Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 2 - Services

The Early Days

This is a continuation of my campaign information, and if you want to check out the first post I made about this, you can find the link below to part 1.

My campaign is running really well, and I've begun promoting it to try and bring in more nominations. I'm not really doing any general promotional things right now, focusing more on the bigger things I can write about later in my campaign.

Breakdown5/24/17 - Campaign Submitted

I received my link on this day and submitted to multiple different locations for promotions, including Scout Boost, Books Butterfly, and OnlineBookClub.

 Scout Boost - This is something I haven't tried before. They charge $94 dollars (get 25% off with code: 25%-OFF-NOW) and feature your book in newsletters and other places to get nominations. They only send out up to three books daily, and you can schedule the promotion up to four times (I did it twice because after a while I expect the returns to dramatically diminish). This is scheduled for the 7th and 16th of June to run.Books Butterfly - I used this service last time around to get views on my campaign and they did an excellent job for me. I'm hoping they do just as good this time (I requested 6/8 and 6/18 as promotional days but waiting to hear back from them).OnlineBookClub - This is a wholly new service, because it isn't even something that they offer. Several of my books have been featured as books of the day on Scott's website, and Raven's Peak was even book of the month in April and got a lot of publicity. Setting up my campaign to run on June 13th is something of a trial run, and if it goes well he might be able to open this up to be a permanent offering to reach his 35,000 newsletter subscribers and 170,000 website members.

I also scheduled advertising to go out across several social media sites, including Facebook (+Instagram), Twitter, BookBub, and Goodreads. I also submitted to Bing, GoogleAds, StumbleUpon, and Reddit and those were declined until the campaign begins (since the links show 404 until the campaign goes live). So, now I know which sites actually check and which don't really care!

5/26/17 - Campaign Begins

Today, I resubmitted to the self-serve advertising locations since the site is actually live. With all of the ads, I set my bids incredibly low (a few cents per click at most) because I would rather simply not get any impressions than spend too much money on the advertising. I'll tweak as I go and drop off the lowest performing advertising platforms to focus my efforts once I see who is responding.

I also submitted to two other paid platforms today:

Author Shout - This is another website that runs a promotion during the entire month, and it only costs ten dollars. I'm not really anticipating any huge results out of it, but if it manages to trickle in several people a day I will be thrilled with it.https://authorshout.com/promote-with-usBest Indie Press - This is one that I am leery about using simply because of it's lack of presence or information, but it is one that I sincerely hope proves my reservations wrong. It's expensive ($250, but $50 off with Coupon Code: TS50) and I wouldn't have done it except I want to test it out and report my findings with it. I've seen a recommendation of it from someone I trust, so I'm willing to give it a shot and review.

