Archive | May, 2020

When I suggest to Amazon authors that they seek reviews, the biggest objection I hear is, “But the more reviews I get, the greater the chances that I’ll get negative reviews.” Understandably, negative reviews are scary. But if you write a good book that either helps people or entertains them (or both) then two things will happen…

1. The positive reviews will greatly outnumber the negative reviews, thereby ‘negating’ the negatives.

2. The negative reviews can actually help sales.

For one thing, if you have negative reviews then your positive reviews become much more believable. Have you ever landed on a product with 400 positive reviews and NO negatives? Pretty hard to believe those are all real reviews, isn’t it?

And for another thing, ‘an enemy of my enemy is my friend’ Meaning, some negative reviews, when read by the right prospects, will actually convince prospects to purchase your book.

Here’s an example: Someone from political party ‘A’ writes a book. A member of political party ‘B’ writes a bad review, citing things in the book they didn’t like. But those things appeal to the prospect (who happens to be a part of Party ‘A’) and this is enough to nudge them into buying the book.

In other words, if you’ve written a good book then DON’T worry about negative reviews. On the other hand, if your book stinks then you might want to pull the book, rewrite it and relaunch it under a different title.

Lastly, why do you want more reviews of your Kindle books? Two words – more sales. The more reviews you have, the more popular your book looks, the more sales you will get. Plus, reviews are some of the best kind of social proof you can get.

Here then, are 8 ways to get more reviews of your Kindle books

– Write a good book. Seriously. If you write junk, your readers will be inspired to tell the world in reviews. But if you write a great book, again some of them will be inspired to tell the world in reviews.

Tiss: Practice makes perfect, so write a lot and you’ll get better and better. Add your own voice and personality – this makes it far more interesting to the reader. Get someone to edit and proofread the book for you.

– Write a short book. Most people finish reading a book before they write a review. Thus, if you have an 80,000 word book versus a 10,000 word book, all else being equal the 10,000 word book will get more reviews. Of course if you’re writing fiction, you might have to make it long since it’s expected.

Tip: If you already have an 80,000 word manuscript, break it into 4 or even 8 smaller books and charge less per book. Then cross promote your books for more sales.

– Ask for a review. Okay, this is really basic but most authors still don’t do it. At the end of your book, ask your reader to help you out and write a review. Remind them that they got the book at a great price, and if it helped them or entertained them, they can return the favor and really help you out with a review.

Tips: Let them know it will only take them a couple of minutes to do it. Provide the link where they can leave the review.

– Build a following. If you don’t already have one, build a list. Then when you put out a new Kindle book, ask them to review it.

Tips: Give your book away for free to your list and ask them to review it. OR give your book away for free to strangers on Amazon and ask them to sign onto your list – then ask them to review it. Either way, once you’ve got some great reviews, stop giving your book away for free and start charging for it.

– Use an email signature. If you have a separate email account just to answer questions about your book, then use a signature to ask for reviews. People will write to you with questions about your topic. When you write back, it’s the perfect time to ask for a review in your email signature. Be sure to give the link, too. And even if you don’t have a separate email account, you can still copy and paste a request each time you answer an email from your book’s readers.

Tip: When someone writes just to praise you and your book, ask them in your reply email to post what they wrote to you as a review. Be sure to give them the link to make it as simple as possible. When they do post it, THANK them.

– Give your book away for free. Strange but true, the way Amazon’s algorithm works you can get a real boost to sales after giving your book away for free for 5 days. Plus you can get a lot of good reviews when you give your book away, which will also boost sales.

– Run a countdown deal. This is the new ‘free’ and can have the same boost to sales as giving your book away. Again the added downloads will boost you in Amazon’s search results, plus you should be getting added reviews as well, which will also help sales.

Use social media. Post reviews of your book on your social media accounts to promote your book. This will get eyeballs on your books and usually sales, too. With more sales you can ask for more reviews.

Tip: When you have a loyal following, post a negative review now and then to social media to get your fans riled up. Your fans will go to Amazon to vote the review ‘not helpful,’ and often times they’ll even post a new review themselves.

One more reason to increase your reviews – publishing deals. If you get two or more books to each garner several hundred reviews, you might have a chance at getting a lucrative publishing offer.

If you do, think hard before you sign. Often times you can make more money by self-publishing than you can by going through a publishing house. But if they’re offering a large sum up front and a great marketing plan for your new book – then you might want to take it.

There’s a Shakespeare quote you’ve heard: “To thine own self be true.”

And here’s another one (not quite with the Shakespeare flair, but still quite eloquent): “You can’t fit a round peg into a square hole.”

People online will tell you what to do. How to do it. When to do it.

They’ll tell you to get up two hours early and work on your business before work. Or set a timer for 30 minutes and work without distraction. Or enter a niche just because there is money there. They’ll tell you all sorts of things. And they’ll even get righteously indignant when you don’t do what they tell you to do.

So now I’m going to tell you what to do. Seriously.

