8 Ways To Grow Your FBA Business, Today

Ordering products and successfully uploading them onto Amazon’s platform is only the first step in building your FBA business.

The next step that a lot of new entrepreneurs get hung up on is when it comes time to actually making sales, and scaling their growth so they can afford to purchase more product and expand their product lines.

We’ve got 8 strategies that we know will produce results, and help you begin increasing your Best Seller Ranking, which is the ultimate way to increase the amount of sales you are making without having to continue working to generate them.

Start from the top of the list and work your way down. By the time you get to the final strategy, you will have already made sales, and have a process that you can then repeat every time you launch another product in the future.

Strategy #1 - Friends & Family

Your first sales are going to come from the people closest to you. It happens with every type of business, not just selling physical products on FBA.

Asking your friends and family is going to be the best way to get your initial set of sales and reviews that will help jumpstart the rest of your launch strategy.

To get started, make sure that your products are listed on Amazon ready to go, and that you’ve never logged into your Amazon account from your friend’s and family’s houses. If you’ve ever logged into your account from their IP address, the reviews may get flagged and not go through.

However, if you’re sure that you’ve never logged in from their IP, and the accounts won’t be tied together in any way, give your friends and family the links to your products and ask them to make a purchase, even if you have to reimburse them for it later.

Then, once they’ve received the product and a few days have passed, get them to login to their account and create a review.

When they do it from the same account they made the purchase from, the review will get listed as “Verified Purchase” which holds more weight in the eyes of the customers who are looking through the reviews before they buy your products.

Make sure to let your friends and family know that they should leave out the fact that they’re related to you in the review, and make it seem as natural as possible. It will help your sales over the long haul, as customers are getting smarter about spotting fake reviews.

Strategy #2 - Blogging & Guest Posting

Now it’s time to put on your marketing hat, and start getting in the trenches to find out where your potential customers are hanging out online.

Chances are, there are a ton of blogs related to topics that your customers are interested in -- the customers who will buy your products.

All you have to do is land a spot on those blogs, with links back to either your website or your product pages on FBA (if you’re allowed) and let the traffic numbers add up over time. This is generally called an “outreach campaign”, and is highly effective when it comes to kickstarting an FBA product launch.

Getting Started

To get started, sit down with a pad and paper, and write up a customer persona for around 5-10 different types of people you think will purchase your products. If your product is specifically niche focused, it makes this part of the process that much easier.

For instance, if you’re selling garlic presses on FBA, you can specifically target cooking blogs, and end up with a list bigger than you can handle reaching out to over the next year.

If you’re selling hand towels, though, you may need to focus more on figuring out exactly who is going to purchase your products. That could include decorating blogs, mommy blogs, the same cooking blogs as above, or even sports blogs that have athletes who could benefit from your towel.

For less focused products, your imagination is your only limit.

The goal is to create a list of blogs and sites that are already creating the types of content you could create, and promoting the types of products that you’re selling. Then, you want to start reaching out to them, figuring out a way to build a relationship and get your products featured on their blog.

This strategy works the best if you already have a website of your own, showcasing your content and products.

While it’s not impossible to pull off without having a branded website, you’ll just have to work a bit harder, or focus on getting your own site up before you start your outreach campaign. A lot of bloggers may have issues promoting FBA pages directly.

The best way to find these blogs is to take your list of niches and add the word “blog” to the end of each one. Then, take those niches (plus the word “blog”) and begin searching on Google. You’ll get back a list of results you can start picking through.

Here's an example:

When you’ve found potential targets you could see your products being featured on, you need to find a way to contact the owner. Most times, this is going to be through a contact form on their site.

However, some bigger names have made it harder to get in touch with them.

For times like these, you can search for their name on social media platforms and make contact through that route.

Once you’ve gotten in touch with them, ask them how you can help their audience. Let them know that you sell products on FBA, and the types of products you sell.

Tell them how you think their audience could benefit, and that you are willing to create some content that helps showcase the products, while making the blog owner look good at the same time.

Around 20% (from our experience) of the time, you can expect the blog owner to take you up on the offer. The rest of the time, you’ll have to get creative to build the relationship between you and the blog owner, in order to eventually land a spot for you to promote your products to their audience.

Strategy #3 - Review Bloggers & Groups

Massively increasing the number of reviews your product receives is easy if you’re willing to drop the price and create promotions inside of groups designed specifically to trade products for reviews.

The types of groups we’re talking about are called, for lack of a better name, “Amazon review groups”, and the goal is to get your products in front of people who have aged accounts on Amazon with dozens or hundreds of existing product reviews.

Before you jump in and start offering up your products, though, you need to know how the process works.

To start, you need to come up with a template that you can copy and paste into multiple groups. This will save you time from having to write out each one, and doesn’t really matter that you’re copying and pasting since the main goal is to get a quick influx of views -- not win the next writing award.

