Category: internet marketing

For FREE or Not for FREE – That is the Question

Now I am no Shakespeare, but the question needs to be asked. Shall it be Free or not for free? However, before I get to that I wanted to give you an update.

I have spent so much time trying to learn the best way to sell on amazon kindle.

There are so many different opinions on the best way to write, format, upload and market your book, I got myself quite confused.

I have produced a few training courses over the years and have quite a lot of my own websites. I also sell physical products on Amazon and ebay. SEO and online marketing is my forte, and I would say I am pretty clued up when it comes to ranking websites and using social media.

Kindle however, is new to me and it is taking me some time to get to know and understand the best way to promote my book. I am not sure why as I usually get to grips with these things fast enough.

I think part of the problem is that the advice and opinions are so varied. I am very careful who I listen to and make sure that I checkout that person proffering an opinion, to ensure that they are qualified to give the advice. The 3 or 4 people, whose opinion I value and trust are top sellers on Amazon and very experienced in kindle, and yet they all teach something different in regards to selling price and ways to market your books on the kindle platform.

This has left me having to work it all out for myself. Now, that is not a bad thing, far from it, but, when I am looking at something new, I tend to buy a couple of different courses on the topic, that give me a heads up and a guideline on the best way to move forward and get results in the shortest possible time. Learning from a mentor or someone that has the relevant knowledge is the way I like to do it.

I have never been afraid to ask for help and am happy to pay of it.

In this instance it has not worked for me. I still do not know whether I have set the right price or not or whether I have chosen the right commission level.

What Currency I chose

I went for US dollars even though I am based in the UK and the book was written in UK English. I did this because the US is the biggest market and also because it was the default setting on the Amazon settings 🙂

What Price Should I choose

I went for $7.99 as I thought that this is a fair price for the book. There are other books on the subject of social media that sell from $0.99 up to $28!!! I am thinking that people will believe that, at that price, the quality will be good. I tend to pay a little more and don’t often go for the cheapest option. Only time will tell. It has been on the market for a week and has already had a handful of sales, even though everywhere that I have mentioned the book, I have told people that it will be offering it for free in a week or so.

This appears to suggest that the people who have bought it have found it from searching rather than from one of my promotional tweets or posts. I have not had any reviews as yet though.

What Commission Should I Take?

At the price I have set, I have the choice to take 35% or 70%. I actually went for 35%. That might sound nuts but, there is meaning in my madness. I am thinking that if amazon are getting the lions share then they will put more effort into promoting the book in the rankings and also in the “people also bought” section.

I can change this but, as this is my first attempt, and I am not worried too much about making money at this point with this book (although I am hoping it will be profitable of course). Learning the right way to do it is my goal and so I thought I would try this strategy first.

I did notice that Amazon was already retargeting me and I am being followed around the internet with adverts for Understanding Social Media For Business which is great. They are definitely spending money on marketing my book which is great.

KDP Select or Not

I decided to enroll in the Amazon KDP select program. Actually, that is not true. I clicked on it without thinking too much about it and it was only after that I discovered that a lot of people do not use KDP when they launch their book. It was too late for me and I intend to read a bit more about the pro’s and con’s as I still do not understand the why just yet.

Free or Not For Free

One of the reasons I thought KDP select would be good is that I can put the book up for FREE for up to 5 days. Apparently, they can be any single days or any number running consecutively.

There are so many different avenues to promote the book when it is free, I thought this was a good idea. It was not until I then realised that I have to actually register and upload the details of the book that it hit me. This is going to be hard work and very time consuming.

Software Services

I have found a couple of automated services but they only do a few sites. The one I bought was a software program called KDROI, it submits to about 32 sites. It is a one off payment and you can use it as many times as you like, unlike most of the others where you pay monthly. You can check it out here www.kdroi.com (that is an affiliate link, so if you buy it, I will get a commission). I have seen a few services offered on fiverr but I am a bit reticent about using them as the there could be problems and I don’t want any backlash from amazon for doing something dodgy.

Which Free and Paid sites are worth doing?

After realising that you have to register with a lot of the free book sites and it is very time consuming, it became apparent that this was not necessarily the best way to promote the book. I have used the Kdroi software and got one of my assistants to go onto as many of the others as possible to see how many she can get done in a week.

How many Days to make the book free?

