🤫 How I Lied My Way to the #1 Spot on Amazon-2

Kasim [00:00:11] I wanna teach you how to lie your way to the bestseller list on Amazon

Kasim [00:00:14] Just kidding

Kasim [00:00:15] But sort of

Kasim [00:00:16] So we wrote a book you may or may not know you versus Google the very

Kasim [00:00:19] unauthorized guide to Google ads

Kasim [00:00:20] And it was number one worldwide in both marketing and advertising,

Kasim [00:00:24] which are two Google's or two of Amazon's toughest categories

Kasim [00:00:27] Within the Kindle ebook rankings

Kasim [00:00:29] And I've done that before

Kasim [00:00:30] I've done it once before with my other book the Seven Critical Principles

Kasim [00:00:33] of Effective Digital Marketing

Kasim [00:00:35] Didn't think that title through

Kasim [00:00:36] Just try to rip off Stephen Covey and the way generally this works,

Kasim [00:00:40] by the way, and this is the model

Kasim [00:00:41] So if you're gonna write a book and you wanna hit number

Kasim [00:00:43] one this works pretty well

Kasim [00:00:44] Instead of launching the book and trying to market it That doesn't work because

Kasim [00:00:48] Amazon resets its rankings daily

Kasim [00:00:51] And so everybody who bought today doesn't apply to your ranking

Kasim [00:00:53] tomorrow and so on and so forth

Kasim [00:00:55] It's, on this 24 hour rolling pattern

Kasim [00:00:56] So what you wanna do is market the book from a pre-launch perspective

Kasim [00:01:01] So we started marketing and we ran ads

Kasim [00:01:03] We did YouTube videos

Kasim [00:01:04] We sent out emails to our list saying, Hey, we wrote a book

Kasim [00:01:08] Versus Google

Kasim [00:01:08] It's, gonna be amazing

Kasim [00:01:09] It's, the authoritative guide

Kasim [00:01:11] Everybody's been waiting for it, I'm gonna give it to you for 99 cents for a day

Kasim [00:01:15] And I'm pretty sure that Amazon's promotional window, by the way,

Kasim [00:01:18] requires you to list it for a little bit more than that

Kasim [00:01:20] I don't remember exactly, but

Kasim [00:01:22] You, still, you're gonna, you know, mark it down to nine, 9 cents for

Kasim [00:01:25] a short period and then put it back to where you want it to go

Kasim [00:01:27] And the reason you're doing this is because you get a

Kasim [00:01:29] bunch of people to opt in

Kasim [00:01:30] So you run the ads, you send out the emails, you go to your

Kasim [00:01:33] list and you say, Hey, I'm gonna give you this book for 99 cents

Kasim [00:01:35] I'm only going to give it away for nine, 9 cents for a day

Kasim [00:01:37] And I'm not gonna tell you when it is, opt in, if you wanna get

Kasim [00:01:40] alerted when the promotion goes live

Kasim [00:01:42] It's, you know, sometime in May or whatever the month

Kasim [00:01:44] is that you're doing this

Kasim [00:01:45] So we've got thousands of people to opt in, literally thousands

Kasim [00:01:49] of people to opt into our list

Kasim [00:01:50] And we've got this huge list and we've promised everybody this book

Kasim [00:01:52] for 99 cents, the ebook, right?

Kasim [00:01:54] You're not gonna get the physical book

Kasim [00:01:55] It costs me, I think it costs me $20 to print this damn thing

Kasim [00:01:58] Look at this

Kasim [00:01:58] It's unbelievable and it's color

Kasim [00:02:00] Which is great

Kasim [00:02:00] It looks great

Kasim [00:02:01] So we get thousands of people to opt in for the ebook

Kasim [00:02:03] I go

Kasim [00:02:04] To set the promotion inside of K D P, which is the Amazon publishing portal,

Kasim [00:02:10] and Amazon has this weird obscure rule that if you are the file size

Kasim [00:02:15] of your ebook exceeds a certain size

Kasim [00:02:18] You can't list it at 99 cents

Kasim [00:02:20] The lowest you can list it is at like two point 99

Kasim [00:02:22] And so now I'm like, I just promised

Kasim [00:02:24] Thousands of people, this book for nine, 9 cents, , now it's 2 99

Kasim [00:02:28] you might say, well that's, it's $2

Kasim [00:02:29] Who cares?

