How To Make Free Money With Amazon Ads For Kindle Books

Last Updated on August 20, 2020 by Jordan Alexo

Hey you! Have you been in the Kindle Publishing business for some time now and have realized that the bucks are not flowing in as you want them too? Did you recently start thinking about trying out advertisements for your books? Are you confused about what kind of ads to use for your books? Do you even know the right way to go so you don’t end up with failed Amazon ads?

Jordan knows how crazy all of these scenarios can be! Yeah, I know (sad face). But with what we are going to be talking about here, all of that is going to change. I would be taking you through everything you need to know about Amazon advertisement and book advertisement in general. This would include how you should go about it and some juicy little secrets that would bring in the pool of dollars as you’ve always wanted.

Oh, today is going to be a good day. I can feel it in my bones already. So, let’s get started, shall we?

Hold on! Before we go into all the chunk of creating your first Amazon Advertisement, let’s deal with some basics. We should familiarize ourselves with them, so we don’t get lost in technical terms/words.

Watch My Video Here

Book Advertisement

This is, in simple words, a marketing technique where you pay or don’t pay for a platform to promote your books to optimize sales. Examples are Google ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, which you pay for and advertisement on a social media platform that is free of charge. There are others as well.

Now let’s see the meaning of AMAZON ADVERTISEMENT; This is a platform where you get to promote your books on Amazon. What makes this different from other books is the fact that it appears in the sponsor section of the search engine results page (SERP). With an avenue as such, the visibility of your book is increased because the books promoted with Amazon advertisement are usually on the first results of the front page.

When you use Amazon advertisement, and your book is featured on the first results of the front page, customers get to see it faster. That book also gets more clicks because trust me, most people get lazy when it comes to scrolling and scrolling just trying to choose a book to buy. Customers mostly make their pick from books on the front page, which makes Amazon advertisement good for you and your book.

One thing about books in the sponsor section that you need to know is, the book that has better sales would have a better ranking. Of course, Amazon’s main objective is to make more money. Better sales increase their chances. There is also the probability of better ranking; hence the visibility of a book has higher bidding.

Do Amazon Ads Work For Books?

Everyone likes money, and you are not excluded! So it’s simple. As a publisher, Amazon advertisement is your best shot at making more money. Hence, maximizing profitability for your publishing business.

You are probably wondering, “Why not Facebook ads, Google ads, and the likes?”

I won’t deceive you; you don’t want to stress yourself with those. I mean, why do you want to break a sweat trying to get a buyer there (which hardly comes through) when you have something like Amazon advertisement that is a lot easier.  In Amazon, you have a warmer audience because your market is directly targeted at those who come there to buy books.

How To Use Amazon Advertisement

STEP 1 – TOOLS

To start with, you would need some tools to get this small job done. They are:

1. WPS Office Spreadsheet: if you already have Microsoft Office spreadsheet, that’s fine. If not, I would recommend the WPS Office instead because you get the same functional spreadsheet at no cost. It’s free!
2. Publisher Rocket: with this application, setting up your ads would be easy breezy. The sweet thing about this software is you pay just once to get it: no monthly fees. Click here to download Publisher Rocket. Another good thing is, if you get it from me, I will send a special bonus to your mail. You need to send a message to Jordan@jordanalexo.com
3. Finally, it would be best if you had a book to promote.

Quick one

Nowadays, I only promote my paperbacks. In the past, I used Amazon ads for my e-books, too, but I stopped. The question is, ‘Why?’ Well, it’s been tough for me to make a profit with e-books because the biddings, over the past year or two, have increased. The problem is e-books are cheap, usually priced at $2.99. I’m not saying you should not try it. It’s even better you do, so you know what works for you.

STEP 2 – RUN AN AD CAMPAIGN

Go to the book you want to promote on the Kindle store and look for ‘Promote and Advertise’ on the options menu. It takes you to a page with ‘Run an Ad Campaign’ as the title.

