Is Your Online Book Advertising Campaign Ready for the Holiday Push?
Now is the time to have your online book advertising campaign in ship shape. So, here four things you can easily do right now to improve the effectiveness of your online book advertising campaign going into the holiday season. Test Your Ads and Keywords. I can’t say enough about this one aspect of running an effective campaign. You absolutely should be testing your ads and keywords for what converts. You want your ads to have a both a high click-through-rate and a high conversion rate. It is not too late to test before the December push. Take the next week and test your ads and keywords. For more about testing, click here. Use a Landing Page Landing pages are very useful tools for testing and selling. Nothing can sell your book better than a well-optimized landing page. An effective landing page is one that is optimized to SELL and track conversions from your different ads. Also, if you want your ad to show on Amazon, you need to drive traffic to a landing page. For more about landing pages, click here. Use Ad Review Extensions Review extensions are a new feature in AdWords and a way to highlight your best book reviews right in your ad. It is a feature that can improve your click-through-rate on your ads. Learn more. Use Ad Callout Extension This is another new ad feature in AdWords. You can use this feature to provide additional selling power to your ad with two to three bullet points about your book. Again, this feature can improve the click-through-rate on your ads. Learn more. This holiday season; take these four actions to improve your online book advertising...
Read MoreThe Secret to Advertising Your Book on Amazon with Online Book Advertising
One of the questions I get asked by authors wanting to do online book advertising campaigns is, how they can advertise their books on Amazon in the “sponsored links section.” If you do an Amazon book search for let’s say, “historical fiction,” it will typically return 12 results and at the bottom of the page Amazon will show up to four ads in the “sponsored links” section. Typically they are ads for books (see image below). Note: Amazon is a Google search partner, which means it is in Google’s search partners’ network for Adwords. So, your campaign has to be set up in Adwords. Here is the process: When setting up your campaign in Adwords, the first step is to be sure you have the campaign set to “include search partners.” Settings > Networks > Google Search Network > (check) Include search partners Next your ads’ destination URL needs to point to your website, a website or webpage you control. If you look at the ads at the bottom of the Amazon page, you will see that all the ads point to websites away from Amazon. This is a must! That’s it! If you want to see how many impressions and clicks your ads are getting in the partners’ network just go to: Campaign > Ads (tab) > Segment > Network (with search partners) This will show you the data for the search partner network. It has been my experience through testing that the vast majority (@90%) of impressions in the partner network are occurring on Amazon. Also, I have found that in my campaigns, the cost per click is significantly less for the ads showing on Amazon than the ads showing on Google. When doing online book advertising, making a few changes to your Adwords search network campaign can help you to get your book advertised on...
Read MoreOh My God, Not My Frappaccino!
There you sit in your favorite chair pensively sipping on your frappuccino, gazing out the window not noticing the people coming and going. You dream about your bestseller and you imagine topping the Amazon charts. Then suddenly reality sets in: OMG, blogging, tweeting, article writing, advertising, book tours, etc., etc. All the things I need to do to expose my book to climb the charts. Sigh! What was that you are telling yourself? I don’t blog, I’m too old to twitter, I don’t know what to blog or tweet about, I don’t know about this SEO thing, I can’t afford to advertise, yada yada yada . . . Let’s get real for a moment and jump out of the box. Don’t blog, don’t twitter, don’t advertise, don’t know SEO . . . as The Terminator once said, “no problemo.” For little more than the cost of your frappuccino you could: Get an article or blog post written for you. Have someone write awesome tweets for you. Have your promo message tweeted to over 100,000 people on twitter. Have a Facebook Fan Page created. Have your message posted for a 100,000+ people to see on Facebook. Submit a press release to multiple press release sites. Get a video made to promote your book or website. And so much more. Fiverr.com is it. You can find all sorts of services on Fiverr.com for a mere $5. Just a little more than the cost of your coffee drink each day, you can do book promotion. This site is a good resource. Don’t blog, don’t twitter, don’t advertise, don’t know SEO . . . “no problemo.” Also, you could do promo activities with a paid search or a display network advertising campaign. Advertise your video on YouTube and get up to 100s of views of your video each week from searches on YouTube – $5.00/day. Have your book seen each day thousands of times on a number of websites like FanFiction.net – $5.00/day. Also, for little more than a few coffee drinks you can get an author interview or do a guest post at @IndieBookPromos (indiebookpromo.com). You are in a global marketplace. Whether you can or can’t do any of the above is of no consequence. It is so easy to find others who can do it for you, which will free you up to do what authors do, write. So, tomorrow as you sit in your favorite chair pensively sipping on your coffee, gazing out the window and dreaming about your bestseller, that great coffee aroma swirling around you enticing the senses, and slowly vanishing from your cup — remember, so too are vanishing readers. Remember! You can do it all for little more than the cost of your frappuccino. EXPOSE yourself, NOW! Until next time… “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.” Casey Kasem By J.P. Thompson TheAdWordsGuy.com...
