This is a guest post from Curt Humrichouser of Seller Rocket. Curt has helped thousands of sellers get products placed in editorial content that helps new customers discover their brand, increase revenue, and improve seller ranking. Seller Rocket is a PR/Affiliate marketing agency that works with 500+ major media outlets to drive external traffic to Amazon through product reviews, recommendations, buying guides, and search advertising.

Whether you’re launching a new product or scaling revenue for an established product, gaining recognition outside of Amazon can be difficult. For instance, customer reviews are a major factor in convincing content creators to feature your brand; if an influencer has two products to choose from, one with 10 reviews and one with 10,000, they’ll choose the latter option every time.

Unless your brand is a household name, securing media coverage from top-tier publications with only a handful of customer reviews is next to impossible, so it helps to start small.

As you earn reviews and coverage from writers, publications, and other media outlets, you can then upgrade your media targets from small influencers and blogs to bigger names. This article will provide tactics for sellers of every size to tackle the challenges of boosting their brand presence.

Building an off-Amazon presence

Let’s talk about building product awareness and recognition off Amazon in a few different product scenarios.

Newly launched products

Whether it’s micro influencers or large publications, no one wants to bet their reputation on an untested product. For instance, what if it turns out to be low quality or hazardous?

Luckily, there are a few avenues for sellers to collect their first handful of reviews and raise public awareness of their brand. A strong first option is Amazon Vine, a program you can use to gather up to 30 reviews on a newly launched product. Savvy Amazon sellers launch different versions of the same product separately and run them all through Vine, then combine the variations under one parent listing. That way, a recently released product with five variations can hit the ground running with 150 reviews.

Once you have that foundational feedback, you can reach out to small blogs or influencers. Manage your expectations based on the number of reviews your product has, as well as your brand history.

When Sony launches a new product, they could easily convince Forbes to write about it. Meanwhile, if you launch your first product on Amazon and nobody has heard of you, you’ll have to aim for much smaller targets.

To save time and resources as you reach out to small blogs and influencers, message them directly. It also helps to keep your messaging as simple as possible.

For example: “Hi [blogger/influencer name], I really enjoy your content! My brand is ___ and I sell ___. I was wondering if you would review my product on your platform?”Software platforms can streamline outreach, but these usually have a fixed monthly cost to use. Additionally, you’ll have to pay fees based on any sales that result from the blogger or influencer’s endorsement, so be sure to factor those expenses into your collaboration budget.

Products with 100-500 reviews

Once a product breaks 100 reviews, it becomes more appealing to bloggers, influencers, and possibly even some larger publishers. Direct outreach will then see greater success and earn your product a spotlight in more content.

For products in this segment, you’ll likely need a software platform that assists with outreach. Most affiliate platforms require supervision to be successful. However, the benefit is you gain access to a database to discover new influencers and bloggers. Some platforms also help streamline outreach with templates and automated follow-ups.

Products with strong reviews

If you’re climbing toward #1 in your category, it’s possible bigger influencers and publishers will pick you up organically as they come across your product.

A product that has more than 500 reviews and is within the top 100 for its subcategory is highly tempting to content creators that want to recommend ”something new,” rather than recycle the top-ranked products that are highlighted on other major sites.

At this point, working with agencies like Seller Rocket is essential to broadcast your brand off of Amazon. Getting discovered by large publishers can make your brand a household name; they produce content that millions of people read, and their product recommendations help funnel new customers to your eCommerce store.

The external traffic and high conversion rates from these publications helps your brand skyrocket to the top of the search page and cuts your reliance on PPC advertising to maintain that position.

Products that lead their category

Items that lead in their category are the most likely to gain traction naturally. Many publications feature all of the top-ranking brands for a given niche, often without contacting the companies they write about. It’s a good shortcut, because the top products are almost always well reviewed and need to have impressive sales to achieve their ranking.

For affiliates, top-ranking products are an easy commission. If your favorite influencer recommends a product and you navigate to Amazon and see it has 50,000 reviews, you can trust it’s a worthy purchase. What’s more, we’ve seen that Amazon sellers average two to three reviews for every 100 sales, so an item with 50,000 reviews will have sold well over six figures of units.

Be aware, though, that publishers regularly replace category-leading products with ”something new.” So, even at this level of exposure, it’s still helpful to work with partners like Seller Rocket to maintain your brand’s established presence and ensure it’s always considered for new features.

If your product leads in its category, it may be beneficial to work directly with a publication. That option can be expensive, but the result is stellar content that focuses solely on your product or brand. Many sellers will then highlight this on their website or Amazon storefront, such as with banners that say, “As Seen On.” This is a sign of credibility to customers who visit your store.

How to earn a feature off of Amazon

Publishers constantly receive outreach emails from brands asking to be featured in their editorial content, and the larger they are, the more requests they receive. So, it’s common knowledge that publishers rarely respond to emails. Additionally, writers want to maintain editorial integrity, so they won’t let you dictate what they say, which products they include, or how they rank items.

With those caveats in mind, let’s look at how you can secure a feature and grow your presence off of Amazon. Although no publisher has shared their internal processes, we’ve listed a few key points based on what we’ve seen and heard from the brands we work with.

Be a top seller in your category

It’s not uncommon to find editorial content that features a majority of the top-selling brands on Amazon, as if the publishers chose products one through five on the Bestsellers list in the category. If you secure one of those coveted spots, this is a great shortcut to help maintain that status and earn repeat features.

Reach out directly

Every once in a while, your outreach message will capture someone’s attention. The best tip to yield a higher success rate is to keep it short and simple!

Use 50 characters or less in your email. Content creators don’t need to know your company mission or every detail that makes your product great (again, don’t tell publishers what to say about your offering).

Use affiliate platforms to find publishers

There are several platforms that publishers use, which you can reach them with. Impact, CJ Affiliate, and ShareASale are some of the big platforms, but they are all built for DTC.

Many omnichannel brands we speak with report sending offers through their affiliate platform, hoping to direct traffic to their brand’s website, but the publisher chose to link to Amazon. Links to Amazon convert 5-10 times better than links to a DTC website, so publishers are clearly thinking about the revenue they’ll receive when featuring a product.

Since they’re looking at affiliate platforms but still linking to Amazon, we can assume that publishers are looking for lists of products to choose from, which is how Seller Rocket operates. At Seller Rocket, we send lists of pre-vetted products to publishers and then let them do what they want. This allows the content creator to maintain their editorial integrity and focus on producing more content.

Wrapping up — Leverage publishers and influencers to grow your brand off Amazon

Publishers and influencers have many sources to find products, so you must fight for their attention.

Utilize tools, outreach, affiliate programs, and more to generate product reviews and make your products more trustworthy and likely to be featured in external publications.

Get your products in front of publishers of all types and sizes with partners like Seller Rocket, and leverage Amazon-powered resources like Vine to get started, and you’ll be building your off-Amazon presence in no time.