An Amazon Promotion, or Amazon Push Campaign, is when an author makes a one day effort to “push” his book to bestseller status on Amazon.com
To do it, the author needs people with lists to send his promotional e-mails. They’re usually his friends, affiliates and fellow marketers. She also needs people to supply bonus items for the push campaign.
Often, the bonuses are what induce people to purchase the author’s book. It’s the opportunity to get some “extras” that pushes people over the line to become buyers. (You can see why it’s called a push campaign.)
There are two basic strategies for an Amazon Push Campaign. Both involve getting as many people as possible to promote your book on the same day, and getting other marketers to give you bonus items to make your promotion more attractive and successful.
The primary difference between the two is what your friends, affiliates and fellow marketers get out of the deal.
The first model has you going, hat in hand, to your network and asking them for a favour – the bonus item and/or an e-mail slot. You’re asking a favour because all the bonuses will be loaded onto your site and you deliver them.
This model isn’t creating any traffic for your supporters.
The second model – the much more attractive model – does create traffic for your supporters and rewards them for participating.
To make this one work, you ask each contributor (of a bonus item) to supply you with:
- A description of their bonus item
- An image to go with the bonus item (generally an image of the item or the author), and
- A URL where people who buy the book can then get the bonus
This way, every time someone wants to download a bonus they are actually going to your contributor’s website.
As a contributor, there are a few things you need to set up to make this promotion work for you. After all, you don’t want to just give away something without collecting a name and e-mail address.
What you’re going to do is use the simplest elements of an online campaign:
- Squeeze Page
- Thank You Page
- Confirmation e-mail (when using a double opt-in system)
- Download e-mail (to deliver the bonus item)
- Follow-up e-mails
Next month, I’ll go through each item and show you what I used. That will make this newsletter a little longer just because I’ll use images of the pages and e-mails.
So how did the Amazon Push Campaign work for me?
As a contributor, it added 257 names to my list. And this is after fixing a glitch on the day of the promotion.
When the promotion launched on the morning of May 1st, the URL for my download link wasn’t working. It was a simple matter of some letters being capitalised in the URL that shouldn’t have been – but it still took a couple of hours to get it fixed.
What can I say? I can write, but my skills as a webmaster are limited. So many thanks to Jodi Van Valkenburg, Helen Buttery and Daniel Dumanig for spotting the problem and bailing me out.
When you get an opportunity to make use of an Amazon Push Campaign for building your list – take it.
Your time investment is about 4 hours – assuming you write the content for the pages and e-mails. The lifetime value of the names you add to your list will pay you back repeatedly for the time you invest.