Know yourself first. Yes, you can get round pegs into square holes, but it does a tremendous amount of damage to the round peg. If you like to sleep in until 10:00 am, then maybe that’s what you should do. You probably do your best work in the afternoon and evening anyway.

If you have a flair for an odd niche, maybe you should find a way to monetize that, instead of going into a more popular and overcrowded field that everyone is telling you to enter.

If you don’t like speaking to people in person, why are you buying that course on how to do marketing for local businesses?

Figure out who you are and what you’re good at. Then build your business around YOU.

For example, if you’re great at seeing the big picture and hate details, then focus on what needs to be done and have other people do the actual work through outsourcing. If you love to write but hate to deal with websites, have someone else set up and run your blog. If you hate writing but love talking, make a vlog instead of a blog. Or do a podcast. Or both.

Just don’t do the thing you hate to do, because guess what? You cannot force yourself to do the things you don’t like for any real length of time. It just isn’t going to work.

To be successful, figure out who you are and what you like. THEN figure out how to build a business around you, instead of trying to mold yourself to a business you simply aren’t suited to.

If you haven’t yet had a big launch of your own, then it can be hard to relate to how things work, what needs to be done, and especially the results you can get. It all seems a bit foreign and out of reach. But the fact is, anyone has the potential to create a product that people love and launch it with tremendous success.

Imagine spending the next 2 months working on your new product and the launch itself. Then the big day is almost here. You’re lying in bed the night before, wondering if you did everything you can do to make this a big success. You’re worried it will flop. You’re thinking, “What if I just wasted the last two months of my life?” But the fact is, no matter what happens, it’s impossible to waste that experience as long as you learn from it.

Do you know what else you’re feeling? Excitement. It’s like the night before Christmas when you were a kid, times 10. Or maybe times 100. You can hardly sleep. What will tomorrow bring?

And let’s face it – you’re also proud of yourself. Regardless of how many sales you make or don’t make, you did it. You stuck with it and saw it through to the end. And that is priceless.

Do you see what we’re doing here? We’re imagining what it will be like when you launch your first BIG product later this year. Wow. What a great way to get motivated, huh?

Now then, I’m going to show you how to add a hefty sum to the bottom line of your next (or your first) product launch, and increase your chance of success in the process.

Let’s say you’ve done your work. You’ve built a nice list of buyers and prospects by offering terrific info on your topic. Now it’s time to take the next step and offer a course of instruction for the advanced players. You’ve even got some terrific affiliates lined up. You press the button and POW! Your new product is launched to the world.

Sales on the first day prove that you have a winner. For the next few days, sales continue to come in at a slower rate. Then on the final day of your launch, WHAM! Sales flood in like crazy. Why? Because people have trouble making up their mind, and it’s your deadline that will get them over the fence and clicking the buy button.

Your launch wraps up and you’ve done a very satisfying amount of sales. It might be $20,000, it might be $200,000, I don’t know. The point is, your launch was a success.

Now here’s how you make it even BETTER:

After your deadline passes, open a new, special enrollment period for 24 hours. Offer this special enrollment period ONLY to those who have clicked through to your sales page during the launch, but never enrolled. This way you are only sending it to those who have basically pre-qualified themselves.

Offer them something new. For example, if you were offering your product for one big price, offer them a payment option. Let’s say your course was $297. You could offer them 3 payments of $99.

Of if you were offering a payment option during your launch, now you can offer them a better payment option. Instead of $99 a month for 3 months, offer $49 for seven months.

When you send an email to tell them about this special enrollment period, thank them for their interest. Let them know that you understand they might want a better payment plan, and this is their one chance.

If you don’t want to offer payments, consider offering something else instead. Maybe a one-on-one Skype call to answer questions after they’ve gone through the course. Or a critique of their work after using the course. Or a special bonus that ties in nicely.

Here’s the bottom line: By clicking through to the sales page, these people have shown that they are indeed interested. Some of them very nearly bought. But ‘nearly’ doesn’t make the sale, and if you don’t get them to buy now, they never will.

What you’re doing is providing them with one more opportunity, along with an additional incentive, to get your course. If your course is good (and we certainly hope it is) then you are doing them a major service by making this offer.

And in return, you can put an extra 4 or 5 figures into your pocket, simply by sending a couple of emails. Of course, you’ve got to do all the work that comes with having a product launch. But the point is, in the world of online marketing there are no limits to what you can earn, if you’re willing to do what it takes.

Now for some motivation…

Think about what you want most in your life right now. Is it more time? More money? More freedom?

You can have all of this and more. And once you start making money, a funny thing happens. It gets easier and easier as you discover more and more techniques like the one we just described above. You’ve just got to do the work to get it, whether you feel motivated or not.

I’ll leave you with one last trick: Make a list of what you need to do in order to launch your next product. Find one thing on that list you can do right this moment, and then spend the next 15 minutes getting started on it. That’s it, just 15 minutes. Once you get started, you’ll probably discover you don’t want to quit.

And there’s your motivation. As the shoe company says, Just Do It. Just get started. That’s truly the hardest part. Everything after that? Is all downhill and will build momentum, almost automatically.