Kindle Publishers!! Whats your marketing Strategy?

Posting in forums with the same niche as your book.
Since product ranking is determined by number of sales and not the traffic, SEO is not an option.

Hey buddy, obviously I have my own Kindle product but I'm not going to suggest my own product as I think it's good but it's not meant to be an A-Z course.

If you are really, really serious, and want an A-Z course that has tons of great feedback and is probably the best Kindle membership being sold on this forum, check out Kindling: the Better than BEST Kindle Training.

Do a search for that and the thread will pop up. I highly suggest checking it out.

Great question and comment. Here's the first myth I need to expose - Kindle Marketing is like every other "marketing" online.

What do I mean? It's start with the biggest problem 99.99% of sellers online are crushed by: they don't know THEIR IDEAL CUSTOMER....

In this case, it's your ideal reader! If I were to give a quick and dirty "kindle marketing game plan for 30 days success" it would look like this:

Step 1 - whip out a pen/pencil and write down a clear picture of your ideal reader. In this respect, it will put you light years of ahead if you start publishing in the same niche - or closely related niches.

As an example if you are publishing nonfiction (say how to book on personal finance) answer these questions:
how old is your reader?
is he/she mail or female?
where do they tend to live?
do they have children?
what other websites to they visit?
what are the problems, obstacles, goals, desires, etc they lay at bed at night thinking about?

If it's fiction, you need to ask the same question(s) - although slightly augmented.
What sort of heroes does my reader look up to?
What movies, tv shows, etc do they watch?
What kinds of plots do they enjoy?
What kind of endings do they love or hate (so much so that they will tell their friends about it, write reviews, etc)


Step 2 -now that you have a clear picture of who will be buying your books (hopefully, repeatedly) - you know of a better sense of - wait for it - where to find them!
Fact of the matter is there are 2 ways of getting more traffic to your kindle products: within Amazon and without. Now a lot of those WSO's are very samesy as you said because they are all focusing on how to do better with the Amazon search engine and whatnot. And while that is all good, *you* also have to do work to get people outside of the Amazon ecosystem to be aware of your product. In this respect, what you can do is:

set up a Google alert to get updates on the blogs, websites, etc frequented by your ideal readers. Once you do this you can start building up your brand on those websites

Step 3 - here's something other people don't talk about: there is no such thing as a free lunch! Learn to buy traffic. You can start out with something as simple as $25 bucks a month. Let me ask you this. If you had a friend who owned an offline shop and they wouldn't invest a measly $25/mo to pay for fliers - would you consider them serious? Heck no! Similarly, if you solely rely on "free" traffic to get more sales, you are just like that person.

Listen. The internet has changed. Right when Google went public, there were 80,000 websites indexed. Did you know that? Now there are about 200,000,000 (according to several studies). What this means is competition is greater than ever. You can't solely rely on the seo tricks that worked years ago when there were fewer websites online.

Now we all have to do things differently.

I could go on, but if you just do the steps listed above you'll be very happy with the results. I know, our Mastermind is filled with some of the most successful and motivated Kindle publishers on the WF or practically anywhere online (if I do say so myself)!

I would say if you are really serious, you should join a community of other Indie publishers on Kindle who can help you get reviews, leverage your brand and skip all the mistakes 99.999% of Kindle publishers make!

You can do it - best of luck....

Get John Locke's book. Forget the negative reviews. It's loaded with great stuff by a guy who's done it, made a million with Kindle.

There are lots of WSOs out there too. Most that I've seen are pretty unimpressive. For example, "...find authority sites with good information. Copy and paste their good information into your books and then rewrite it..." Ugh.

Locke says, write great books and build a following on Twitter, FB and on your personal blog or Website. Sort of parallels the core marketing strategy for IM...

I agree that Kindling is one of the very best courses out there about marketing on Kindle. I also found John Locke's book good.

As to marketing, I am enrolled in the Kindle Direct Publishing program and find that works fairly well for me. I am building a subscriber list so I can develop long-term relationships with those people who opt in for my free cookbook.

I have heard that goodreads.com is a good place to be but I haven't used it much yet, I've been too busy writing new books!

I will also be interested to hear what others have to say on this thread.

The advice from iSoftware is gold.

The first step to marketing anything is to know your customer.

For the majority of authors, writing is the easy part. To be successful you need to be spending at least the same amount of time promoting your book.

I have just (as in only a few hours ago) finished writing a guide for authors wanting easy and affordable ways to promote their Kindle and paperback books.