Here’s a sample template to get you started:

Simple, and straight to the point.

You also want to make sure you include a high-quality image of the post to grab their attention and to ensure that you’re pricing it low enough to get people to make a purchase, but not so low that you’re giving the products away.

As you make a bunch of sales to the review groups, you may lose money up front, but this is a long term mission that’s going to increase the amount of sales you make in the months to come, because your reviews are so much higher than your competition.

When you start getting responses, you want to verify that they are actually a legitimate reviewer on Amazon. Ask them to send you a link to their profile, and then dig through to make sure they’re providing reviews with a high “Helpful” rating from other customers.

Providing honest reviews is crucial because you don’t want too many 5 star ratings or you run the risk of having the reviews flagged as being manufactured.

Here’s a small list of Facebook groups to help you get started:

Strategy #4 - Amazon’s Top 500 Reviewers

There’s a list on Amazon that you’re going to want to get comfortable with. Really, really comfortable. It’s Amazon’s Top 500 Reviewers list, and it’s your key to tapping into a gold mine -- if you approach it the right way.

The link we’ve just given you, is a list of Amazon’s top ranking reviewers, based on the number of “Helpful” votes they’ve received, compared to the total number of reviews they’ve left.

Getting just a few of the people on the Top 500 list to review your products does wonders for increasing your social trust when it comes to getting future customers to pull the trigger and make a purchase.

Some reviewers are picky about the types of products that they’ll accept in exchange for a review, though, so you may have to do a bit of research to find 5-10 that are actively willing to take your products and leave their insights on your product pages.

On the same note, other reviewers (especially those at the top of the list) have actively chosen to no longer accept free or promotional products, so you won’t be able to get a review from them. Not to fret, though.

Once you’ve gone through the list and have located a handful of usernames you think would be interested in exchanging their time for one of your products, it’s up to you to begin reaching out to them.

Start Contacting Them!

To get started, find a list of reviews that they’ve given. Then, navigate over to the page where their review is located, and add a new comment underneath.

Let them know that you’re a private label seller looking to exchange products for reviews, and would love to get one of your offerings into their hands.

This is a pure numbers game, so you may have to keep reaching out to a bunch of reviewers before you get a few that will bite on your offer. When you do get a taker, the time you’ve spent getting to this point will be worth the effort.

Having a listing with one of Amazon’s top 500 reviewers leaving a 4 or 5 star review of your product can go a long way toward helping you increase your sales.

Strategy #5 - Amazon PPC Advertising

Before you start creating sponsored product advertisements on Amazon, there are a few things you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.

It will help you shortcut your path to finding a successful campaign, which means that you’ll be spending less money to make more money.

While organic listings are always going to drive more traffic to your product pages than sponsored listings will, if you’re not working the advertising that Amazon lets you have access to, you’re leaving money on the table -- especially for new product listings.

By taking the time to make sure your product listings look professional, you’re going to increase your conversion rates, and decrease the amount you’re spending to make sales.

Doing that is actually fairly simple, and something you should be doing anyways.

Here’re a few tips to help you get started:

When your product listings are up to snuff, you need to focus on creating the right type of advertising. For beginners, the best types of ads to create are “Amazon Sponsored Products”. These ads will send traffic to your product listings, instead of pulling traffic off of Amazon and onto your website.

Amazon Sponsored Products ads will have you bidding on keywords that visitors are typing into Amazon’s search box. Going back to our example, if you’re selling garlic presses and bid on the keyword “garlic press”, you’ll rank for keywords such as “hand garlic press” and “black garlic presses”.

Creating Your First Campaign

You want to set a daily budget of at least $50 to get started.

Until you’re making a few sales each day, Amazon will not send you enough traffic to go through your budget. As your sales go up, Amazon will lower your cost per click, and begin sending you even more traffic to gradually increase the amount of sales you’re making.

Then you’ll have to figure out the targeting that you want to use.

Most beginners will start out with automatic targeting to figure out which keywords are going to bring in the most conversions. While this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, it can eat through your budget fairly rapidly.

Instead, we recommend that you use manual targeting. This will allow you to set the keywords you want to bid on, which can be found by using a keyword research tool like LongTailPro.

Once you’ve created your ad, and input the keywords you want to bid on, along with your default bid per click, you’re going to want to start the campaign.

Keep in mind, that if there is any reason you aren’t ready to start running ads, now is the time to pause your campaign. Amazon will begin charging you as clicks are generated, so if your listings aren’t 100% ready, you could be paying for bad data.

Strategy #6 - Bing & AdWords Paid Advertising

Now, you want to take the list of keywords that you’ve generated on LongTailPro and transfer them over to your Bing Ads and AdWords advertising accounts. If you don’t already have accounts on both platforms, now is the time to sign up.