Well again this is another subject which has varying views. In my case, I thought I would offer it for 3 days over a week end. The dates are set 15th to the 17th of April. So mark your calendars or get on my list here to get notified on the day. I just thought it would give people a few days to see the posts and tweets and pick it up for free. 🙂

So that is it for now. I will keep you posted over the next week

You can see the details of the book here

Amazon.com Understanding Social Media

Amazon.co.uk Understanding Social Media

My Publishing Website – Simple Simons Publishing

Join the List to get Notified when the book goes free

I welcome your comments and feedback and any helpful advice you care to share.
Quick Start Challenge 3.0

Quick start challenge video

I had to post a video up for this weeks challenge which I have done. I am not keen on watching back videos of myself but I did it.

Amazing what a bit of encouragement and a challenge can do for you 🙂
Forget SEO – It Is A Total Waste Of Time

Forget SEO – It Is A Total Waste Of Time

Now, I know that this is a controversial statement but hear me out before passing judgment on my parentage or doubting my sanity..

I am NOT saying SEO is dead per se. You can, with a lot of work rank a website for long tail and low competition keywords, although getting a new site to rank for highly competitive keywords is like pushing water uphill, and is not going to happen whatever those SEO professionals tell you.

The perception that organic rankings in google is free is incorrect.

My point is that the amount of time it takes and the associated costs to get a site ranked, especially in a competitive niche, is not always worth the effort.

With paid traffic you can switch it on and off as you like and you can easily and accurately measure the ROI.

Who is Lloyd Hester and What Does He Know?

Gone are the days where you could rank a site on page one of google in a few minutes. I know, I used to do it. Try typing in “Who is the number one SEO expert” into google or “Lightning Fast Google Rankings” or click on these links to go straight there. Who is the number one SEO Expert? or just Number one SEO expert and also lightning fast google rankings NOTE: In reality, this is not that impressive if you remove the inverted commas the result disappears from the first few pages at least.

Continuous and Ongoing Changes For Marketers

What worked then does not work now. And, what works today will probably not work tomorrow.

The Guru’s have stopped selling SEO ranking tools and gone over to selling youtube ranking, Amazon sales machines and running webinars for profit!

If you are working on SEO then you are aiming at getting google to rank your site in the search engine ranking pages (SERPS).

Google’s terms state that any type of manipulation to improve rankings is a bad thing. Not up there with fox hunting or mistreating defenceless animals but they do not like it and spend their lives trying to find out how we do it and blocking it.

They really don’t like it. I imagine that their underground, protected shelter looks a lot like the CTU unit out of 24. Who knows, maybe they have their own Jack Baeur running about searching out and torturing those of us planning a Black Hat campaign on the World?

Any form of link building that is done for the purpose of improving your site’s position in the SERPS is against the mighty G rules. That’s it.

Not only that, google are continually updating their algorithms to cause us pain and giving them silly names like penguin and panda!

Now this being said, of course, there are a lot of ways to build links and I am not suggesting that you totally ignore them. However, in my humble opinion, I would forget SEO for SEO’s sake.

Content Is King – Oh Yes

Content is king and if you are producing and posting relevant, informative, educational and interesting content that provides value to your readers, you will find those people will naturally talk about it, it will get syndicated and links will grow naturally.

Posting to snapchat (HUGE at the moment) facebook, Instagram, twitter, Pinterest and youtube can all help drive traffic to your site and if you get a lot of interaction, retweets, pins. Likes etc, then you could well get promoted into googles prized ‘first-page’ for a certain low competition keyword.

Using on-page SEO techniques are a different matter, however, if you are producing content it does not take long to optimise it properly which will give you a boost.

Adding the right h1, h2 tags, using keywords in your title and related phrases in the body text is all good and will make a positive difference.

But, if you want to drive guaranteed traffic to your site then I would suggest paying for traffic. Shock, Horror.

If you value your time then this is by far the cheapest way. Running a facebook campaign is not expensive and as long as you get a reasonable ROI then it is not a problem.

Spending all your time and effort trying to rank a website only to get it slapped down a few places, replaced, or worse still totally wiped out in a few weeks is soul destroying and whilst we can shout at google all we like, it is their ball and they can do what they like with it (well nearly)

If you are building amazon affiliate sites for example, why spend hours writing unique content and building links to it when you can put up a site quickly, run an ad campaign and get instant results. If it does well ramp it up, if not then move on the next one.

Always The Exception To The Rule

There are always exceptions to the rule and I am sure there will be plenty of people who will be quick to tell me of their SEO gymnastics and phenomenal results but, I would put a pound to a penny that there are very few of them that have ranked for a very competitive term.

It is still easy to rank for “What to do in Azerbaijan for the over the fifties” or “The best vinegar to make pickled onions” But, to rank for a term like “best mobile phone” or “top t-shirt designs” the chances are it is not going to happen.

You can even sell it to someone who has not read this post and let them try to SEO the crap out of it and see if they can rank it.

