#176: Why You Need to Know Your Numbers

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Is your marketing working? How will you know? Well, one way you'll know is by understanding your numbers. That's what we're going to talk about in this training. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm an author, coach and owner of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. And in this training, we're going to be talking about something that I recently covered with my Author Audience Academy members. So let me read you a post I recently got from one of my members inside our private Facebook group. One of our members posted this question. Shelley, I can see a lot of people are looking at my books on my book launch pages, but they're not buying. I know this says something, but I'm just not sure what. Therefore, I don't even know what needs to be improved on. So this was a very big question and some of my members jumped in with, you know, different things to share with her, which was great. I love how active and supportive our group is. However, when I replied to her question, this is what I asked her said, have you went through the training on traffic offer and conversions? I have a previous podcast that covers this, but basically traffic is how many people are coming to your site, your offer is what are you offering them? And then conversions are how many people are converting to buying from your page. So the problem could either be in your traffic, how much traffic you're getting in your offer, what kind of book that you are offering, your copywriting on your page, your book description, you know, all of those things go into it, your book cover, or it could be conversions like and. And that can deal with a lot of different things. And my second question to her was, how much traffic are are you getting to the page? What are your numbers? Do you know your numbers? And so we had to really dig in and let me find the numbers and share with you what we learned. She says, I can see that people are looking at the page are actually not that many. So she started off saying, there's so many people coming to my page and they're not buying. What's wrong?

Sometimes you need to really look at your numbers and say, is there really a lot of people? When she really looked at her numbers and she shared them with me, she admitted there was only three to four people coming to her page every day. And she was getting about one to two book sales per month. And so I went into some more numbers to kind of tell her what really she should expect from for industry standards. So typically a 3% conversion rate is pretty good for any kind of sales page, which would include a book page. And so 3% of that's of all your traffic. So I basically told her if she's getting four visits to her page per day, which that's a high number. She said three or four, that would be about 120 visits per month. And a 3% conversion rate or 120 multiplied by 0.03 is 3.6 sales per month. So she's getting about one to two sales per month. It's not that far off from what she should expect with that kind of traffic. So what we were able to drill down into is that it wasn't necessarily a problem with her book launch page or her book or her book cover and all of those things. You could go into a frenzy like, oh, I need to change this, I need to do this, I need to do this. I think really it boiled down to having a traffic problem. So she just simply needs more people to come to that page, more eyeballs to that page. And what I recommended that she do is to focus on one main marketing strategy and implement the 30 day marketing plan that's available inside authoraudienceacademy.com so if you're already a member, that training is inside the platform module and it will help you to set up a 30 day book marketing plan and then you can implement that plan over the next month, track your results, see what's working, see how it's going, and then rinse and repeat. So you have to know your numbers. I like to say test track and then tweak. But if you're always tweaking without tracking, without knowing your numbers, it's just going to be like the blind leading the blind and it could get very, very frustrating. So first of all, do you know your numbers? Do you know now on an Amazon sales page, we really don't have a great way to track how many visitors we're getting to that page. We. But if you have your own standalone book page, which you should, every author should have some sort of sales page. You can track that, you can track it through Google Analytics, you can track it through many different ways. I personally use Google Analytics and it's fairly simple to set up. And then you can see what are your numbers and then you'll know like okay, these are my numbers and what are your sales and how you know some of the sales can be coming from different places. I get that. But there's ways to track these things. If you have questions about tracking and want to go into more detail, post a question inside our private Facebook group for Author Audience Academy. If you're a member and if you're not a member, we would love for you to join us. In case you haven't seen, we recently added in a monthly option and you can get started for as little as $39 a month and and join our community of Christian authors. Get instant access to all my training as well as access to our private Facebook group where we're discussing things like this all the time. Again, my name is Shelli Hitz. I'm an author coach and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. I will see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Author Audience. I would like to invite you to attend one of my free trainings on all about how to sell more books without being pushy or self promotional. It's called Amplify youy Message. Plus I will give you two free gifts just for attending. No credit card required. First you'll get my best selling book 9 Strategies to Build and Grow youw Author Platform and you'll also get my ebook titled List Vend 5 powerful emails you can use immediately to grow your business. These are basically fill in the blank style templates and they are yours at no charge when you join us for the training. You can sign up for my free training by going to shellyhits.com.

Amplify this training and the two bonus ebooks are free and I would love to help you sell more books.