Get your book on top of the directory from this Amazon Ads expert

Hello and welcome today to the Unnoticed Show, our sort of our pre-Christmas special with Alex Strathdee, who's joining us from San Diego, sunny San Diego in California. Thanks for joining us, Alex.

Jim, it's a pleasure.

Now, Alex, you have got on your sort of bio that you're a surfer, but also you run a business called Amazon Ads, so Advanced Amazon Ads, and you help entrepreneurs with their books. Can you help us to understand What do you do to help entrepreneurs get noticed?

Sure. If you have ever seen on Amazon when you're searching for your mother's Christmas gift, which I'm not gonna lie, still haven't done, probably have to figure out something last second, but you've probably seen while searching on Amazon something with a little bit of a sponsored tag. And what this is, is, you know, a product or a book that, you know, down beneath it just has this little sponsored. And on Amazon, it's such a different ad platform than, let's say, Facebook or even Google, because people are actually on there with their wallets out. People are on Amazon to buy things to begin with. And so you, by placing ads on that platform, oftentimes the conversion rates are much higher. You're going to get a lot more engagement with your ads. And so we help authors really get noticed on the largest— in the largest bookstore in the world, which is Amazon.

And Alex, you talk about Amazon in general, but There's also the category of books alone. How does it work? Is it different for the main sponsored product to the sponsored book area? And if so, how, and how do authors then leverage that?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are, uh, not, I think there are a lot of similarities between the two, but products have a little, their focus there is a lot more rich content as opposed to books is really about what Amazon really cares about is relevance to the consumer. So there's just 2 sort of priority goals when it comes to the ads for each of those different types of selling, selling on Amazon. So I would say that's the biggest difference, but there is a lot of overlap in terms of, you know, different types of targeting and then overall, you know, maintenance of what you are targeting.

So can you just take us through then? Because as you know, I recently published a book, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, and everyone I talk with really says that the launching of the book is really just the beginning and not The end at all, right? And should people be marketing in advance of the book going onto Amazon, for example? Can you talk us through the timeline first?

We're such a click-ready society where I personally don't recommend authors run their campaigns until the day that they actually launch their book. And that is because, you know, you, you, if you have extra budget, you know, feel free to go through, go, go for it and run those beforehand. But People want their stuff now, and oftentimes when they go onto Amazon, if you are running those ads, you might be building awareness up until your launch, but people aren't going to be buying your book out of those ads per se. So it's a lot harder to track the exact ROI. Yes, you might be able to build some more long-tail marketing with it, but I usually recommend authors get their ads up and running on the day of their launch.

Okay, so that's good advice. So you do marketing of the social media kind in advance, But the sponsored ads for the books just there and then. It seems like such a huge task. Could you just take us through, Alex, what would be the steps to helping an author launch their campaign?

Sure. And one of the best ways to figure out what you should be targeting is just to look at what Amazon is saying other people are buying related to your book. If you look on your product page and you scroll down to the bottom of your product page, you'll oftentimes see people who bought this also bought. Right? And you can also do this with your competitors. What are the books that are within your market? You can go look on their product pages and again scroll down to the bottom. It'll say people who bought this also bought, or these 3 items are often purchased together. Well, that's how you begin building your targeting list. And that's real data that Amazon's actually saying people who bought this also bought this.

And are you looking by, for example, by genre Or by keywords in the title or by tags? And does it vary by geography?

Both are very important, but via geography, yes, there are slight nuances depending on where you are. But really what you want to be doing is targeting customer search terms, which is keyword targeting on Amazon, and then product targeting, which is targeting ASINs, which are the code for the ebook, and then ISBNs, which are codes for paperbacks. And so you want to have different campaigns running for each of those. The customer search terms you can oftentimes get just by searching, you know, most basic form of this is just searching into the search bar on Amazon, you know, business books. Well, what else have people searched for, you know, including business books, and build up that list. Now, that specifically is going to be a very competitive niche, so I wouldn't recommend you just stick with business books as your, your ad campaigns. But essentially, you can really just backwards engineer Amazon to find your perfect targeting.

Well, you make that sound kind of, of course you can, that would be easy. For me, that sounds a little bit more complicated than, than, uh, than you, than obviously you find it. So what would we do? We'd find the names of the books that are in a similar category to us, and are we saying then that we'd buy advertising with keywords that are in those best-selling titles? From a practical point of view, Alex, what does that mean?

