How To Set Up An MBA Listing

Creating Your Listings In MBA

One of the hardest and most frustrating things in Merch By Amazon is how the heck can I get my Tshirt or what have you design in front the buying customers eyes. At low tiers, this is really painful.

One of the best ways is through platform-specific PPC, the other is organic search.

Half of the job will be done just by your researching or looking for a niche, as well both can be crossed, (I found a niche looking for keywords and vice versa).

We will focus on organic in this article, briefly touching on PPC, because I am  Particularly Pathetically Cheap.

Really I'm not but I think organic is a better way to achieve long term, not just poof paid campaign, poof done.

Choose The Niche

Ok and yes there are niches for everything today, niche s the new, slightly older new selling tactic.

Online retailers have in the past 10 or so years maybe less noticed why niche specific stores are able to compete against the big box crew.

Specialization seems to be key to most small business, or always was right. Your Niche research would consist of

• Amazon search
• Google search
• Existing Listings (Amazon mostly)
• Google Trends (If you want to really get down)
• Any KW finders (there are a great many free)

Remember all those things that show up automatically in the search drop down are keywords, and what people are actually looking for.

  

Use a Couple Of Free Tools

There are a couple of free tools to help you in the research. (At this point I will talk Amazon)

one of the tricks in choosing properly:

• Find The Niche 
• Check the shirts in that niche (BSR)
• If BSR of the top 10 is under 500,000 its a pretty good niche to try out

BSR= the amount a shirt has sold, the lower the better.

1. Unicorn smasher is a big help here (free) showing BSR for the products in the niche ( faster than going through all)
2. Merch Tools just right click and go on "show all merch" for the niche or keywords. Also, you can launch right to the USPTO trademark search from merch tools
3. Tangent Tess takes you to the USPTO site search.
4. TMHunt, check for clothing Trademarks
5. AMZ suggestion expander, does just that expands the number of results for the drop down search
6. Keywords Everywhere this is my favorite scours every google search page and displays the top keyword searches etc.

These are just a couple of good chrome extensions free  I use.

Drill It Down

Once you have chosen your niche you will more than likely have to drill it down a bit two levels possibly (Nurse Surgery),  or cross niche (Nurse, Mom ++) 

This will gain you more exposure overall as two search terms are employed in one Long-tailed keyword, sort of.

So you will have say, Awesome Mom Dedicated Nurse and Insane Organizer (Just an example I would not string this together)

So A long-tail Keyword has already started to develop in your title sort of.

You have researched the niche through the drop down bar in Amazon search, Google searches and listings on the Amazon site already.

What You Found

Basically, you have found the most popular searches, which in turn are your KW, niches or niche ideas as well as being an easy and quick way of writing a title.

With so many long sentences in the search bar these days, you can almost get the complete volume, KW, Niche, and title ;)

This is all great info when you sit down and put it all together.

There are some people that spend a good amount of time cruising around other PODS to see what sells, and why, also looking for KW`s, niches.

The Design

We now know the niche we have a great idea of what KW`s we are targeting.

At this point we have to design things accordingly, is it mainly a text-based niche or a design based or is it mixed Text and design?

Make the design according to what sells there, or make an existing design better ( be careful not to copy)

Your design will be your KW sort of and vice versa.

Make it or outsource it, just make it decent enough that you would buy it, although I have some pretty bad stuff that sells too. as does everybody, hence, get in front of the right eyes.....

The Listing

Ok, this gets tricky. Make sure you are not infringing, check line by line in TMHunt or USPTO, you will get very fast at this, so don't despair and don't think it is a waste of time.

You have two Lines at the Top and two bullets plus a description to sell your design!

The first line is described as a brand, a lot of controversies here, I personally never use just one brand here. Example Joes Fishing Tee Co or joes Fishing TShirts.

Though if you are building a brand, which may be a good idea, you will.

Why Not The same Brand        

The why is simple, if people are copying your designs, they are easy to find just by clicking the Brand.

There is also the argument that, yes, they are easy to find with a click.

Some people (I do This) clump certain tees together in one brand, if it is one niche one idea, expanded to several shirts.

The Title

This follows e brand so we have this:

The title will be your tshirt content and keywords, try to be coherent and still stuff the top KW in there. 

Some say KW KW Tshirt KW KW gift like this but I have found the keyword algorithm seems random?

1.  Joes Fishing Tshirts (Brand)
2. Bass Tournament Tshirt Fishing Boat Anglers Funny Gift (Title)  Or Bass Tournament Fishing boat Anglers Funny Tshirt (Either way)
3. Bullet
4. Bullet
5. Description

I have split test most of this here and found either or, some say the designs suck or or-or, all very much not true as I stated and they have also, sold very bad designs.

Bullets

The first bullet should be like the title  Bass Tournament Tshirt great for outdoorsmen blah blah

The second bullet should be more to the point, sort of.

Unique and cool fishing shirt makes a great gift for anglers mom dad blah blah don't stuff too much here etc.

Here some say the same KW KW Gift or shirt or and KW KW

Description 

Simple copy the title and the second bullet point points and you're done, these three combined are said to have an effect overall on SEO, though it is not 100% confirmed.

 I have always filled all of these fields in, but many, much more successful than I do not.

So as always with Amazon, there is an amount of guessing, throwing something at the wall and seeing what sticks.

A small thing I do, not on all now, is put a few different versions of Tshirt in the Brand, title and bullets, this was a strategy I learned from a youtube video. Tshirt, t-shirt, tee shirt, and shirt.

Pricing Strategy              

 This is as usual full of debate, there are three camps here yep you guessed...  

1.  Low
2. Middle
3. High

So I have also tested all three and yep as guessed it doesn't seem to matter a lot.

If a buyer likes what they see, they buy...that being said I have never sold over 16 bucks on MBA, but a lot have sold much higher.

A couple of pretty successful sellers start low and as sales velocity builds, if, they raise up slowly. 

Actually, all do this they just start at different price points. 

• $12.99
• $14.99
• $16.?? and up

Why What Is The Difference

The whole idea here is to tier up, the higher the tier the more shirts you have up, the more shirts the more eyes see them.....

Now the second reason you're listing will stay for 180 days if you don't have sales it comes down automatically if you have one sale it stays up.

Its called getting a shirt the BSR and hopefully it gets enough sales to start the price up.

PPC Amazon 

You will eventually try this, I will but next 4th quarter, there is a lot to make but a lot to learn too.

If you opt-in for this option you will make sales and tier quickly for sure, but be careful. Make sure your pricing is set to make a higher return, meaning do not start at $12..99 per shirt.

I hope that this gives you an idea of how and why listings in MBA are done. Research is key, but as you can see the research is not rocket science.

With a bit of thought and 20 mins. you can come up with a ton of niche, design, and keyword ideas for organic search

Setting up your listing is sometimes, or always a lot more important than how great a design might or might not be, who said that?

If you do things with this stuff in mind you will be ok on MBA, but remember, Merch is basically a great step as well as an opportunity to learning e-com and POD.

You can make money here but its a long game for most, keep on marching in a straight line and you will get there.

Any questions or comments, or anything at all even them below I will answer as I can

All the Best and the very best in your POD journey

EJ