ignore. We want to make sure that we drive all this traffic from outside sources. And of course, you know, there's so many different ways to do this, but Amazon specifically loves when we bring in new customers. Amazon is already big enough; it has so much search volume, right? For all categories, for all products, but it loves when we bring in new shoppers, new potential customers that Amazon can now have. This is probably one of my favorite strategies right here. It's called the time release launch. And most brands, you know, they treat ranking as a one-time thing. And I'm sure a lot of you, especially the high-level sellers, that I'm talking to, you have seen different strategies over the years. But one thing that brands forget is that Amazon needs consistent ranking. It's not a one-time thing. And again, it's great that you have all these customers come in and they buy your product and Amazon will reward you, will keep your rank for, you know, a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but you have to consistently grow. And again, you don't want to, if you have a thousand people on your list, don't send them all to the listing right away. Try to time that in a way that it shows Amazon that you're consistently growing and you're not stopping. Again, you know, instead of just that one single spike, you want to make sure that Amazon gets all these data points, that the product continues trending, that the people like it. Today, you have 20 orders. Tomorrow, you have 30. In a few days, you have 40. So you want to show Amazon that this is not a one-off event. It's a product that is consistently sought after, that is continuously purchased. And every time they purchase it, every time they come and search for your specific product, that they choose yours over your competitors. And review velocity matching. This is, again, something not a lot of people talk about. And I want you to be aware of that. And I want you to be aware of that. And aware of it because a lot of brands will come to me and they'll say, 'I have this list. I have 500 shoppers. Can I have them all purchase and can they all leave reviews?' Bad idea. You don't want to show anything that's outside of the norm. If you have 500 shoppers and 500 of them leave reviews, you already know what's going to happen. You will get suspended for manipulation. And the opposite is also true. If you have 500 orders, if only two people leave reviews, that's also unnatural and Amazon will look into it. And even if nothing happens in that case, because what are they going to do? Suspend you for not getting reviews? No, but they will derank you. So you want to make sure that the velocity matches. And I get this question a lot like, Isabella, what is that percentage? And I'm going to give you a big range. It's anywhere between 1% to 10%. So if you have, you know, if your first month you have 500 orders, Amazon loves seeing anywhere between, you know, 20, even up to 50 reviews. That's in a case where, you know, the product is quite popular and you have a lot of, you know, a lot of people searching for it. So you want to make sure that it matches everything else that you're doing. And again, you know, this is so important. You want to maintain steady purchases. You want to give Amazon that data point. You want Amazon to know that, again, this is not a one-time event, but it's something that's happening all the time that your product is being searched for. And every single month you're getting, you know, more and more orders. The search ecosystem takeover method. This is another really good one. And this really refers to, you know, for your Amazon listing optimization, of course, you should be looking at that quite a lot. But what a lot of brands don't do is they don't optimize their listing to be Google SEO optimized too. And what do I mean by this? If somebody researches collagen for women on Amazon, you want to make sure that it's also optimized for Google because everybody, somebody who's actually interested in purchasing this specific product, they may go to Amazon and type in collagen for wrinkles for women, right? So you want to capture that and add that into your listing in a way, obviously, that makes sense and is allowed. But don't forget to do quite a few tests because when you optimize for Google and your shoppers now come from the Google listing, well, if you type in, you know, Google collagen, best collagen for wrinkles, you will see your listing show up in the searches. So now you're ranked on Google, which obviously it's amazing extra sales, but that boosts your ranking on Amazon even more than somebody just typing it into Amazon. TikTok and Reddit traffic. And of course, guys, this is, you know, all extra stuff. You want to go the extra mile. This is what a hundred million dollar brands do. And, you know, if you're a brand that's going to be a successful brand, it will all come down to you what kind of online branding will work for you. Customers from other platforms, Amazon will love you absolutely love you; same thing with blogs and reviews. Um, and again, I know it's extra work, but it's so worth it, and especially for blogs, if you're thinking, 'Oh my god, blogs died 10 years ago.' I would urge you to reconsider because even though people might not necessarily read a whole blog, they will Google 'best collagen for wrinkles' and they will come across a blog that mentions your product specifically, that that you wrote, and uh, that will be a big decision maker in their in their purchasing. The competitor hijack strategy this is a really good one; so, many of you are familiar with uh data dive, and I would highly recommend using that for this uh specific method, Helium. 10, that's another really good one, so of course you know you reverse engineer keywords, keywords you are searching for what your competitors are ranking for, everybody knows this, um, and you want to make sure that you capture their audience. And one of my favorite things that I've seen this million-dollar brands do is um, they do a lot of content off of um, off of Amazon, and where they'll compare brand acts with your brand, right in this case, you know if you have the collagen, because a lot of a lot of these bigger brands, they're already spending so much money on ads on Amazon, whatever they are, right, so a really big brand that's you. Know that's not you right now, um, they have already spent all this money. You're easily able to one again look at their keywords and everything that they're doing but to do these comparisons on again on blogs it can be on TikTok it can be anywhere where you're literally comparing brand X with your brand and in the end of course you're going to list the pros and the cons and um in the end you can mention how much more amazing your brand is compared to the other brands so by doing this you're already uh targeting all these competitors' products because when people have intent to purchase and they already know that brand, my name. By name, they would type in that brand. But every time they type in that brand, your brand shows up, so don't forget about this one; it might seem