Overall, the work it takes, and the unreliability makes it a fools errand.

Of course, I do not expect everyone to agree but I have yet to see an argument that has made me change my mind.
Allowing Comments on a WordPress Blog

Here is a video and a step by step guide to allowing comments on your blog.

If you use wordpress to build a traditional website or e-commerce store then for the bigger part you do not need to have comments activated. However, if you are setting up a conventional blog then it is a good idea to have comments on your site as the more interaction you get from your readers the better it is.

If you want to allow comments on your blog then the following video will show you how to do it in a few simple steps.

Go to Settings – Discussion

If you want to allow comments then tick the box

Select the comment must be manually approved

Add negative or spam keywords

Add a list of spammy keywords and swear words, You can search google for a list of spam words to add.

Choose if you want to use avatars and how you want them to appear.

Remember to “Save Changes” before leaving the page.

If you allow comments on the site then you can edit this on the page or post levell

Mouse over the Title and click on ‘Quick Edit’ then tick or untick the allow comments

You might want to allow comments on your posts or blog page but not on the ‘contact us’ and ‘privacy page’ etc.

Clcik on ‘Quick Edit’

Tick to allow comments on a page
Working With Local Businesses – What To Offer Them
There are many services to work with local businesses. The beauty is that once you have built a relationship with them then you can go back and add more and more services and products to them. If you did a good job the first time around then the likelihood of getting more business is high.

One thing for sure is that a lot of these companies need help. There is so much to do and even if they know what it is they need to do and maybe know how to do it, they rarely have the time to do it.

The best way is to start off with something that is low cost so there is a low barrier to entry. In other words, they will be happy to take the risk due to the small cost of the service that you are adding.

I would avoid offering SEO services to begin with, as they are sure to have had numerous emails, phone calls and hard mail sent to them. Once you have established a relationship and built trust then you will be well placed to offer advice and do the work for them.

One good way is to build a local business directory using open source software or a paid option, then add ALL local businesses for FREE, then start work to get the site ranking for the term “your town business directory” (if you can get the exact match domain this is relatively easy) Then approach all of these businesses and offer to upgrade them to the paid featured option. If you can demonstrate the directory is on the first page of google then it is not difficult to get them to cough up for a paid advert or featured post, especially if you only allow one or two paid adverts per category.

In the meantime there are plenty of other ways that you can help local business get ahead.

I would not get into reputation management until you really know your stuff. This can be a minefield to get right. Offer to help setup their review accounts or to get a few nice reviews for them. The problem is that if someone NEEDS reputation management, the chances are they have a fair few bad reviews and they will expect the Earth from you in 24 hours. This is NOT possible to do if they have had a few bad reviews over a few months. This takes some time to sort out, and know-how

Here are a just a few of the services that you can offer to do at low cost.
- Setup a Facebook page
- Edit their existing Facebook page for the new timeline
- Create markup or micro-formats like Schema for their address and contact info. (really important for local search)
- Add businesses to business directories like yell, local pages, yelp etc.
- Setup a google+ page
- Setup google places (or improve what they have)
- Setup a customised twitter account
- Create a pintrest account
- Setup a personalised youtube channel
- Create a QR code for them
- Build them a website (wordpress or joomla)
- Design leaflets or adverts for them (outsource to fiverr)
- Facebook graph search
All of the above are relatively easy and quick to do so you can offer these services at an affordable price.

Some more involved services
- Text message marketing campaign
- PPC campaigns
- Re-design website
- Design leaflets and flyers (can be outsourced cheaply)
- Reputation Management
- Lead Generation
- SEO Services
The most important thing is make sure you understand why the services you offer are needed by the local business and that you can do them properly. Forget the mantra ‘fake it, till you make it!’ You will get caught out and lose any credibility that you had and word will get around fast.
Another way to generate business is to offer a free seminar to show people how to improve their own reputation of build their own pages on google + or how to do SEO or, or , or. the list goes on.

People LOVE free.

There are 3 stages to building business when offering a service.

Tell them what they need to do – FREE

Teach them how to how to do it in more detail via video or written course

Then offer a full service to do it all for them

Lastly and maybe this should be at the top…. Before you offer any of these services make sure that not only can you do it, which I already covered but, that you also ENJOY doing it.. There is nothing like getting out of bed in the morning to do something that you really love to do. If you love to write or have a passion and real talent for design then offer services that will utilise all of your skills. Forget buying the next GREAT shiny WSO where you have to learn everything from scratch.

Just think, there is NO learning curve if you are offering services that you already know how to do!!!

I hope that gives you some food for thought. 🙂