Specific Facebook ad

Though I said I wasn't going to do another ad until we started seeing some sales, I can't resist trying one more while the free book promotion is running.

To that end, I created a small lifetime budget ad of $6.00 scheduled to begin tomorrow, Oct. 31, and run until Nov. 1.

Here is the targeting and the image I've used:

26,000 people

• Who are in the broad category Literature/Reading
• Who live in United States
• exactly between the ages of 22 and 40 inclusive
• Who are female
• Who like #Apparitional experience or #Poltergeist
• Who are not already connected to Paranormal America

Update:

Alright, this ad campaign was a complete waste and fail! I'm disappointed and I'm not entirely sure what the difference was compared to the original ad other than the obvious difference in total reach (26,000 vs 2,200,000).

The entire $6.00 budget was spent and gained us only 13 new likes on our page. We were running the free promotion at the time so our intention was to get as many book downloads as possible. However, the day this ad was running wasn't our highest day as far as download counts, so I do not believe it was very effective.

This was running the same day of the week (Thursday) as the first ad which netted us 80+ likes on that same day in the previous week - so the problem must have been:

1. The targeting be limited to a smaller age range or
2. Adding the Poltergeist tag to the targeting.

The next ad I do will be targeted to an age range of 40 to 60. I think people of that age range may be the sweet spot. While we had a large number of ages 18-25 on our statistics, I failed to acknowledge my wife's friends would have contributed a large chunk of those fans and it was skewed unnaturally.

We're really not getting the momentum we had hoped on sales so another ad is probably not a good idea for at least another month or two. 

Beginning of free book days

Today, October 30, 2013 through November 1, 2013, the Paranormal America ebook is available for free on Amazon. We've tried to spread the word as much as possible so hopefully the results will be good enough to have some long term benefit.

Sadly, there was only one single person that responded to any of the Craigslist ads we posted offering to give away the book during these days. This morning I sent out that email reminder.

As of this morning at 8 a.m. we've given away 39 free units. The result of that is a #6 and #7 rank on Amazon for the two categories we're under:

During the next few days, I'll report back the results several times a day. Hopefully we can hit #1 in at least one of these categories and see a boost in sales after the promotion runs.

A few notes:

1. While the response to the Craigslist ads was dismal, I think it's worth noting that after the first few ads were posted, I quickly changed the wording to actually include the dates the book was available. My original intention was to build up an email list and as such, they were being directed to our website to fill in their Name and Email Address to be reminded. However, since I was getting zero response, I figured it was better to be more transparent and let people know the dates so it didn't feel so shady. 
2. During the same week, we also decided to start promoting our free giveaway for the paperback copy. I'm afraid mixing the two might have been a bad idea and one or the other could have gotten lost in the mix.
3. We're on Hawaii time, so while I say 8 a.m. above, the book had already been available for free roughly 11 hours.

Edit/Update #1:

We're up to 70 free downloads of the book, and we're at #4 in both categories (Supernatural & Unexplained Mysteries).

Edit/Update #2:

As of 8:45 p.m. we're now up to 102 free book downloads and we've hit #1 in Unexplained Mysteries and #3 in Supernatural! We still have two solid days remaining to gain some more downloads and tomorrow we're going to make an announcement on the Facebook page to our fans about the free promotion. Most of them should know - but we're hoping it will spread around and get another good chunk of interest.

I've also setup another small ($6.00 lifetime budget) Facebook ad. I told myself I wasn't going to do anymore until we got some actual sales, but much of what I've read says that it's important to gain as much attention as possible during the free promotional days. I'm taking the advice and trying to push the number as high as possible.

I'll probably do one more update tonight before I call it a day and then report first thing tomorrow morning. Here's to another 100+ a day!

Edit/Updated #3:

Final update for today: We hit 110 downloads of the free book. Ranked #1 for Unexplained Mysteries and #3 for Supernatural. Hoping tomorrow we break #1 for both categories! :)

Edit/Update #4:

As of 8:30 p.m. we're now at 157 downloads. We've held the same position at number #1 and #3 since we hit it earlier this morning. Tomorrow is the last day of the free promotion...and today was about half the number from the previous day so we may do well to break 200. We plan to put the word out via Facebook tomorrow, after we announce the winner of the free Paperback giveaway.

Will give one final update tomorrow night after the free promotion ends with a final count of free downloads!