like so simple, uh, but it really would make a difference, uh. This third one, frequently bought together, I know you have seen it, uh, I know you probably get mad when you see it on your own product, uh, you know Amazon recommending your competitors, but they're doing basically what I'm teaching you to do so um, what you can have is you can have this control group of shoppers that uh, they will go to your listing, they will go to your competitor's listing and they will go to your competitor's listing and They will go to your competitor's listing, uh, they might even add both to cart and eventually let, uh, the competitors go and just purchase yours. But again, you know Amazon tracks all of these data points, you know, clicking into your listing, clicking on your competitor's, and eventually buying yours. Again, Amazon is not really and I hate saying this but they're not really interested in what is the best product, but what people think is the best product, and the more signals we give them the better they will remember you, the brand um that you know I was uh talking about in the beginning. We use this exact method all the points that i went through you know month one we launched the time release where we just wanted to make sure that amazon understands this brand so this brand specifically it was actually doing really amazing i mean they were at 800 000 a month uh they were thinking oh how how much higher can i go so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to go ahead and it doesn't have to be a brand new launch for amazon to start getting this information that this is worth looking at right so we did a time release strategy we we made sure that we stabilized the rankings That every single day, we gave it new data that more and more and more and more customers are are searching for the specific product, and they're picking yours. Um, uh, month two, and you know even though I broke them into you know month one, two, three, four, five; we did a little bit of this every single month, so I don't want you to think that you know month one, we did the time release, and then we forgot about it. No, this every single month two, we uh, we started driving external traffic because again, we wanted to feed Amazon this data; this is coming from TikTok, this is coming from Google, this is coming from the Blog, uh, from and even the smallest amount counts I don't want you to think, 'Oh my God, there's so much work that I have to do.' This is very possible without really spending that much money because all your competitors are just throwing even more money in sponsored ads like what do you have to lose? You've got nothing to lose if this doesn't work, just continue going back to your PPC that's all right with me. Month three um, you know. Competitor hijack strategy again. You want to make sure that you capture those high converting keywords and what are some other keywords that you haven't thought of? And then, you know, when you get to month Four or five, and you're already exhausted. All the other keywords, then you can start considering, um, can I target some of my competitors' keywords as in their brand name? Let's just say if you were to do that, right so there's always new methods that you can bring in even more traffic onto your listing. The final result we had a hundred forty percent revenue growth in five months, uh, they still spend money on ppc because you always wanna um, you know I love saying this, you know? You want to capture all the real estate, you want to be on the sponsored ads and then you want to be um, right below with organic ranking, so uh, but you. Know that this is at your discretion. Eventually, you might want to not spend so much in sponsored ads if you already uh have brand recognition if you're organically ranking on page one all the time you can do that um these are the numbers I hope you can uh see and uh you can see this you know the first line right here this we were already like a month in, month and a half and you can see like the first the first month it was you know over a little bit over a million you got 1.5 1. 6 980 dropped a little bit right here um you know they had some some things going on but then you can clearly see in january uh they were already you know almost at two million i mean this was impressive even for me and uh you know when kevin asked me to come to uh market masters i i really wanted to show you guys and again these are numbers that i haven't shown anyone before and um i just you know i don't i don't want you guys to necessarily be impressed but um i want you to understand the possibilities of what this can mean for you so just really know glass ceiling if there is search volume you can get there and if there isn't search volume you can create it and you know you can always create a new audience by uh you know driving all this extended traffic um doing different things that you know think outside the box a little bit so you know how to apply this to your business again algorithm reward strategy uh you want to make sure that you focus so much on strategy and not necessarily just Seiten j work whatever strategy it may be if därar data points day i keep stressing you may be policies very simple principles at least in the beginning again data points i keep i keep stressing day you how to make sure that year you're giving amazon data every single month if there's one thing that i swear by is this don't stop organic ranking again you know scaling without burning cash this refers to sponsored ads and you know again i don't want to you know make sponsored ads the halter among salons.. Most people you know, they don't know any other methods, but you do now. You do so you know I would take some of that money and see how I can uh spend it, you know again whether it's influencers, um an organic search service, whatever the case may be for you and um you don't have to you don't have to turn off PPC just see what are some things that possibly you haven't tried and um it may work for you so um this is everything that I have for today but um there's one thing that I want to mention, you know. You never lose if you don't give up, and you know Amazon is a competitive marketplace, but if you're still standing today, I mean I started this over 10 years ago and it's only gotten harder, but also it's gotten better at the same time because people who have remained they are able to to build businesses like this. I mean this brand specifically, imagine five months to double your business; it's amazing, and again even for me that I get to see it over and over again. So don't give up um obviously know when to give up if you have a product that you know there's no search volume that there's um nothing else that you can do um don't hold on to to a to a that product for sure, but um I have faith in you; I know you. Can do this and you are surrounded by so many amazing people, amazing intelligent humans that can help you so feel free to reach out whether it's to me or Kevin or anyone else, but I wish you the best of luck and I'm so excited to have shared this with you and I hope it helps in your journey. Thank you.