A SHOPPER’S DREAM

Have you ever gone on Amazon to search an item – say a watch?

If the same happened to you as what happened to me, for the next while, every time I was on their site, Amazon flashed a variety of watches – I mean every – single – time. It’s like they flagged what I was interested in, and then tempted me in every way possible.

This brings back a memory of when my husband and I were on a train in Cusco, waiting at the station, with Machu Picchu as our destination. Along the tracks were vendors all holding up their wares at the passenger’s windows. They were trying to tempt us with anything from t-shits to woven bags, jewellery – a huge variety of items. One of the T-shirts caught my attention and I waved the fellow over. Within seconds, every vendor there had dropped what they had been showing and were now waving T-shirts, trying to get the sale.

Amazon’s selling style reminds me of that time. And the reason they follow this sales method isn’t hard to understand. It’s because it works.

This is the way they are selling books now too. If you go to my book page on Amazon for say my newest release, Sweet Retaliation, you will see two queues under the book description. One is of the customers who bought this book also bought…

And the other queue of books is those little fellows waving their products by the train yelling, Senora. Mine’s ahhh “mucho bettero”.

Just think of your book on an Amazon ad in that second queue, waving at the buyer yelling – Oye! Senor! Lookie here!

Keeping this thought in mind, I decided to get in with those people beside the train and wave my book at the crowd too. So I did some research into Amazon ads. Rather than re-inventing the wheel – I found this fabulous site that gives you step by step information you need to get started.

https://janefriedman.com/using-amazon-kdp-ads-sell-ebook-amazon/

Jane Friedman Blog (Jan, 2017)

After some thought, I decided to run a Sponsored Ad and came up with some ideas from a bunch of u-tubes I watched and have simplified them here. Keeping in mind that you’ve written a great blurb for your book and it has a cover that competes with the rest of the books in your genre, then here’s stuff you might want to keep in mind:

• Don’t set the campaign and forget it. Keep checking and working it. Constantly monitor what is working and how many clicks and impressions are happening.

** So you know – I’ve gone in each day and added 50-100 more keywords to my list – Amazon allows 1,000 and I intend to get there eventually to give my ad the best chance possible. We’re talking author names, book titles and tiles of series’.  Next blog – where to find keywords and my results after 5 days.

• Keywords are the drivers for the campaign so using those main seed keywords which for me would be romantic suspense, mystery, etc are important but working on as many others as you can come up with is also huge. Finding those words is all about taking the time and making the effort to design your list.
• It’s a good idea to run the campaign for at least seven days and maybe run a few at the same time to see which is working the best.
• If the ad is not doing well and Amazon isn’t giving you enough impressions, either your product isn’t well branded – meaning the cover isn’t cutting it or the bid is not high enough or the key word’s aren’t relevant. There are four things that the readers will be looking at to get them to click on the buy button. Cover, title, reviews and price.
• Check the average CPC (cost per click) to see if you’re going to be making any kind of a return on your investment. This is important and for some will be the reason to terminate the ad. For others, if they’re getting their book to the audience, they might decide that profit isn’t the whole reason for the ad. It’s getting their work in the hands of the readers who might buy others in the series that might be the driver. For me – its wanting the readers to be invested in my new series so they will want all four books eventually.