Final Update #5:

Alright, the promotion was ended about 12 hours earlier than I intended because I was trying to do some new promotional stuff with Amazon. We ended up with 176 free downloads of the book and we stayed at #1 & #3 in Unexplained Mysteries and Supernatural categories respectively.

Why did it end early? Well, Amazon now has a new promotional tool for Kindle Select members, called Kindle Countdown Deals. It lets you drop the price of your books and show customers a countdown before the book returns to normal price.

It sounds like an interesting idea and I wanted to try it out as quickly as possible because they will have a new section to discover countdown deals and I thought we might be in a smaller crowd right off the bat.

However, they have some restrictions which I wish I had known about sooner because I would have loved to start this promotion instantly and trying to do so caused me to end the free promotion.

1. You can only run the free book promotion or the countdown promotion in your 90 day enrollment to KDP - so you can't run both at the same time.
2. You must wait 30 days after a price change to run a Countdown promotion; though you can set it up, the start date will be thirty days from the last price change.
3. You must be enrolled in KDP at least 14 days after the Countdown promotion ends.
4. You can edit the settings of your Countdown Promotion as long as it is 24 hours before it is set to begin.

You are able to run the promotion for up to seven days and during that time, it allows you to increment the price back to the original list price up to three times. So for example, you may start at $0.99, then it will increase it to $1.99, then $2.99 then back to your original list price of say $4.99.

While the promotion is running, you will still be able to gain 70% royalties (if you are using that option) even if the price drops below $2.99 -- which I was excited to read.

I stopped my free promotion because I didn't realize I wouldn't be able to start the free version back up along side the Countdown. Oops!

I've set my Countdown promotion to begin on November 25th (as that was the soonest available since I changed the price not too long ago) and it will run for 160 hours. During the promotion, I'll post updates on how it is going.

Inviting forgotten facebook friends

So, I was under the assumption that my wife had invited all of her Facebook friends to like the Paranormal America page... but it turns out she hadn't actually asked them - only posted those previously mentioned status updates on her own time line.

Today, she went through and invited all 800+ of her friends and as of an hour later we're already up nearly 30 new Likes for the page and we've had a fairly large increase in people signing up for the free paperback giveaway.

I' not sure how much difference it would have made to original sales but I'll have to make sure she is more proactive next time we put anything out into the world. :)

Edit:

After a few days, the number of likes from her friends seems to have topped off at around 35. Still a nice boost but much like the ads I talked about in a previous post, the impact on sales was possibly zero.

Sending emails for a contest

A couple of days ago, I sent out an email to roughly 30 of the Authors that had responded to our request for real email address. In the email, I was simply letting them know about the promotion/contest for a free copy of the book in paperback and urged them to share the request to gain more chances.

The response was small but at least 7 of them did actually sign up for a chance to win the book. Hopefully a few more stragglers will be coming in before the contest ends.

After how much trouble it has been to get any kind of response as far as email sign ups, I feel as though we'll need to try more "Share and Like" contests in the future. Either people just aren't that interested in the book or they aren't as willing to give out emails as I had hoped.

Edit:

There have been a handful more sign up after a few more days. The total number is at 12 of those thirty authors.

Another go at Facebook Ads

After what I felt was a fairly successful first attempt at gathering some Facebook "Likes" on our page, I thought I'd give it another shot targeting Males.

This time, I set the budget at only $2.00 and let it run for two days. I targeted Men between the ages of 18-44, with interests in #Paranormal and Reading Books.

So far, with only $0.44 remaining to be spent, the campaign has only produced 4 page likes. The click through rate is 3.92% but out of what was originally 800,000 potential reach, it has reached just 104 people.

There are several possibilities for what might have caused this one to fail so hard:

1. First. I'd guess is that having a budget of only $2.00 was just way too small for any real results. I'd imagine a minimum of $5.00-10.00 is required for reasonable results.
2. Second, I'd also guess the male demographic is probably much harder to get with things like books and paranormal experiences. Women seem to generally have a greater interest in that sort of thing.
3. Third, the ad was running on a Thursday and Friday which are probably not very prone to good results because the weekend is so close - maybe more so because Halloween is coming soon and they are paying more attention to friends and parties and such.

