August 20, 2025 • 36 mins
Click Here to ask your book writing and publishing questions!
Amazon ads don’t have to be complicated (or eat up your entire marketing budget) to actually sell books. In this episode, I’m sharing my approach to making Amazon ads simple(r) without endless spreadsheets, confusing dashboards, or the kind of budget that makes you wonder if you should’ve stuck with free bookmarks.
Common Questions Tackled:
- Do I really need to spend $50–$100 a day like people recommend for Meta ads? Or can I start with $2–$3 and still see results?
- How do I actually know if my ads are working?
- Everyone says to use 300+ keywords. Do I actually need that many? (No, you don't.)
- Should I even bother with ads if my book listing isn’t fully optimized yet?
- How often am I supposed to tweak campaigns?
- What’s more important: impressions and clicks, or actual conversions (aka sales)?
- Can I determine the exact words people are typing into Amazon when they find my book?
If you’ve been curious about trying Amazon ads but feel completely overwhelmed by the process, head to publishaprofitablebook.com/amazonads and see how simple this process can actually be.
🎉 NOW OPEN - AMAZON ADS FOR INDIE AUTHORS!
Get lifetime access and early-bird pricing right here: https://www.publishaprofitablebook.com/amazonads
Get the first draft of your nonfiction or memoir written in 33 days!
...even if you don't have a cabin in the wilderness, 4 uninterrupted hours a day to write, or confidence that you're a "real" writer. No overwhelm, no confusion. Just simple, actionable steps.
Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Write the Damn Book Already
podcast.
My name is Elizabeth Lyons.
I'm an author and book editor,and I help people write and
publish thought-provoking,wildly entertaining books
without any more overthinking,second-guessing or overwhelm
than absolutely necessary.
Because, let's face it, someoverthinking, second-guessing
and overwhelm is going to comewith the territory if you're
(00:23):
anything like me guessing, andoverwhelm is going to come with
the territory if you're anythinglike me.
In short, I love books and Ibelieve that story and shared
perspective are two of the mostimpactful ways we connect with
one another.
A few things.
I don't believe in gimmicks,magic bullets and swoon worthy
results without context, as in.
Be sure to reveal that a resulttook eight years or required a
(00:43):
$30,000 investment in ads,because those details are just
as important.
What I believe in most as anauthor, the long game is the
shortcut For more book writingand publishing.
Tips and solutions.
Visit publishaprofitablebookcomor visit me over on Instagram
at Elizabeth Lyons Author.
Hi everybody and welcome back.
(01:05):
So today, you just got me todayand we're going to talk about
one of my favorite topics as oflate Amazon ads.
I've gotten a number ofquestions and I'm not surprised
by any of them.
I either have gotten them orI've heard them.
These are questions that peoplehave when they're considering
running Amazon ads, but they'renot really sure or they're like
(01:27):
they've tried other ads.
Maybe you've tried Google ads,or you've tried meta ads or both
.
Maybe you've even tried Amazonads, I mean just for
storytelling purposes.
I started running Amazon ads in,I want to say, 2017, 2018.
And they were going well for awhile, and then something
happened and people startedreleasing courses and directives
(01:50):
and all kinds of things on howto make ads work better, and, of
course, their screenshots oftheir earnings, which were
multiple, five figures if nothigher, were very, very
appealing, as they wouldprobably be for most anyone, and
so I started to listen to allthe chatter about what I should
(02:14):
be doing differently and beforelong, I had many, many campaigns
running at the same time formany books.
I was trying to do a lot in avery short period of time.
Even though each listing oreach campaign had maybe a $2 or
(02:35):
$3 budget, once you added themall together, I was still
running between $20 and $30 aday.
Each of those campaigns wasgrowing very slowly on the $2 to
$3 a day budget, and I just gotcompletely overwhelmed and
frustrated.
I felt like one person very wellmeaning, I'm sure, by the way
(02:58):
was telling me to do it one way,another person was telling me
to do it another way, and then athird and a fourth and a fifth,
and what I forgot to do in themidst of all of that was to ask
myself and then assess, of theperson who was giving me the
information, what is their frameof reference?
So do they predominantly workwith fiction authors?
(03:21):
Do they predominantly, evenwithin that genre?
Is there a sub-genre likethrillers?
That was sort of when I startedrunning Amazon ads, where a lot
of the big focus was A lot ofpeople who had written thrillers
and mystery were coming out onthe different boards.
There was K-boards and allthese different places talking
(03:42):
about how best to run Amazon adsand, for the record, none of
them was necessarily wrong.
It's just that I wasn't lookingat it from the standpoint of
okay, that works for them, so itshould work for me.
But I wasn't comparing applesand apples, so I wasn't looking
at well, wait, they do mysteryand I'm nonfiction.
How does that translate?
(04:03):
Does it translate?
And the thing that'schallenging in this space is
it's very, very hard to say, ifnot impossible to say across the
board, this approach works.
It's the same with meta ads orwith Google ads.
It's so important to look atand make sure that you're
(04:23):
comparing apples and apples.
So even for me, runningpredominantly ads to nonfiction
books, and having helped severalauthors set up and kind of
analyze the data running ads totheir fiction books I admittedly
don't have yet nearly the dataset to say, okay, I run ads to a
(04:44):
hundred self-help books and 100fiction romance, like let's
drill down.
And so in comparing those datasets even if it were 20 and 20,
what I can see is that this typeof ad performs better than this
type of ad for this genre.
We need bigger data sets andmost people don't have them.
(05:08):
So I aim to be extraordinarilytransparent about what types of
books I've run ads to, what mybooks are.
My ads are the only ones overwhich I have full control.
But so often people will think Iwant to start running Amazon
ads.
Who can I hire to do that forme?
How much is that going to cost?
And once they figure out howmuch they're going to pay just
(05:31):
to have someone else run the ads, they realize that it's not
just a zero-sum game.
It's a losing game every month,which for some people, is
completely fine.
So if people know, for somepeople is completely fine.
So if authors know what theirgoal is and they're willing to
spend extra upfront to not be incharge of their ads, to get
those sales, especially ifthey've written nonfiction and
(05:55):
especially if they have anotherproduct on the back end and
they're planning to monetizethere, that's fine.
For many, many, many authors,however, that's not the case.
So perhaps they have a backlistof other books and they're
looking to get traction andmomentum with more of their
titles.
Perhaps this is just theirfirst book and they're looking
to build an email list, but theydon't want it to cost them
(06:18):
$1,500 to $2,000 a month to dothat.
So part of this for me is aboutmaking it simpler and being very
clear, very transparent aboutwhat the numbers are, the full
context of all of it.
So I've grabbed a bunch ofseveral.
I've got I think I've got sixquestions.
(06:39):
I don't know that I'm going tomake it through all of these
today, because I'm trying.
I'm going to try to keep thisone short, but of some of the
most common concerns that I'veheard and that I've had when it
comes to Amazon ads and some ofthem, while they're all valid in
some cases, I would suggest tosomeone not to run Amazon ads
(07:00):
Again.
