7 Ways to Grow your Business During the Chinese New Year
As most of you are aware the Chinese New Year is about to be in full affect, which means all things work related in China will come to a halt for the holiday. For us Amazon sellers that means we cannot place any new orders with our suppliers for at least 3+ weeks. Yes, this is unfortunate but there is nothing we can do about it.
So instead of wasting this time and waiting for your supplier to come back to work, let’s try to make the best of this time. In this post I will go over 7 different things that you could be doing to grow your business during the Chinese New Year.
1. Create (or Grow) Your Social Media Accounts
Now is the perfect time to either create your brand’s social media accounts or start putting in the time to grow them. No matter what niche or market your brand is in, I would suggest having both a Facebook page as well as a Twitter account. Twitter and Facebook are the two big ones that just about every single reputable brand will have. I would also classify Instagram as being vital but, some brands may not fit well on this platform.
Depending on the niche of your brand, you may also want to consider creating an account on Pinterest, Youtube or even Snapchat.
If you have already setup social media accounts for your brand then this is a good time to start becoming active on them and see if you can start driving traffic back to your website or Amazon listing. I am not going to dive into exact strategies on how to grow these accounts in this post but, I will give you some quick actionable advice that you can use to get started.
Facebook: Research other popular FB pages within your niche and see what other people are having success with. If they are posting a lot videos, then post a lot of videos on your page. And no, these videos don’t have to be your own, just go to Youtube! Just be as active as possible and copy the popular types of posts from other similar pages.
Twitter: If you have been selling a product for a while the first thing I would do with your twitter account is search for your name brand within Twitter. When I did this when I created my brand’s Twitter account I found around 5 different tweets of people talking about my product. I was able to reach out to these people and thank them for buying my product. Give that a try if you are already selling a product.
Another good tactic is to search hashtags that are related to your product and hop in the conversation. Like, retweet and comment on these posts and see if you can interact with them.
Instagram: Take screenshots of popular pics from popular accounts within your niche and post them on your own account every single day. MAKE sure to tag the account where you got the picture so you don’t get in trouble. Put around 5 related hashtags in each picture you post and this will get you some new follows/likes.
Also, search hashtags and like as many pictures as you can. You can also follow a good amount of people as well. Liking and following other related accounts will gain you some initial followers.
2. Create (or Grow) Your Brand’s Website
Setting up your own website is super easy. Use a host such as Bluehost and install WordPress, that’s pretty much it! I will do a tutorial on how to setup your own website sometime in the future. However, this is the perfect time to get your site up and running!
If you already have your site created then you could start trying to grow it. Having a website that brings in traffic each day that you can send to your Amazon product listings or collect their emails to sell to them later on is HUGE. The best way to grow a website is to have valuable content written and published on the site.
You can create this content yourself or you could hire someone from Upwork. Either way, adding new content to your site will slowly start to bring in organic traffic down the road.
3. Apply to Brand Registry
If you are selling on Amazon and you aren’t a part of Amazon’s Brand Registry then now is the time to do it. There are a lot of good reasons to get your brand registered with Amazon but, mainly to protect you from hijackers who start selling your product without permission. With brand registry you will be able to get rid of these hijackers.
Here is a pretty good guide on how to apply and get accepted into brand registry – http://www.privatelabelventures.com/how-to-get-approved-for-amazon-brand-registry-in-less-than-2-days
This is the perfect thing to get done during the Chinese New Year!
4. Find Suppliers you Want to Contact
Even though the suppliers will not reply, you can still browse through Alibaba and note the suppliers that you want to contact when the holiday ends. Create a spreadsheet where you can put the link to the suppliers page and jot down a quick note about them.
This way you can come back in a week or two and know the exact suppliers you want to contact. You could email the suppliers during the Chinese New Year but, there is a good chance that your email will get lost with the rest of the emails they received.
The best way to go about this is to email them as soon as they get back after their holiday so they will for sure get your email. That is why I would suggest keeping note of the supplier and contacting them later on.
5. Find More Products within your Niche to Sell
Even if you are not looking to expand your product line it does not hurt to plan for the future. Use this time to find a couple products that you could possibly sell at some point down the road.
Since you are already selling a product within a certain niche then your next products will be in the same niche, this makes finding future products a lot easier. Look through Amazon at brands within the same niche as yourself and see what kind of products they are selling successfully. See if you can find these products on Alibaba and take note of the suppliers that manufacture them.
Like I said, even if you are not looking to start a 2nd or 3rd product it is good to have a game plan that you have laid out so that when you do get to that point you will know exactly what you need to do and how to do it.
