Amazon Bestseller Campaigns

John Kremer

All rights reserved. As the buyer of this program, you have the right to use this material in the promotion of your own book and/or those of your clients. If used with clients, you are not allowed to reveal all the details of this program to your clients without applying for an additional license from Open Horizons and John Kremer.

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The Amazon Bestseller Campaign

Below are the basic steps you need to take to create and carry out a New York Times bestseller campaign in the style of an Amazon.com bestseller promotion.

1. Locate your campaign partners.

Your partners should include all the authors, publishers, ezine editors, bloggers, and website owners you know who have something to sell to a similar audience to the one you want to reach. If these people aren’t already in your network, you need to do more research.

1. Websites: Use Google, Yahoo, or another search engine to target the websites with the highest rankings for your key words.

2. Blogs: Use Technorati.com to search for those blogs that are targeting readers who would be likely readers of your book. Again, search by the key words to target your audience.

If you are a business author, check out: Todd And’s Power 150 List ofmarketing blogs: http://www.toddand.com/power150.

For a list of book review and literary blogs, check out this site:
http://metaxucafe.com/cafe/find_members/index.

When contacting bloggers, be sure you don't violate any of the rulesmajor bloggers live by. To read about these rules, seehttp://customscoop.com/resources/ whitepapers/Seven_Sins.pdf.

3. Ezines: Use one of the following online sites to locate appropriate ezines, ones that are again targeted at your key audiences.

Freezine Web — http://www.freezineweb.com

ZineBook — http://www.zinebook.com

Ezine Universe — http://www.ezine-universe.com

Zinos — http://www.zinos.com

Ezine Directory — http://www.ezine-dir.com

2. Send out emails or make phone calls to all your potential partners.

Ask them to join your bestseller campaign.

Why would they want to participate in such a campaign? Easy. They will get promotional exposure to everyone who receives the sales promotion since their bonus offering will be featured in the sales copy. In addition, they will get to add each buyer’s name to their list when those buyers come to their website to download their bonus.

To get enough partners involved, you will have to follow-up a number of times. Once they commit to sending out your campaign, to be sure they mail to their list, you will need to send reminders probably several times leading up to your email drop date.

3. Compile great bonuses.

You must get a list of 20 to 30 bonuses to be included in your promotion. Help your partners identify the bonus each can offer that will be most attractive to the lists you will be mailing to. Remember: The bonuses often determine whether or not someone acts right away to buy your book. They might buy your book anyway, but to get them to act right away, you must offer must-have bonuses.

Here are a few items your partners could offer: reports created from book excerpts in DOC or PDF format, an MP3 audio interview, a recorded speech MP3 download, a discount coupon for consulting, a PDF report created by consolidating several articles, an ebook in any format, or a teleseminar delivered in MP3 format.

Don’t include hard copy bonuses. All bonuses should be delivered via online downloads (cheaper and a lot easier to fulfill, plus then each participant can capture the email addresses of the buyers to add to their ezine lists).

4. Write the sales letter.

Once you’ve compiled the list of bonuses, you need to write a compelling sale letter, making an offer that knocks the socks off your readers. If you’re not good at writing sales copy, research some of the others sales letters previously used in bestseller campaigns. Copy their structure and language, but adapt it to your book’s benefits (and reasons to buy) and the bonuses included in your offer.

You can find examples of the sales letter (both the email to be sent and the website sales letter) in the Appendix.

Some people try to carry out a bestseller campaign with few or no partners. They’ll write something like the following:

Our new release XYZ Book is starting to get great reviews. We are going to tryto get high on the charts at Amazon.com. In order to do this, we are requestingthat if you plan to purchase this DVD for a daughter, son or friend, please do so on April 15th at Amazon.com.

Now, try to guess how well such a campaign performs. That’s the campaign. Maybe it sells another 10 or 20 or even 100 books (all depending on how many people receive the note), but it will not create an Amazon.com bestseller. It can’t. Not enough people will be exposed to the plea. There’s no incentive to act even if you get the plea, other than to help out a friend (if the sender is a friend).

The above note is taken from an email I received from someone I barely knew. No incentive, unless I had someone I wanted to buy a gift for this week. That’s a poor paltry luck of the draw chance. Nada.

In addition, the note was sent within an email that included three other sales messages. Don’t ever send a bestseller campaign email that includes more than one action point: Buy this book on this date (or during this week) and get all these great bonuses for helping us out.

5. Send the sales letter to your partners.

Let them know which day to drop the mailing. They should send out the email sales letter during the week of your promotion. Remember: Anyone offering a bonus should also mail the promotional sales letter to their customer list, or include a notice in their ezine, or post a notice on their website, and/or include a post in their blog.

6. Put the main sales letter on your website.

The email sales letter is short and sweet. It spurs people to go visit your website where you will have put up a much longer sales letter featuring all the bonuses, bonus contributors, etc.

7. Drop the letter.

The letter should be sent out the week of the promotion. You need to have the letter go out to at least one million people to have any impact on sales. Better yet, it should go out to two to three million. Your goal is to sell at least several thousand, hopefully 10,000 books via Amazon.com during one specific week. In general, .05% of those on a cold email list will become buyers. 3% is in the high range of sales for a really strong list.

