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Transform Your Amazon Listings: Simple Ways to Skyrocket Book Sales · The Expert's Journey: Helping Speakers & Authors Succeed!

• 0:14
  Welcome to the Experts Journey podcast, where we're all about creating your path to impact. Join your hosts, Dixie, Mary Carlton from Indie Experts Publishing, and Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Howe, as we look at how you can grow your business and influence by leveraging your knowledge for profit.
• 0:28
  Welcome back to the Experts Journey. And today we're going to have a look at book boosting for the start of a new year, it's time to look at your books and look at how you can do better online with those books, what you can do to improve your rankings, your listings, and make them sell better. Good morning, Dixie.
• 0:47
  Good morning, Brad. I'm very excited about today's topic.
• 0:51
  It's definitely one up your tree, that's for sure.
• 0:55
  Then that's why I have you. This was inspired by you coming to me a few weeks ago and saying, let's have another look at what my books are doing and what they're not doing and how do we push them along a little bit harder? Because the main reason why most of us, as nonfiction authors, write books is to help inspire our speaking careers or get more speaking opportunities. And then in turn, sometimes we'll be also making sure that we're selling more books or giving more books away to ensure that we are more present to our marketplace. So one of the best things we can do at this time of the year is have a really good look at what our books are doing.
• 1:35
  So I've got a short list and I started out with your books where I looked at your primary bestseller, which was Run towards the Flames. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to see how it was performing, how many reviews it had, what sort of sales background it had, what the listing looked like. Now, I know that I did the listing originally when it first was launched, and I managed the launch phase for that, but that was nearly 18 months ago, so it was time to have another look. So what I did first was I went back in and I looked at where is your primary marketplace now? Originally, when we launched that book, it was geared towards being a global book. So we put it as the primary marketplace on Amazon under Amazon.com what we've done now is we've looked at, let's make sure we're really mastering it in our own backyard. So I've changed that to your primary marketplace being Australia. And so that's going to give you a little bit more boosting of the rankings because Amazon.com for example, is the big wide global version of the Mazon when you are looking at, say, Germany or dot UK or dot India or dot, you know, Canada or whatever, then your book will be primarily focused for its marketing in those particular parts of the world. And of course, Australia is a population size of what, 28, 29 million? So most people in Australia will have dot com au accounts. So you can rank really well in the Australian market for your topic, whereas opposed to going to.com, the same size marketplace might be half a billion people. So the categories are a little harder to rank in. So what I did was I've changed your categories. I've looked at which categories fit best for your Australian market and I've also looked at what's price relevant for the Australian market and where you're going to be doing your current promoting.
• 3:40
  And I know you speak internationally, but it's still better for you. And this applies to everybody listening. It is still better to dominate in one particular area of a marketplace and a category and a, an industry type than to try and be orphans to everybody. As we talked about in the last episode, you want to be quite niched with this. So if I am focused on Australia, that doesn't affect the fact that I'm still available around the world means everyone can still get my book if they're in America, uk, Singapore, wherever. Absolutely. So if you send people to your listing, for example, you'll probably send them to the link that is to your Amazon page, your author page. You will send them to the page where the book is. Now, if you are sending them to the page that is on the.com account, then if someone has an Australian account and they try to buy it there, Amazon will just divert them across to.com au so it doesn't hurt. You don't have to tell everybody of all of the marketplaces to go to.
• 4:48
  It just means that your book is going to perform a little better in some ways on the.com au account because you're selecting it as a primary marketplace. And if you think of Amazon as being like a gigantic store, that someone's standing at the front of the store and saying, hey, these are the books that I think you'll be interested in. When your books, when the algorithms kick in really well for you, for Australia, then your book will be like someone standing there at the front of the store in Sydney saying, here's Brad's book.
• 5:19
  He's Australian too. It's kind of that bit of graph speaking. Cool. So we've adjusted the pricing and then I went in and I looked at the reviews.
• 5:30
  Now, the other thing that we should be doing at this Time of the year is doing a bit of a boost to all of those people who are taking time out over the holidays to maybe not only read books, but also to go back to books that they may have read a few months ago and say, hey, remember I gave you a copy of my book at that conference or when it launched or whatever. I know you've had time to read it by now and if you haven't, please take a minute to do. But would you mind just giving me a quick review and send them the link to where the reviews can go on Amazon. Now often we get people saying, oh, I haven't bought enough books on Amazon for the last six months for Amazon to let me post the review. So there's two things that you can do. One is start becoming a regular reviewer. So if you are a regular reviewer on Amazon, it seems to mean that you get a little bit more leeway on posting reviews.