If we do more ads through Facebook for this project, which is doubtful if we don't get some more sales soon, I will definitely stick to what appears the be the bread and butter of the Paranormal crowd: women between 18-54. :)

Edit:

The ad closed with a total of 5 new likes. Definitely won't be trying to push this out to the men again!

Free paperback contest

I made mention of sending out emails for a contest in a previous post but realized I didn't go into detail on the contest. Luckily for you, as I'm writing this I have zero followers and I'm probably talking to myself for the foreseeable future. ;)

Here's the deal with the contest, quick and simple:

1. We're directing people to our website to sign up to win a free paperback copy of Paranormal America. ($11.99 list price)
2. People are asked to give their Name and Email Address to enter the drawing. 
3. The email confirmation they receive, asks them to return to the page (link provided in the email) and share with their Facebook friends. The incentive is that for each friend they have sign up, they will get their name added to the drawing for an extra chance and there is no limit to the number of times they can do so.
4. The drawing will be held on November 1, 2013.

We've posted this on our Facebook page, in the top 20 most populated cities via Craigslist ads, and through email to the authors involved in the book.

The initial results were very slow -- for the first two or three days we didn't have a single entry -- but we're now up to 27 people entered in the contest. 

I'll admit, that seems very low to me for the amount of work we've put into spreading the word. I figured people would jump on a chance to win a free book.

Seems much more difficult to get email addresses than I expected - maybe I'm just a sucker and give out my email too easily since I can throw one of my alternate emails at these sorts of things. Perhaps a free book on Kindle or Paperback just isn't enough value for someone to risk getting spam. 

That reminds me, I should probably go back now and add on the form that we won't ever sell their email and it would only be used to promote future books in this series...

Live and learn!

Finding the perfect price point

Starting out, the price tag was $4.99 for Kindle and $11.99 for Paperback. We felt with the number of pages (220 for the printed book and about 155 estimated for Kindle) and the amount of work we put into it (not to mention each of the authors) it was a reasonable amount.

At this point, I'm starting to wonder how much the price has to do with the lack of sales. We're getting people to the site and they are clicking the link but few are buying.

There are many factors to consider, and I know I'm being impatient. But we're already stalling and it hasn't even been a couple of weeks. I'm afraid it will get even worse if we don't get at least some buzz going about the book to begin spreading the word for a longer term potential.

However, with that said, I dropped the price by $1.00 a moment ago. It will likely not show up on Amazon until late in the middle of the night. Hopefully that will yield a few sales and I would be reasonable confident it was due to the price since nothing much else would have changed other than the description, which I changed at the same time - so that will be a consideration to factor in with the results.

From Oct. 30 through Nov. 1, there will be a FREE promotion going on. After that, I'm going to test the book at $0.99 for a week or two and see if that works to build momentum. Slowly, I'll raise it back to $4.99.

Likely, I will not adjust the price of the paperback for quite some time because we need to sell a fair amount of them as it stands even at $11.99 to recoup the money spent getting that ready.

Edit:

The new price so far seems to have made no difference on sales, as we've been stuck at the same number for nearly 5 days. We've had just one new borrow in that time.

Importance of a book description

I'm starting to get the feeling the book needs a description that really pulls people in and gets them curious enough to purchase. Duh, right?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I assumed that we'd have a lot of interest right off the bat because we had so many people involved and I didn't spend too much time thinking of a detailed description, because I figured nearly everyone checking the page would know exactly what it was about - either being one of the authors, or friends/family of theirs.

Of all the things I put together in this project, the description is one that I know for sure falls short. I've made various revisions and changes along the way but I've yet to find the perfect fit.

I'm working on an update now, which I believe is a better - but still not perfect - description. My next step beyond this version will be to give a brief insight into each of the 50 stories in the book. Hopefully that will give it a full and interesting introduction that will get some people to click buy.

Here's the current go at it:

"A collection of unexplained paranormal experiences, Paranormal America takes you all across the country where it finds everyday people in each state with something truly remarkable to share.

Inside you'll read stories of meddling ghosts moving items around their houses and apartments. You'll read about alien abductions and missing time linked with unexplained dreams. Others have seen creatures they can't explain or witnessed dark figures with ominous intentions. Even some tales of demonic possession or inanimate objects that take on a presence are to be found in the mix. In an exceptionally rare case, you'll read about a father who connects with a child he thought lost in a previous life.

