In this post I’m going to break down a highly effective & ethical method of advertising that can radically increase your sales while at THE SAME TIME generate a ton of good will in your market with your new readers.
Here’s the bottom line: if you’re reading this you’re probably an author. And as an author your goal is to make a healthy living doing what you love. The author life is one of passion because the volume of work you put in and years of dedication it takes to succeed can be long an many. But that’s okay. Because this is what you were meant to do.
There’s only one problem: Getting Discovered By Readers Is HARD!
If you’ve been doing this for any length of time you already know that each and every month Amazon can change up their rules and suddenly, all that momentum you’ve built up can vanish in a puff of sadness.
Ads can be horribly complicated and very expensive to purchase… and do they even still work!?
And let’s not even get started on what’s happening with social media! Now that FaceBook has totally killed organic reach it seems like it’s next to impossible to post anything that even gets seen let alone gets engagement!
Most authors who come to us are anywhere from seasoned veterans to total newbies. And in each and every case we hear the same story: “What used to work isn’t working as well. My business isn’t growing. What can I do to turn it around (or start getting traction)?”
How are you supposed to grow your platform, build a fanbase, nurture your fan base AND turn that fanbase into sales if nobody ever sees what you do?!
I get it. It’s SUPER frustrating. Some days it can feel like nothing will ever work and all your hopes and dreams of earning a good living from your work are every bit as made up as the characters in your books.
And I know this because my team and I have been in the trenches with you since 2011. We’ve worked with well over 18K authors in a multitude of ways and have experienced your struggles first hand.
But if I may, please allow me to give you a bit of good news:
You CAN DO IT! It IS Possible To Win The Self Publishing Game!
What I mean by that is it’s VERY possible to create a successful publishing career for yourself when you apply the right strategies. You simply need to know what they are & put them into consistent action!
Here’s the BIG “secret”: Your success isn’t going to show up by testing more ads. Ads aren’t the issue. The issue is that every single genre and market has been FLOODED by authors with books that look just… like… yours.
For some this next statement will come as an unpleasant shock, for others it will confirm what you’ve probably suspected for years:
At This Stage Of The Process The Quality Of Your Writing Does Not Yet Matter
To clarify: the stage we are talking about here is the “getting in front of new readers” stage NOT catering to those who already love you. You see, if you don’t have a consistent method to bring in NEW readers you will soon find your publishing career dead in the water. (Yes, deeper in the process quality does very much matter. But not yet. Not when they haven’t even opened your book)
Here’s the hurdle we then need to jump: Readers are being bombarded on a minute by minute basis with an ocean of ads and offers from every direction.
Authors, to their credit, have become VERY good at running ads with high click through rates (CTR) or low cost per click (CPC). However, what most are starting to realize, is that cost per click and/or high click through rates don’t translate into sales. At least not all that often. In fact, most of the metrics being tracked by most authors have nothing to do with making sales or getting KU reads.
But hold up… most authors are talking about those metrics and saying how much they matter to an ad. Why are you saying they don’t?
Even a few years ago an author could run some FB ads and, with some testing, find a winner that could end up producing more money than the ad cost. But that was years ago. Think about it: There wasn’t as much competition back then! Even as recently as 2016 there were FAR fewer books to compete against!
What that means is IF you want to keep a constant flood of readers coming to your books it’s NOT just about getting that 1st click…
The secret now with all the noise in the market is to KEEPING READERS ATTENTION!
Do you see how this simple shift can totally change everything? Anyone can get a flickering second of attention with an ad. Literally anyone.
But how many can say they are able to hold it? How many authors know what to do after that reader clicks the 1st time? Where do they go? How can you follow up?
One Click Is NOT Enough Any More!
When you start to realize the biggest shift that’s happened is the level of noise in a readers life… you are now fully armed with all the information you need to win! When you realize the real success lives not with just getting that 1st click but in saying front of mind and staying with them consistently… NOW you can make something happen!
I’m sure you’ve heard the rule in advertisement that it can take 7 or more “impressions” before a person will buy? What that means is people tend to buy from those they know, like & trust. People buy what they are comfortable with and the way to build comfort is to become part of a readers every day life.
Long before social media ads were possible, direct mail campaigns would consist of multiple & frequent mailings to the same group of people. Often times sales wouldn’t start coming in until the 3rd or 4th blast.
This is because it’s super easy for people to dismiss your stuff if they only see it 1 or 2 times.
But when they start seeing it often and everywhere?
Oh yea. That’s when you start to become “Front of mind”.
What’s fantastic about the times we live in is you can do this for super cheap! Sometimes for as little as $1/day. Sometimes you can even do it for free.
Here’s How This Works:
STEP 1: Just like you’ve always probably done, you need to get their initial attention. What’s nice is you can do this with pretty much any run-of-the-mill ad. (Better is using video but we can dig into that at a later date)
Now here’s where it gets a bit different…
You know how almost 100% of authors are running most all traffic directly to Amazon or another seller like iBooks/B&N?
DO NOT DO THAT!
When you run traffic directly to amazon you fully lose the ability to get any further data. Even worse? You lose the ability to follow up with that potential reader.
What you want to do instead is run traffic to a page on your site.
Why? You might be asking…
The reason is because when you send traffic to your page rather than Amazon you can use this little thing called the FaceBook Pixel to track who visits & then build an audience from that.
Let’s Pause A Moment For Those Terrified Of Tech: There’s a lot of “tech terror” in the author world so to eliminate it let me ask you a fast question: Can you copy & paste? IF you can copy & paste then you can put the FB pixel on your page. Even if you have never done it before due to not knowing about it or simply telling yourself the story that “I don’t know how”… it’s a 30 second thing that will change your life. And the reality is you need to learn. Here’s a YouTube search showing you how to install this demon on your page. Once you get it, it’ll be all of 30 seconds with the difficulty of “copy/paste”. Oh yea, if you can’t copy & paste there’s also a YouTube video for that 😉
In the next section you’ll learn exactly what you are going to put on this post AND how to do it for maximum effectiveness.