I’m sure if you’re like me and someone told you to find as many of the 1,000 keywords Amazon suggests you use, you’ll be thinkin…
Whaaaa!?
How in hell am I going to come up with so many words about a romantic suspense book? I mean, face it; sometimes I’ve had trouble filling in the seven keywords that Amazon makes me add when I released the book.
But then something dinged and my sluggish, slow-thinking brain kicked in.
Every day, I get a lot of newsletters from promoters like BookBub, Read Cheaply, Pixel of Ink and a whole lot more. When I opened one of those e-mails, I saw the list of books for sale. It dawned on me that the keywords Amazon accepts doesn’t all have to be generic words like series, suspense, mystery or thrillers, etc.
Wouldn’t other books also be keywords that people type into the Amazon search bar? Then I began to realize, not only do they type in titles to find a book, many type in author names and even series’ labels.
Whoa! Suddenly, I can see a huge list of keywords. The fact that these books are being promoted and would most likely have action on their pages makes it all the sweeter.
Unfortunately, those newsletters only have a few books each day. So, I clicked on one of the actual books and it took me to the book page where there was the “Customers who also bought list”. Now I had another windfall of books to snag.
I could go to any Amazon book page of the best books and find all kinds of best-selling authors and that’s exactly what I did. Each day, I gathered at least another 1-2 hundred names and added them to my Amazon Sponsored Ad.
And guess what? That created a lot more impressions.
Just no darn sales….arghrrr!!
Then something that someone once told me slithered into my disappointment and ramped up my excitement again. People, who are on the page to buy the pricey books from those top-sellers, have already made up their minds. How many would actually be bothered looking at the small queues to find new reading material. Maybe some, but I wouldn’t think many.
Aha! I suddenly realized something. I needed to stick to the people, like myself. An Indie author who has that market of readers who are willing to pay a few dollars for a book and aren’t super tied into those bigger names.
To begin with, I went to my own book page and began taking the titles, authors, and series names from there and then I clicked to those book pages, and on and on. Trust me, it’s never ending. I had started a word file list and each day, I added more names and then added them to my Sponsored Ad.
You know what happened? I got a couple of sales. Yesss!! It was working. I upped my ad from $3 a day to $5. I had my list (650 and still building) I can constantly add to it and even pause keywords that aren’t working. You’ll see what I mean when you’re on their page. It’s very easy to figure out.
So – this is my advice. And don’t expect miracles – give yourself time for the ad to actually take off:
- Start with you own book. Type the title in Amazon’s search bar and a number of books will show up under yours that Amazon thinks are similar. Get those names and titles.
- Then go to your own book page and see other books in the queue – “Customers who bought this item also bought…” and use those names. Follow through on their queues too.
- Then go to the product details and see the categories. Mine show in italics:
#1477 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Collections & Anthologies
#1531 in Books > Romance > Anthologies
#1976 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Romance > Sports
- Click on the categories and they will take you to the “best 100 book’s list”. And again, don’t make the mistake of taking the top 20, (first page) but scroll to the bottom where it shows you the next pages and go to the middle or even the end page (80-100) and use those author’s names and titles. They’re still best-sellers and bring traffic to their pages but their readers are more likely to look at your book too.
- Check out places like Bookbub, etc, because these books will be selling big amounts due to being promoted and that means a lot of traffic going to their pages – right? If you don’t already get those promoter’s daily newsletters, you might think of signing on or just go to the website for the day’s deals.
Once I gave my brain license, trust me, a whole bunch of new opportunities began to take shape.
After 5 days, I found that one or two author’s pages worked the best to bring me clicks. One actually got me 8 clicks. So, I went to that author’s page and made sure to gather most of the authors and books from her “Customers Who Bought” list.
Right now, I have almost 650 keywords and that’s after clearing off many of the ones where there were no impressions at all. Just to be annoyingly repetitive – this is a work in progress.
***Have you had any success with these ads? If so, please share any suggestions that will help the rest of us.