There are truly no exceptions to the strange and unexplained phenomena these people have seen in their lives. Read about the events that often times changed their lives and opened their minds! "


Edit:

While I'd like to come up with something better, I haven't had the time to sit down and make it happen. The idea I have is to go through each of the 50 stories and come up with a quick line describing each story. Perhaps an interesting quote from each of them to get people curious.

Going through and reading the 220 page book again will take some time, so the description above will have to work for the time being. :)

Facebook page tweaks

Today I spent some time editing the Facebook page. When I first created the page, I was still neck deep in editing and formatting the Kindle and Print version of the book... so many of the things were left blank or skimmed over. Hopefully these changes will help bring some naturally occurring organic folks. Some of the things I've done, in no particular order:

1. I updated the page so that it has a proper user name (http://www.facebook.com/ParanormalAmerica) which got rid of the ridiculous long number after the name. Made for some ugly link mouse-overs.
2. I added some Genre categories: Paranormal, Ghosts, Spirits, Aliens, UFOs, and Unexplained Phenomena. 
3. Added Topics: Paranormal, Ghosts, and UFOs. Originally, these would only pop up as Interest Pages and I wasn't sure what purpose they served. I thought it was because the page had just been created and didn't have the ability to create my own or set them. Hopefully, this will help pull some organic traffic to our page.
4. Added J&M Publishing as the publisher; and:
5. Added website link to J&M Publishing.
6. Updated the cover page to be a bit more interesting (or so I think, anyway). The original had the same flag theme as I've used everywhere which was also a very early creation and very dull. Perhaps its time to start expanding the concept and putting more mystery into the images. Faint faces, shadows, etc. People are interested in the unexplained after all.

Were sitting at 253 page "Likes" as of this writing on October 24, 2013. The goal is at least 1,000 before we start trying to really push promotions - though we do have a couple going already to get our feet wet and have a baseline of interest.

Our overall sales are less than 25 at this time, but I know we'll get there! :)

Spreading the word

We're trying everything we can think of and reading up on the subject as we go along for more ideas to spread the word about our page and the book itself.

We've already mentioned the website, Facebook and Twitter pages. Some other ideas we've attempted are posting to all the Paranormal Groups on Facebook and now we're trying out some Facebook ads.

I'm experimenting with creating Craigslist ads to promote an upcoming FREE book giveaway. This is one post of what will be many, in popular areas all over the country. Unfortunately, for reasons I don't quite understand, Craigslist does not allow you to post using Bitly links so I won't know exactly how many people have clicked the link without digging around in the Google analytics data.

Note that in this attempt, which is my first, I'm trying to gather some names and email address, so rather than sending them directly to our website or a link to Amazon, I'm sending them to a squeeze page which promises to notify them of the FREE days coming up sometime before the end of the month.

Edit #1:

I started off with a single post in Honolulu. I'm now going down the list of top populated cities in America (at least the top 20) and posting a similar link. It directs them to the squeeze page but I'm being upfront and letting them know the duration of the promotion.

Before, I was approaching it as more of a gimmick to get them interested with a bit of mystery. But after a day of silent reflection, I realized this was probably the wrong way to go - simply because we're a nation of "Instant Gratification Junkies" and it was probably ignored. As of yet, I've had not one single reply to the original post after nearly 3 hours.

Edit #2:

After posting 14 different ads in the top 10 most populated cities around the USA (plus some other random ones), we've had just one person sign up for the "FREE Book Notification". I have a feeling the idea of letting someone know it's going to happen is just not working. It looks as though

Note: Two of these ads were removed/deleted from Craigslist as spam. I'm not entirely sure what causes them to be flagged as spam in some areas but not others - are the people doing it? or does Craigslist have an algorithm that automatically flags certain posts? Aside from minor wording tweaks as I posted them and selecting a slightly different image (one of three) there was no difference in the ads and the majority of them are still up and running.

Edit #3:

I put out one more local ad in Honolulu for FREE book days (on Kindle) and also mentioned the FREE Paperback copy of Paranormal America. So far, the response has still be nearly non-existent from what I can tell.

Edit #4:

Out of pure curiosity, this morning I posted the same ad for the FREE book days on Kindle as well as the chance to win the free paperback book in Osaka, Japan and Hong Kong. I'm not really expecting much from the two minutes I spent posting there...but I thought, "Hey, in the off chance these people are curious about America and read English, maybe they'll be intrigued."