In my world there is no.
This will work for everyone.
I just think that's.
I don't know of a situationwhere that's true ever.
We all need air to breathe, butI mean I think.
But besides that, you know,okay.
So the first one is I'm goingto burn, like I'm going to spend
all this money and I'm notgoing to get anything back, or
(07:22):
how long is it going to take forme to see a return?
It's such a fair question.
And in the meta ad space, so ifyou're running Facebook or
Instagram ads, it's oftensuggested that you need to be
spending $50 to $100 or more aday in order to rapidly collect
data, and I'm not saying that'swrong.
What I am saying is that thatmakes a lot of people really
(07:42):
nervous, myself included.
For a period of time, I'vegotten a little more comfortable
spending more money on meta ads.
But it took me a minute.
So one of the things that Ilove about Amazon ads is that
you don't've talked about thisbefore the Amazon ads dashboard.
(08:07):
So you have two dashboards.
When you're logged in Well,when you're running ads, you
have your regular KDP dashboardwhere you can see your orders
and your reports and yourbookshelf and all that.
Then you have your advertisingdashboard, which is sort of a
subset of your KDP dashboarddashboard, which is sort of a
(08:31):
subset of your KDP dashboard.
These two sets of data don'tequal each other almost ever.
So I can log in right now to myKDP dashboard and see it might
say that I have sold six bookstoday and maybe it's three
different books.
I'm just going to try to makethis easy.
Three books have each sold twocopies today.
Great.
I go over to my Amazon adsdashboard and it will say I have
(08:55):
no sales or it will say I havetwo sales.
One of the biggest challengeswith Amazon ads and it's what
frustrated me before I figuredout a way it's not the perfect
way, but it's pretty good in myexperience to better track ads
better than using theirdashboard is that there is no.
(09:17):
With meta ads as an example,instagram, facebook ads.
There are third-party trackingsoftware platforms that you can
use to better correlate yoursales with an ad, to just make
it really simple to be able tosay oh, this is where the sale
came from.
It came from this ad.
So when we're selling our bookson Amazon, there are a couple
(09:41):
of things we don't know.
We don't know who bought it.
We don't have access to thatdata, to that customer data
that's proprietary to Amazon.
They don't share it with us,understandably.
So unless someone buys yourbook off of your website, you
don't know who bought it.
The other challenge is thattheir tracking is at least their
reporting I'm guessing thattheir and so there's also a
(10:11):
delay.
So if someone clicks on your adon a Monday and they order your
book and it's a paperback or ahardback version and it has to
print on demand and then ship,it will not show up in your
orders until at least two daysusually two days later, between
one and three or four days later, depending on their shipping
time but it will show uptheoretically in your ads
(10:33):
platform as having sold that day.
Sometimes the sales don't evenshow up in the ad platform.
So we have to do a bit ofguessing.
As to educated guessing, likeintelligent, strategic guessing,
it's not just throw it outthere and hope that we were
somewhere in the mark.
There are ways to beintentional and strategic about
(10:54):
the guessing that we're doing,but we have to do that.
That is much more comfortableto do when you are spending a
maximum of $2 or $3 a day thanwhen you're spending $50 to $100
a day and you're just watchingthe dollars just drain.
So that's one of the biggestreasons I love Amazon ads is you
(11:19):
can, in your mind, think, okay,this month I'm going to budget
$60, $2 a day and I'm just goingto let it go Like I'm just
going to act as though I'm notgoing to make any sales off that
$60.
And that's less money in mostcases than you're going to spend
, certainly with a publicist orwith meta ads or Google ads,
(11:39):
toward your book.
So, yes, there's no guaranteewith ads ever, but there are
lesser levels of risks andAmazon does offer that, which I
personally am a huge proponentof and highly value.
When I start an ad campaign now,I start at $10 a day.
You don't have to do that whenI started back.
(12:02):
So I started in like 2017, 2018, got very overwhelmed, kind of
quit for a while with the ads,came back in in like 2022, and
then really started ramping uparound 2023.
And when I did that, I wasgoing at two to $3 a day because
I was very I was not onlyskeptical, I was cynical and I
(12:23):
was being very conservative inresponse.
And so as I started to get amore, more comfortable with it
and see what was happening andwhat wasn't happening and what
was working and what wasn'tworking, with air quotes around
the working, I got morecomfortable starting my ads at a
higher dollar amount.
That being said, I have onecampaign.
(12:46):
It's my most successfulcampaign right now.
It's for write the damn bookalready, which is my most recent
book, and I have that set at$10 a day and there are still.
It's been running for nine or10 months, that campaign.
I mean with some variations,there are still, I'd say, the
majority of days.
It doesn't even spend my whole$10.
It's hard to get Amazon to spendyour money, which I'm not mad
(13:10):
about either.
Sometimes I wish there weremore options to have them spend.
But if people aren't clicking,you only pay with Amazon ads
when someone clicks on your ad.
So if people aren't clicking onyour ad, it's only happening
for one of two reasons Eitherthey're seeing it, but it's not
resonating.
(13:30):
It's not what they were lookingfor.
That's a you problem.
That's a your book listingproblem.
Or you're not getting enoughimpressions to begin with.
If your book isn't seen, itcan't be clicked on.
That's also a you problem.
So that's good because you havecontrol over fixing those
issues.
So the idea of, well, if I juststarted $100 a day, can I really
(13:53):
get more traction?
Probably not, because, amazon,you got to build up the
impressions first and then fromthere are people going to be
clicking enough to generate.
It's not just you don't justpay for the number of
impressions, like you do withmeta ads.
You're paying when people click, so we need to make those
clicks count.
All right, so I love this one.
(14:14):
Where do I even start?
There's auto manual ASIN.
What is an ASIN Like?
Okay, there are all differenttypes of ads you can run on
Amazon and keep in mind that theAmazon ads platform is not just
for authors, it's also forpeople who are selling all
manner of things shoes andpurses, and eyelash extensions
(14:36):
and whatever.
So with that in mind, it'sunderstandable why the ads the
back, like the dashboard, is soconfusing, because whether
you're setting up a campaign ormoderating one, you're looking
at the same options as far asdata analysis that all of these
other B2C people are looking atwho aren't selling books.
(15:01):
A lot of it doesn't apply in thebook selling space.
It's irrelevant, which is greatbecause you can just ignore it.
However, in the book sellingspace, there are multiple ways
that you can run a campaign.
You can run a keyword campaign.
You can run a category campaignall manual, meaning that you're
telling Amazon these are thekeywords that I want you to show
(15:23):
the book for, these are thecategories, these are the
products I want you to match to.
And then there are alsoautomatic campaigns where Amazon
determines, based on their bestguess, where your book will
best be received.
It can be hella confusing toeven know what all those mean,
when to use them, how to bestuse them, et cetera, and so
(15:47):
people just shut down Me too.
My solution to that is startvery simply Again, start with
your two to three dollars a day.
Do a manual keyword campaign.
This is not, by the way, themost heavily recommended option.