That's a great question, and you— what you're going to want to do is think about customer search terms as a different kind of targeting than targeting books that are related to yours, right? When I say customer search terms, you know, with your wonderful book, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, what you really want to be doing is finding customer search terms that people are searching for in Amazon, and they're probably looking for something similar to your book, right? And you want to generate a list of at least 200, 300 of these keywords. And so, you want to think about, okay, what are all the ways? Well, building a business, growing a business, small business, small business for people in their 20s. You just want to be thinking about all of the different possible ways that people could be searching for things on Amazon that are related to your book, and that's to build out your keyword list. And that's going to show up for the actual— when people type stuff into the search bar on Amazon, that's what you're targeting. You're targeting the searches people are performing. Now, that's different from the product targeting that you do on Amazon, and that's where you go out, you find the other books in your niche. You brought up a really great way to do that, which is to look at your category. Not all of those books are going to be relevant, so you do want to place a filter on that, a personal filter of saying this is relevant, this isn't relevant. And then you want to build a list of those, the codes, the SINs, the ISBNs, and then you're going to be targeting those. And those ads show up differently. Those don't show up on the customer search page, those show up on the actual product. So if you've ever noticed with your book on Amazon, there's probably down— if you scroll down to the bottom, there's a bunch of sponsored listings. That's where you're trying to show up for product targeting.

Right. Okay. So you did mention in there the ISBN and the EISN, which is for the eBooks. Can you just share with us how is that related to my marketing?

Yeah, that's great. And my apologies, I live in this stuff all day long, so I forget that the rest of the world doesn't care as much about Amazon ads as I do. So great questions to really bring us back out. And ASINs are important to target because that is basically Amazon's tag tag essentially for a product that you want to target. So that's why it's important to have those. And then if you also want to think about it, oftentimes people go to Amazon looking for a specific book, right? So they type in Rich Dad Poor Dad. And so what they do is they click on that book then on Amazon and you want to— it's a second chance to really bring in that reader. If you didn't— if you targeted the keyword Rich Dad Poor Dad on Amazon, which gets tens of thousands of searches a month and nope, they still clicked on Rich Dad Poor Dad, your next opportunity to get in front of that reader is on the product page itself. And you know the marketing rule of 7, obviously you need to show up in front of your audience multiple times before you can actually get them to buy. It's basically just another place for you to show up along the way and ASINs and ISBNs is just your way to actually tell Amazon this is what I want to target. Does that clear things up a little bit?

A little bit. So I look for ISBNs, ISBNs and any other kind of SDNs that might be in a comparable category. Because within those numbers there are some clues, aren't there, to what kind of book it is? Is that the idea?

So on each product page, if you scroll down to the bottom, you're going to be able to— Amazon provides you with the ASIN or the ISBN number of that book. And so that is what you want to be pulling. And then you just tell Amazon, this is what I want to be targeting. That number in and of itself doesn't tell you much. It's just saying, it's just saying to Amazon, I want to target this. So that's why it's an important thing to have data on. And the ones, you know, you can target ones that aren't your category. There's a spiritual book that works really— that we work on that works really well targeting alien books, and that's not in the same category. So sometimes, you know, you have to think about, well, what is my reader also reading, right? It's not a matter of figuring out who your avatar is and thinking about what other books might they be reading.

That does make sense. And if you think of it that way, then you probably reduce the cost too, don't you? Because if you Are targeting, say, an entrepreneur book, but if you assume that person's also interested in fitness, for example, you might be getting them when they're looking at fitness books, but also looking for travel for when they've got holiday reading to come.

That's a really great point. And luckily Amazon provides us with data, you know, back to us in the form of your click-through rate, right? And if you have a click-through rate that's above 0.36, then you know that it's something that's relevant. And if it's below that, then it's clearly something that's not relevant. So it's okay to test these things. Obviously long-term, you really want to focus on relevance, but a lot of people make the mistake of going after category ads, which is where you just target a whole category and auto campaigns. And if you have no sales history, Amazon is just going to take your money because they don't know what your book is relevant to. You really have to build that yourself with the right targeting out of the gates. Wow.

Okay, so we've got the beginnings of understanding what content we're going to be marketing to, the keywords and the, and the, the codes and the categories. What is the tool, Alex, that someone like me that's got a book would need to use? Are there sort of outside of Amazon tools that we use to prepare this content, or is it all within Amazon like Google AdWords?