The types of advertisements you’ll be creating are similar to the ones that you’ve just setup on Amazon, with one slight difference: instead of using product images, you’ll be required to exercise your copywriting chops.

Both platforms require you to use a short title, along with 2 lines of text that describe your product. You’ve probably already seen the ads before, if you’ve spent time searching on Google and Bing.

Every time someone searches for your keyword, your advertisements will be displayed. Then, when the visitor clicks on your ad, you’ll be charged for the click. Advertising on Bing and AdWords is going to be cheaper than Amazon, for the most part.

Setting up your campaigns is fairly straight-forward if you’ve already completed your campaigns through Amazon. If you haven’t, do so now.

Then, take the keywords you’ve generated from LongTailPro and setup a new campaign inside of AdWords.

The same process you’ll use to setup the campaign in AdWords can be repeated through Bing Ads. In fact, once your campaign is setup, you can export it and then import it into Bing.

Get Started With AdWords

To start, create a new campaign in AdWords. Then, select “Search Network Only”. This will ensure your ads are only displayed when visitors type your keywords into the search engines.

On the next screen, give your campaign a name that will describe what you’re advertising, so you can easily refer back to it later. Then, choose the countries you want to advertise to. Most people can leave this set to United States and Canada.

For your bid strategy, leave it set to “Manual: Manual CPC” and then enter $1.00 for your default bid.

Set your individual budget to something you’re comfortable with while you’re learning the system. You can start small at $10 or $20 per day, and then increase as you begin making sales and fine tune the campaign.

Now, click “Save and Continue”.

On the next screen, you’ll insert the link to your product page -- either on FBA or your own website -- and then name your ad group. You’ll also be able to enter the keywords from LongTailPro into the box and then click “Continue to ads”.

This is where your writing chops come in.

You’ll want to come up with 10-20 headlines you can use and test, while also coming up with multiple descriptions. As your ads run, Google will give you the data that’s being clicked on the most, so you can prune the non-performing ads.

When you’re finished, click on “Review campaign” and then verify the results. If everything looks like you want it to, you can start the campaign by clicking “Save and finish”.

Like Amazon, once you start the campaign, your ads will begin running and you’ll start being charged for any clicks sent to your pages.

After the campaign is setup, you can click on it in your AdWords dashboard, and then click on the “Edit” dropdown menu. From there, select “Download Spreadsheet”.

Export The Campaign To Bing

Then, take it to your Bing Ads account, and create a new campaign. Select the option to “Import From AdWords”. If Bing doesn’t request access to your AdWords dashboard, you’ll be given a chance to upload the spreadsheet, and Bing will create the campaign for you.

Once it’s finished creating the new campaign, verify that your results are acceptable, and make any changes necessary. Then save the campaign, and it will begin running as soon as you’re finished.

Strategy #7 - Facebook Paid Advertising

Facebook Ads is the new kid on the block, and a true powerhouse if you know how to properly work the platform.

It’s a lot different than advertising on Amazon, Bing, and AdWords, though.

Getting Facebook ads wrong can also blow through your budget incredibly quickly because most of the traffic coming from Facebook is going to be considered “cold” in nature.

Where customers are shopping around, looking for products similar to yours on Amazon, the traffic is going to be "hot" -- ready to buy.

​Likewise, on Google and Bing, when a customer types your keywords into the search box, you have a high chance of converting them into a sale, so they would be considered “warm”.

That means you must spend a lot more time up front getting your targeting right, and ensuring the copy that you’re using to generate clicks is also going to prime the customer for a purchase.

With that being said, traffic from Facebook is still going to convert at a lower rate than the previous paid advertising strategies will, but if you’re not learning how to use the platform, and your competition is, you’re leaving money on the table.

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, here is a link to setting up ad campaigns on Facebook. We’ll guide you through the best practices at each step, though, to ensure you’ve got the best chances at success.

Tips For Facebook Ads Success

As a general rule, “Newsfeed Ads” always perform better for FBA products than sidebar ads will.

For your advertising objective, you want to run “Clicks To Website” so you can send them off of Facebooks site, onto the product listings either on Facebook or Amazon.

You want to make sure that you’re using a high-quality image that gets your visitor’s attention. You can split test multiple images, and use the one that gets the highest click through rate (CTR).

You’ll also need to come up with a handful of headlines and bylines. You’ll be limited to 25 characters in the headline, and 135 characters in the byline. Like AdWords and Bing, you’re going to have to get a bit creative, but you’re able to test multiple variations to see which performs the best.

Now, you will be given the chance to setup your targeting. This is what’s going to make or break your campaign, and where you need to spend the most amount of time.