STEP 3 – CREATE AN AD CAMPAIGN

To do this, you have to choose a market place first. As you will see, there are various market options to pick from. I usually go with Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, which are for the U.S. and U.K. respectively. I have also heard that the Canadian market (Amazon.ca) is highly profitable too so you could also try that one. Then you click on ‘Create an Ad Campaign’.

STEP 4- CHOOSE A CAMPAIGN TYPE

You have two options; sponsored products and lockscreen ads.

• Sponsored Products: this works well for non-fiction books and fiction books. It is keyword-based and targeted. Your book shows upas sponsored in search results [image]
• Lockscreen Ads: this is also ok for fiction books but not advisable for non-fiction. The ads only show when shoppers’ unlocktheir Kindle E-readers and based on their interest.

I have not had much success with the lockscreen ads and that is why I would advise that you stick to the sponsored products type.  It has been proven to be more profitable.

STEP 5 – CREATE CAMPAIGN

At this stage, you have a number of options to set on this page, such as:

• Campaign name: input a name for your campaign. I like to number my campaigns because I might want to run more than one campaign for a particular book. Then I add the date too. With numbers and dates, it’s easier to identify and track each campaign. For example, Cryptocurrency – C1 – 07/07/20 – Paperback would be my campaign name.I only use either paperback or e-book if I am promoting both options for the same book, otherwise, you may exclude it.  You could try out this method.
• Start and end: these bars are for dates you want your campaign to start and end. It’s better if you don’t give a specific end date. This would allow for better optimization of your campaign.
• Daily budget: I normally input $5for my daily budgeting and I would suggest you do the same. You can go lower, but you may run out of budget quickly and not get enough data. It’s not reasonable for you to set a higher bid because first you want to test the waters without spending too much money.
• Targeting: you have the Automatic Targeting and Manual Targeting options here. Automatic targeting is not the best because your keyword choices are limited to what Amazon picks for you. You want to use your own keywords and be as diverse as possible so choose manual targeting.
• Campaign Bidding Strategy: there are three different strategy options. For the first two, your manual bids are altered depending on sales likelihood as predicted by Amazon. That is why they are called dynamic. The last option is a fixed-price bid and it is whatever you set that they work with. You might be tempted to think that any of the first two options would be better to make profits but that’s not true. I have tried all three and I’d recommend the fixed-price bid.
• Ad Format: you can choose if you want to add a description to your ads or not. I have created campaigns with and without descriptions before. It doesn’t make much difference to me so whichever way you want it is ok.
• Product: add the product (book) you want to promote.
• Targeting: this simply means what group of audience you’d like to see your book. Keyword targeting(if you want to choose keywords so your book appears in searches) or product targeting (choose specific products, categories, brands or product features you want your ads to target). Our focus is on keyword targeting so we go with that.
• Custom text: this is the description that customers would see beside your book. So make sure it’s a catchy line.

In the Keyword Targeting section (second to the last on our list), you have to make several choices too.

1. Click on ‘Enter list’.
2. Choose a bid: you want to go with the custom bid because you have the liberty to set the bid to whatever you like for each keyword. The chances of losing a lot of money with the suggested bid are high as you bid for each keyword is based on Amazon’s recommendation. I advise bidding 0.30 to 0.35 for the U.S. market and 0.25 to 0.30 for the U.K. market.
3. Match type: you have the Broad, Phrase, and Exact boxes to check whichever you want. Go for just broad so that your keyword list can accommodate a wide range of words.
4. Now, copy and paste your keyword list.

For your Keyword List,

It’s crucial that you properly maximize the number of keywords allowed for each campaign, which is 1000. Don’t be like, “OMG! Where do I get a thousand of keywords from?” Just relax, I would show you.

So the first thing is, go to your spreadsheet and enter your main keywords e.g., cryptocurrency, blockchain, bitcoin, etc. would be suitable for my book since it’s related to cryptocurrency. Your seed keywords should be about ten keywords. A little less is cool too.

You could get seed keyword ideas from your kindle store also by searching out the broad keyword, and mine is ‘cryptocurrency.’ Also include the name of the bestselling author with the name of his/her book. Your book would show in the results this way when people search for that book.

