How I got Amazon to run Sponsored Ads for my book on their ad budgets

Amazon promoted my book for free over the past week. In this article, I will share the exact steps I followed and how I ran an Amazon growth hack to promote my book on their ad budgets.

What is this Amazon growth hack about?

This can be considered an ‘Other People’s Budgets’ (OPB) growth hack where you get another business to spend their ad campaign budgets on your product or service. Think of it as a classic twist on the OPN hack. And I can promise you using other people’s ad budgets is much more satisfying than using their networks 🙂

This is not common but if you crack it, it’s the best marketing campaign you can ever run. The ROI yield return ratio is unimaginable as you’re essentially running ads on Google without paying for them.

NOTE: Author’s can also pay Amazon for sponsored campaigns on Amazon itself. This is very different from Amazon ads. In this case, it’s an Amazon growth hack because Amazon is running ads on keyword groups and promoting selected books through the same using their own money.

Step 1: Using KDP Select to publish the book

The first step is to publish the book using Kindle Publishing. There is a KDP select program which you can enroll in as long as you keep the book exclusive to Amazon. So I made sure I don’t upload the book on Google books or any other platform until now.

Step 2: Using the 3-phase price curve for your book’s pricing strategy

Here’s how the 3-phase pricing curve works:

• PHASE #1. Upload the book at a very low price initially even keeping it free works
• PHASE #2. Increase the price to double or more of the final price point at which you actually want to sell the book
• PHASE #3. After the first few 5-star reviews and a one-month time period, reduce the price to the actual price point you planned initially

This creates the ‘PRICE DROP’ label that you saw on the Amazon sponsored post. Also, as a book which dropped its price, you are more likely to show up on the sponsored widget by Amazon than other books in the same category or ad keyword group.

Step 3: Outreach for book reviews

I have all in-depth 5-star reviews on my book on Amazon. This is mostly because it’s an absolutely amazing book with really high-value and actionable growth hacks.

But this is also because I reached out to people for reviews. Even if people love your product, they might miss posting a review. Always drop a gentle reminder to them in case you feel they could write you a review.

My book is sold through Kindle as well as directly in Paperback version. I sent emails to all those who got the paperback version and my VA also approached them on Whatsapp to get the reviews.

You can also see the reviews on the Amazon listing of the book here.

How to Scale this Growth Hack?

I had chosen Amazon.in or Amazon India for this experiment as a lot of my audience is Indian entrepreneurs and marketers.

However, the next step could be to repeat the campaign for Amazon.com. You can do the same in multiple Amazon listings as long as you have a sizable target audience set in each of the countries you’re targeting.

If you have any questions about this growth story, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer it here.

If you haven’t got my book yet, get it here and learn 101 growth hacks.