How to Get Your Products Featured in Major Press PLUS Sell More

Ever wondered how you can get your products featured in the major press? Well stay tuned, I have the perfect solution for you!

Whether you’re selling on Amazon or selling on your own website, increasing backlinks can really boost your product sales. While consumers are searching for recommendations on which product to buy, merchants are also looking for recommendations on how to get the press behind their products, reach a wider audience and sell more. Which is why today we are going to talk about how to get your products featured on major press sites. I’m only going to focus on two strategies/platforms: Stackcommerce and Help A writer Out

Now is Stackcommerce and why they should consider working with them?

Stackcommerce is a product discovery platform and they partner up with thousands of publishing houses and brands to help people/consumers discover products and brands that they love. They mostly partner with popular media sites. And I happen to have a vendor account with them, so the knowledge I am about to endow you with right now, is gold, stay tuned!

Think of Stackcommerce as the biggest eCommerce company that you’ve never heard of, it’s a behind-the-scenes kind of player. It’s basically like vendor control on Amazon, except that Stackcommerce buys products from you, in bulk, and they list them for you. In this case, what they do is you have a vendor account with them and as products sell through the media campaigns, the publishing houses they’ve partnered up,  they get compensated via commission, then they split the profit with the media outlets.

So Stackcommerce is listing your products on all these top 10 lists, and on the media sites. And the nice thing about working with Stackcommerce is that if you had done tried to do this on your own, you would have paid thousands of dollars for recognition with a publishing house. But with Stackcommerce, all you need to do is fulfill the product to the customer when it sells through their platform. And this can in turn, also blow up your Amazon sales.

Although Stackcommerce might offer a coupon on your product through all these media sites, people sometimes prefer to buy on Amazon and other Trusted Sites. So sometimes they’d rather pay more by buying from the original store. This means as the original seller you’ll just get this huge spike of sales on your Amazon store because Stackcommerce has published your product(s). And if you Google your product, you’ll find it on every major blog and every social media channel. When Stackcommerce publishes an article with one of these major blogs, it stays there for a super long time. So you will receive consistent traffic organically for a very long time after that day.

StackCommerce’s biggest goal is to rise, to make the merchant and the publishers get the recognition that they deserve.

Their top-tier publishers are CNN, Mashable, TMZ, Mac Apps, all Math publishers, Cult of Mac, 9-5 Mac, and Scary Mommy. And they have a publisher for every category. You are in pets? They’ll find you a publisher that can match for your pets. You are in tech? Tech is obviously their biggest category. They have lots of tech publishers, such as Gizmodo, Gadget, and Next Web. All the big boys are on Stackcommerce.

What’s Stackcommerce does is that it gives you this unique combination of content and advertising that you cannot get anywhere else. Amazon is also good for this but the value Ad you get from Stackcommerce is that marketing department you wouldn’t be able to afford on your own, obviously, you can’t afford to get a PR company to constantly pump out press on your behalf unless you’re Jeff Bezos.

Aside from the press that you get from these publishing houses, your product also sells on the stores Stackcommerce created for them. And they have also created stores for TMZ, if you go to shop@tmz.com, they created that, and you’ll see: powered by Stackcommerce written at the bottom, this is to let everyone know that they are the operators of the store. TMZ is one of the top publishers, they’ve also created Mashable’s store, called deals. mashable.com.

And aside from getting press, the fact that your product lives on the sites that have this vast amount of traffic coming in on a daily basis is an absolute value for the merchant.

Now stack commerce doesn’t have to pay you as the vendor directly, all they’re doing is fulfilling your product when it sells. So it’s a performance-based partnership. They do well when you do well. They don’t charge you any listing fees, no sign-off fees, etc. However you might incur fees if you become unresponsive, or shipping out stuff late, but that’s all. That’s the only downside when selling with Stackcommerce. It’s a completely unique and awesome way to sell. And I’m surprised more merchants, don’t do it. But I know it’s probably because they haven’t heard of them. So here’s your chance.

Back in February, the company got acquired by one of the biggest venture capital firms out there. This means they now have a lot more room to grow and make sure more merchants know about them, more room to use and leverage the services in this great platform they have. Exciting isn’t it?

The lifetime value you get on Stackcommerce

Once you get once your product online with them, it’s not coming down, ever! And typically, with the lifecycle of an article on Stackcommerce, when you notice the most amount of sales is usually within the first four days after the article goes live.

