How To Use Ads To Generate More Organic Sales

Hey,


Organic sales on Amazon are wonderful because they are essentially free sales.

Organic sales are simply sales (and borrows if your books are in Kindle Unlimited) of your books that happen as a result of your Amazon Bestseller Rank. The better your rank (i.e. the lower the number), the more organic sales you're going to generate.

There are 2 bestseller ranks on Amazon:

– One for Kindle Books

– One for Print Books

A good bestseller rank is subjective of course, but I consider good as being a rank of 20,000 or better. And with a good bestseller rank, comes more visibility:

– Amazon will email relevant readers about your book

– Amazon will show your book on Also Bought and Also Viewed carousels on relevant product pages

– Your books may start to appear in the Top 100 of certain categories

– Your books appear higher up on search results pages

– The list goes on...

So many opportunities for enhanced visibility come your way when you have a good bestseller rank.

To see what the bestseller rank of your book is, scroll on down to the Product Details section of your book product page, as you can see from the example below:
 

The question then becomes...

How do you improve your bestseller rank?

The answer... advertising and marketing.

I'm not saying that Facebook Ads and Amazon Ads are the only way to improve your bestseller rank; there are plenty of other avenues to explore, such as:

– Newsletter Swaps

– BookBub Ads

– BookBub Featured Deals

– Group Promos

– Email Marketing

– Promo Sites (i.e. Bargain Booksy, Robin Reads, LitNuts, etc.)

– TikTok Ads

– PR (Public Relations) opportunities (i.e. interviews, podcasts, etc.)

And I'd never say to rely 100% on one advertising platform; spreading your risk is always a good choice, and you'll also benefit from reaching readers who you'd never reach with advertising.

Every single sale and borrow improves your bestseller rank. Whether the sales and borrows come from Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, BookBub Ads, Promo Sites, or wherever, your bestseller rank will improve.

And the better your bestseller rank, the more organic sales and borrows you'll generate.

When your bestseller rank is let's say, 100,000, you're unlikely to generate many, if any organic sales or borrows at all. Almost all the sales and borrows you generate at that rank will be directly from the marketing and advertising you're doing yourself.

With a bestseller rank in the Top 10,000 though, more than half your sales and borrows will be organic.

As an example, in October, we sold a total of 3,373 of my wife's books and generated 1,720,221 Page Reads, across Lori's 5 books.

According to the Amazon Attribution Stats and Amazon Ads stats, of those sales and borrows:

– About 1,100 Sales came from the Ads

– About 280,000 Page Reads came from the Ads

So, only around 20-30% of the total sales and page reads actually came from the Ads themselves. The vast majority were from organic means.

This is the power of organic.

Without the Ads, the bestseller rank wouldn't be where it is and therefore, the organic sales and borrows wouldn't be what they are.

If I were just looking at the performance of the Ads themselves, I may have thought that things just weren't working and I should cut my losses.

It's only when you look at the big picture that you realize the impact your Ads are having on your overall figures.

And to top it off, every sale and borrow you make organically also improves your bestseller rank. It's a beautiful flywheel effect that just keeps snowballing.

Naturally, there is variation in daily sales and borrows, as you can see from the screenshots above, but it's how things perform over an extended period of time that matters, much more than the day-to-day.

So, next time you think your Ads aren't working, look at the bestseller rank, look at your total royalties, your total orders and your total page reads.

This is big-picture thinking.

To Your Success

– Matt