Most people who run Amazon adsspecifically for books, but for
(16:10):
anything will recommend that youstart with an auto campaign and
that you use that campaign tosee, like you let Amazon do the
heavy lifting for you, to seewhat keywords people like, and
then you move the successfulkeywords into a manual campaign
later.
I have not found that to be asuccessful approach, with one
(16:33):
exception, and that is when yourkeyword campaigns are not
generating any or manyimpressions.
Your categories campaign is notgenerating many or any
impressions, then it's like aHail Mary to the auto campaign.
The challenge is that even withan auto campaign, if you don't
have your listing optimized,with keywords, categories and
(16:58):
your description, the autocampaign won't matter because
Amazon doesn't know.
It's sort of like taking a box,a cardboard box, into Target.
Let's say you're the delivery,you're the stock I don't know
who you are.
You're UPS, I don't know, andyou're bringing all the stock to
(17:18):
the warehouse at Target.
If you walk into the warehousewith a box, just a cardboard box
, no label on it, no writing onthe side of it, nothing, and you
hand it to the person who's incharge of putting it in the
warehouse, that person's goingto be like I don't know, like
put it in shoes or put it inmakeup or what do I do?
(17:41):
That's exactly what's happeningwhen you don't have your
keywords and your categories andyour book description well
optimized so that, at a bareminimum, when the guy walks in
to the Target warehouse, theperson receiving the package
knows well it's shoes.
I don't know if they're flipflops or heels or boots, but I
(18:02):
do know they're shoes.
Ideally they know they're shoes.
They're women's shoes, they'reheels and they're black.
That's ideal.
Heels and they're black, that'sideal.
That allows them to put it.
Not only put it where it needsto go, but when a customer comes
in and says I'm looking forwomen's black heels, they go oh,
(18:23):
aisle seven.
Like here are three choicespick one, and then she picks one
, and then what she picks willoften come down.
There are all kinds ofdifferent things.
Now we're getting into the weeds.
As you know, I'm prone to do so.
Don't get overwhelmed, pleasewith oh my God, do I do a
keyword category auto manual.
Just start with keywords.
(18:44):
And well, don't even start withkeywords.
Start with optimizing yourlisting, which is the first
thing that I it's literally thefirst entire module of Amazon
Ads for indie authors is how tooptimize your listing, because
if you don't, it's not the magicbullet.
But without that in place,imagine that you're essentially
(19:06):
walking into the targetwarehouse with a box with no
writing on the outside Okay, Ihave clicks.
I've gotten a lot of clicks, buthaven't gotten any sales.
What's going on?
What's wrong?
Number one you don't know thatyou have.
Do you know for sure that youhaven't gotten any sales, or is
it just in the reporting it saysno sales?
(19:28):
Are you looking at your orders?
Has your number of ordersincreased at all from before you
were running ads?
So, with right that, and one ofthe things that I recommend,
and this is in the I have thisunbelievable spreadsheet.
That's simple, but behind thescenes it's not simple because
all the formulas are baked intoit already in this ads course.
(19:48):
But what if your book has beenout for a while?
What I have you do, what Isuggest that you do, is note
your sales from the previousfour months prior to starting to
run ads, because you do want tobe able to compare.
So for Write the Damn BookAlready.
My most recent book I wasselling before ads between zero,
really between zero and twocopies per month.
(20:10):
That's it.
I rarely talk about the bookanywhere on social media or
anything.
I'm busy doing this kind ofthing, so I let my author side.
Sadly, it takes the brunt ofthis, but it was good because it
gave me a really good benchmark.
So I knew I was selling betweenzero and two copies per month
(20:31):
for the months prior to runningthe ads.
Once I started running the adsand really got them going, after
about three months my saleswent up to 83 per month.
I don't know what else toattribute that to, besides
making sure that my listing wasfully optimized, which it was
pretty good to begin with.
I didn't make any major tweaksto it but because I just knew
(20:53):
how to do that, when I wasloading the book initially and
then I ran ads and I keptlooking at the ads and tweaking
them and I don't tweak my Amazonads every day, I probably tweak
them every two to three weeks.
Well, there's a whole processto this, but it's sort of if you
keep moving.
If we go back to the warehouseanalogy, let's use it.
(21:13):
Here's an analogy that's reallygood.
Have you ever gone into thegrocery store or Target and
nothing is where it's supposedto be?
One time I went into Sprouts.
We have this local.
It's like a small, healthygrocery store here called
Sprouts.
I'm in Arizona and I went inand I kid you not, over the
weekend they had completelyflipped the store, with the
(21:37):
exception they didn't move likethe whole meat counter, but with
the exception of that, all ofthe aisles that were on the
right-hand side of the store,all of those contents were on
the left and vice versa.
I was so lost.
I was like this is, and Iunderstand sort of why they do
it because they don't want youto just go to the same place in
the store every time and getyour same seven items.
(21:58):
This is why I now order mygroceries and pick them up,
because it saves me from allthis impulse shopping when I'm
walking by the Oreos because Ithought that's where the peanut
butter was gonna be, and thenI'm like, oh my God, maybe I
want some Oreos and all of asudden my grocery bill is $150
higher, hundred and fiftydollars higher than it has ever
been or should be.
But I digress.
It's the same with Amazon ads.
If you're changing yourkeywords in your listing in your
(22:22):
ads, if you're changing all ofthat every day or two days or
three days, it's the.
The back end of the Amazonsystem is like wait a minute.
Like last week, peanut butterwas here and now, and now it's
eyelash extension.
Why am I talking about eyelashextensions a lot today?
I don't anyway.
It's the same thing.
So we want to be careful abouthow often we change them, and
(22:44):
that's a good thing, you knowwhy?
Because it means you don't haveto be in there every day
tweaking and analyzing.
It's like an every two to threeweek thing.
So, number one is the bookreally not selling?
So you say you're gettingclicks but you're not getting
purchases.
Is that really the case?
Number two there's a way thatyou can go in and see which
(23:07):
searches what the customer isactually searching.
That's generating a click.
Is it relevant?
Does it even make sense thatAmazon is showing your book for
that click?
If the user is searchingfiction, world War II romance
and you've written a rom-comfrom 2025, why is your book
(23:31):
showing up there as an option,as an impression?
It's almost certainly gotsomething to do with your
keywords, your categories andyour book description, and it's
misleading customers, which, forthe record, amazon doesn't like
.
So it's very it's I'm going togo with impossible to try to
(23:54):
game the Amazon system Like,just don't.
It's much smarter than any ofus.
So, thinking well, if theybought this thing, they might
maybe like this.
Like, if they're readingrom-com about something that
went on in England, maybe they'dalso like to buy my book about
(24:15):
how to garden because maybe theylike roses, like that is a
bridge too far and it'smisleading, and Amazon sees it
as misleading, and then you endup getting penalized for that.
So there are some simple.
There's a more complicated wayto explain why things might not
be working, but the fix for itis simple, which does not mean
(24:40):
that the next day you're goingto make a million dollars in
book sales, because you're not,but it's not.
