Tag: metadata

Categories
Platform and Branding

Amazon Advertising: Introduction

In October, we discussed keywords. There are two main goals when selecting your seven keywords: 1) to find words that are actually being searched for in high quantities and 2) words that aren’t so competitive that you can’t show up high in searches for.

When you only have seven keywords to choose from, you have to hit both of those metrics to remain relevant. But what if you could choose 1000?

With Amazon Advertising you can.

Essentially, Amazon Advertising works the same way as your keywords: you selected words or phrases that are related to your book, and when someone searches for them, they’ll see your book. What makes Amazon ads different is that you can select up to 1000 keywords (per campaign, and you can run as many campaigns as you like!).

Not only that, but you can target comparable authors and book titles in your genre. If you write Christian Living, how would you like to rank next to Max Lucado? Joyce Meyer? What about being the first result for “bible study” or “Christian living for women” in an Amazon search? You absolutely can with Amazon Advertising.

The only difference between Amazon ads and your seven keywords (despite the vastly greater number and the kinds of targeting you’re allowed to use) is the fact that you pay per click. You never pay when the ad is shown, but you’ll pay a marginal fee when a reader clicks on the advertisement and is directed straight to your book page.

The typical cost per click is around 10 – 20 cents, so depending on the price of your eBook/book, you can make a great return. If you make $2.00 per eBook, and your average cost per click is 20 cents, you can have ten clicks and only one sale to break even. If you covert more than that, the cup runneth over. Obviously the paperback or higher priced eBooks will give an even better return on investment.

But the real benefit of Amazon ads isn’t just making your money back. It’s about visibility. That’s the most difficult part about book sales right? We work our tails off planning for a book, writing it, editing, and then shell out money and time to get it prepared. And for what? Most of the time we launch our books not to applause but to crickets. Why? Because most people don’t know it exists.

Amazon advertisements solve that problem.

Whether you are a New York Times Best Seller or a first-time author with zero sales and zero reviews, you can be the first result in an Amazon search and appear on the book pages of your favorite authors and books. That’s how you get discovered: being visible to the right readers.

If you’re already sold on using Amazon Advertisements, feel free to follow this link and take a look at my comprehensive online course on Amazon ads: AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) Zero to Hero. As a special offer, use the code A3AMS for 50% off!

If not, stick around for next month, where we’ll dig into Amazon ads a little further, and gain a better understanding of not only why they work, but why they are crucial in the modern publishing environment.

Vincent B. Davis II is an author, entrepreneur, speaker, and soldier. His first novel “The Man with Two Names” was published in July 2017, and has since become an Amazon International Best Seller. He is passionate about helping authors improve their brand and platform. He works with publishing companies and individual clients to help them sell more books in the modern publishing environment. Vincent created Warrior Book Marketing Group in 2018 and he and his team would love to help improve your digital sales. Email him at vincent@warriorbookmarketing.com with any questions.

Categories
Blogging Basics

Make Your Blog Mighty: Attention To The Details

Do details matter? In the world of blogging, I would say, “Yes.” You labor over a beautifully crafted blog spending time, effort and energy to share your heart with your audience only to hear crickets. Has this happened to you? The following two tips could help make your blog hum with activity by paying attention to the details.

SEO Your Headings

I recently saw a lengthy news article online. After the title and under the featured image, the writer listed bullet points sharing the most important topics shared in the article. This helped me to decide if I wanted to read the article in its entirety.

Headings in a blog are similar to the points noted in the article. Using the Headings Feature in WordPress will help your blog to be easily read. This allows the reader to scan the blog and know, at a glance, if they would like to read it.

Another reason to craft Headings is for SEO. As stated in a Yoast article,

“Although not a major ranking factor, headings do affect SEO. That’s because headings are important to help users understand the subject of an article. And if readers use headings to figure out what an article is about, Google will too.”

Crafting headings helps visually set a block of text apart and aids with the readability score in WordPress.  Yoast SEO recommends you offer a heading for every 300 words. To add headings, you type the heading, highlight it, and then select the dropdown box that says Paragraph.

Heading 1 – 6 are available options to select from. I usually use Heading 2 throughout my blog. You can choose Heading 1 as your first heading and use Heading 2 in the remainder of your blog.  For this blog post, I used Heading 2 only.