You’re trying to come up with a customer persona that you believe is most likely to buy your products, while growing your potential reach as big as you can. Don’t be afraid to advertise to a small group of 10,000 to 20,000 people, though, when you’re just starting out.

It’s better to advertise to a smaller, more tightly focused group of people who have a higher chance of converting than it is to blanket your ad across millions of people like big brands do.

Set your bidding strategy like you did with Amazon, AdWords, and Bing, but cut your bid in half.

Since Facebook traffic is cheaper to buy, you will get a lot more clicks for the daily budget that you set. Your daily budget can be as low as $10 to start, gradually increasing it once you start getting the hang of the platform and make sales from the clicks you’re sending to your product pages.

Strategy #8 - Recruiting Affiliate Marketers

Affiliates are the backbone of quite a few successful businesses online.

If you’re unaware, affiliates are bloggers and website owners that promote your products in exchange for a commission on sales they generate.

Since you’re already selling your products on Amazon, recruiting affiliates is easy because of the Associates program. Amazon’s Associates program lets bloggers and site owners join, and then grab links to the product pages that they can post on their own site.

When a visitor from their site clicks through on the link, and makes a purchase, the site owner is automatically credited with a percentage of the sale.

You don’t have to worry about paying extra because the commission comes out of Amazon’s cut that they’re already making each time you generate a sale.

​Finding affiliates to promote your products is actually fairly easy, because of the disclaimers that Amazon requires them to use.

In order for site owners to participate in the Associates program, they’re required to put a small blurb of text on the pages of their site, letting their visitors know that they will be compensated for any sales made through the Amazon platform.

How To Easily Locate Potential Affiliates

That small blurb also lets you track them down.

To find the affiliates that participate in the Associates program, you want to take the keywords that you generated in strategy #7 and #8, and then add these words to the end, in quotes:

So, if you’re selling garlic presses, and you want to target cooking blogs, you would type in:

Cooking blogs “Participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program”

Then, the search results will contain a ton of targets that you can reach out to, letting them know that you have products available that fall in line with the types of products they’re already promoting. Ask them if they are willing to include your products in a post to their readers.

To sweeten the deal, you can even offer a complimentary product to help them create the content, with pictures and a hands on review.

Like some of the other strategies we’ve laid out for you, this is going to be a numbers game. The more people you contact, the better your outcome is going to be. Some will never get your email, while others may ignore it.

Then, every so often, you’ll have a blogger willing to accept your product in exchange for a review on their blog -- and your sales will go up as they send their visitors over to your product pages.

Bonus: Long Term SEO Growth

The same keywords that you’re paying to rank for in Google and Bing’s search results can also send you traffic for free -- if you take the right approach.

If you’re implementing strategies #2 and #3 in this list, you’re already setting yourself up for long term growth utilizing the search engines.

Now, all you need to do is take the same keywords that you’re paying to advertise on with Google and Bing, and implement them into the right places on your product pages or blog posts to start increasing the free, organic traffic that the search engines will send your way.

Ranking In The Search Results In 2016

The best way to play the SEO game these days is to actually take a more conservative approach to how you’re optimizing for the various keywords you want to rank for.

By that, we mean that you shouldn’t aggressively try to rank for them, instead opting for gradual rankings increases that happen over time, and begin to snowball as you get more, and more wins under your belt.

In years past, you would optimize your posts or pages, and spend a ton of time trying to find as many backlinks as you could to help force your way up the search results pages. That will only lead you to catching a penalty in 2016 and beyond, though.

Instead, you can put your keywords, and some related variations of them in the following areas on your blog posts:

If you have the main keyword you want to rank for included in those locations, as well as a few variations of it inside of the content on the page, you’re going to be optimized enough for the search engines to know what the page is about.

You need to make sure that you’re not trying to hammer one specific keyword to the top, though. For instance, if you’re trying to rank a blog post for “blue widgets”, you want to also include keywords such as “best blue widgets”, “dark blue widgets”, “light blue widgets”, “widgets that are blue”, etc.

This will keep you from over-optimizing the posts and risking a penalty, while also giving you chances to rank for other keywords, too.

When you’re creating links pointing to your posts, you also want to make sure to switch up the text that you’re using in the links, to prevent sending links with the text “blue widgets” in it too often.

While this strategy may take a little more time to rank well for the keyword, you’re going to end up ranking for a lot longer than you would if you were trying to send 20 links with the text “blue widgets” in it, in one form of the keyword or another.

Growing Your FBA Business, Made Easy

Work from the top, to the bottom, implementing each strategy as you go. Then, once you’ve gotten through the list, prepare to launch your second and third products using the same strategy.

If you have any questions about what we’ve laid out here for you, or you get stuck along the way, feel free to reach out to us.

We’re here to help you get “unstuck” and keep pushing forward to grow your FBA business the right way.