And there are some pieces of content that have been created so perfectly by the house content team, or sometimes by their publishers, as they sometimes request to create the content themselves when they request samples that they use to review a product and then they write about it. Sometimes the content produced that you see value from and not just value in terms of vanity metrics. By this I mean value in terms of you are going to get sales even two years after the article went live.

Is Stackcommerce an invitation-only system? And what’s the threshold? What are the criteria that ideally should be in place for a product to be a good match with stick commies? So, it’s not invitation-only, however, you do need to be qualified to sell on Stackcommerce.

What are the requirements?

By this, they mean what is your level of inventory? Do you have deep levels of inventory? As a merchant, you cannot approach Stackcommerce with 50 units, that’s not going to get you any coverage. Remember what I said at the beginning? To get an article feature with one of these publishing houses, you have to pay them somewhere between 10 to 15 thousand. So Stackcommerece looks at your product, and looks at how much they can sell through to get that cost that they’ll ideally be getting if you don’t reach out to them directly. Therefore, if you have 50 units, no one is going to put you on Stackcommerce because you are a small account.

Secondly, you have to give them, (Stackcommerce) a discount because that’s the premise of what they’re going to write about. E.g “Hey, this product is usually $50. But with this Stackcommerce partnership, you can get it for $45. So if you give them a discount, you have deep levels of inventory. However, this is not a deal-breaker, but they would like it nonetheless.

And thirdly, exclusivity to the product will make you perform better on Stackcommerce. And by exclusivity, I don’t mean a product that you only sell as the commerce I mean a product that you’re probably selling on Amazon and other channels. If they can take that product bundle it with something else to make it unique, or do a multipack that is exclusive.

What about saturated products on the market?

Let’s say a mobile phone holder an automobile?

Good news! They don’t put requirements on that. Although Stackcommerce started off as a digital marketplace and that’s typically what sells best on their platform, digital products. Since they started doing so well they decided to merge to physical products and the first category that started doing well in the physical category was actually animatronics. So yes, saturated products can still do well because they have a way of promoting them.

The cool thing is if you find something like that recommended from Mashable, you’re going to buy the exact same product. Take a camera, for example. If you go on Amazon and search for an HD webcam, you’re going to get so many results with thousands of reviews and you won’t have any idea on which one to choose. So rather go on Google and search for the best HD cameras for web recording. And sure enough, you’ll find multiple highly rated blogs with tips and reviews of which webcam they recommend the most. And they do a really good job of breaking down why they recommended this product over that product, especially by listing all the specifications and special features. Then after that, you can just go on Amazon and buy the recommended one, regardless of its Amazon reviews not being five stars. Because you know? YOLO! So trust your sources!

Therefore, Stack commerce can add trust to saturated products, and help brands really shine and come through.They do it through the content, the fact that the product is saturated doesn’t matter, because they’ll be covering it with their publishing partners, which guarantees sales for the product. So if you’re hitting all those checkmarks that they require, you’ll see your product continue to get coverage.

What about health and wellness products?

Well, StackCommerce has recently acquired a company called joyous.com. and they own it. Joyous has a big lifestyle audience. So lifestyle products are now doing quite well on Stackcommerce because of this addition. So it’s not just tech and electronics, Health & Wellness is also flourishing, especially products such as natural deodorant, first aid kits, and all of that. So don’t sell yourself short. Any category that can be talked about online can be sold.

And on top of that, they have TV partnerships, and just to mention one, The Kelly Clarkson Show. So they have a wide array of categories that fit within the state commerce model.

Now how do you get in contact with them and apply to become a StackCommerce seller? Go to stack commerce.com. and go to “contact”. Fill out that mini-application/form as it will go directly to the sales team.

Stackcommerce is growing like gangbusters and you don’t want to miss out on this awesome opportunity! If you can’t beat them join them because Stackcommerce is one of the many ways that you can get your product featured in the media.

Let’s talk about Help A Reporter Out

What are they about and how can people utilize them to get more press?

Help A Reporter Out is a platform that journalists use to get stories to come to them as opposed to going out and hunting for stories. They have a basic idea of what they want to talk about, but they sometimes have a hard time finding candidates to talk about that specific topic with so it’s similar to a job board, job post, you’re letting those who believe they possess the experience and knowledge come to them by posting that specific topic they want to talk about.

They have every category from health, wellness, electronics, etc. So this is an opportunity for you to reach out to them in order to tell your story or your product story in whatever category you want to talk about.