Beginning with Facebook ads

Today we created the first Facebook ad ever. We used a tiny budget of only $10 and set it to run from Oct. 22, 2013 to Nov. 1, 2013.

We've found that 66% of our current Facebook fan base are women between the ages of 18-54. As such, the ad is targeted only to women in that age range.

The selected keywords: #Paranormal, #Ghosts, Reading books

This ad was intended to gain page likes based on this interest. Here are the images created for the ad:

Edit #1:

After one day, there were only 3 new "Likes". I thought it might be too thin of a budget since I had set the "Lifetime" cost at only $10.00. I changed the date range from Oct. 22 to Oct. 26 around 9:30 a.m. HST. Over the next 30 minutes we got 32 new "Likes" on the page and spent about $5.75 of the budget.

Edit #2:

After another day, we're up by another 75 page "Likes". I wanted to start a contest, so I upped the budget by $5.00 and created a new ad:

I disabled two of the original ads because one of them wasn't performing well at all ("Did you see something?") and the other had a lower click-through rate compared to the others ("What have you seen?") and replaced it with the "Win it FREE" image above.

As I mentioned, I increased the ad budget by $5.00 because I wanted to see how well this new ad would perform with the same amount available (by that time I was nearly through the original $10.00). So far, its over two times as effective as the first three with a click-through rate of over 41%. I'm not sure if that's good or not, but it seems okay.

Edit #3:

The ad is finished and ended up getting 155 page "Likes". We've gained 1 extra sale, and we had only two people sign up for the contest promotion so far. However, I'm thinking most of these people blindly clicked to like the page but didn't even visit it and certainly didn't follow the links to the sign up page as our website traffic didn't increase more than the usual trickle of people.

The click through on the "FREE" ad/banner ended up dropping down to around 2% click-through while the original version was back up to 11%. I guess it's more important that people see their interest (Ghosts, Aliens, Demons) than the word "FREE" no matter how powerful the books say it is in marketing.

Edit #4:

The final results for both ads ($15.00 total spent) was a gain of 175 page "Likes" according to the stats given by Facebook. We sold perhaps two copies of the book and had one borrowed. I was excited about our results as far as the people liking the page were concerned, but the overall effectiveness seems a bit lacking. We had only 20 people total sign up to win a free copy of the paperback. There are 3 more days until the contest ends and we do our drawing - so hopefully we can round up some more folks by then.

While I'm sure using ads to build up a general population and help your content spread and start gaining more organic traction, I'm not sure how well that works for a page about a product. Since the page doesn't have daily updates and much new information, there is only limited interaction...but I'm trying to come up with some ideas that are (a) cheap and (b) feasible to do daily or weekly to keep people coming back to the page and more importantly, get them to start interacting, sharing, commenting, etc.

I'll continue to post updates as we move along!

Building a fan following from the ground up

Starting from Zero:

We created the website on October 6th, 2013. (Paranormal America website)
We created the Facebook and Twitter pages on the same day. (Facebook Page or Twitter Feed)

As of 10/22/2013, we have 129 "Likes" on the pages and only "10" Twitter followers. We've had 195 unique visitors to the website - with a total of 384 visits.

Beginning with only myself and my wife, we gained around 35 Facebook likes in the first two days. The goal was to reach at least 1,000 likes for the page and eventually, that many sales on the book.

Original Theory:
We figured since we had engaged 50 people for stories, we'd have an instant fan base of those people plus anywhere from 10 to 25 of their close friends and family. We have one final announcement which we hope will draw more people in - which is the back cover of the paperback book including their names. We wanted to give them credit and also thought it would help urge them to promote the book!

Reality Lesson:

1. While we can't be sure this has not worked to some small extent, it clearly wasn't as big of a deal to them as we hoped. If each of them had liked the page we would have started with 52 "Likes" and potentially hundreds more (52 x just 10 friends/family per original person = 520 "Likes").
2. We may not have been persistent enough in making sure that they were all aware. Our original point of contact was Craigslist and many of them replied with anonymous proxy emails. We weren't getting responses from them (over 20 people) when trying to let them know we'd selected their stories.
3. Having an eBook is interesting but it seems that a paperback is still the impressive kid on the block. When we announced a paperback coming soon, the interest seemed to be much greater.