The fix is almost never ascomplicated as the problem that
you're trying to fix.
So that's a great thing, okay.
Last question I'll do today,I'll do another one of these and
send your questions over like,dm them to me on Instagram,
(25:01):
email them to me, elizabeth atElizabeth lionscom, and I'll
just keep doing these.
I read somewhere that I need 300plus keywords in order to have
a successful campaign and that Ineed to have exact and phrase.
So that's really 600 keywords,just no.
The answer is no.
(25:21):
This was one of the things thatmade me quit back, however,
many years ago, because againback then and some people will
still say you should start witha thousand keywords, and I'm not
here to say they're wrong thatmay very well work with the
genre, the budget that I don'twant.
(25:41):
We'd have to get the contextFor myself.
Who's just?
I'm just an indie author with afew books and I'm helping
people who have a few books orone book Most of the people with
whom I work have one book andthe idea of having to come up
with 300 keywords not only comeup with them, but then track
(26:01):
them to figure out what'sgetting impressions, what are
getting clicks that made me quit.
You should have seen myspreadsheet.
Just no, I think I went throughan entire bag of chocolate
chips one night just trying toanalyze this spreadsheet.
I was like stress eating andthen I put my hand in the bag
and they were gone.
It was awful.
So my recommendation for therecord is to start with between
(26:24):
30 and 40.
If you do your keyword researcheffectively and it will take
you a couple of hours, so set acouple of hours aside.
It's honestly not hard.
It's just takes a minute to getit all out there.
If you can narrow your list downto between 30 and 50, and I'd
prefer 30 and 40, keywords thathave high search traffic.
(26:49):
So you want somewhat nichekeywords.
So the words romance, self-helpniche keywords.
So the words romance, self-help, personal growth.
Those are women's health, thoseare way too broad, like way too
broad.
That's like saying my book issomewhere in Target.
You want to be able to say mybook or my product is in this
section.
Ideally you want to be able tosay it's in this aisle.
(27:12):
And I apologize if my Targetreference is offensive at this
point, because I do realize thatTarget has left a lot of
people's vernacular and for manyyears it was my magic kingdom
and I loved it there so much andI'm rarely in there anymore,
which is not to say anythingnegative about Target.
Substitute whatever store youwant.
Please don't take me down overmy mention of Target, target,
(27:35):
walmart, safeway, wherever youshop, any store.
If you can say, oh, that's inthis section, you've made a step
in the right direction.
If you can say it's in thisaisle, you've gotten even better
.
And if you can say it's halfwaydown on the right-hand side of
aisle 17, that's where we'retrying to get with it On row
(27:59):
three, from the bottom in themiddle, like that's what we're
trying to get with this, and sothey don't have to be quite and
it'll be challenging, by the way, at the beginning to have them
be quite that specific.
That's something that you honeover time as you see what people
are searching specifically.
I'll give you an example sothat it hopefully helps
illustrate this a little bitbetter.
For write the damn book.
(28:20):
Already one of my best keywordsis write a book.
As you can imagine, it's also akeyword on which I lose money.
I think Not overall, but somedays I actually I make enough
money from the keyword that Idon't get rid of it.
The reason I get I get far moreimpressions than clicks with
(28:40):
that keyword because when peopletype in write a book they might
be thinking like write achildren's book or write a
romance, write a romcom, write ahistorical fiction, and then so
they get the impression showsup, but then they see the title
of the book.
They realize that's not aboutwriting a children's book or not
about writing historicalfiction, so they don't click on
(29:02):
it.
So I do get a lot ofimpressions with lower clicks
and even from people who doclick on it, it's not a one,
it's certainly not a one-to-oneratio of the number of people
who click on it with a number ofpeople who purchase it.
Now, if we go to a keyword likewriting a memoir my click
through, my conversion rate onwriting a memoir is
(29:22):
significantly higher than it ison write a book.
That's the stat we want to lookat.
Is the conversion rate, noteven the click rate?
If you have a really high clickrate on something and you're
spending a lot of money on itbut it's not converting, that's
a problem that we want to lookat.
But for me, I haven't pulledthat keyword down because I
(29:45):
still get a large number ofpeople for whom, again, when
they see the ad, they know it'snot for them, they don't click
on it.
But when they see it and theyrecognize that it's about
writing nonfiction or memoir,they do click and they often
convert.
So but having 300 to 500keywords, I just can't even
(30:07):
personally imagine the overwhelm.
Well, I can imagine it becauseI lived it.
I don't suggest it.
So, to answer that concern, youcan do it that way.
I don't teach it that way, Idon't do it that way and I would
give you some level ofreassurance that in order to
(30:31):
have a successful Amazon adscampaign, you can do that with I
mean honestly you could do itwith as few as 10 keywords,
especially if they're verytargeted, if you're very clear
about what your ideal reader issearching for, and the more you
run ads, the clearer you getabout that because, again, you
can see the data.
(30:51):
So I hope this was helpful.
Again, I'll do this again andagain and again.
If you have more questions aboutif you're running ads and
you've got questions aboutwhat's not working, or if you've
been thinking about it butthere's something that's making
you think I don't want to likethat, I mean, if you've been
thinking about it but there'ssomething that's making you
think I don't want to like that.
I mean, if you just don't wantto, don't want to, I'm never,
(31:11):
I'm not going to be the girlwho's like you should or you
have to or you must or you needto.
But if you've been thinking I'dkind of like to however, I'm
afraid of this or I'm concernedabout that or I don't really
like data then shoot me thequestion and let's see if we can
make it feel a little bitbetter, to where perhaps you're
(31:31):
comfortable giving it a try fora month or two and just seeing
what happens, because the worstthing that can happen is you say
this isn't for me and you turnthem off and you try something
different.
The alternative is you go fromzero to two books a month to 83
on average a month, and thatbrings you great joy.
(31:54):
Is it going to fund yourmansion in Bora Bora?
No, I don't think it will, butit does what most of us as
authors, regardless of the genrethat we've written, most want
to do, which is share themessage with someone else and
then let it impact them inwhatever way it does and go from
(32:16):
there.
And certainly if you have aproduct or service on the back
end of your book like I do withWrite the Damn Book already, it
is a great, great way tointroduce yourself and your
philosophy and your product orservice just who you are and
what you're about and how youfeel about the topic about which
you're speaking to a wideraudience and let it go from
(32:40):
there.
And then many times, most times, the ROI comes on the backend
of that, but at least you're not$1,500 to $2,000 a month out of
pocket just to have someoneelse running the ads for you,
because truly it's not necessaryand it's not nearly as
overwhelming.
Is it like one, two, three?
No, but nothing is.
(33:01):
That being said, it's notnearly as overwhelming.
If you're just willing to takeit like step one, we're going to
do this Step two.
We're going to do this and thenkind of just follow those
directions on through Askquestions when you need to and
just keep going.
So I have the link to thecourse in the episode notes.
It's also over on my website atpublishaprofitablebookcom.