90% of the work is going to take place in— well, I've— okay, I guess taking a step back, 90% of the work's probably going to take place in Excel spreadsheets. But beyond that, you know, a lot of the work takes place in something called Advanced or Amazon Ads Or what is it? advertising.amazon.com. And so that is Amazon's self-service portal for actually running these campaigns. Any self-published author can run these themselves. We work with some publishers like New World Library, Morgan James Publishing. We work with some of their authors, and what they're able to do is set up kind of ads accounts that are separate to themselves for the author to run for their own book. Because oftentimes, if you are traditionally published or you know, pseudo-published or pseudo-hybrid published, then, you know, you won't have access to your own ads account and they will need to set one up for you. So don't think that just because you aren't a self-published author, you don't have access to this. But self-published authors can easily access this through their KDP account, which if you are a self-published author, you definitely know what that is. You just need to click on the marketing tab and you'll find the directions to get there.

Yeah, that's the kindledigital.com app, isn't it? And that's where you get your sales statistics And, and other things. Okay, so, so we've managed to figure out what we might be targeting. We've figured out we need to go into KDP and to advertising.amazon.com or .co.uk. I guess it's by wherever your store is. What about budget, Alex? Can you give us some ballpark? Because the margins on the books are not actually that great, are they?

No, and especially I think cost per click rose by about 60% over this past year. And so you really need to make sure, and this isn't to say we don't have, we have a lot of authors who make thousands of dollars from their books a month. Now, we no longer take authors who are after that because the cost of the ads is getting so high. What we care about is people who see the value in a reader. And so a lot of the authors that we work with will have coaching programs, they'll have courses, they'll have speaking opportunities, and what they're trying to do is build their business with their book. They're not necessarily trying to make money with their book on Amazon. Again, there's still, as there is in everything, there's the top 1% or top 20% make 80% of the royalties, right? There are a lot of authors who still make a full living on their books on Amazon. We just encourage authors to make sure that they have other opportunities for readers to go deeper with them, because if you're able to turn a reader into a $10,000 client, your ROI on those ads are going to be much better.

And Alex, you raised a really great point about the book being, you know, the biggest business card you could ever have. How can you make a book into a sales funnel then, from Amazon through to the web page or to whichever tool set you're using to get them through the funnel?

That's a great question, and I think it's going to depend on what your branding is, who you are as an individual. You know, some authors, their, you know, their readers are a bit more open to some more spammy stuff. You know, if you open up the front page of the book, you know, can have access to my— Pat Flynn did this with Will It Fly? The first page of the book was, access my complimentary course, or complimentary video course for this book, where I will literally walk you through, hand in hand, through this book myself. And what he's doing is collecting email addresses. But that's so much value, where someone kind of sits back and says, well, I'd love the author to walk me through this book. Every author is going to be different. Mike, who's a friend of mine, he wrote Profit First, He is not spammy. His audience is not interested in someone who's just going to sell, sell, sell. He has a much more subtle approach. In his books, he says, obviously, if you implement the Profit First system, I want to hear about it. I want to be your champion. Reach me at— and he gives his email address, right? It's going to depend on you, your reader. If your audience is going to be very averse to more direct marketing, then you definitely want to take a more subtle approach. But free courses, putting out your email addresses, extra resources in the book— those are all ways you can further drive traffic from the book.

That's really interesting. What about the other way around, taking people from non-Amazon to Amazon to buy the book? Because they've got to be within Amazon already, haven't they, to get to them. But what about if you're promoting on social media, for example, on LinkedIn or Facebook? Any advice, Alex, on how you get people To the Amazon to then get a deeper relationship with you.

Yeah. And that's, I mean, it's all about controlling the process. Amazon takes all those email addresses and they don't provide authors with who actually bought their books, right? And so, and it's no different from traditional publishing, right? If you sold your book in Barnes Noble 10 years ago, it's not like you got the email address of the person who's buying your book then either. It's not like Amazon is this, you know, this, they're intentionally this bad guy. They're, you know, they're just taking the place of the traditional bookstores, right? And so what you need to think about it as if you have a way to get traffic outside of Amazon and you have the means and the right publishing resources, you could print on demand yourself. There's lots of resources out there now. Print on demand yourself and send that traffic your book. You might get higher royalties. But if you're someone like me who doesn't have those kinds of resources, you probably want to publish through Amazon, have them handle all the It's kind of like a one-stop shop. And so that's where it really does come down to then, you know, most people do have Amazon here in the US. I know Australia, they're a bit behind the curve. Sales are slowly growing there. I'm not sure, quite sure how it is in the UK in terms of the adoption of the Amazon platform. Yeah. Are you guys sort of gravitating towards it or?

Yeah. Amazon is kind of the big platform, I think, here as well. And what about the use of the Amazon Author Central? Alex, are you a fan of building that out or does it really not make much difference?