Read MoreHow Much Can Indie Authors Realistically Make?
A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers ~ Plato Two friends have told me this week that they’re disappointed in the sales of their first book, because it’s not enough for them to quit their jobs and write full time. I also read articles on Writer’s Digest and another one by David Vinjamuri (IndieReader) about the success of indie authors. And because we met with our accountant today, I have some hard numbers I wanted to share because, well, I truly don’t pay attention beyond my daily sales and it’s a good reality check. Over the past eighteen months, I’ve made $36,000 in books sales (that’s gross, not net). That seems like a pretty good number (to me, anyway), and something I never thought I’d see. (2012: $14,000; 2013: $22,000 thru August). Yet, is it, really? Let’s deconstruct. BOOKS I have three books out (A Walk In The Snark, Mancode: Exposed, and Broken Pieces), eBooks only at this point, though Booktrope signed me for print so I look forward to having that out soon. I’m also finishing up my social media for authors book and working on Broken Places, the ‘sequel’ to Broken Pieces. Pieces sells more by far than any of my other books; it’s also the best reviewed and winner of five awards. That helps.* *Note: All three of my books have been edited, proofed, formatted and designed by professionals. GUESTIMATED BREAKDOWN I tell you this NOT to sound like I’m bragging, because, to be honest, there are many authors out there making way more than me. However, it’s worth breaking it down to look at the reality of that amount: $36,000 divided by 18 months = $2,000/month. That is my monthly rent. Nothing else, just rent. $2,000/month divided by 4.16 (my 70% royalty from Amazon) = sales of approximately 480.7 books monthly, which is right on target. I still have to pay taxes on that, so say for the heck of it since I have no idea, let’s deduct 20%. That’s down to $28,000. I pay $500/month for Google AdWords x 12 months, so deduct another $6,000 — down to $22,000. Add in expenses like Hootsuite, ManageFlitter, Pluggio, and other various and sundry costs to run any author platform effectively, and deduct another $2400 so we’re down to –let’s call it $20,000. Be sure to subtract the content editing for all three books, formatting, proofreading, and graphics, and deduct another $7500, so down to $12,500. That’s about not quite 6 months of rent. As the breadwinner for a family of four, I still have my day job (BadRedheadMedia.com) Add in travel to conferences, conference fees, and award entry fees and forget it — I’m lucky to still be in the black. So final total is $7,000, or 3.5 months of rent. I’m not complaining. My point is this: I’m making a decent living on the sales of three books, but not enough to make a decent living doing nothing but writing. I share this not to discourage anyone, but to make any aspiring author or gosh, any author anywhere, realize that writing one book will not take care of you for the rest of your life. That is a myth and I’m not sure why most authors have this dream of a movie and Oprah’s couch, when the reality is that less than 1% of writers will ever achieve that (a number I pulled out of the air but seems about right), and those who do have likely released ten or twenty books by the time they’re an ‘overnight success.’ In an informal poll...
Read MoreThe Tenth Witness
Best New Mystery Thriller Off the Scale Brilliant! Check Out This Ingenious, Deceptive Thriller. By Leonard Rosen Buy or Download Your Copy
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