(33:23):
Forward slash Amazon ads.
It's still in early birdpricing for lifetime access.
So if it's something that feelslike it would be a good fit for
you, I would love it If you'dcheck it out.
And someone messaged me lastweek and said I send out a
message about every I don't knowI think it's after eight or
nine days that someone's been inthe course saying hey, how's it
(33:45):
going?
Do you have any questions?
Are you stuck?
How can I help?
And someone responded and shesaid this is such a breath of
fresh air, and so I don'tremember the exact word she used
, but it was something about notoverwhelming.
And I said that makes me so, so, so happy, because that was the
goal the entire time.
But regardless, keep thequestions coming and we'll be
(34:08):
back next week with anotherinterview.
Talk to you then.
Hello and welcome to the Write the Damn Book Already
podcast.
My name is Elizabeth Lyons.
I'm an author and book editor,and I help people write and
publish thought-provoking,wildly entertaining books
without any more overthinking,second-guessing or overwhelm
than absolutely necessary.
Because, let's face it, someoverthinking, second-guessing
and overwhelm is going to comewith the territory if you're
(00:23):
anything like me guessing, andoverwhelm is going to come with
the territory if you're anythinglike me.
In short, I love books and Ibelieve that story and shared
perspective are two of the mostimpactful ways we connect with
one another.
A few things.
I don't believe in gimmicks,magic bullets and swoon worthy
results without context, as in.
Be sure to reveal that a resulttook eight years or required a
(00:43):
$30,000 investment in ads,because those details are just
as important.
What I believe in most as anauthor, the long game is the
shortcut For more book writingand publishing.
Tips and solutions.
Visit publishaprofitablebookcomor visit me over on Instagram
at Elizabeth Lyons Author.
Hi everybody and welcome back.
(01:05):
So today, you just got me todayand we're going to talk about
one of my favorite topics as oflate Amazon ads.
I've gotten a number ofquestions and I'm not surprised
by any of them.
I either have gotten them orI've heard them.
These are questions that peoplehave when they're considering
running Amazon ads, but they'renot really sure or they're like
(01:27):
they've tried other ads.
Maybe you've tried Google ads,or you've tried meta ads or both
.
Maybe you've even tried Amazonads, I mean just for
storytelling purposes.
I started running Amazon ads in,I want to say, 2017, 2018.
And they were going well for awhile, and then something
happened and people startedreleasing courses and directives
(01:50):
and all kinds of things on howto make ads work better, and, of
course, their screenshots oftheir earnings, which were
multiple, five figures if nothigher, were very, very
appealing, as they wouldprobably be for most anyone, and
so I started to listen to allthe chatter about what I should
(02:14):
be doing differently and beforelong, I had many, many campaigns
running at the same time formany books.
I was trying to do a lot in avery short period of time.
Even though each listing oreach campaign had maybe a $2 or
(02:35):
$3 budget, once you added themall together, I was still
running between $20 and $30 aday.
Each of those campaigns wasgrowing very slowly on the $2 to
$3 a day budget, and I just gotcompletely overwhelmed and
frustrated.
I felt like one person very wellmeaning, I'm sure, by the way
(02:58):
was telling me to do it one way,another person was telling me
to do it another way, and then athird and a fourth and a fifth,
and what I forgot to do in themidst of all of that was to ask
myself and then assess, of theperson who was giving me the
information, what is their frameof reference?
So do they predominantly workwith fiction authors?
(03:21):
Do they predominantly, evenwithin that genre?
Is there a sub-genre likethrillers?
That was sort of when I startedrunning Amazon ads, where a lot
of the big focus was A lot ofpeople who had written thrillers
and mystery were coming out onthe different boards.
There was K-boards and allthese different places talking
(03:42):
about how best to run Amazon adsand, for the record, none of
them was necessarily wrong.
It's just that I wasn't lookingat it from the standpoint of
okay, that works for them, so itshould work for me.
But I wasn't comparing applesand apples, so I wasn't looking
at well, wait, they do mysteryand I'm nonfiction.
How does that translate?
(04:03):
Does it translate?
And the thing that'schallenging in this space is
it's very, very hard to say, ifnot impossible to say across the
board, this approach works.
It's the same with meta ads orwith Google ads.
It's so important to look atand make sure that you're
(04:23):
comparing apples and apples.
So even for me, runningpredominantly ads to nonfiction
books, and having helped severalauthors set up and kind of
analyze the data running ads totheir fiction books I admittedly
don't have yet nearly the dataset to say, okay, I run ads to a
(04:44):
hundred self-help books and 100fiction romance, like let's
drill down.
And so in comparing those datasets even if it were 20 and 20,
what I can see is that this typeof ad performs better than this
type of ad for this genre.
We need bigger data sets andmost people don't have them.
(05:08):
So I aim to be extraordinarilytransparent about what types of
books I've run ads to, what mybooks are.
My ads are the only ones overwhich I have full control.
But so often people will think Iwant to start running Amazon
ads.
Who can I hire to do that forme?
How much is that going to cost?
And once they figure out howmuch they're going to pay just
(05:31):
to have someone else run the ads, they realize that it's not
just a zero-sum game.
It's a losing game every month,which for some people, is
completely fine.
So if people know, for somepeople is completely fine.
So if authors know what theirgoal is and they're willing to
spend extra upfront to not be incharge of their ads, to get
those sales, especially ifthey've written nonfiction and
(05:55):
especially if they have anotherproduct on the back end and
they're planning to monetizethere, that's fine.
For many, many, many authors,however, that's not the case.
So perhaps they have a backlistof other books and they're
looking to get traction andmomentum with more of their
titles.
Perhaps this is just theirfirst book and they're looking
to build an email list, but theydon't want it to cost them
(06:18):
$1,500 to $2,000 a month to dothat.
So part of this for me is aboutmaking it simpler and being very
clear, very transparent aboutwhat the numbers are, the full
context of all of it.
So I've grabbed a bunch ofseveral.
I've got I think I've got sixquestions.
(06:39):
I don't know that I'm going tomake it through all of these
today, because I'm trying.
I'm going to try to keep thisone short, but of some of the
most common concerns that I'veheard and that I've had when it
comes to Amazon ads and some ofthem, while they're all valid in
some cases, I would suggest tosomeone not to run Amazon ads
(07:00):
Again.
In my world there is no.
This will work for everyone.
I just think that's.
I don't know of a situationwhere that's true ever.
We all need air to breathe, butI mean I think.
But besides that, you know,okay.
So the first one is I'm goingto burn, like I'm going to spend
all this money and I'm notgoing to get anything back, or
(07:22):
how long is it going to take forme to see a return?
It's such a fair question.
And in the meta ad space, so ifyou're running Facebook or
Instagram ads, it's oftensuggested that you need to be
spending $50 to $100 or more aday in order to rapidly collect
data, and I'm not saying that'swrong.
What I am saying is that thatmakes a lot of people really
(07:42):
nervous, myself included.
For a period of time, I'vegotten a little more comfortable
spending more money on meta ads.