It's all about, you know, one thing at a time, right? Like the first step I would focus on, like running ads is probably going to be more important than building out your author profile, right? You know, people are more interested in the book, they click on the book, they read the book, you know, they'll hear about you in the book. Some people put a lot of time into their author essentials. The same thing with the— there's a lot of rich content you can now put on your product page. Some people spend a lot of time on that. I haven't necessarily seen the data that indicates either that works really well or doesn't work really well, but if you have the time, feel free to put that on there. Definitely include links to your social media, your website, include those on your Author Central profile. But I don't know about you, Jim, I oftentimes put myself in the shoes of the consumer and I ask myself, have I ever clicked on an author profile on Amazon? And the answer is no. Right. So if I haven't done that now, again, I'm not representative of everyone else. Maybe other people do that, but I think it's going to be a smaller percentage. So I would, I would spend my time elsewhere before I spend my time polishing that up, I guess, per se. But Author Central is really useful for marketing. So, you know, you can look at your rank over time and things like that.

Yeah. I think I've updated mine because you can also include your RSS feeds. So that's a nice and easy way to just take it from your blog and your Medium and so on, and it auto-populates.

That's great.

One thing we didn't mention, Alex, budget. How much should someone be spending promoting, let's say, a book like mine, which is at $13.99 or $8.99 on Kindle?

Sure. Yeah, it's going to come down to, again, your goals with the book, right? If your goal is to drive traffic into the backend and, you know, that's going to be, you're going to be able to spend more, right? The authors who, you know, you're looking for like an exact number, so I'll give you an exact number, US dollars. $400 is usually what we recommend authors start out with. Now, if you are a bit of an independent author and you want to take a more gradual approach, you can get away with $200 a month, but it might take you a year to actually really build up your Amazon advertising. The clients who come to us want their books selling now, and so we need to be able to aggressively test things, and you are going to have to test things. And so that first month, we oftentimes recommend a $400 starting budget. And then over time, I mean, we have some authors who spend upwards of $3,000. Actually, we have one author who just upped to a $6,000 budget on Amazon per month because he's doing $10,000 in sales. And so it makes sense if you have the sales to support it or if you are accomplishing your goals. Oftentimes, a lot of the authors we work with just want to break even on their ads, and then basically it's all about just the backend items, the readers that want to go further with them. That's really where they get the value. Right.

That's really, really useful guidance there, Alex. And how about you? Final question. How are you getting your own business noticed?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's by honestly, obviously getting on podcasts is a wonderful tool, but also having your own podcast. And it's because you are able to, oftentimes I have a lot of people ask me, well, how can I start to get clients? And it's like, interview your clients, talk to your clients, Right? And so if you start a podcast with, you know, focused around, you know, your client, for example, I work with authors. And so I want to work with the best authors. And so I started a podcast interviewing the best authors out there. That's how I, you know, got connected with Mike Michalowicz from Profit First, Michael Watkins, who wrote The First 90 Days. We have a potential interview with the book that was number 10 on the Amazon charts this week. I won't say what it is because it hasn't closed yet. I don't want to put that out in the universe until it's really, really closed. But just interview your ideal client. And I have literally, I'm not even making this up, about 50% of the authors that I interview who aren't already our clients end up becoming a client. Because I don't talk about Amazon ads at all throughout the interview because that's not the point. I genuinely do love interviewing authors. You can't just make it spammy. You do have to genuinely enjoy what you do. And then, At the end of the episode, oftentimes they say, Alex, you know, great episode. Like, what is it you do? I'm like, oh, well, we do Amazon ads. And I leave it at that. And they're like, can I hire you? That is, that has word for word been the dialogue in the past. And I did absolutely no selling for it. It's how I got one of my current biggest clients. So I would say start a podcast, interview your ideal client if you're trying to get clients. And that's how you can get noticed by the exact person who's going to pay you for your service.

Alex Strathdee joining me from sunny San Diego. You've even got a surfboard. In the back. And as we're in sort of darkness here in the damp in England, I'm thinking you've got the best space in this wonderful sunny morning for you in San Diego. Thank you for joining me and sharing your wisdom.

Jim, it's been an absolute pleasure. You know, you've got to be one of the best hosts to listen to, and really it's just very genuine conversation. So thank you for the time that you put into your show.

Great. Well, thank you very much for the compliments, and thank you for sharing. And the show is great because smart people like you share really valuable insight with our listeners. So thank you so much. You've been listening to Alex Strathian. Of course, I'll put all of his details in the show notes as always. Thank you very much and have a happy Christmas and a happy New Year.

Happy holidays, everyone.