The art of being patient… with Amazon Ads.

Another week has flown by and here I am drinking green tea (part of my new intermittent fasting regime), staring at the screen, still trying to fathom Amazon Ads.

I told myself to be patient and not expect fast results but then I did get a fast result, however, I am always suspicious when things happen too quickly. Experience has shown me that if you get a quick sale, it’s likely to be the only sale for quite a while. It’s some kind of weird law of the universe.

I am still very much in the experimental phase of Amazon Ads. Every day I read my book by Deb Potter – Amazon Ads for Authors 2021 and I watch YouTube tutorials. I have a creative brain rather than an analytical one so I am training myself to understand logistics, statistics etc… From what I can gather the experimental side of it never truly changes. Even the most experienced Amazon advertisers are constantly monitoring and devising strategies.

When I got a sale via one of my ads I felt very smug. It only cost 10p out of my £2 daily budget. Instant success! I have to assume my keywords for that book are good. Having said that, it sold a few days ago and no sales since. So it could just be a fluke. This is the most likely scenario in my sometimes pessimistic mind. So I’ve raised the daily budget to see if that makes a difference. So far, no, but I am trying to be patient. We are only talking a few days.

It seems you have to have your eye on the ball all the time, working out what does and what doesn’t work. It feels fairly daunting at this point but I am determined to succeed. I have worked hard and created around a hundred books already, so I have plenty to experiment with. It’s one thing to create, but another to sell. I concentrate on quality over quantity and I’m devoting equal time to creating and marketing at the moment.

The important thing is to keep an eye on profit. This is tricky when you are experimenting and speculating to accumulate. I made a profit with my sale which is great but I will have lost money by not getting the formula right with other books. So it has to be balanced off.

The good thing is, while I am intensely focused on the mysteries of Amazon Ads, I don’t think about food. The intermittent fasting is working extremely well, far better than I imagined it would. I know this is off topic but in a way it isn’t. As I feel lighter and sharper, the more able I feel to work effectively and absorb information. Intermittent fasting isn’t for everyone but it seems to be working for me, which is great.

One of the YouTubers suggested you need to wait a week to see how your ads do. I’m not finding this easy so I prefer Dale’s suggestion of checking every day. What I don’t want to do, is become too obsessed but it is fascinating to check in to see how many impressions each book gets and try to work out what I am doing right, or wrong. What I don’t want to do is lose too much money in the experimental phase so I think checking every day (not every hour) is a good thing to do.

If you’d like to see some of the books I have created, you can check them out here or at Amazon via MyriadLifeBooks and MyriadLifePhotoArt. Any money raised helps me keep this site going, so please support this indie author by buying one of my lovely notebooks or cards if you can.

If you’d like to share your experiences of Amazon Ads I’d love to hear them.

I will give an update of my progress (at least I hope it will be progress…) next week.

Please hit the subscribe button if you’d like to be updated with my blog posts. Sometimes I even give notebooks away to my subscribers… worth keeping an eye out for!

I write as PetraKidd.com so please check out my short stories there:

The Isolation Sex Stories

The Eight of Swords

The Putsi

Every day I learn something new… here I share it with you.

If you are a new author or anyone trying to sell a book of some kind, here is a website you might find useful. I know I do!

Now and then I make great discoveries and if it saves you time and energy so much the better. We are all here to learn.

Lately, (on Twitter) I have seen a few writers wondering about how to make their links universal. I had the same problem and with a bit of research I came across this site booklinker.net. If you have published your book on Amazon but want to include as many countries as possible in marketing links you post on social media, through Booklinker you can shorten the URL and direct whoever clicks on the link to the Amazon site of the country they reside in.

This saves having to cut and paste links from amazon.com, amazon.es, Amazon.It etc to get your book(s) seen all around the world. It’s a really useful timesaver.

You get a choice of link styles as you can see below. I generally use mybook.to but I guess it is good to mix it up if you feel so inclined.

Booklinker also logs which countries traffic comes from so that you know which ones are providing the most hits on your links. As Amazon KDP doesn’t give you this kind of information it’s really useful and interesting to have access to.

Here is what the information looks like for one of my books.

I am sure you will be happy to know that BookLinker is a free tool, provided by the intelligent link management company Genius Link, for authors, publishers and marketers to create localised links that work no matter where in the world your audience is. Simply sign up and go! There is a premium option available too.

Of course there are other sites that do similar URL shortening so you might want to research those too.

I’m not being paid to promote Booklinker, I’m simply writing posts like these because I know how frustrating it can be trying to find the right information sometimes. I will keep my post tips short and sweet on the whole as again, when I’m looking for information I like it when the article cuts to the chase.

Please leave your comments here if you have any tips on this topic.

Of course, if you’d like to buy a notebook to show your appreciation of free information, that would be great! But no pressure. Everytime you do buy a notebook it helps me create more and helps fund my writing ambitions as PetraKidd.com.

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Here’s an idea, please subscribe below to get my blog updates…then we can keep in touch. If you have a blog, let me know about it and then I can follow you too.

Thanks for reading… more coming soon!