Unprecedented success with Amazon Ads for my pre-order book!

“Unparalleled prosperity rains down on author through ingenious use of keywords, cost per click bids, and probably a little luck.”

You know when a rocket is just leaving the planet? The hardest part, the stage that consumes the most energy, is that first boost from the (0) ground to (1) off the ground.

Once it’s in the air, it has momentum, less resistance, and with each passing second, the gravitational pull is weaker.

unprecedented: without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled;

Let’s analyze the numbers.

I just went from … are you sitting down? I just went from:

Zero Pre-Order Sales

to:

One Pre-Order Sale

[Crowd goes wild! Fireworks shoot off from hidden launchers all around the stadium! Grown men are seen weeping in the front row!]

Remember the rocket? I’m going with the rocket story for how this is going to end up. The first one is the most painful, takes the most fuel, and we’ll remember it forever. I could sob.

Disclaimer: if you have experience with Amazon Ads and are looking for the Master Course to Achieve Amazon Immortality, this is not it.

Disclaimer #2: I was about to write that I have no idea what I’m doing, but that’s not true. If you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing, then, relatively, I’m a genius. I’m practically, in your eyes anyway, a card-carrying member of the Masters of Time, Space, and Dimension.

The Big Reveal — Author Tells All in Shocking Success Story

The Ad

Here’s the ad to gawk at.

Brilliant copywriting combined with a friendly tone rocketed this ad to a pre-order sale.

This either resulted from:

1. Results of the corporate marketing team’s four-week-long efforts at capturing the essence of the message and encapsulating it into a 26-word mini-masterpiece, or:
2. The author cranking it out in the time it took the water to boil for tea. Or less time if you count standing up and coming back.

The Keywords and Cost Per Click Bids

Let’s have a look at the custom keywords ingeniously excavated from months of focus groups.

I think the technical term is “winging it.”

Because I don’t really understand the whole math behind the Cost Per Click bids, I mean, after careful analysis of the financial implications behind the science of clicking and bidding, I came up with … not changing what Amazon gave me.

My keen analytical skills are like lasers. Follow the beam of light as it points to the only keyword that even got actual clicks: habit.

Yep, my book is about habits. But why is “habits” the only keyword that got clicks and not the others? I’m afraid I can’t reveal that science without first consulting with my crack marketing team. No, not my marketing team on crack, the crackerjack marketing team. No, not the sugary popcorn treat. Oh, forget it.

The point is to see what worked and expand on it.

I will expand and extract from the “habit” term and see how those do. I’ll post back with news.

The Results

What you see below might be offensive to those who have not yet had quite the success that is portrayed here. Avert your eyes and peek just through your fingers to sense the magic.

What if we added a bunch of zeroes before the decimal point?

When your speedometer is at zero, you’re not sure if you’re not really moving or if it’s just broken. Sure, you could look at the window and all that sort of scientific testing, but seriously now: if it’s at zero, you just don’t know if anything is working at all.

But One!? One is such a beautiful number.

One is, mathematics aside for a moment, closer to two than it is to zero. I could draw a graph if that would help, but I think you get the idea. Getting from zero to one is harder than getting from one to two. We’ll attack quantum physics in another lesson, but for now, make your goal getting to just one.

Now What?

Get to two.

What worked at sale number one? What didn’t? Where can we improve?

Now that we have some data to work with, we can, well, uh, work with it.

That’s all from the rocket ship today. Tune in next week when we discuss how coasting downstream is easier than paddling upstream.