Friday, 30 November 2012

Using LinkedIn to promote ebooks

Yesterday I started a promotion of my Kindle book, Romancing The Sale by offering free downloads for 3 days.

It was moderately successful with 98 downloads from the USA, 40 from the UK and 1 from Germany. I did a free download promotion on the day I launched the book which was significantly more successful however interestingly although this was a much smaller number of downloads, it was enough to get me to a ranking of 1,050 in all books and #1 in the sales and marketing category. Previously I was around 7,000 so maybe people buy less books this time of year!

So how effective was using the social media aspect of LinkedIn?

The approach I used was to post a status update and encourage people I know to like the status update. I had 46 likes for my status post. The status post lead to this blog and in the blog was a link to the book on Amazon.  I used an Amazon affiliate account to track the Amazon views.

I had 98 visitors to the blog page outlining the offer and there was a link to the book there. The Amazon affiliate account showed I had 31 visitors resulting in 3 purchases - sadly none of them my book.

So 31 out of 98 people viewing the blog went to Amazon (32%) and zero downloads.

Free should eliminate risk but it shows even when risk is eliminated there is not 100% take-up.

Clearly I was getting downloads from somewhere.  I had set up announcements on about 20 of the ebook review sites such  as Pixel of Ink so it looks likely they were driving the traffic and not LinkedIn.

Interestingly I did discover LIKE and SHARE have different behaviours on LinkedIn.  I'm still not entirely sure what SHARE does as it is inconsistent.   Some people shared and it effectively spawns a new status post from them but not always....maybe someone can explain it to me.

So now to experiment number 2.  My day one experiment was a little convoluted with the blog in the way so today I have linked direct to the product on the LinkedIn status post.  Let's see what results that brings...



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