The Mighty Meta-Description

The purpose of creating a meta description is to have a reader choose your blog to read. Similar to the description on a book jacket, the meta description helps draw them in. State why they should read your blog. Using 150 characters, craft enticing phrases like, Learn More, Get It Now and Try It For Free. This needs to mirror/match your content or Google may penalize your site.  The meta-description should have your selected keyword shared at least once for SEO purposes.

For my blog titled, Why Being A Mother Has Great Value, I wrote the following meta description:

Is there value in the mundane daily chores of being a mother? This article says, “Yes.” Read why being a mother has great value.

My selected focus keyword is: a mother has great value. These words are also contained in my title. Using the focus keywords in my meta description, and title helped to give my Yoast SEO score a green light.

Another example of a meta description used by Barnes & Noble for the memoir, I Can Only Imagine By Bart Millard is the following:

I Can Only Imagine is an amazing book. I was humbled just reading it, Mr. Millard’s story is fantastic to read. To know all that he is gone through in his life and how GOD fit exclusively into it.

In this meta description, Barnes & Noble chose to use a book review to entice the reader. However you choose to craft your meta description, remember to make it do the heavy lifting to gain attention. In other words, make it mighty.

Why do these details matter? Meta descriptions help to entice your reader. Headers help your readers decide if they want to continue to read. There are many aspects to writing, designing and marketing your blog. These two details are two of the ingredients to make your blog mighty. For more tips, read Sure Fire Ways To Gain An Audience .

Evelyn Mann is a mother of a miracle and her story has been featured on WFLA Channel 8, Fox35 Orlando, Inspirational Radio and the Catholic News Agency. A special interview with her son on the Facebook Page, Special Books by Special Kids, has received 1.4M views. Along with giving Samuel lots of hugs and kisses, Evelyn enjoys hot tea, sushi and writing. Visit her at miraclemann.com.

Categories
Platform and Branding

Nailing Your Metadata: Keywords

Last month we talked about categories. Now we’re going to dig into the other side of the metadata equation: keywords.

Nailing your Keywords

Your keywords are the 7 (on Amazon) particular words/phrases that you’d like your book to come up under if someone searches for them. Most authors make the mistake of picking a few descriptive terms like “bible study” or “romantic comedy”. Unless you’re a NYT Bestseller, it’s unlikely that you’ll rank first on this page of results.

Alternatively, some people pick keywords that no one is interested in or actually typing in. If you are trying to rank in ultra-competitive keywords, you’re in shark-invested waters without a float. If no one is searching for the keywords you’re using, you’re in the desert.  So what’s the key? Picking keywords that are being searched for often, but don’t have much competition. There is a fine line, and it’s a tightrope to balance.

 There’s a statistic that says if your book ranks first overall for a search term, there is a 27% chance a shopper will click on your book. If your book is the second result, that number drops to 12%. The odds of someone clicking on your book if it ranks on the second page are only 7% (for all 10-15 results on the page).

So, you want to be on that first page, and you want to be that first result if possible. But you also want to make sure there are people actually interested in that keyword.

Your job is to research various terms related to your book and analyze the market for it. You need to break down the monthly traffic volume for each possible term, and then look at how fierce the competition is based on the highest-ranking titles’ sales rank. With these numbers in mind, you can choose the 7 most effective keywords to keep your book visible to the right audience.

Pro Tip: How do you analyze the traffic of each term? Well that’s a good question. I use a tool called KDP Rocket to analyze traffic data for all of my clients. It digs into the Amazon numbers to tell you just how often (per month) a term is being searched for, and how competitive that term is. You might be surprised by the results. This is the best tool I’ve found to help with keyword research.

Putting It All Together

Optimizing your metadata might not become a bestseller overnight. It doesn’t have the kind of immediate effect that ad campaigns or discount promotions have. But what it does give you is a competitive advantage and the ability to maintain long-term success from the short-term sales strategies. By updating your categories and keywords, you instantly become more discoverable to target readers, and that is always a good thing.