http://unbouncepages.com/bestindiepress_kindlescout/

Other things I've set up that don't cost money...Newsletter - I set up two different automatic resend newsletters today, spreading them over my campaign to cover as many days as possible. I thought about segmenting it out and trickling it in, but I ended up just doing blasts. *Note* The reason I set two newsletters is one is for my campaign, and one is for another promotional thing I will mention shortly.Blog Posts - I've been writing these slowly and scheduling them in advance. My goal is to get about five to ten posts going during the campaign, some promotional and others informational (like this one).HeadTalkers - Sort of self-explanatory, I set up a couple of these to help drive people to all sorts of different promotions. With luck, I'll get the twenty-five supporters I need to make these a reality (shouldn't be too hard).Drive-By Promotions - This one is a little bit tricky because it requires a lot more effort to set-up as well as effort in general. Most people won't have time to do things like these, and my goal is more just to see how everything comes together long term.Instafreebie Group Giveaway - I am hosting a group giveaway on the site for multiple genres with over seventy participating authors and even more books. I've done many of these before, but for this one I timed it so that it would start around midway in my campaign and run until it ends. Basically, authors sign up to promote their free books, I host the group, and we all direct traffic to the giveaway page. What I did was put global promotional links on my website (at the top and bottom) to drive website traffic over to my campaign page. (If anyone wants to join the giveaway, the signup is here). I usually get several thousand page views during promotions like this, so with luck at least some of those readers will nominate my campaign. It takes a lot of work to organize and setup, along with custom page design.Handouts - I didn't do this last time, so this time I put together bookmarks, rip sheets, and QR codes for people to get to my website and then head over to KS to nominate. I also built custom landing pages to track traffic so I will know exactly how successful this part of the campaign is in bringing traffic. I'm going to a book signing on Memorial Day and I plan to hand out as many things as I can, and then I'll also be leaving bookmarks in as many shops, bookstores, and other places as possible. The other thing I did was make sure the bookmarks took people to my website, not the campaign site, so that after the campaign is over I can simply change the landing page to feature something new and still gain benefit out of that traffic.Gleam Giveaway - I'm going to run a custom giveaway, also during the second half of my campaign. I'll be giving away a $50 dollar gift card, some custom The Everett Exorcism T-Shirts, and a paperback set of my World on Fire series. Altogether the prizes cost about $130 dollars, and the giveaway serves multiple purposes. I have a lot of entry options to help promote my books and brand, and one of the main options is to check out my book on Kindle Scout. This helps because I can drive people to the giveaway itself to reach an audience my normal promotions might not hit. It is also the feature of my second newsletter (so the first drives people to my campaign directly, the second drives people to the giveaway to hopefully catch the people I missed the first time around).Summer Solstice - This was the exact opposite of the IF giveaway, because rather than scheduling it around the campaign, I scheduled to campaign to overlap with it. I put together several anthologies, and this will be the third one in a series of them. The Solstice is June 20th, and the book will be launched to begin heavily promoting that day. Much like the IF giveaway, the hope is to catch drive-by readers who come for the anthology and would like to support me. This one is incredibly difficult to put together and requires a lot of time and effort, and I do it to help cross-promote with a lot of friends and great writers from the Kindle Press World.

Basically, my hope is that I can drive a lot of traffic to my website for various purposes, and then customize the content on my website to unobtrusively funnel people to my campaign to check it out, too. The nice thing is I'll be able to track a lot of the results to see how well the various efforts performed.

My initial guess is that the drive-by options will be too much work/time expense for most people to put together, but I still felt it was necessary to mention them and hopefully help people think of ways to create their own drive-by promotions. It helps you practice funneling and website design as much as anything, and then when you try to do similar things to help promote real sales the experience is invaluable.

The other benefit of this is they don't usually cost money. It's more work, but if your checkbook is the problem and not time than these can be invaluable ways to save money while still bringing people to your campaign!

Results

So far, I have been getting over 200 page views per day, with the number running closer to 300 and peaking at about 420. As far as advertising goes, Facebook has been generating the strongest results, with twitter, google, and stumbleupon just behind it. Bing has been slow, but staying cheap, but reddit, pinterest, and bookbub have been somewhat floundering in results with clicks costing far too much to be worthwhile. I'm ramping those ones down and focusing my efforts in the routes with the strongest results.

My larger advertisements are also ramping up. My giveaway went live on Wednesday and my solo email went live Thursday of this past week (I have another one planned later in the month for the giveaway feature). I still haven't heard back from the service recommended by Tom Swyers so no idea if that one is going to pan out at all (they said contact back within 48 hours and it's been many days).

Upcoming

Next time I'll start reviewing the services I submitted to and giving you all an idea of what works and what doesn't. There were some services I didn't use this time around simply because I already analyzed them in my book and didn't want to spend more money (I'm more interested in trying and reporting on new things than simply getting campaign results).

I'll also post more statistics later on (don't worry!) and let you know how each individual piece performed. Hopefully, with all of the information I gather you'll be able to make your own campaign the perfect one for you!

If you want more in-depth analysis of just how Kindle Scout works and how to set-up a campaign, check out my guidebook. I already broke down things like the hot & trending lists, categories, blurb/cover/excerpt, and many other details that go into the basics of running a campaign.

Other Entries