Marketing Journal: Encouraging Progress!

The last time I updated you on the marketing efforts, I managed to bring down the monthly bill by a bit. But the great news is that as I’ve continued to work, the results have continued to be, as the headline implies, encouraging.

To review:

The first thing I did was stop all key words that didn’t net a single sale after 20 clicks.

I had to patiently (and I still find some every other day) eliminate all key words bids above 25 cents.

Any new campaigns followed settings above.

My fear was my costs would go down, but my sales would plummet.

That’s not the case. The wonderful news is that my marketing bill went down.

After one month, my bill was already $50 less.

Sure, I only had six sales and a handful of pages read, but I wasn’t too far away from the 10 books a month I sold with the super-costly keywords. But with patience and persistence (and God’s kind grace), I just kept at it.

The cost for the month of March wasn’t much less expansive, but look at the sales.

What this means is my costs leveled off, and my sales increased, which was the exact goal I had. Obviously, the month of April isn’t done yet, but I can tell you now the costs is down, and I have a shot at repeating the sales.

This is the general goal. As each month progresses, I’m still doing what I did to improve sales (identifying key words that seem to work and building campaigns around them). I’m also still testing the market in Germany, and those results are encouraging as well, but I want to wait another month before I study those results.

No, these aren’t results that say it’s time to quit the day job. However, success isn’t instant. This process is an endurance race. You try something, and then you adjust. I’m just happy that things are moving in a forward direction.

What I’ve learned that I can share with you at this point:

Start your campaigns soon. The progress I’ve made in about a half-year or year is progress I could have made over six years.

Never bid more than 25 cents for any keyword. Sure, you’ll get clicks, but you’ll pay out the ear. I recommend this formula: (.70 X PRICE OF YOUR BOOK) / 20. If a keyword doesn’t get you a sale within 20 clicks, it’s probably not working for you.

You could stand to work on your book blurb. A lot of times, when the clicks aren’t converging, it might be traced to reviews or book blurbs that don’t promise the same thing as your sell copy on your campaigns. However, you can only draft so many blurbs, and you don’t really have a ton of control over reviews. You can control these other things.

I’ll continue to track my results and share them with you.

Thanks for reading,

Matt