Podcast transcript
James Dihardjo
Steven, thanks so much for making time to join me in your evening. I know we're both pressed for time and I'm out of breath. So I wanted to get you to kick off and tell me about A+ premium content. A lot of people are talking about it. Some of the people I've interviewed have talked about it. Can you tell us a bit about what it is? How do you qualify and what your thinking is on it?
Steven Pope
So just to take us back a step, enhanced brand contents come a long way, right? So like a few years ago, you couldn't even get it if you were a seller, central brand. You had to go through Vendor Central and then they used to charge for it on vendor. Brand registry 2.0 came along and then you could start to get EBC and A+ content and kind of rebranded a little bit.
A few years ago, I started talking about how you got to add 500 words of copy to your A+ content because it index it. And if you're one of the very few people listening to this and you still don't think the A+ content index is, test it yourself. Put Spanish if you're in the US market into one alt text photo and it will index in under 48 hours. I pretty much guarantee it, and if it doesn't, I'll give you a free coaching call. That's how confident I am.
So now that we've set up that A+ content is important, it improves traffic and SEO, but it also improves conversion rates. So now along comes randomly like a week ago, Premium A+ content, and Amazon's like, Hey, we used to charge a quarter million dollars for this upwards of a half a million dollars to get access to this per year to give to the premium brands. Well, what's happening over at Amazon right now is their sales suck. Sales are down. Across e-commerce, across the platform, across the economy. Inflations are just rampant. The government says the inflation rate's 9%. Whatever they say, triple it, 27% is probably more accurate.
So, because of that, Amazon's like, we got to find a new way to make revenue. I got an idea. Let's add premium A+ content to all of the Amazon sellers. Now, obviously, I don't have any inside information, total speculation on my part. But my thought process is they know video is converting and they need a way to get consumers to view more content, and stay on Amazon longer, right? They tried social posts, but how many of you listening to this have actually engaged with a social post? Crickets in the background, right? Like, so it's free, right? It's great. And it's Instagram for Amazon called Amazon Social Posts. But premium A+ content is really big news. It's, it's going to have a high impact on sellers' abilities to convert and act and feel like a premium brand.
James Dihardjo
Interesting. Now, obviously, you need to have to be registered and brand registry to get access to this as a baseline. But I've heard some people say, you have to have 15 approved A+ pages previously for it. Can you shine a bit of light on that?
Steven Pope
We don't know a whole lot yet, but if you got the email, you have access now. If you didn't get the email, hurry quick. Go submit 15 A+ contents this month. And by the end of the month, they will allow you access potentially. Also, the other constraint is you got to have your brand story up and live on all products.
And it's surprising how many people don't have brand stories up on their detail pages. And what it is, is it's a new module. So if you go into the advertising dropdown A+ post content, you click on that, and then the next layer you'll see two modules. On the left is a brand story, and on the right is basic A+ content. And so you click the brand story and you're off to the races.
Now, what's really cool about this is not only can you tell your brand story, which is more copy, more SEO, and more keywords, but you can also increase your average order value. You can crosslink dozens, not just like onesies, twosies, but dozens of your products through the brand story. And you've got this little button you can click to the right and you can get module after module after module. And the reason this is important because when you're trying to create a brand and most of the people listening to this, they're going to be native-born Amazon brands. And what that means is they started selling on Amazon and they don't sell anywhere. For the most part.
Now, whether you're native or not, brand stories are important. A+ content's important. And premium A+ content is just going to take this to the next level. It's going to be gigantically important. Now, a couple of people did ask me, they're like, well, what happens if Amazon takes it away and they want to start charging me the quarter million dollars? Who cares? All of your old A+ content is still there. Just transfer back. No big deal.
James Dihardjo
Yeah, it's true. That's true. Just a final question for you before we both have to jump off this. From what you've seen, what do you think the most important part of the content is at the moment? You touched on the video before. You mentioned like this Amazon social thing that's crickets as you say. Like, what's the most important content thing you are, you know, you and your team are looking at the moment?
Steven Pope
The number one Amazon hack that I always give is the main image. The main image has more effect on sales than anything else. So if you have a crappy main image and you're going to spend time on your premium A+ post content. Let me tell you, run a pick food test, run an AB test something on your main image and fix that thing up.
I have a really strong use case for this story. So my brand name, Age of Sage, and I talk about my brand all the time just to kind of showcase I know what I'm doing, I'm a practitioner or that kind of stuff. I launched products like every month. Age of sage, incense sticks. I got the number one new release and incense. I'm still Amazon's choice for incense. And then we had a mom box. Well, I had to switch the main image of the mom box three times before it started selling. On that third time that I switched it, I got a hundred units in sales larger than the previous day. And in the first 30 days, I did $144,000 in sales going into Mother's Day for a mom kit box, two years ago, this year it was only 65,000. So I couldn't maintain that momentum post covid.
But the point is that if you get these content pieces correct and you need to get them all correct to be clear. Can't just do the main image. You got to do the main image, and secondary images. Got to show your customer avatar. I need a photo of your customer touching your product and looking at the camera with their eyes open and their teeth showing because that's the shot. That is the money shot when it comes to Amazon's secondary images.
And then you got to get your bullets, your title, your brand story, your A+ content, and you got to make two social posts a day. And you got to have your alt text filled in. And now you got to do premium A+ content and put a video into the modules and you have to redo all of the modules' sizings. And then there are like seven modules. And instead of it just being this nice thin piece of art, it's now this panoramic vertical view, whatever that's called. And it's gigantic, right? So you got to build all of these content pieces together. And if you do that, you're going to be a successful Amazon brand instead of just an Amazon brand.
James Dihardjo
Awesome, man. Awesome. Well, look, thank you, Steven. I hope we can do this again when both of us have more time in your evening and my morning. But, man, I'll
Steven Pope
I’ll make time for it. Thanks for having me on, James.
James Dihardjo
Awesome mate. We'll talk soon. Thank you.
Steven Pope
All right.