This is where Publisher Rocket, in all of its glory, steps in. Instead of struggling to get 1000 keywords, you can use the AMS Keyword Feature of the Publisher Rocket to get hundreds of keywords at a time.

Input one of your main keywords in the search bar and click. Your screen is populated with different keywords you could use for your campaign. The AMS Keyword Search has the e-book and book (paperback) options so you could repeat a keyword search twice using these two options. You get more keyword ideas. Then you repeat this process for every of your seed keywords.

 

The next thing is you want to export those keywords to a file so that you can easily copy them to a spreadsheet. When exporting different search results, be sure to change the file names so that the new one doesn’t override the previous. You could just use a dash (-) or something simple.

 

 

Now, open all the files from Publisher Rocket in WPS  Office. Afterward, copy and paste those items to your main spreadsheet.

 

In your spreadsheet:

• Separate the items using the ‘Text to Column’ feature on the spreadsheet.
• Choose Delimited and then pick (a) Tab (b) Others, where you input the quotation mark sign [“]. Then all of the items are separated. You can delete the items and columns you don’t need leaving you with your keywords.
• Press CTRL + F select, “Replace” tab and fill the Find What: “,” and press, replace all. This option removes all the unnecessary commas in the spreadsheet.
• Highlight your keywords and author names columns and click on Remove Duplicate. This would get rid of every item appearing more than once. Yes, I use author names for my keyword list if you are wondering.
• Put all of your data in a single column with their respective rows. This way, you can know how many keywords you have.

When you’ve exhausted the data on Publisher Rocket, you can go to Google Ads Keyword Planner to get more keywords. The approach here is a little different, and so you can input all your main keywords at once to get similar keywords results.

For the Google Ads Keyword Planner, you can go ahead to copy and paste directly into your spreadsheet after clearing the statistics columns.

And finally, you can copy and paste your keywords to the box in your Amazon Advertisement campaign.

Now don’t forget to write a captivating ad description.

STEP 6- LAUNCH CAMPAIGN

All that is left for you now is to launch your campaign. You’d see the yellow bar somewhere at the end of the page. It takes about 12-24 hours for Amazon to verify your campaign before you start seeing it in the search results.

STEP 7 – Monitor Campaigns

After a week of publishing your new campaign, you should have enough data to start making some adjustments. In case, your ad doesn’t have any or few impressions and clicks, then probably is because your bidding is too low, or it may be a glitch. I suggest you restart the same campaign. Also, analyze the following data:

• If your book cover is getting impressions but no clicks, then probably your book cover or title isn’t enticing enough. Otherwise, readers would be clicking through and purchasing your book.
• If your book is obtaining clicks, but no sales, then the problem may be that your description isn’t captivating readers to purchase your book.

You should also monitor your ads daily. Just follow the next steps for each keyword in your campaign:

• Non-Profitable Keywords:

If a keyword has about ten clicks and no-sells then deactivate it, so you won’t lose more money.

• ACOS Below 10%

If a keyword is relevant and making money and below ACOS 10%, then bid more 0.04. For example:

You are promoting a Yoga book and bidding 0.30 on the keyword, “Yoga for Beginners.” This keyword is making money and below ACOS 10% – then just increase the bid to 0.34

Yoga for beginners the bid is set at 0.30 then

• ACOS between 10% to 20%

Bid more 0.02

• ACOS between 20% to 30%

Don’t bid anything

• ACOS between 30% to 40%

Bid less 0.02

• ACOS between 40% to 50%

Bid less 0.04

• ACOS Higher than 50%

Deactivate keyword

 Extra Tips

• Start your biddings between 0.30 to 0.35 USA market and 0.25 to 0.30 UK market.
• Monitor your ads daily. This way you know: when it takes off, the keywords that are more relevant and make more money for your books,
• Make sure your book cover, title, ad description are sleek.
• Exhaust all keyword ideas on Publisher Rocket first. Let Google Ads Keyword Planner be your last resort.

Conclusion

The bulky part of this process is getting your keywords, but with what I have taken you through, this would come easy, and you can start publishing your Amazon Ads with no sweat. Good luck!