• 6:23
  So if you are seen by Amazon to be someone who reviews books, not on a one time only ever basis, then you are given a little bit more credibility. Now I at times have ranked as being a, I can't remember what the term is, but it's kind of like a dedicated reviewer, someone who has a bit of status around. Yes, this person is someone who reviews. And what I have found is that has made it easier sometimes for me to get reviews on my books. Maybe there's something there, hard to know, but it does seem to help. And it also means that I don't get rejected when I try to review someone else's book.
• 7:01
  So reviews are really important. And if you do one thing for any author, please get yourself into the habit of once a month post a review on someone's book because it really does make a difference for the author. Absolutely. And look, it is hard to get reviews. I know everybody says, oh look, I'll read your book, I'll review it, and that. But even after asking some people five or six times, they just don't get there. They're busy. So getting reviews is really hard work and it's gold when you've got them. So anyone who has read one of our books, please go. And people are reviewed and you don't have to necessarily write a piece of information, you might just give it a five star rating. Now please also note that, and this happened to me the other day, I noticed that someone had given me a three star review and they hadn't left anything in terms of a comment on one of my books. And I thought, oh, I bet I know that Is someone who is just wanting to be bit of a jerk going to get those people? Unfortunately downside of making it that you don't have to write something, you might get those people that upset at high school suddenly finding your name on Amazon and they think, we'll give you a one star review to bring you down on your averages.
• 8:12
  It's definitely an issue. We see it with Google listings as well, where people write reviews, but they force you to actually write something with the stars and you get the right of reply. But as I say to all my clients, the more reviews you get that are positive, they will squash the negative reviews because people will see them as an anomaly or as just a troll completely. And so that's why it's also good to remind people to go and give you a five star review and if they're not prepared to give you a five star review, get them to tell you why. If they say, look, no, look, I read your book and I actually thought it was rubbish. Okay, what didn't you like tell me? So I know how to fix this. So that's important to do at this time of the year. Now I want to talk about keywords and descriptions. Because you have 4,000 characters that you can use on Amazon and also within Grimspark, you've got lots of space to write really good, long, comprehensive descriptions. You can put bullet points, you can use bold type, you can use headings, you can do numbered lists, you can write your contents. There's a lot of space there. And when you use that space effectively and you use good keywords, then people are looking for those topics. Your book is more likely to be put in front of that reader by the magical mystery genie who's standing at the front of the Amazon store. And people who are looking for your kind of book will find it more easily. Another thing that you should probably be telling people to do is instead of always just giving them the link, tell people to can you go on Amazon and do a search for my book?
• 9:51
  That's a good idea. Yeah, because that comes up as someone's looking for it. We get the same thing on the search engines. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, very important. Now I am constantly going in and looking for people's books rather than just taking the links that I know I have to easily just look up on my spreadsheet. So looking when someone's looking for your book, it makes a difference.
• 10:13
  Now sometimes someone will say, I went and looked for your book and I couldn't find it anywhere. I went really deep in this instance, maybe you have to say, please write in toward the flames in my name. Then maybe it will come up. And so that's a really good reason to also remind your friends and family that, hey, even and also family members often can't leave you a review. But if they can do this little thing for you, go in there and regularly look for you for your book or your name, that is also serving to help remind the algorithm that you exist and making sure that you have with your description that you do an update. I've come across books that have been loaded up onto Amazon and left there sitting miserably on the back of a dusty shelf for years. And there's no way that you can justify people wanting to buy a book that is covered in dust, right?
• 11:13
  So if your description needs to be updated, you've got more keywords to add. And if you want to refresh the style of that description, maybe you also need to look at whether or not your subtitle was working hard enough for you. Do you need to revise the COVID Do you need to revise the book or do an updated version of the book?
• 11:32
  Several of my books I have updated a couple of them I have updated at least five or six times over the last 15 to 20 years. And that makes a difference because I will always tell people I've got authors that have updated their books every two to three years because their industry is fast. Adam Houlihan is a great example. Every two years he was updating his books to make sure that he kept pace with what LinkedIn was doing.
• 11:59
  So he's a LinkedIn master. His books were about LinkedIn and mastery, and it was relevant to make sure those books were updated regularly.
• 12:06
  And people want the updated version, so that's important. Look, I mean, we've all got books that we wrote a few years ago. I think my first book was 2013 billion dollar blueprint.
• 12:17
  And I recently actually got it out and started going back through it and reviewing it and also using AI to help me find new examples of the stories because the stories were dated, that sort of stuff, it's absolutely worth doing. Yeah, yeah, it very much is. And if it needs that, you need to put your covers, if you've got several books by now and you need to make them all uniform, that's a really good thing you can do for your books as well. And then I want to talk about a content. So a content is where you can have information about your book or yourself as a speaker and other things you do and other books that you've written going into the middle of the listing page and making sure that you've got extra information there that inspires the reader to read a bit further and maybe that convinces them to buy the book.