But it took me a minute.
So one of the things that Ilove about Amazon ads is that
you don't've talked about thisbefore the Amazon ads dashboard.
(08:07):
So you have two dashboards.
When you're logged in Well,when you're running ads, you
have your regular KDP dashboardwhere you can see your orders
and your reports and yourbookshelf and all that.
Then you have your advertisingdashboard, which is sort of a
subset of your KDP dashboarddashboard, which is sort of a
(08:31):
subset of your KDP dashboard.
These two sets of data don'tequal each other almost ever.
So I can log in right now to myKDP dashboard and see it might
say that I have sold six bookstoday and maybe it's three
different books.
I'm just going to try to makethis easy.
Three books have each sold twocopies today.
Great.
I go over to my Amazon adsdashboard and it will say I have
(08:55):
no sales or it will say I havetwo sales.
One of the biggest challengeswith Amazon ads and it's what
frustrated me before I figuredout a way it's not the perfect
way, but it's pretty good in myexperience to better track ads
better than using theirdashboard is that there is no.
(09:17):
With meta ads as an example,instagram, facebook ads.
There are third-party trackingsoftware platforms that you can
use to better correlate yoursales with an ad, to just make
it really simple to be able tosay oh, this is where the sale
came from.
It came from this ad.
So when we're selling our bookson Amazon, there are a couple
(09:41):
of things we don't know.
We don't know who bought it.
We don't have access to thatdata, to that customer data
that's proprietary to Amazon.
They don't share it with us,understandably.
So unless someone buys yourbook off of your website, you
don't know who bought it.
The other challenge is thattheir tracking is at least their
reporting I'm guessing thattheir and so there's also a
(10:11):
delay.
So if someone clicks on your adon a Monday and they order your
book and it's a paperback or ahardback version and it has to
print on demand and then ship,it will not show up in your
orders until at least two daysusually two days later, between
one and three or four days later, depending on their shipping
time but it will show uptheoretically in your ads
(10:33):
platform as having sold that day.
Sometimes the sales don't evenshow up in the ad platform.
So we have to do a bit ofguessing.
As to educated guessing, likeintelligent, strategic guessing,
it's not just throw it outthere and hope that we were
somewhere in the mark.
There are ways to beintentional and strategic about
(10:54):
the guessing that we're doing,but we have to do that.
That is much more comfortableto do when you are spending a
maximum of $2 or $3 a day thanwhen you're spending $50 to $100
a day and you're just watchingthe dollars just drain.
So that's one of the biggestreasons I love Amazon ads is you
(11:19):
can, in your mind, think, okay,this month I'm going to budget
$60, $2 a day and I'm just goingto let it go Like I'm just
going to act as though I'm notgoing to make any sales off that
$60.
And that's less money in mostcases than you're going to spend
, certainly with a publicist orwith meta ads or Google ads,
(11:39):
toward your book.
So, yes, there's no guaranteewith ads ever, but there are
lesser levels of risks andAmazon does offer that, which I
personally am a huge proponentof and highly value.
When I start an ad campaign now,I start at $10 a day.
You don't have to do that whenI started back.
(12:02):
So I started in like 2017, 2018, got very overwhelmed, kind of
quit for a while with the ads,came back in in like 2022, and
then really started ramping uparound 2023.
And when I did that, I wasgoing at two to $3 a day because
I was very I was not onlyskeptical, I was cynical and I
(12:23):
was being very conservative inresponse.
And so as I started to get amore, more comfortable with it
and see what was happening andwhat wasn't happening and what
was working and what wasn'tworking, with air quotes around
the working, I got morecomfortable starting my ads at a
higher dollar amount.
That being said, I have onecampaign.
(12:46):
It's my most successfulcampaign right now.
It's for write the damn bookalready, which is my most recent
book, and I have that set at$10 a day and there are still.
It's been running for nine or10 months, that campaign.
I mean with some variations,there are still, I'd say, the
majority of days.
It doesn't even spend my whole$10.
It's hard to get Amazon to spendyour money, which I'm not mad
(13:10):
about either.
Sometimes I wish there weremore options to have them spend.
But if people aren't clicking,you only pay with Amazon ads
when someone clicks on your ad.
So if people aren't clicking onyour ad, it's only happening
for one of two reasons Eitherthey're seeing it, but it's not
resonating.
(13:30):
It's not what they were lookingfor.
That's a you problem.
That's a your book listingproblem.
Or you're not getting enoughimpressions to begin with.
If your book isn't seen, itcan't be clicked on.
That's also a you problem.
So that's good because you havecontrol over fixing those
issues.
So the idea of, well, if I juststarted $100 a day, can I really
(13:53):
get more traction?
Probably not, because, amazon,you got to build up the
impressions first and then fromthere are people going to be
clicking enough to generate.
It's not just you don't justpay for the number of
impressions, like you do withmeta ads.
You're paying when people click, so we need to make those
clicks count.
All right, so I love this one.
(14:14):
Where do I even start?
There's auto manual ASIN.
What is an ASIN Like?
Okay, there are all differenttypes of ads you can run on
Amazon and keep in mind that theAmazon ads platform is not just
for authors, it's also forpeople who are selling all
manner of things shoes andpurses, and eyelash extensions
(14:36):
and whatever.
So with that in mind, it'sunderstandable why the ads the
back, like the dashboard, is soconfusing, because whether
you're setting up a campaign ormoderating one, you're looking
at the same options as far asdata analysis that all of these
other B2C people are looking atwho aren't selling books.
(15:01):
A lot of it doesn't apply in thebook selling space.
It's irrelevant, which is greatbecause you can just ignore it.
However, in the book sellingspace, there are multiple ways
that you can run a campaign.
You can run a keyword campaign.
You can run a category campaignall manual, meaning that you're
telling Amazon these are thekeywords that I want you to show
(15:23):
the book for, these are thecategories, these are the
products I want you to match to.
And then there are alsoautomatic campaigns where Amazon
determines, based on their bestguess, where your book will
best be received.
It can be hella confusing toeven know what all those mean,
when to use them, how to bestuse them, et cetera, and so
(15:47):
people just shut down Me too.
My solution to that is startvery simply Again, start with
your two to three dollars a day.
Do a manual keyword campaign.
This is not, by the way, themost heavily recommended option.
Most people who run Amazon adsspecifically for books, but for
(16:10):
anything will recommend that youstart with an auto campaign and
that you use that campaign tosee, like you let Amazon do the
heavy lifting for you, to seewhat keywords people like, and
then you move the successfulkeywords into a manual campaign
later.
I have not found that to be asuccessful approach, with one
(16:33):
exception, and that is when yourkeyword campaigns are not
generating any or manyimpressions.
Your categories campaign is notgenerating many or any
impressions, then it's like aHail Mary to the auto campaign.
The challenge is that even withan auto campaign, if you don't
have your listing optimized,with keywords, categories and
(16:58):
your description, the autocampaign won't matter because
Amazon doesn't know.
