When I was in the sixth grade, I took a stand. A neighborhood bully was picking on a friend of mine on a bus ride home. The kid wet his pants. I told the bully to back off. The bully proceeded to kick my ass.
Every day.
In fact, he took the “same time, same place” phrase to another level. Every day at around 3:06, when we got off the bus, I got my ass kicked. This went on for weeks, maybe an entire month. My teacher couldn’t do anything. The principal couldn’t do anything. The bus driver said a prayer every time I got off the bus. My mom worried herself sick.
And then, one day, I finally stopped swinging like a wimp and clocked the guy in the jaw. It felt good!
(Then I got my ass kicked again).
Eventually I moved away and never had to deal with the bully again.
What a metaphor for my marketing adventures today! 🙂
LESSON LEARNED & EXECUTED
I finally got confirmation that the ads for my poetry collection and short story collections weren’t flukes. I sold ONE of each today (oooh, big money), finally ending a losing streak of clicks that was very, very difficult to watch.
Oh, but make no mistake—I’m going to bleed money today again. But I at least know that SOMETHING IS WORKING. It might be the ad copy, the book description, the cover…something. A few more weeks and I’ll finally find out.
Why is this good, you ask? Because my ads are leading to sales. Sure, it’s only been a handful, but if I can make a handful, I can improve on that. Like I said, the only way to go is up at this point. I haven’t even done any tweaking yet.
The work I did yesterday with the negative targeting will go a long way toward making these ad sets profitable. Once I improve the conversion and drive my cost per click down, I’m fairly confident I can get these books to bring in a little trickle of money every month. Little revenue streams add up. My logic here is that if I can get ads going & profitable for a poetry collection (for Pete’s sake), then it’ll probably be smooth sailing for all my other books if I’m lucky. It’s a weird gamble, and in many respects, the opposite of what a normal person would make.
Most people would target their better-performing books, and that’s what I did earlier this year. However, I discovered that it’s really, really easy to coast when you do that. I let my ads run on my best books and they worked really, really well. As a result, I fell asleep on my ads and didn’t look at them for sixth months. Not really smart marketing, honestly. By focusing on the long shots, it forces me to check my numbers every day. Good psychological tactic for those of you with a decent amount of books…
Anyhoo, today overall was pretty good sales day so far with a lot of hours left.
The Amazon ad reporting platform is down, so I actually don’t know how many clicks I’m getting or any other analytics. Gives me a good excuse to keep writing.
(Oh, and to give this a poetic ending, the bully I fought every day went nowhere with his life. I became a prolific author. So I have even more hope for this ad story…)
