AMAZON ADS PART 3

            As many of you know, marketing sucks. Of all the things about writing that I love, marketing is the one that gets my stomach grinding. Having to go out and “beg” people to buy my book rubs me wrong, yet without marketing, nobody will know I even exist.

            Now, in the grand scheme of things, we’re going to continue to explore Amazon Ads.

            Besides having to deal with a sucky web site, there’s minimum daily budget, setting up a professional looking page, and it all gets down to keywords.

            We’re going to concentrate on negative keywords today.

NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

            When you get a lot of hits and no sale, one way to filter these money-buster keywords is with negative keywords.

            The idea of negative keywords is to exclude certain keywords or parts of them that are just costing you money.

            For instance a key phrase is “Romance With Mystery.”

            You get a ton of hits with that phrase, but not a single sale. However, either Romance or Mystery generate sales.

            In this case, you do a negative keyword for With.

            To me, while it may seem like I’m wasting money on a lot of keywords, generally, the ones with the most hits have the most sales. To use a negative keyword, despite the money saving implications, kind of defeats the idea of getting as many people to click on your stuff as possible. You never know when it might generate a sale. To me, the more exposure, the better.

            This may not be the best or most economic way to do things, but hey, I’m so far in the hole anyway!

SUMMARY

            As of the day I write this, I’ve spent $2715.50 on ads (spread over almost a year) and sold 59 books. While that seems like a lot of money down the toilet, hey…that’s 59 more books than I’ve sold anywhere else except the random sale at a book signing.

            Amazon Ads has the potential to be a great marketing tool for those of us that cannot get out all the time. It can work for anyone, especially if your product takes off. I’m still waiting on mine to take off, but 59 is still better than zero, at least until my breaking point.

            Happy writing!