Have you been running ads on Amazon? Let me tell you exactly how you should run Amazon ads for authors in a way that would help you will not lose much money to it.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around for the third point. Because it's a secret as to the absolute one thing you're going to want to remember when it comes to Amazon ads.
So let's get into it. The topic we're discussing today is Amazon Ads For Authors. By the end of this topic, you're going to know the key strategies to win at Amazon ads. You're going to have the steps necessary to fix your ads or just get started.
You're going to feel great that you're making as many sales as possible for your book. But before we proceed, grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist. To make sure that you're not skipping any of the secrets, not just self-publishing your book but also getting it to sell.
From my own story, when I first got started with self-publishing, I had put out my very first book. It was so exciting and then I even saw sales coming. I put it on the free promo for 5 days and I was able to see thousands of copies of it moved into the top 1000 books on Amazon for the free books.
Later, some of my books would even be best-sellers for weeks at a time. But the thing is that after a year, I hadn't reached that point. I was getting no sales at all.
So I started to wonder, is this whole public self-publishing thing about putting a book on the market, getting some initial sales, and then that's it? Well, fortunately for me, I had a friend who told me about Amazon ads.
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He had taken a course at the time and he was recommending it to me as well. So I decided to give this course a time a chance. After I had gone through this specific course, everything started to change.
When I say everything, what I mean is that I started seeing sales on my books. I started understanding how exactly ads play out. Since that point, I've run 128 million times, the impressions that my ads have been shown to people. And you begin to see patterns that emerge when you're running your ads.
The difference that they played was completely pivotal to keeping me in self-publishing. I was looking at the time saying maybe I should try a different online business opportunity like dropshipping, currency trading, or something like that.
Maybe today would be cryptocurrency but the fact is that I didn't need to switch. I just needed the right information on how to run ads successfully on Amazon and that would completely turn things around.
The combination of doing correct keywords which also was a very important part of my self-publishing side of things. In getting me up and running and to get things moving for you with the ads.
This combination proved itself to be pivotal to not only keeping me in self-publishing but keeping my books continuing to sell. These books that were out 5 or 6 years ago are still pumping out copies of the 200 plus books that I have on the market.
How You Should Run Ads
So Amazon ads for authors? Here are just some of the basic strategies. One of my coaching clients recently was asking a little bit about this. I thought it might be good to take a little bit of time and discuss this very subject.
So the first thing is you need to set your bids at 15 cents per campaign. That is to say that anytime somebody clicks on your campaign on your ad, you're going to pay 15 cents. Then we set a daily budget to $1.
You figure out what works for you. But the thing is we need some money in there so we can get multiple clicks per day. Anytime we have an ad that loses $2, we're going to kill that ad immediately.
So we don't tolerate losers in that sense. Keep in mind that when we are only making 40% to 60% for our paperback versions. We're making 70% for our other one. This is the price that it sells at your profit will be about 70%.
Because you're splitting it, they're going to get their portion as well. If a book would make a $10 profit or $10 that come off of that book for let's say one of your Kindle books sells, you're only making $7 in royalties. Because they're going to keep $3 of that profit.
Then you have to keep that in mind that when it comes to your ads, you don't get tricked into thinking "I'm doing great. I'm getting back the money I spend." It's like well you also have to factor in how much money, what type of book it is, and the royalty rate.
But bringing up these different versions of your book is a key thing. You're going to separate your Kindle ads from your paperback ads. The reason being is because they make different amounts of money based upon each sale.
One may outperform the other. So we may wish to kill let's say the Kindle ad and keep on increasing the bid spend we're doing on the other. Does that make sense? So if we see that we're doing well on our ads, we're going to raise the amount of money we're willing to put into it.
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Take it from $15 up to $17 and if it starts losing $2, I just killed the ads altogether. In the old days, I used to take it down to one cent. But I just don't want to deal with that so I would just kill the ad at that point.
If I've lost $2 on the ad, it's just not worth your time. We're going to re-roll a new ad up using different keywords. The thing is you're going to run automatic ads in the beginning once you feel comfortable that things are going okay.
Then I would highly recommend getting Publisher Rocket you which is a fantastic tool for finding the right keywords. That is for the specific ad groups that you're going to be running. We're testing, experimenting, and trying different keywords.
In the old days, it would be running a thousand keywords and now it would be the 10 top keywords. In addition, your Amazon ads are going to tell you things like which keywords people clicked on. They came in through a keyword and then they clicked on it.
The Real Power
This is like through your automatic ones and so it already gives you an idea of keywords that you can use in your ads. But let's get to the secret point of the day, the most important thing when it comes to ads. It is the real power in the ads is the information that they give you on your title and cover.
Now you may be wondering, what do you mean to give me on my title and cover? That is a very legitimate question. The answer is that it's because when they see your ad, they're going to see that title and cover.
If the cover and title are terrible or don't match the keywords that brought them in, they're not going to click. The same goes for your reviews. That's one reason why some of my coaching clients had no reviews, I recommend just asking friends and family.
Please have somebody leave a review so at least we have something to work from here. Once you're building an email list and moving on in the future. But don't overwhelm yourself with all of this stuff like building web pages and building up email lists.
Focus on one thing at a time. Because that's one of the points here, we're trying to make self-publishing easy. It just doesn't have to be so hard because you break it down into smaller steps.
That's the reason I tell you these basic Amazon ad strategies which are 15 cents per campaign and $1 max. Splitting up between the two types, we're letting it do automatic targeting and we just set up the basic account. Let me know below in the comments if there are any questions on that.
But the real power is knowing whether or not your books themselves are optimized and we find that out very quickly. The other thing is don't think for a second just because you have a feeling about what you would personally do. Or which cover you would click on that has anything to do with what your target audience would do.
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This is a huge mistake like there is this terrible cover and it doesn't match the best-sellers in your market. You're going to confuse your readers. So what we feel, what we prefer, and what we do, has absolutely nothing to do with any of this.
Because, if you already knew what you would do, well you know maybe you would buy your book 50 times. But we don't care about that, we care about our ideal readers and what are they going to do. The reality is they're telling us whether they click or they just swipe on by.
These are the sorts of communication messages that our ideal readers tell us. And that's something we should not ignore. So my question for you is have you given Amazon ads a try?
If you have, write "Yes" below in the comments. And if you've never tried it, write "No" below in the comments. Because I need to know what your level of experience is. Check out my other blogs and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.