The Self Publishers Guide to Book Marketing
Step By Step Guide For Fiction and Non-Fiction Authors

When first starting out self-publishing, it can be very confusing and expensive to promote your book.

This guide provides you with step by step instructions, templates and examples so that you can quickly and easily promote your book and maximize your sales.

All methods are either completely free or very affordable.

Contents

Getting Started
1.1 Why Are You Publishing?
1.2 Who Will Read Your Book?
1.3 How Will You Sell Your Book?
1.4 Essential Author Details
1.5 Creating a Book Cover
1.6 Writing a Book Description
1.7 Choosing Your Genre
1.8 Choosing Your Keywords

Pre-Release Promotion
2.1 Writing Book Promo Text
2.2 Creating a Landing Page
2.3 Writing a Basic Press Release
2.4 Distributing a Press Release
2.5 Creating Social Media Buzz

Publishing Tips
3.1 Kindle and KDP Select
3.2 Publishing Tips
3.3 Author Central
3.4 Pricing Tips
3.5 Pros of eBook with Paperback

Promote Your Published Book
4.1 Goodreads
4.2 Shelfari
4.3 Book Giveaways
4.4 Updating the Landing Page
4.5 New Press Release
4.6 Contacting Book Reviewers
4.7 Approaching Book Bloggers
4.8 Creating a Book PDF Promo
4.9 Creating a Banner
4.10 Creating a Video Trailer
4.11 Donating Books

Revisions
5.1 Handling Reviews
5.2 Revising Your Book


The listing on Kindle will be available in about 10 hours from now, and the paperback will be available in about 2 days.

Just PM me if you are interested and send you a link once it goes live

-Jamie

Some great tips here! I would also emphasize publishing related books as a 'brand' and if relevant, as a series, so titles can help promote each other. Also building a subscriber list of fans and buyers who are eager to read your work.

Gracias. Excelentes comentarios.
David

No marketing strategy. Just continue to get regular sales from my kindle book. Since Kindle doesn't give you access to the customer, it's in my best interest to promote my book via my own website, get customers, and then sell to them over and over again for prices much higher than the Kindle price.

Sounds confusing?

Thanks for the great info! you guys are the dogs dangly's!!!! love ya!

*Social Media- almost everyone have facebook, twitter and more. Set up a fan page for your service or business.
*Offer freebies- one of the most powerful strategy in IM. Think of something that you can offer for free to get more sales.
*Outsource- this will give you more time to do the important things you need to finish.

These are some of marketing strategies that i use and it worked perfectly.

First you need to find out what is selling. Right now what is flying of the shelfs is Writing Women’s Erotica... then start on your marketing once you have written up a book or re-branded one.

On the Amazon platform, focus on researching your 7 keyword tags allowed. Look up Amazon buyer keywords under your specific subject/topic to see how much competition each one has - under 1,000 titles is good. Pick the keywords that are closest to your subject matter. You can also find popular book titles to piggyback off of by using their book title as one of your 7 keywords.

Consider enrolling in KDP Select and running a 1 or 2 day free promotion for your new book. If you have a series, promo the first in the bunch and price it at $.99, subsequent titles can be higher. I'm going to do $.99 for the 1st book and $2.99 for other books in the series.

For me, I'm not bothering with social media, blogging, etc. Instead, I'm taking the advice of certain authors in the know and putting all my energies into creating QUALITY fiction stories in a series format. If you're doing non-fiction, you can still do a series. This means you can promote each installment in each book (same as John Locke, Amanda Hocking, et al). If a reader likes one book in the series, they will probably want more. One off books are a harder sell.

Write more books is the advice I've seen from some successful KDP authors. With limited time and resources, you have to decide whether or not to spend that time writing or promoting. I choose to build my list of titles/product.

When I read book reviews on Amazon for various series, often I see readers salivating for the next book. Big Hint - Write more and build up a fan base. Your readers will spread the word on social media, word of mouth, etc.

I do think you should have a main author website with the author name as the URL. You can use your Author Central bio to promote your website. Readers can hop over and get more background info on you, read testimonials, blog posts, articles, whatever else you wish to put on there. But your hottest buyers are already on Amazon searching for new cool stuff to read.

I recently enjoyed the book Making A Killing On Kindle by Michael Alvear - a KDP book. After following one of his tips, I've seen an uptick in sales for a couple of titles.

I've pretty much shifted from "aspiring internet marketer" to "aspiring fantasy novelist" at this point. Most of the advice I'm reading is to write more books, get professional looking covers, write a compelling blurb, and go where the readers are.