• 13:09
  And by the same token, if you've got books in a series, for example, I just made sure that two of your books, your Micro Course profits and your AI profitability, they look similar, they came out at a similar time, they are connected in lots of ways. So I've put them into a series.
• 13:28
  Yeah, they're part of my profits series. Yes. So when your books are part of a series, you get an additional listing on Amazon as well. And when people click through to the series or if you just share the link to the series page, that series page is not dominated with advertise.
• 13:46
  So it's a very powerful way making sure that you've maximized your listing there.
• 13:51
  So those sorts of things. Interesting. And of course then the other thing that you could be doing is you could be running Amazon ads. Amazon ads can be hit and miss. They can also suck a lot of your money.
• 14:02
  But at the same time, if you know what you're doing and you know how to maximize your advertising effectiveness on Amazon, you can do really well. I've noticed that with the advertising I've been doing just for three of my own books over the last few weeks, that my print versions are actually selling significantly better than my digital versions on two of the three that I'm currently promoting.
• 14:29
  And I found. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. There was a.
• 14:33
  Literally a news item the other day that said since the new laws came in, about 16 plus for social media in Australia, the bookstores are actually seeing an uptick in people coming in and buying books.
• 14:43
  Wow. I mean, obviously that's a specific market, but. And maybe there's a flow on someone, people have started going like physical books again or something.
• 14:51
  Well, trends come and go, but that's also been something I've noticed specifically as a result of the advertising that I've been doing on Amazon.
• 14:59
  It is worth going in and doing also a double check on your files, make sure your files download properly, that there's nothing in your files that you don't want to update. For example, you don't have to do a whole update on the ISBN, for example, if you're just updating, let's say your bio, let's say you've moved country or you've changed, whatever you're doing, you've updated your branding in some way, you don't have to do a whole lot of relaunch the whole book just to go in and refresh some of the critical pages that might be worth having a look at. So things like that are worth doing. So those are the things that you need to be thinking about as an author at this time of the year. Take your time, get it nailed. Yeah, look, it's been 18 months since we launched Run Toward the Flames and it makes sense to go back and review things. As we always say, you've got to go back and review. And then you become distanced from your projects too. You kind of, you get it up there, you put it up there and you go, it's on Amazon now, doing the new sell and you walk away. And so I got it right the first time.
• 16:08
  I'm not going back there. That's more work that I have to do that I really got other things to do. But look, it is key to go back. Things change. As you said, you've learned lots more about how Amazon works because obviously that's your specialty area as part of your business. And as you learn more and how to apply it, you probably need to go back and review things. So it really does make sense. And so I do encourage people to change things. I was just looking at the listing that Dixie's updated and does read much better.
• 16:37
  It's much more business focused. It's definitely more modernized. It really does look really great. The description for Run towards the Flames. So thank you very much. You're welcome.
• 16:48
  No, I mean, look, one of the things that I keep coming back to is when you're looking at your book, working hard for you, there's three reasons to have your book on Amazon. Even though people will say, oh, not all of my friends or family or not everyone that is in my market wants to have a Kindle book or a. Some people really don't like Jeff Bezos and there are Amazon haters everywhere. But at the end of the day, if someone is wanting to book you as a speaker or if they hear about your book and they want to look you up, they will find your book on Amazon. They will Google you or research you on Amazon and they'll find your books. You want to make sure that your listing looks professional, that it looks solid, that it's reader friendly, that you've got good reviews and that you've got good ratings and rankings. So three reasons that you go on Amazon, real estate reviews and rankings and. Those all about real estate online. As we all know, you want to be found in as many places as possible. As we say search everywhere optimization.
• 17:50
  And so having your books on your website, having them on Amazon, having it on those places is really important, especially as Amazon actually commands the market in that they have control over listings, they have control over what goes into search engines. They are much bigger than everyone else.
• 18:08
  So you need to be there. Absolutely. Thank you very much for all those tips. That's definitely some work for everyone to do and I think it's given us a lot to think about as well. So I encourage everybody to go back through the podcast, take those key points down and apply them in your business because it's going to make a big difference.
• 18:26
  Thanks for tuning in to the Expert's Journey. If you picked up some useful tips today, please take a moment to subscribe. Subscribe and share this with a fellow speaker or expert in your network. It really helps us reach more people. And don't forget to check out our books on Amazon, Dixie's books that are focused on empowering and educating non fictional authors, including Start with the Draft and My book Micro Course, Build a Seven Figure Income with Micro Learning Courses or Run towards the Flames, which is the one we've just been talking about. They're all packed with practical ideas to help you grow your business faster. We'll catch you in the next episode. Look forward to it. Thanks Brad.