Selling on Amazon can be classified into 3 main stages. And here is stage 1...

Stage 1: The Grind

This is the foundation so you should be spending the most time in this stage.

Who are considered to be in the 1st stage?

Sellers who have:

• Less than 20 sales a day
• Less than 50 reviews

The timeline for this stage is generally 3-4 month after your first sale.

For people who are in this stage, all you need to focus on is to reach this level of 20 sales a day and 50 reviews.

In order to achieve that, we need to rank higher in Amazon, right?

And since the top 2 factors affecting Amazon rankings are quantity of sales and reviews, the goal of stage 1 is to...

Generate enough sales and reviews to rank for keywords on Amazon.

How to Do That?

There are 3 things you will be doing in this stage:

1. Product Launch
2. Review systems
3. Amazon PPC (after you've gotten 15 reviews)

First, Product launch.

When you are just getting started and your product is ranking on page 9 of Amazon for example, a strategy you could adopt is to offer your product for free or at a very low price. This is because a free or discounted giveaway feeds the Amazon algorithm almost as much as a "real sale".

The theory behind this is for you to spike the algorithm with a bunch of sales, then your ranking will rise.

Don't think this is ridiculous yet! Keep reading...

The way to do this is by creating a landing page or a squeeze page offering your product at $1 for example. You describe and promote the product on the page. At the same time, tell your potential customers that you are offering certain quantity of your product at this price is because you are just launching this product and you need reviews.

Just be honest with your customers, they will be very willing to give you reviews.

You don't need to have a website for this. You just need to create a landing page. There are quite a few companies who are offering this tool. For example, leadpages, convertkit...

After this is done, you can create a Facebook Ad for the landing page and target it to your target audience. Simple as that.

If these 2 steps are setup properly, you will soon be getting quite a number of sales and reviews. This will spike the Amazon algorithm and your ranking will go up pretty fast. This has been proven to work.

Definitely, this requires some costs: your advertising costs and the cost for those discounted products. But remember, the more you invest upfront, the faster and easier your path will be. You will be earning a lot more in a shorter period of time.

Second, Review System.

In order to make sure your review comes in and also to encourage more reviews, you should do Email follow-ups to ask for feedback and ask for the feedback as a review.

Another thing you could do is to do phone calls and ask questions like "Did you get your products? Was it what you expected? Can I send you a bonus/coupon for our future products?"

"And by the way, can I send you a link for you to leave a review for our products? Give your honest feedback and I really appreciate what we talked about today."

Something like this will definitely boost the customers' shopping experience and encourage more quality reviews for you.

Third, Amazon PPC.

PPC should be quite straight forward. PPC stands for "Pay Per Click". Basically, you spend some money to rank for keywords related to your product.

Here are 3 guidelines for Amazon PPC that you should keep in mind:

1. Start once you have at least 15 reviews
2. BE AGGRESSIVE while bidding on keywords that you want to rank for
3. If operating at a loss, pause until you get more reviews and/or improve your listing

That's all for the first stage.

Recap:

• The only thing you need to think about is SALES and REVIEWS because they affect your ranking.
• You can accomplish both quickly by LAUNCHING your product to an audience.
• Repeat until you have at least 20 natural sales a day and 50 reviews.