And Help A Reporter Out sen you a morning, afternoon and evening email of all the categories you signed up for. The reporters actually look into cover. So, when this comes into your inbox. you look at your specific category, and you see if any of that matches, it could be a reporter looking to talk to someone about the healthcare product that is coming out, one tip I’ll give you on using Harrow is actually you write the content for them, reporters, journalists, they’re extremely busy these days. when you go, and you have the article already written out for them, and like, hey, yes, my product fits this specific category you’re looking to talk about, here is my product. And I’ve already even written the article for you. And they take your work. And of course, they will edit it and make it read, like how they write and make any changes on any edits.

So you can subscribe to heroes like daily newsletter, it’ll give you kind of updates on what different reporters are looking for. And then you can reply and say, Hey, I have a product that meets your needs, or I have a story that meets your needs. n the beginning, when you’re first responding to those requests, do you write the whole thing up? Or do you just do you just respond first, and kind of give them your pitch or your hook,

usually give him an outline. because ideally, the journalist or the reporter will want to write themselves with the outline helps drastically. It’s almost a pitch as well. It’s it shows them that you know what you’re talking about, you know, what story they’re trying to cover. And as soon as you have all those outlines for them to see, it just makes your job extremely easy. It’s it’s I think it’s the ease that Alright, I’m gonna go through any more applicants this guy’s done everything for me.

So you don’t have to write the whole article but you should provide an outline introduction hook them in and then some three main points something like that. And then you got your your wrap up your conclusion, and just hand it over to them and and get their consideration, if you need to hire a writer, how do you recommend finding the best writers to help you create good content for your brand for your social media Where do we find good copywriters? scripted Inc, is a good place to get good, versed American, or not even just American writers that are well versed in what they’re doing. And they’ve been vetted by the team at on scripted. you can use any other freelance marketplace out there from Guru freelancer.com Upwork. There’s so many take advantage of them. compare prices between writers and pick what works best for you.

there’s people that do this for a living and you can even find press release publishers on these types of sites. really great a way to find writers as getting your products in the press is content marketing. So let’s talk about content marketing. What is it? And why should people care?

content marketing is the most slept on marketing technique out there, because it is extremely hard. But if you do it consistently, and you do it well, which means having a good writer, again, it is the gift that keeps on giving. Because when you’re not paying for anything, aside from the writer, have I have a good writer in house that writes content on a daily basis, pump out content on our site. And obviously content, he has to be relevant content as well, emember the saying. they said content is king, in a way, content is still King, good boy just has to be good content. a bit of paid as well, do Pinterest. most of our marketing on our direct to consumer channel comes through content marketing. And and what we do is we cover things that are within our category, things that fit with gig supply, regardless of if it’s a competitor, we will still cover if it’s a product or a story. And we push it out through our social media channels. And what we’ve seen is competitors, whatever the if it’s, if it’s a competitor, whatever the case might be, they are still willing to go around and share your content that you’ve created on your site. doesn’t even have to be a complimentary product, it could be the same product. example. We have another brand called a geek and a gentleman and we did this great beard care line, beard oil, sulfate free, all that cool stuff. And we were selling it on our site. But there’s so many companies making great beard oil out there. And we we talked about them all the time we went and we pick beard oils from competitors. I’m like, Hey, we tried this one from this company. We tried this one from this company. And we pushed it out there. And the engagement we got from that was unreal that it actually brought people back to our site, because the content was on our site. And they were buying it at all as well. So he can be the same product as well. He doesn’t have to be complimentary, because he might be afraid, oh, this is going to take away from my sales. If I talk about them. It actually what we’ve seen is the complete opposite.

So you can take like direct competitor. So all of you out there selling things that you can’t advertise on Amazon or on Google, selling stash boxes, and I just found out that I can’t advertise. They could do content on their website, have a review of all of them and all their different elements. And now they’re driving traffic to their own website. Maybe they could offer a deal on theirs on that same content, you know, and Hey, now they’re providing value and they’re getting their stuff shared all over because they’ve they’ve now shown competitors in their own top 10 version of stash box reviews, right? And you could even do the same thing on your YouTube channel. There’s so many different Because people love unboxings they search YouTube for unboxings. So you could unbox your competitors products and drive traffic to your own site and your own. You could even give a coupon code on for your own product on a review of a competitor’s product on your YouTube channel, right?

the mindset that one person has to lose for someone else to win is so 9090. Now with the internet, how everything is so pervasive, everyone can win. give that strategy a try.

That’s it from me today, stay tuned for our next tips Tuesday edition next week!