8. Send buyers to Amazon.com.

Be sure that your letter sends people to the right page on Amazon.com (provide them with the specific link)—and that they buy during the specific day or hours for your campaign. That’s the only way your book stands a chance of breaking out from the huddled book masses.

9. Tell them how to get their bonuses.

In the sales letter, be sure to tell them to email or fax you their receipt from Amazon.com. Once you receive their receipt, send them a return email with a link to the page where they can get the download links for all the bonuses included in your campaign. Note: Only 50 to 75% of buyers will actually go to get the bonuses. They won’t actually download all bonuses. They generally are selective.

10. Send a thank-you note to your partners.

And provide them with the details on the success of the program: How many people bought your book. What rank did your book achieve. Samples of any thank-you emails you receive from buyers. This will encourage your partners to work with you on future promotions, on-going campaigns, and other partnership activities. The true goal of any Amazon.com promotional campaign is the relationships you create.

11. Now do something more.

Any bestseller campaign only works if it is part of an integrated marketing plan. Doing a bestseller campaign is really worthless if you are not doing some other things to help keep your book high on the list. For most of the past 5 to 10 years, my 1001 Ways to Market Your Books has hovered between 2,000 and 10,000 in the Amazon bestseller list.

12. Partner with other campaigns.

If you want to be successful in doing additional Amazon.com or New York Times bestseller campaigns, be sure to participate in other author’s campaigns as well when you are asked. Remember that you are creating relationships that could last for years and profit you in many ways beyond the one-time campaign.

Conclusion

The above points cover the basic steps you need to carry out in doing an Amazon.com bestseller strategy. Don’t ignore any step in the process. Don’t fudge it. Don’t think you can run such a campaign without any partners. Don’t settle for poor partners. Go for the best partners, with the largest email lists, most visited websites, most active blogs. Again, use this campaign as the first step in creating a relationship that you can build on.

Biggest note: Don’t roll out such a campaign without at least 1,000,000 people receiving the promotion. Better yet, mail to 2,000,000 or more. Do the math. Make sure that you gather together enough partners to do a credible campaign. Don’t cheat here. 95% of the unsuccessful Amazon bestseller campaigns failed because they were not mailed to enough people.

Amazon.com Strategy on Steroids

Besides building relationships with key emailers, bloggers, and website owners so you are mailing to more than a million people, you can also boost your campaign by doing the following:

Write articles that you syndicate online. Post any articles you write to online article directories. You can find a long list of such directories by going to http://www.bookmarket.com/onlinearticles.htm.
Make sure that the articles you write are posted at least a week or two before your campaign. Also, be sure that the articles include a link to your bestseller campaign sales page—and a reason to go to that link.

Write a great press release and release it online. Write a press release featuring a great story that ties into your book. Include a link in the press release to your website (which, in turn, can include a prominent link to your bestseller campaign sales page.
To distribute your press release online, use one or more of the free and/or paid online PR distribution services featured at http://www.bookmarket.com/onlinepr.htm.

Make use of social networking websites to create relationships to expand your bestseller campaign. Besides blogging websites, there are also knowledge-sharing websites such as Squidoo and Helium as well as photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and Photobucket, video-sharing websites such as YouTube and Metacafe, and social networking websites such as Bebo, Coghead, Digg, Linked to, Shelfari, Xanga, etc.

How to Sell More of Your Books
on Amazon.com

Besides developing an Amazon Bestseller Campaign to sell your books, Amazon continues to offer many new ways for its users to comment on books and other products for sale on the site. Below are a few of the sections appearing on book pages that you can use to sell more of your books — and set up an Amazon.com book shop on your web site to make even more income!

Write a So You’d Like to Guide

You can write a guide on how to do anything, whether you’re an expert on that subject or not. Obviously it makes most sense to write guides on your expertise. The guides are currently limited to a 100-word minimum and a 1,500 word maximum. For example, I wrote a guide, Self-Publish and Create a Bestseller, which is now featured on the book page of every book I listed in the guide. So now my name is in front of anyone buying one of the major books on self-publishing. People read these guides and are also encourage to rate them. Chris Epting wrote a guide, Plan a Road Trip, that featured only his books. Thus far, it’s been read 230 times.

Create a List for Listmania

Amazon allows users to create all sorts of book lists on whatever hits their fancy. Any list you create will be featured on the pages of the books you list. It’s a great way to tie into related books and get your name and book noticed by people already looking to buy competitive titles.

Use Tags to Help People Discover Your Books

Amazon now allows readers to tag any book with key words. Be sure to tag your book for key words that you think people would use to find your book on Amazon when they don’t know the title or when they’re simply searching for books in a specific subject area. Here are the tags I’ve added so far to my book: marketing online, book marketing, books, self-publishing, writing books, book author, authors, book publicity, publicity, bookselling, promoting books, self-promotion, book promotion, promoting online, and Internet marketing.

Book Reviews

Write reviews of other related titles and include your book title as part of your signature on the review. This is one way to piggyback on the popularity of related titles. If you have time, write a review for every book related to your book. But only write reviews for books that you have actually read and enjoyed. Don’t be critical, glib, or superficial. Dan Poynter, author of The Self-Publishing Manual, has written 198 book reviews on Amazon.com as of April 2006. 1,739 people have said that his reviews were helpful to them.

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