It's sort of like taking a box,a cardboard box, into Target.
Let's say you're the delivery,you're the stock I don't know
who you are.
You're UPS, I don't know, andyou're bringing all the stock to
(17:18):
the warehouse at Target.
If you walk into the warehousewith a box, just a cardboard box
, no label on it, no writing onthe side of it, nothing, and you
hand it to the person who's incharge of putting it in the
warehouse, that person's goingto be like I don't know, like
put it in shoes or put it inmakeup or what do I do?
(17:41):
That's exactly what's happeningwhen you don't have your
keywords and your categories andyour book description well
optimized so that, at a bareminimum, when the guy walks in
to the Target warehouse, theperson receiving the package
knows well it's shoes.
I don't know if they're flipflops or heels or boots, but I
(18:02):
do know they're shoes.
Ideally they know they're shoes.
They're women's shoes, they'reheels and they're black.
That's ideal.
Heels and they're black, that'sideal.
That allows them to put it.
Not only put it where it needsto go, but when a customer comes
in and says I'm looking forwomen's black heels, they go oh,
(18:23):
aisle seven.
Like here are three choicespick one, and then she picks one
, and then what she picks willoften come down.
There are all kinds ofdifferent things.
Now we're getting into the weeds.
As you know, I'm prone to do so.
Don't get overwhelmed, pleasewith oh my God, do I do a
keyword category auto manual.
Just start with keywords.
(18:44):
And well, don't even start withkeywords.
Start with optimizing yourlisting, which is the first
thing that I it's literally thefirst entire module of Amazon
Ads for indie authors is how tooptimize your listing, because
if you don't, it's not the magicbullet.
But without that in place,imagine that you're essentially
(19:06):
walking into the targetwarehouse with a box with no
writing on the outside Okay, Ihave clicks.
I've gotten a lot of clicks, buthaven't gotten any sales.
What's going on?
What's wrong?
Number one you don't know thatyou have.
Do you know for sure that youhaven't gotten any sales, or is
it just in the reporting it saysno sales?
(19:28):
Are you looking at your orders?
Has your number of ordersincreased at all from before you
were running ads?
So, with right that, and one ofthe things that I recommend,
and this is in the I have thisunbelievable spreadsheet.
That's simple, but behind thescenes it's not simple because
all the formulas are baked intoit already in this ads course.
(19:48):
But what if your book has beenout for a while?
What I have you do, what Isuggest that you do, is note
your sales from the previousfour months prior to starting to
run ads, because you do want tobe able to compare.
So for Write the Damn BookAlready.
My most recent book I wasselling before ads between zero,
really between zero and twocopies per month.
(20:10):
That's it.
I rarely talk about the bookanywhere on social media or
anything.
I'm busy doing this kind ofthing, so I let my author side.
Sadly, it takes the brunt ofthis, but it was good because it
gave me a really good benchmark.
So I knew I was selling betweenzero and two copies per month
(20:31):
for the months prior to runningthe ads.
Once I started running the adsand really got them going, after
about three months my saleswent up to 83 per month.
I don't know what else toattribute that to, besides
making sure that my listing wasfully optimized, which it was
pretty good to begin with.
I didn't make any major tweaksto it but because I just knew
(20:53):
how to do that, when I wasloading the book initially and
then I ran ads and I keptlooking at the ads and tweaking
them and I don't tweak my Amazonads every day, I probably tweak
them every two to three weeks.
Well, there's a whole processto this, but it's sort of if you
keep moving.
If we go back to the warehouseanalogy, let's use it.
(21:13):
Here's an analogy that's reallygood.
Have you ever gone into thegrocery store or Target and
nothing is where it's supposedto be?
One time I went into Sprouts.
We have this local.
It's like a small, healthygrocery store here called
Sprouts.
I'm in Arizona and I went inand I kid you not, over the
weekend they had completelyflipped the store, with the
(21:37):
exception they didn't move likethe whole meat counter, but with
the exception of that, all ofthe aisles that were on the
right-hand side of the store,all of those contents were on
the left and vice versa.
I was so lost.
I was like this is, and Iunderstand sort of why they do
it because they don't want youto just go to the same place in
the store every time and getyour same seven items.
(21:58):
This is why I now order mygroceries and pick them up,
because it saves me from allthis impulse shopping when I'm
walking by the Oreos because Ithought that's where the peanut
butter was gonna be, and thenI'm like, oh my God, maybe I
want some Oreos and all of asudden my grocery bill is $150
higher, hundred and fiftydollars higher than it has ever
been or should be.
But I digress.
It's the same with Amazon ads.
If you're changing yourkeywords in your listing in your
(22:22):
ads, if you're changing all ofthat every day or two days or
three days, it's the.
The back end of the Amazonsystem is like wait a minute.
Like last week, peanut butterwas here and now, and now it's
eyelash extension.
Why am I talking about eyelashextensions a lot today?
I don't anyway.
It's the same thing.
So we want to be careful abouthow often we change them, and
(22:44):
that's a good thing, you knowwhy?
Because it means you don't haveto be in there every day
tweaking and analyzing.
It's like an every two to threeweek thing.
So, number one is the bookreally not selling?
So you say you're gettingclicks but you're not getting
purchases.
Is that really the case?
Number two there's a way thatyou can go in and see which
(23:07):
searches what the customer isactually searching.
That's generating a click.
Is it relevant?
Does it even make sense thatAmazon is showing your book for
that click?
If the user is searchingfiction, world War II romance
and you've written a rom-comfrom 2025, why is your book
(23:31):
showing up there as an option,as an impression?
It's almost certainly gotsomething to do with your
keywords, your categories andyour book description, and it's
misleading customers, which, forthe record, amazon doesn't like
.
So it's very it's I'm going togo with impossible to try to
(23:54):
game the Amazon system Like,just don't.
It's much smarter than any ofus.
So, thinking well, if theybought this thing, they might
maybe like this.
Like, if they're readingrom-com about something that
went on in England, maybe they'dalso like to buy my book about
(24:15):
how to garden because maybe theylike roses, like that is a
bridge too far and it'smisleading, and Amazon sees it
as misleading, and then you endup getting penalized for that.
So there are some simple.
There's a more complicated wayto explain why things might not
be working, but the fix for itis simple, which does not mean
(24:40):
that the next day you're goingto make a million dollars in
book sales, because you're not,but it's not.
The fix is almost never ascomplicated as the problem that
you're trying to fix.
So that's a great thing, okay.
Last question I'll do today,I'll do another one of these and
send your questions over like,dm them to me on Instagram,
(25:01):
email them to me, elizabeth atElizabeth lionscom, and I'll
just keep doing these.
I read somewhere that I need 300plus keywords in order to have
a successful campaign and that Ineed to have exact and phrase.
So that's really 600 keywords,just no.
The answer is no.
(25:21):
This was one of the things thatmade me quit back, however,
many years ago, because againback then and some people will
still say you should start witha thousand keywords, and I'm not
here to say they're wrong thatmay very well work with the
genre, the budget that I don'twant.