6. Become an Expert within your Market
This is something that I have been doing a lot of lately.
Whatever market your brand is selling in you should start to gain some knowledge within the niche and start learning the ins and out of the market. This will help you immensely in so many ways. You will be able to determine the pain points of your customers and know the kind of products that they need to solve these problems.
How can you do this?
Read forums within your market. If you are in the cooking market then go to Google and search “cooking “+ “forums” and you will be shown all of the forums that are related to cooking. Now dive into these forums and start learning everything you can.
See what everyone is talking about within the forums and start to become an expert within your market. I can do a whole post on the benefits of this and exactly how to do this but, it is really as simple as going to the places where your customers hang out and see what’s going on there.
7. Grow your Email List
There are a million different ways to do this but, we can all agree that having your own list of people that are interested in your products is so valuable. You can collect emails from your website, drive traffic from social media accounts to a landing page, run contests or a million other things.
The main thing that you should be doing is testing all different types of things and start growing your email list NOW. No one can ever take this email list from you, which means that you will always have a way to contact and sell to a group of interested people.
One thing that I have been having success with lately is running a contest where I give away one of my products for free. I run Facebook ads to a landing page for my contest and grow my email list that way. In the past 4 days I have grown my email list by a total of 165 with the combo of FB ads + contests.
I have a lot more testing to do with this but, I have seen some awesome success so far and I’m excited to see what kind of ROI I can get from this email list. I had to spend $100 to get these 165 email signups, which comes out to be $.60 per lead, which is pretty cheap compared to a lot of niches but I will keep testing and optimizing to try and lower this price.
This is just one example. Go out test your own strategies and tactics and see what works for you. With these 3 or so weeks of not being able to contact new suppliers it is a great time to start growing your email list.
Conclusion
For us Amazon sellers it can be a real pain in the butt not being able to reach out to our suppliers for so many different reasons or not being able to contact new suppliers for new products. It is important to realize that there is nothing that you can do to change it and try to make the most of this time.
That is why I wanted to put together a list of different things you can be doing to grow your business while you wait. I hope you enjoyed reading!
Let me know in the comments below what you will be doing to grow your business during the Chinese New Year.
Comments
13 Comments
As always, awesome post! Thanks Josh
🙂
Thanks for the valuable info .
You are welcome! Thanks for the comment Marvin
Great post Josh.
I haven`t got a website and I like what you say about blue host and install Word press, but that is as far as I can go, just wishing to know how to.
Can you please put me in the direction how to learn to do it, any links or literature where I can learn?
thanks
Regards
Hi Juan,
Here is a good guide – https://www.shivarweb.com/website-setup/
Josh
Thanks Josh
Again thank you for your amazing post Josh. 🙂 My product story is at the beginning. I prepared everything for contacting suppliers from my list, but then I red an article about Chinese new year. Your article came one day after that and I was like damn… what now. 🙂 I googled and for some it is just 7 days off, for other 14 days off, you said 3+ weeks off… So for how long exactly will be everything stopped in China for FBA Amazon sellers? Can I at least contact my suppliers or is everything worthless?
Best regards,
Jani Jovan.
Hey Jani,
The length of the CNY for suppliers will vary depending on your supplier. So it could be anywhere from 7 days to a couple of weeks
You could try contacting your supplier but, if they don’t answer they are probably still on CNY.
Josh
Hi Josh,
Please make a tutorial about creating and building a stand alone website that you are talking in this post.
I’m really curious to know the process, what platform to choose (WordPress I assume), maybe talk a bit about other platforms too, such as Shopify or Weebly.
Additionally, I’d also be interested in knowing how to build our own ecommerce website.
Thank you very much for your useful writings. I truly enjoy every bit of your post. Really inspirational.
Thanks for the suggestions, I will get working on something now.
Josh
I would urge you to consider sourcing sites other than Alibaba. I have written extensively on the subject of the risks involved in using that site, ranging from the fact that a large % of suppliers advertising as manufacturers are traders in disguise, so you don’t get the best prices, to the huge number of scams by suppliers including many Gold Suppliers.
Are you aware that “verified” means the business exists, at least on the day Alibaba’s representatives visited the office? Are you also aware that no further verification takes place to be upgraded to Gold status? A verified supplier simply pays for the badge and lo and behold he suddenly appears to be more reliable and trustworthy.
I would be happy to write an article on the subject for you if you like.
Thanks for the comment Walter, I will keep this in mind when I source products in the future
Josh
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