Do book trailers provide a benefit?

In this short post I want to consider the benefit of book trailers. Let’s first of all look at the benefits. If done well, they can help create exposure, in the same way as trailers to movies stimulate your desire to watch a movie . . . or not, as the case may be. Not everyone will want to watch the same movie, or read the same book – but if your target market see it, and like what they see, then it will definitely generate readership.

If you recall my earlier post about AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – a good book trailer, like a good movie trailer, will deliver on all four counts. Once your viewer's attention is grabbed – either through something visual, or audible, the trailer should try to build on this interest and develop a desire for the him/her to want to read the book. Finally, there should be some form of call to action. In other words, details of where the viewer can obtain the book, or at least give them more information about it.

So the major benefit is additional exposure, and potential extra sales. But what about the negatives? The biggest negative is cost, and this is where a minefield exists. Some companies charge huge prices for the creation of a book trailer. An expense you need to re-coup from additional book sales.  Yesterday’s post outlined the number of hits you need to generate to make sales. However, if a book trailer can be created for a modest cost, then it reduces the number of sales required to cover the cost. My own book trailer, below, was produced by Tracy Stewart (www.allaboutthecover.com) for a very modest $50. (Tracy’s normal price is $75, which includes the sourcing of graphics – but I provided my own.)

Once you have a book trailer it can be used on any website, without the need for the website to upload a huge file. My book trailer is on a number of sites, including, for example, my author page on the Independent Author Network website. I’ve already had a number of people inform me directly that they have purchased the book as a result of watching the trailer. I took the view that the cost was low enough to warrant taking a small gamble, primarily due to the flexibility of being able to have the trailer on more than one website.

So in summary, book trailers can help create additional exposure, but you need to be very cautious about how much of your hard earned royalties you are going to invest in them. 

Do cost per click promotions work for authors?

The answer to this question is a simple case of mathematics, and considering a ‘conversion funnel’.  For many years I worked as a Dealer Principal in the automotive retail sector. Based on the performance of the sales staff, I knew how many people, on average, they would need to speak to, to make one sale. We constantly measured conversion rates. How many people who test drove a car would buy one? How many visitors to the showroom would take a test drive? How many people who rang in making any enquiry would make an appointment to visit the showroom, etc etc.

Below is a conversion funnel relating to online book sales.

Let’s create a scenario, relating to the promotion of books, using the above conversion funnel. We’ll say you’ve been approached by an online company who want to promote your book on their website. They state you’ll only get charged if a visitor ‘clicks’ on your link/advert on their site, and they want to charge 10 cents per click. We need to make another assumption – the royalty you receive from the sale of your book. If using the Amazon 70% royalty scheme it could be two or three dollars. Let’s be reasonably ambitious and say $2.50. In our scenario that $2.50 will pay for 25 clicks. If 20%, who click on the link, buy your book, that will provide five sales. So that’s $2.50 out, to get $12.50 in. That’s a pretty good return on investment in anyone’s eyes. But wait a minute. How realistic is it that 20% will make a purchase? We can examine the question by developing the scenario further.

The company approaching you has, say, an impressive 100,000 Twitter followers, and use Twitter to promote their service . . . and your book. The first thing to consider is how many followers actually visit the site, and how many of these visitors are unique? This is the first question to ask the promoter. That 100,000 audience will drop dramatically in terms of active clicks. Let’s be generous and say 10% do. So now the site has 10,000 visitors. What percentage will click on YOUR link? This could be 5%, or in other words 500 people (That would be a high percentage considering all the books being promoted on the site). If you are being charged 10 cents per click, those clicks have just cost you $50. You now need to make 20 sales to cover your costs. OK, so we now have 500 viewers looking at your promotional page on this particular site, with a link to Amazon. How many will click the Amazon link? 10%? If we are lucky. So now we have 50 visitors on the Amazon site. Yikes, you need 40% to buy the book just to achieve breakeven. What sorts of numbers convert to sales on Amazon? Sadly it’s a lot lower than that, and when I say a lot lower, I mean something in the region of 0.1%. Some items will convert higher, and some will be lower, but when I looked at a recent sample of 160,000 visits, across a selection of e-books, it wasn’t far from 0.1% in terms of those actually making a purchase.

I’m now going to turn the numbers on their head, using a 0.1% Amazon conversion. I think I’ve been exceptionally generous with all the previous conversions, but I’ll stick with them for the point of this exercise. To make one sale, you’ll need 1000 visitors to your book’s page on Amazon. If 10% clicked on the Amazon link on your promotion page, you’ll need 10,000 visitors to that page . . . to make one sale . . . and earn $2.50 in royalties. If those 10,000 visitors to your page came from a conversion of 5% visiting the website promoting your book, then the website will need to have 200,000 visitors, and if they arrived at the site due to 10% of all Twitter followers reaching the site, then this particular company need 2 million followers – not 100,000. If you think that’s bad news, remember you’ve had 10,000 visit your page on the promotional website, at 10 cents a click. That $2.50 sale has cost you $1,000.

