7 Proven Ways to Drive External Traffic to Your Amazon Listing

So you have got a product listing on Amazon. Now, you just need users and customers! Customer acquisition is one of the biggest challenges of building an online business. It has become easier to build a product, but it is hard as ever to acquire customers. You might have the best product ever, but if no one knows about it, no one can use it, and you won’t be able to build a business.

The first step to acquiring customers is generating traffic. Traffic is the first step in the process of converting the billions of Internet users into paying customers. Amazon.com has become a kind of online community where customers can browse for products, research purchase alternatives, share opinions and reviews with other visitors, and chat online with authors and experts. In this way, Amazon does much more than just sell goods on the Web. It allows competing retailers from small, family-owned operations to big corporates to offer their products on Amazon.com, creating a virtual shopping mall of incredible proportions.

Amazon FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon

The FBA Business Model by Amazon continues to grow in popularity, and for a good reason. Instead of having to fulfill orders one by one, Amazon stores your products for you and even picks, packs, and ships them out to customers. The vendor does not have to worry substantially about marketing but only needs to convert the huge flow of potential customers into clients.

By using Amazon FBA service, you get the following benefits:

• Reduce your effort
• Get a wider Customer Base
• Higher Selling Profits
• Less Competition
• More Visibility
• Less Overhead Costs
• A Guaranteed Good Experience for Your Customers
• Freedom to Continue Doing Business When Your Availability is Limited

When you use the Amazon FBA facility, it finds the buyers for you, and once they buy, they will put your item in a box and will ship it out. Not only this, but Amazon will also handle all the queries of the customers.  By delegating all these tasks to Amazon you get to reach a lot of customers with little effort from your end, and you can utilize your time to grow your business better. The FBA has affordable associated costs for this service.

The following are some of the common ways by which you can drive traffic from outside Amazon marketplace into your shop listing.

Tap into social media traffic – The entire social media space, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram collectively account for almost 4 Billion people. This is a massive source of the traffic to tap into. You can direct external traffic to your Amazon listing through linking as mentioned below.

1. You can have your product/niche page on Facebook and engage potential customers on it.
2. You can use Twitter to broadcast breaking news about your new product launches, features, among other things.
3. You can use Instagram and Pinterest to show photos of the latest enhancements.
4. You can use your YouTube Channel to offer product use demonstrations.
5. You can use Stumble upon to spread information about your product discovery

Make Amazon PPC advertisements – Both Google and Facebook work on PPC. PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. It is a democratic form of voting where you as a customer pay your advertisers only for work done (piece-work basis). The quick rise of both Google and Facebook proves PPC to be the most popular form of advertisement. Simply create an advert (text, image, animation, video, or a combination of some or all of these) as per the advertising platform requirements set by Amazon. Pay and upload the advert and let the advertising platform launch it to your target audience. Whenever potential customers click the advert, they are directed to your product listing.

Use non-Amazon SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Amazon has its own Search Engine. Thus, you can optimize your listing within Amazon. However, driving traffic from beyond Amazon will require you to devise a different approach to SEO, targeting popular search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, among others. This is mainly done through content marketing. You will need to create blogs, optimize them for SEO, and redirect traffic flow from them to your own Amazon listing.

Create a Niche Website – To be successful in eCommerce, you need your very own online real estate – a niche website. A niche website is a website specifically designed and developed to provide content and promote activities related to your niche products. This is a must-have if you intend to increase your passive income streams. Create a niche website and use links to redirect traffic to your Amazon listing. The niche website is also multifunctional. You can have a checkout on it linking to an Amazon store, you can have your own fully-fledged online shop, and you too can have your own blog where to interact with your followers and customize and publish Press Releases and other content.

Publish Press Releases (PR) on a regular or frequent basis – When you have a following of readers and audience, they crave your continuous flow of information. Thus, you need to feed them with the latest information constantly. There are several PR sites where you can launch your press release.

Amazon Marketing

1. Optimize your Amazon Product Pages – Optimize your product listings by keeping your titles concise, including high-quality, relevant images, and educating the customers with the appropriate product description.
2. Amazon Advertising – Amazon Marketing Services provides effective tools to drive traffic to product detail pages and brands. Amazon sellers advertise on this platform to best target their ads and drive shopping traffic to their product pages.
3. Amazon SEO – Amazon has its own search engine. You can optimize your content for discoverability, relevance, and sales.
4. Product Reviews – The probability of receiving a review increases with the number of customers who buy your products. Thus, you must endeavor to increase traffic flow to your Amazon product page so that you increase the probability of getting reviews.

Apart from these, you can take the following initiatives to land more traffic on your product listing.

Good Landing Pages drive traffic to your List

In online marketing, a landing page is used for marketing or advertising campaigns. The purpose of a landing page is to attract potential readers and to start building a relationship with them by sharing something of value. Landing pages tend to have a good graphic and one or two sentences summarizing an offer, and an assurance of no spam. An effective landing page has very little text, one arresting graphic, and a field for input of the email address. There are many ways to create a great landing page and lots of software that will help you does it. The easiest and most direct way is to create one by using your email list provider’s forms to do the work for you. Using their forms, it will make sure that the emails you collect will go directly to the appropriate subscriber list and receive any additional tags you want to be assigned to it. Places like leadpages & unbound are great places to start for elegant landing page creators.

Maintaining an Email List of potential customers

Having an email list of TRUE fans is not about bragging rights as to who has the highest number of people on their list. It is about who has the most loyal fans. Email lists can be prepared through website registrations, subscription registrations, or purchase records, rented from a list broker or harvested from newsgroup postings or online e-mail directories. You can use outgoing e-mail to make announcements, send promotional offers, or communicate anything important and relevant to stakeholders. E-mail newsletters are a great way to point recipients back to your product listings and engage consumers who might become future consumers.

Amazon’s Affiliate Program

The affiliate links generate a significant amount of traffic to your site and also help to increase your search engine rankings. Another benefit of launching an affiliate program on your website is that you increase brand awareness for your business. All of Amazon.com’s affiliates place banner ads, buttons, text links, and other promotional tools on their website in an effort to encourage their visitors to click through to the Amazon.com website and make a purchase.

If you’re an Amazon business that’s just starting out, you can get a free quote from AMZ PREP.  Not only do they integrate with all the major eCommerce shopping carts, but they also provide some of the most competitive pricing and are a full suite Canadian warehousing solution that helps you every step of the way.

References:

1. Philip Kotler, Suzan Burton, Kenneth Deans, Linen Brown, Gary Armstrong. “Marketing” Pearson Higher Education AU, 2015
2.  Finance Guru. “FBA Amazon Selling Private Label: How to Make Money with Amazon FBA”
3. George Pain. “Getting reviews for Amazon FBA: A Beginners’ Guide to getting Amazon FBA reviews to build a Profitable Amazon Business of Private Label Products and Generate Passive Income” Abhishek Kumar, 2017
4. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/amazon-marketing-strategy
5. Raymond D. Frost, Alexa Fox, Judy Strauss. “E-marketing” Routledge, 2018