I had good intentions of diving in with my experience of Amazon ads so far, but it’s a lot of information and I haven’t got to it yet. Instead, I’ll talk about a few others things I did in the first week post-publication.
Universal links
It is a good thing to set up a universal link to your book. What this means, is that if you post a link on twitter or Facebook, for example, and someone in Australia clicks your ad, they are taken to the amazon.com.au site rather than the US or UK site. Evidence shows that people are much more likely to buy your product if they don’t have to go searching for it on their own amazon site. There are probably some free ways to set up a universal link, but I use geniuslink. https://geniuslink.com It costs around $5 per month (check pricing on their website) but I think it’s worth it. They track where your traffic is coming from – i.e. Facebook/twitter, etc. I think you can run retargeting pixels from there, but I haven’t figured that out yet.
I also set up a link through https://pixelfy.me called a super URL. This is supposed to have your amazon search keywords in the link, so that you get a little boost on how you rank for keywords every time someone clicks the link. You can also add an amazon affiliate link. I stopped using my pixelfy.me link after about a week, because they don’t have the universal link functionality. Facebook traffic is basically cold traffic, and if anyone does click on the link, they are pretty unlikely to buy if it’s not on their particular amazon jurisdiction site.
I hope that makes sense.
Anyway, I think geniuslink is worth the small investment. Check it out.
A+ Content
Have you ever seen that some publishers take the time and make the effort to publish lovely themed photos, quotes and artwork for their biggest-selling author’s books? I love this sort of content, even if it doesn’t really influence me to buy a book or not.
Apparently, it does however influence others to buy, and more importantly, to review. On one of my online courses, I learned that most books generate one review for every hundred sales. With A+ content it goes up to something like 2.5/100. So it’s hardly like bringing in the cavalry, but every little bit helps.
On KDP, this content is called A+ Content. It’s a little tricky to find, it and even trickier to make it and get it approved. On your KDP set up screen, go to the Marketing Tab and you will find it there. Once you create it, you will need to upload it for all relevant marketplaces.
You create it by using different sized modules which are available on that A+ Content tab. I created all my images first in Canva, then decided they were rubbish, so I re-did them in BookBrush. My first efforts got rejected – here’s why.
Mea culpa, but I used the word ‘amazon’ as in: ‘Out now on Amazon Kindle and KindleUnlimited’. Seriously? My book is exclusively on amazon and to be enrolled in KDP Select I have given up the option to be on other marketing platforms, but now I can’t even use that fact in my publicity? In fact, even by using the word amazon in this blog post, I’ve probably violated some rule. Amazon really does control the world…
OK whatever.
So I re-did my content and reloaded it. Three times. I’m reasonably happy with it, though I’ll probably redo it with some review quotes if I ever get any. But that’s a project for another day.
It’s up there now. Phew! Something has gone right…
Lessons learned:
Universal links are a good way to drive traffic to the right amazon site, and can be used on non-amazon sites like Facebook and Twitter.
A+ content takes a little time and effort to create, but it does make your listing look a lot better and more professional.