I accept all the figures here are hypothetical, but one of the biggest mistakes people make in business is vastly overestimating conversion rates. I’ve seen it time and time again when looking at budgets and business plans. The only person who is going to win in the above scenario is the guy charging 10 cents per click.

Marketing Tips for Authors – Author Online Toolkit Part Two

Part Two - Measuring Effectiveness

In the last post I discussed the first part of your online marketing tool-kit, namely the tools of Twitter, Facebook and a website/blog as a minimum. There are of course countless other social media tools such as LinkedIn, Google+ etc. How many you use is a matter of personal choice, and time. But if we say the purpose of all this activity, is to eventually sell more books, we need to know what is, and what isn’t working.

Lord Lever Hulme once remarked – ‘I know half of my advertising works . . . but I don’t know which half it is.’ This is the biggest problem with marketing, most especially those marketing activities which cost money. It is very easy to spend money, and see absolutely no return for that investment. (I’ll cover the cost versus return in another article)

With so much sold online these days, and I’m thinking here specifically about e-books, a web presence is essential, and a website/blog is one of the essential tools. You can have a free blog such as Blogger, which won’t cost you anything for a domain name or server hosting – or you can go to the other extreme and have a bespoke site built and managed by a webmaster. Plus there are many options in between. Regardless which you choose you’ll still need to measure what is going on. Unless having a website is for vanity reasons, they need to work for you. The best tool for measuring online activity is Google Analytics. Blogger, for example, does have a certain amount of statistics, but Google Analytics is the real powerhouse in terms of measuring website activity. These days, just knowing the number of hits the website receives simply isn’t enough.

Google Analytics is a supremely effective tool for measuring a website’s activity. And even better news – it’s absolutely FREE!

So how does it work? Well, the first thing you need to do is attach some very specific “html” code to each page of your website (or just on the Master page, if you have one). Again, the good news is that Google will have automatically written the code for you when you sign up to use the service, and they’ll give you all the instructions required to insert it. To access Google Analytics just click here.

What does Google Analytics tell me?

Once you have set up your free account you can start analysing the data Analytics generates for you. The data is updated every day and you will be taken to your home page each time you log on. It is possible to manage several websites simultaneously within Google Analytics. All the websites you manage will be listed on the home page. By selecting “view reports” you will be taken to your “dashboard”. I don’t have the scope within this article to cover all the functionality of Google Analytics but I can provide a flavour of its power.

The Dashboard

The dashboard is where you choose what you want to view immediately you select “view reports”. The default provides the following information:

Audience Overview – A graph shows you day by day the total number of hits the website has received. Below the graph, there is other data, including – total number of pages viewed, average number of pages viewed per visit, bounce rate (the percentage of people who left the site from the same page they entered the site without visiting any other pages), the average time each visitor spent on the site and the percentage of people who visited the site for the first time. All that information in itself is very powerful, but as you’ll discover there is a great deal more to come.

Standard Reports

Real Time – This provides data on what is happening right now on your website

Audience – This is the default data, as described above. You can also drill down into areas such as demographics, behaviour and technology.

Traffic Sources – This element provides information on how your visitors arrived at your site. Was it direct traffic (those that type your web address into the address bar), search engines (and it tells you which ones) or from referring sites. This last one is especially important. The more sites that are linked to your site the more important Google considers your site. Think about all the sites that you have visited that offer you a download as a PDF (portable document format) file. Adobe are the creators of PDF files and as Adobe Acrobat Reader is used to read these files many sites provide a link to Adobe’s website where the free Acrobat Reader software can be downloaded. Adobe therefore have millions of referring sites across the Internet, making them a very important site as far as Google are concerned. Also within this section Analytics will tell you the keywords used, by those visitors that used a search engine, to find your site. This is invaluable data when trying to optimise your site for search engine visibility.

Content – This section provides deeper analysis on which specific pages have been visited. Look for the pages that have very high bounce rates and short periods of time spent on them. This may suggest that the visitor is not finding the page of interest – time for some action to help boost its ratings!

As we have already seen the default dashboard is a gold mine of useful information about what is happening on your website. However, other aspects of website activity may be more important to you. As Google recognise this fact they have structured Analytics to provide you with a dashboard that can be customised. I’ll be doing more Google Analytics articles in the future to look at some features in more detail.

So that is a quick guide to some of the functionality of Google Analytics. It’s intuitive, it’s powerful, it will add value to your web marketing initiatives and above all else – it’s FREE!

One final point – you should use Google Analytics to track how you your visitors get to the site and use the site. Don’t corrupt your data with activity from internal laptops and PCs. Make sure you use the Analytics filter to ensure that internal visits to your website are not included in your data collection. Each computer attached to the Internet has its own IP (Internet Protocol) address. If you wish to know the IP address of each computer then log on to www.whatismyip.com and it will provide you with the number, which is supplied in four blocks, such as: 123.45.67.255

You will need to type the number into the Google Analytics filter. This process should be done for each computer connected to the internet.