Amazon promoted my book for free over the past week as I used Amazon marketing ad budgets for my book promotion – without spending anything from my pocket and promoting my book at the same time.
In this article, I will share the exact steps I followed and the exact Amazon marketing growth hack to promote my book on their paid budgets.
Understand the Amazon Marketing growth hack
This hack can be considered an ‘Other People’s Budgets’ (OPB) growth hack where you get another business to spend their ad campaign budgets on your product. Think of it as a twist on the OPN hack.
This is not common but if you crack it, it’s the best marketing campaign you can ever run. The ROI yield return ratio is unimaginable as you’re essentially running ads without paying for them.
And it’s always more fun to get your product promoted on someone else’s ad budget, isn’t it?
Step 1: Using KDP Select to publish the book
The first step is to publish the book using Kindle Publishing.
There is a KDP select program that you can enroll in as long as you keep the book exclusive to Amazon.
Don’t upload your book on Google or elsewhere and opt-in for this program.
Step 2: Use my 3-phase price shift for your pricing strategy
How this pricing strategy works:
(In 3 different phases of time)
- PHASE #1. Upload at a very low price initially (or just keep it free)
- PHASE #2. Change to 2x the price if x is the price you really want to sell your book at. So double what you want to price it at for future sales.
- PHASE #3. After the first set of reviews (get 5-star reviews from your network, don’t be shy) and after a one-month time period, reduce the price to the actual price point you really want to sell the book at (which is x).
This creates the ‘PRICE DROP’ label that you saw on the Amazon sponsored post.
Also, you are more likely to show up on the sponsored ad widget by Amazon marketing than other books in the same category or ad keyword group.
Step 3: Network Outreach for book reviews
I have many detailed 5-star reviews on my book on Amazon. This is mostly because it’s an absolutely amazing book with really high-value and actionable growth hacks.
But this is also because I did outreach to my network for reviews in exchange for a free book!
My book is sold through Kindle as well as directly in the Paperback version. I sent emails to all those who got the paperback version as well.
You can also see the reviews on the Amazon listing of the book here.
Step 4: Scale this Amazon Marketing Growth Hack
I had chosen Amazon.in or Amazon India for this experiment as a lot of my audience is Indian entrepreneurs and marketers.
However, the next step could be to repeat the campaign for Amazon.com. You can do the same in multiple Amazon listings as long as you have a sizable target audience in each of the countries you’re targeting.
If you haven’t got my book yet, get it here and learn the 101 growth marketing hacks.
How to use this hack for other marketing channels?
There are a number of channels and networks that run ads on behalf of their marketplace content creations.
Another good example is Udemy.
If you’ve ever created a course on Udemy that’s got students, you can see some % of your students come in from Udemy’s Ad budgets.
For example, here are some ads Udemy is running on their Facebook page:
These are all other people’s courses. And they could be yours.
Look for similar channels, find the kind of content they promote and then use their marketing budgets to promote your content.