(25:41):
We'd have to get the contextFor myself.
Who's just?
I'm just an indie author with afew books and I'm helping
people who have a few books orone book Most of the people with
whom I work have one book andthe idea of having to come up
with 300 keywords not only comeup with them, but then track
(26:01):
them to figure out what'sgetting impressions, what are
getting clicks that made me quit.
You should have seen myspreadsheet.
Just no, I think I went throughan entire bag of chocolate
chips one night just trying toanalyze this spreadsheet.
I was like stress eating andthen I put my hand in the bag
and they were gone.
It was awful.
So my recommendation for therecord is to start with between
(26:24):
30 and 40.
If you do your keyword researcheffectively and it will take
you a couple of hours, so set acouple of hours aside.
It's honestly not hard.
It's just takes a minute to getit all out there.
If you can narrow your list downto between 30 and 50, and I'd
prefer 30 and 40, keywords thathave high search traffic.
(26:49):
So you want somewhat nichekeywords.
So the words romance, self-helpniche keywords.
So the words romance, self-help, personal growth.
Those are women's health, thoseare way too broad, like way too
broad.
That's like saying my book issomewhere in Target.
You want to be able to say mybook or my product is in this
section.
Ideally you want to be able tosay it's in this aisle.
(27:12):
And I apologize if my Targetreference is offensive at this
point, because I do realize thatTarget has left a lot of
people's vernacular and for manyyears it was my magic kingdom
and I loved it there so much andI'm rarely in there anymore,
which is not to say anythingnegative about Target.
Substitute whatever store youwant.
Please don't take me down overmy mention of Target, target,
(27:35):
walmart, safeway, wherever youshop, any store.
If you can say, oh, that's inthis section, you've made a step
in the right direction.
If you can say it's in thisaisle, you've gotten even better
.
And if you can say it's halfwaydown on the right-hand side of
aisle 17, that's where we'retrying to get with it On row
(27:59):
three, from the bottom in themiddle, like that's what we're
trying to get with this, and sothey don't have to be quite and
it'll be challenging, by the way, at the beginning to have them
be quite that specific.
That's something that you honeover time as you see what people
are searching specifically.
I'll give you an example sothat it hopefully helps
illustrate this a little bitbetter.
For write the damn book.
(28:20):
Already one of my best keywordsis write a book.
As you can imagine, it's also akeyword on which I lose money.
I think Not overall, but somedays I actually I make enough
money from the keyword that Idon't get rid of it.
The reason I get I get far moreimpressions than clicks with
(28:40):
that keyword because when peopletype in write a book they might
be thinking like write achildren's book or write a
romance, write a romcom, write ahistorical fiction, and then so
they get the impression showsup, but then they see the title
of the book.
They realize that's not aboutwriting a children's book or not
about writing historicalfiction, so they don't click on
(29:02):
it.
So I do get a lot ofimpressions with lower clicks
and even from people who doclick on it, it's not a one,
it's certainly not a one-to-oneratio of the number of people
who click on it with a number ofpeople who purchase it.
Now, if we go to a keyword likewriting a memoir my click
through, my conversion rate onwriting a memoir is
(29:22):
significantly higher than it ison write a book.
That's the stat we want to lookat.
Is the conversion rate, noteven the click rate?
If you have a really high clickrate on something and you're
spending a lot of money on itbut it's not converting, that's
a problem that we want to lookat.
But for me, I haven't pulledthat keyword down because I
(29:45):
still get a large number ofpeople for whom, again, when
they see the ad, they know it'snot for them, they don't click
on it.
But when they see it and theyrecognize that it's about
writing nonfiction or memoir,they do click and they often
convert.
So but having 300 to 500keywords, I just can't even
(30:07):
personally imagine the overwhelm.
Well, I can imagine it becauseI lived it.
I don't suggest it.
So, to answer that concern, youcan do it that way.
I don't teach it that way, Idon't do it that way and I would
give you some level ofreassurance that in order to
(30:31):
have a successful Amazon adscampaign, you can do that with I
mean honestly you could do itwith as few as 10 keywords,
especially if they're verytargeted, if you're very clear
about what your ideal reader issearching for, and the more you
run ads, the clearer you getabout that because, again, you
can see the data.
(30:51):
So I hope this was helpful.
Again, I'll do this again andagain and again.
If you have more questions aboutif you're running ads and
you've got questions aboutwhat's not working, or if you've
been thinking about it butthere's something that's making
you think I don't want to likethat, I mean, if you've been
thinking about it but there'ssomething that's making you
think I don't want to like that.
I mean, if you just don't wantto, don't want to, I'm never,
(31:11):
I'm not going to be the girlwho's like you should or you
have to or you must or you needto.
But if you've been thinking I'dkind of like to however, I'm
afraid of this or I'm concernedabout that or I don't really
like data then shoot me thequestion and let's see if we can
make it feel a little bitbetter, to where perhaps you're
(31:31):
comfortable giving it a try fora month or two and just seeing
what happens, because the worstthing that can happen is you say
this isn't for me and you turnthem off and you try something
different.
The alternative is you go fromzero to two books a month to 83
on average a month, and thatbrings you great joy.
(31:54):
Is it going to fund yourmansion in Bora Bora?
No, I don't think it will, butit does what most of us as
authors, regardless of the genrethat we've written, most want
to do, which is share themessage with someone else and
then let it impact them inwhatever way it does and go from
(32:16):
there.
And certainly if you have aproduct or service on the back
end of your book like I do withWrite the Damn Book already, it
is a great, great way tointroduce yourself and your
philosophy and your product orservice just who you are and
what you're about and how youfeel about the topic about which
you're speaking to a wideraudience and let it go from
(32:40):
there.
And then many times, most times, the ROI comes on the backend
of that, but at least you're not$1,500 to $2,000 a month out of
pocket just to have someoneelse running the ads for you,
because truly it's not necessaryand it's not nearly as
overwhelming.
Is it like one, two, three?
No, but nothing is.
(33:01):
That being said, it's notnearly as overwhelming.
If you're just willing to takeit like step one, we're going to
do this Step two.
We're going to do this and thenkind of just follow those
directions on through Askquestions when you need to and
just keep going.
So I have the link to thecourse in the episode notes.
It's also over on my website atpublishaprofitablebookcom.
(33:23):
Forward slash Amazon ads.
It's still in early birdpricing for lifetime access.
So if it's something that feelslike it would be a good fit for
you, I would love it If you'dcheck it out.
And someone messaged me lastweek and said I send out a
message about every I don't knowI think it's after eight or
nine days that someone's been inthe course saying hey, how's it
(33:45):
going?
Do you have any questions?
Are you stuck?
How can I help?
And someone responded and shesaid this is such a breath of
fresh air, and so I don'tremember the exact word she used
, but it was something about notoverwhelming.
And I said that makes me so, so, so happy, because that was the
goal the entire time.
But regardless, keep thequestions coming and we'll be
(34:08):
back next week with anotherinterview.
Talk to you then.
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