How to use Kindle free days to promote your book

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: Hey guys how are you in this video I'm gonna explain to you how to use the Kindle countdown deals to promote your book and it's really actually very interesting so this video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy you know you go to your KTB KDP home you go to your you again you go to your bookshelf as I just did and you click on any book let's say let's say this one the marketing one well let's say it maybe whatever yeah the marketing one it doesn't matter which one manage benefit so even though it says Kindle managed book $1.99 the Kindle book the actual Kindle book is is $4.99 for this right 495 as you can see and so you go to manage benefits and you choose not the free book promotion you choose the Kindle countdown deal okay so you click this create a new countdown deal and you choose the marketplace you choose the dates that you want usually the best dates are like starting I like to start on Monday some people like to start on Sunday it really depends on what your book price is because the way this works is it's gonna be like the first day will be like let's say your book is 495 like with mine so the first day the price will be 99 cents the second day price will be $1.99 third day would be $2.99 next 399 and then back to regular price right so it's kind of cool because it creates this sort of scarcity like get you gotta get it today because tomorrow it will be more expensive but also you want to end on a day that is a high-volume internet traffic day and usually the worst volume Internet traffic days are Friday and Saturday Sunday is okay Monday Tuesday Wednesday are usually the best so you're gonna start on them either starting on like a Monday or kind of end on a Monday Tuesday Wednesday right so it's tricky because you get you you kind of end up you know it's hard to feel it well on both ends of that but at least you know maybe it's good to start on at least a like for me I always would I always like to start on a Monday because I don't know Sunday's iffy because it really depends on the audience that you're targeting but Monday is definitely you know everyone's online everyone's at work its back people are back to normal so I prefer Monday some people like Sunday those are typically the good days for this so you post your discounts right you start at any price I would start like at $0.99 you can choose the price increments all that kind of stuff so they give you some choices the dates which we just talked about and really you know your book becomes 90 minutes ends the night the first day that you choose and what happens is you know just like if you were promoting it with promoting your book with a free discount but with the free deal you would simply promote your book we you know in in all the same ways you would promote the discount deal right and so what you would do is you would go to all the online forums and again it's a growth growth coupon calm blackhat forum retailmenot.com right it has a coupon [Music] like section slick deals that net fatwallet calm totally free stop calm I guess you don't do I guess that one you don't do for for the for the countdown because they want free stuff but okay so scratch that one and then retailmenot.com coupon layer calm edu dealer calm and then what I like to do is on Twitter and Facebook what you want to do is promote your book there and use the hashtags deals and discounts and stuff like that right so the people who aren't your followers can find you because you use the hashtags deals and and discount and get your friends to retweet you because when you when you get retweeted you kind of go if you get a lot of retweets you kind of end up going to the top of those hashtag categories when people search the hashtag so you see read so your tweet doesn't just disappear within seconds or minutes it kind of stays up there in that hashtag category and a lot of people can potentially find you so that's another neat little trick that I use you know some things you can't do that you would normally do with a free promotion like you know you can't post on forums that only promote free ebooks um so things like that what you could do is buy maybe some Fiverr gigs I actually have a fiver seller that I like and he's very effective at promoting Kindle ebooks his screen name is BK Knights and I'll have a link to that seller on a nautical going to fiber for people who are not familiar and he's got a lot of he's got a lot of big audience for people who are into the Kindle ebooks and collected to read them and buy them and see what's new in the Kindle so he can effectively help to promote your deal especially if you need to coordinate the exact day he's typically pretty good at that even though he's busy so um so he's a good resource I personally use him I mean fools full disclosure he doesn't pay me to promote him I just recommend him because I found histor was pretty good actually very good so the coupons themselves they should do well which you can also do is just like in the free with the with the free deals um definitely find all the kind of people who already have access to your audience and just consistently do outreach especially on the first day on the first day all you do is out reach out reach out reach out reach and in if you want to be extra proactive about it do the outreach few days earlier because you want to kind of get people you know sometimes people take a day to answer emails or who knows you know you don't want to leave it maybe on that same day I don't think you would make a gigantic difference if you do the you know redo the reach out reach the time they are you know the few days earlier but either way definitely do that hustle piece of just outreach and find the people who have access to your audience and let them know of this deal because maybe they'll be happy to promote the deal to their audiences and what you have to do basically is what you have to do is with all these efforts what you gotta induce is enough sales so that the sales is a gigantic metric for Amazon in terms of how they decide to rank books for different keywords and so you've got to drive your sales to make sure that you end up ranking better so that you blow your competition out of the water right and so this is really the magic of the free giveaways on Kindle and these count down deals so you know you've got to really take advantage of it and if you do take advantage it correctly you can do this every 90 days so you kind of become better at it over time and you kind of will get to know what works what doesn't and things like that and also of course always grow your own audience whether it's your email list or your blog traffic or maybe YouTube audience or somebody that you can ping and then say hey you know I've got this promotion right now buy it and you know obviously people will buy especially if it's a paid thing but any sales when it's a paid product any sales helps to accelerate your sales rate which helps you ultimately to rank and if you rank you get far more organic sales over time so I mean this is really soon Amazon it's really a race to sell more because then you'll rank better and that's it so try this and I hope it helps you and good luck.Video Transcription: hey guys how are you so I want to show you how to promote your book with free discount this video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy it's very easy first of all you go to your Kindle home page so it's KDP that amazon.com as you see when you sign in and then this is your the first thing that appears is your bookshelf and you can choose from your books and then what happens is you click on any of the book that