Vincent B. Davis II is an author, entrepreneur, speaker, and soldier. His first novel The Man with Two Names was published in July 2017 and has since become an Amazon International Best Seller. He is passionate about helping authors improve their brand and platform. He works with publishing companies and individual clients to help them sell more books in the modern publishing environment. Vincent is also the Senior Editor for blueridgeconference.com. If you are interested in contributing a blog for the site, or have any other queries, you can reach him at Vincent@thirteenthpress.com

Categories
Platform and Branding

Nailing Your Metadata: Categories

What is Metadata?

Metadata is the information you give to Amazon (or other distributors) that instructs them on where your book should be located, and to whom it should be shown. Most readers will never know what your metadata entails, and just as few will care about it. Amazon’s algorithms, however, care about it deeply. If your metadata (namely, categories and keywords) aren’t correct and optimized, Amazon will not help readers find your book, and therefore it will drift into obscurity and be undiscoverable.

By adding the proper keywords and categories for your book, you help Amazon’s algorithms guide your target readers right to your book. If you have these elements in place, your book will be much more visible to shoppers, and you’ll begin to see an increase in sales.

Keywords and categories are very simple once you understand them, but they can be a bit more complex than most authors think. Let’s dig in to categories:

Nailing Your Category

Your category is not the same as your genre. They can be one in the same, but categories can also be much more complex.

For instance, I personally write in the genre of historical fiction. As far as I know, it’s the only genre my book fits in. However one of my categories looks like this: kindle ebooks -> literature and fiction -> historical fiction -> Italian. The other looks like this: kindle ebooks -> history -> ancient civilization -> Rome.

Whereas my chances of ranking high in the historical fiction category is very  improbable without a huge marketing budget and a well-established platform, I almost always rank within the top 20 of my first category, and top 10 of my second.

Why is that important?

Because people looking through the bestsellers list will see my book at the top of those charts.

It’s all about visibility. Allowing Amazon to do a little bit of visibility marketing for you can lead to a lot of book sales in the long run.

If I had stopped with the most obviously categories, such as historical fiction or historical thriller, I likely wouldn’t have that added visibility by being at the top of my category charts.

Your job as the author is to research your genre to figure out the most optimal categories for your book to be listed in. You do this by analyzing the competition and it’s difficulty, while also testing how popular the category is.

Through the KDP platform, you can select up to two categories for your book to be listed in. Your goal with each should be a book that your book can easily rank within the top 100 in (the bestsellers list for each category shows the top 100). After that box is checked, you want to find categories that you can confidently make a push into the top 20 (the first page of a bestsellers list shows the top 20). At last, if possible, it’s always good to shoot for a category that you have the ability to rank #1 in. You might not be able to stay there very long, but it is nice to know that if you focus your efforts and spend a little bit on marketing, you can make a push for #1.

If you do, you’ll end up with a nifty little status like this:

Bestseller in America

Bestseller in Canada!

Bestseller in Australia! Have you ever wanted to be an “international best seller”?

 How do you do this, one might ask? Well, it’s fairly simple. You need to spend a lot of time yourself digging into the many niche categories on Amazon to find one that your book can accurately fit into. Next, you’ll need to look at the ASBR (average best seller rank) of the #1, #20, and #100 book in that category. Once you have that number, head over to the KDP Calculator, and type those numbers in to see how many books per day that title is selling. If you feel confident in being able to sell that many books per day so that you can place within the top 100, top 20, or have a shot at number 1, than it is the category for you.

Pro Tip #1: If there is a category you find on Amazon that you cannot find within the KDP dashboard to add your book to, you can always email KDP support and ask them to add your book to a particular category. All you need to do is provide the book title, the ASIN number and the FULL category chain, and KDP will do the rest.

Pro Tip #2: If all of this sounds tedious to you, or your want to ensure you have the most accurate data, you can purchase the KDP Rocket software, which distills all of this information in a quick and easily digestible way. I use it personally for all of my clients, and for myself. I can’t recommend it enough, and it will make your category searches much more efficient.

Vincent B. Davis II is an author, entrepreneur, speaker, and soldier. His first novel The Man with Two Names was published in July 2017 and has since become an Amazon International Best Seller. He is passionate about helping authors improve their brand and platform. He works with publishing companies and individual clients to help them sell more books in the modern publishing environment. Vincent is also the Senior Editor for blueridgeconference.com. If you are interested in contributing a blog for the site, or have any other queries, you can reach him at Vincent@thirteenthpress.com