you want to promote let's say I want to promote this book then my marketing plan book click on the manage benefits when you do that you're presented with a choice there are two kinds of things you can do you can do a countdown deal or a free book promotion in this video we're talking about the free book promotion so you do the free book promotion you say okay create a new reboot promotion and then it gives you dates you can do this for five days every 90 days right um and sometimes I do it all five days in a row sometimes I don't let me show you kind of what I did in my most recent free promotion and I'll show you what I did so these were the results I promoted it for one and a half days so as you can see these are the free so I had no free downloads because I wasn't offering the book for free on any of those days then the book the day that I offered the book for free I got 185 downloads which is not bad but not the best launch by it's not it wasn't much but it wasn't the best promotion by any means but it wasn't too shabby either and I'll explain in a second how I got those 185 sales and at this point when I woke up the next morning when I woke up on this day I looked at my Kindle book and on Amazon and I'm I should have taken a screenshot but I didn't and I regret it now but I was surprisingly enough number one in three categories like starting a business small business and nonprofit and something for like young adults so for confer Kindles right um and that is just from this one-day promotion which was pretty amazing so what I did was and this is a trick that a lot of kind of savvy Kindle marketers used what I did was in the morning of this November 4th you see how it's like a big drop of just 41 downloads because in the morning of that day I actually switched out I opted out of the free promotion so I made the book pay and the reason for doing that is if you've already achieved the rankings that you want which to my surprise it only took it one day like I was on top of them different categories that I was targeting if you're if you already cheap which you wanted so you can make your book paid you can switch it back to paid and what that does is for that for the remainder of that day you'll still be visible in the free categories where you're ranking number one when you're getting a lot of exposure but your book will be paid so a lot of people will see your book a lot more many more people than normally would so many more people that many more people would see your book than they normally would but it would be it would be no longer a free promotion it would be a paid regular price book see that so it's a little bit of a trick that is just for that one day and it can be really good because as you know the more downloads you have the better but the free downloads are not as valuable that they don't have as much weight as the paid downloads so this is also a good way to boost your paid downloads by doing that one day trick but let me show you how I already style explain to you how I achieved I got to those hundred eighty-five downloads right you know it isn't that easy because this actually this book wasn't my marketing book promotion this was my life fundraising book and it's a little bit of a niche topic so you know a hundred five dollars for that book even even isn't an easy thing and what I did was I as I posted that book as soon as that that morning when I woke up which was the first day when the book was free what I did was I right away of course you know I did the basic things like I emailed my email list I did a basic social media outreach and things like that and and those got some downloads but we really helped me get the spike and what's easy for you to do as well is what I did was I went to a bunch of online coupon sites and I posted my free coupon right it's a free deal I'm giving you away something for free and let me tell you about the site that I posted I posted on and I'll have the links to those sites after the video but just to quickly recap it I went to growth coupon calm black hat forum calm warrior forum calm warrior forum be careful because it's a paid thing so maybe avoid that because it's paid right it has a coupons section slick deals that net fatwa calm totally free stones calm and retailmenot.com coupon layer calm edu dealer calm find a coupons calm although actually find a coupons I think that's only for that's not for books so maybe scratched our and then so you can see there's a lot of coupon sites and then what I also did was I googled for Facebook groups where all they do is give away free Kindle books and it's like incredibly easy to find because I just basically did a Google search and I found a ton of groups and basically I just even out the moderators and said hey can you please you know post my book it's free and that was pretty easy and that so what really happened was all these coupon sites what they did was they gave me this really rapid spike because I posted my coupons like all within like an hour or two hour window right and I got this really nice spike like um as you can see like throughout the day like like around by the fiftieth download like I was all my coupons already posted and like the whole day kind of went smoothly and then the Downloads just came naturally because I was on top of the categories so I didn't need to really promote it anymore and that's why I thought like you know I can't push the book anymore extra I've already achieved this download and I have like a few more free days within a tiny period window available so I'll save those and then I switch the book to pay it again and so you see the book is paid again so I'm actually surprised to see that something added one free download here I didn't even knew that know that because I didn't know that was possible because I stopped the promotion here anyway I guess that was maybe some which for some person but you see how that works and think also about anyone who has audience that you that your book is targeting so you can always reach out to them and say hey I have a free book for your group you can give it away because you can give away free value right and usually people are responding like responsive to to it and I know that this works because a lot of people contact me when they have like like very recently somebody was publishing a face book book and I have some resources on Facebook and they were like well engineer email it to your Facebook list and I said sure you know no problem and so a lot of people do this and you know for me it was like pure benefit right because I was able to give something for free to my followers which people appreciate it so it was just so so that's another thing you can do in addition to posting on Facebook groups and in addition to posting on the coupon sites because these are these these are all things like that are very simple to do and there are no gatekeepers like almost right so you can really do it on your own so that's it and that's pretty much how I you know used the free the free deals to shoot up to number one and in the categories that I targeted and then you know of course once the free deal stopped the my category rankings naturally dropped a bit but my search rankings they stayed up you know they stayed up they I maybe should have done it for many more days like for the remainder of the five days because I didn't I didn't become number one but I certainly shot up in the rankings of what my book was ranking for an Amazon like fundraising ideas fundraising strategies like after this one day like few days later I was ranking if we refuse a few spots higher on in every search that I'm targeting which was a very nice resolve after just a one day promotion so try this and I hope it's awful.