Kasim [00:02:30] Breaking a promise in the world of marketing, catastrophic error, complete

Kasim [00:02:34] reach of trust, etiquette integrity

Kasim [00:02:37] Like if you tell people you're gonna do something, you better do it, especially

Kasim [00:02:39] if they don't really know who you are

Kasim [00:02:40] And so it was this, this horrible inflection point where I was

Kasim [00:02:43] like, well, what do we do?

Kasim [00:02:44] We can't

Kasim [00:02:45] like Amazon will not allow us to mark this book down to 99 cents

Kasim [00:02:49] The lowest we can go down is two point 99

Kasim [00:02:50] We need to launch the book

Kasim [00:02:51] We've made a bunch of promises and had obligations and whatnot

Kasim [00:02:54] So what we decided to do is I sent out an email to everybody who opted

Kasim [00:02:58] in and I said the subject line was, I've made a horrible mistake

Kasim [00:03:01] And then we split tested that with, I lied to you and I'm pretty sure that I lied to

Kasim [00:03:05] you, outperformed the horrible mistake

Kasim [00:03:07] Regardless

Kasim [00:03:07] It's a pretty compelling subject line

Kasim [00:03:09] Got a much better open rate than what would've expected to get otherwise,

Kasim [00:03:11] and I just told everybody the truth

Kasim [00:03:13] I said, Hey, I promise you this book for nine 9 cents, Amazon won't let me

Kasim [00:03:16] mark it down to nine 9 cents because of their file size policy screenshot

Kasim [00:03:19] of, the error message I was getting

Kasim [00:03:21] So I'm just gonna give you the book for free

Kasim [00:03:23] And then I created an opt-in page where they could go fill out a

Kasim [00:03:25] form and get the ebook for free

Kasim [00:03:27] We just sent 'em a P D F file, and then I went on to say, however, I'm

Kasim [00:03:30] still trying to hit the number one spot, so if you wouldn't mind buying

Kasim [00:03:33] the book, I'd be really grateful

Kasim [00:03:34] I have it marked down to 2 99

Kasim [00:03:35] If you don't want to totally get it, no big deal

Kasim [00:03:37] Here's what's interesting, the people on the list, a ton of

Kasim [00:03:40] people downloaded the free ebook

Kasim [00:03:41] Far fewer bought the book than I would've expected otherwise if it was 99 cents

Kasim [00:03:45] However, that was the initial blast

Kasim [00:03:47] What ended up happening though, is that page, the free book page

Kasim [00:03:50] Went pseudo viral

Kasim [00:03:51] People started sharing it like, Hey, you can get the Solutions eight

Kasim [00:03:54] book for free by going to this page

Kasim [00:03:56] And on the page, I had a video of myself explaining the exact same situation

Kasim [00:04:00] Look, we don't wanna give this away for free

Kasim [00:04:01] We worked for hard, you know, really hard on it

Kasim [00:04:03] It's 18 months of my life, but I made this mistake I'm giving

Kasim [00:04:05] away for free for a short period

Kasim [00:04:07] However, if you want to help us hit number one, please go by the book

Kasim [00:04:09] And we got it

Kasim [00:04:11] Must have been

Kasim [00:04:12] Five times as many sales as I expected based off of that promotion because

Kasim [00:04:17] a ton, you know, far more people downloaded their free ebook, but

Kasim [00:04:19] enough people were, you know, kind and empathic and helpful and clicked through

Kasim [00:04:23] and bought the book that we ended up being number one in both marketing

Kasim [00:04:26] And advertising

Kasim [00:04:27] And one of those is much bigger than the other

Kasim [00:04:28] By the way, in my previous book, I only hit number one for the smaller of the two

Kasim [00:04:32] I think advertising is bigger than marketing or vice versa, whatever

Kasim [00:04:35] I should know that marketing's bigger

Kasim [00:04:36] Who knows?

Kasim [00:04:36] We'll find out

Kasim [00:04:37] Regardless, It was a great way to turn a bat into a good,

Kasim [00:04:40] a negative, into a positive

Kasim [00:04:41] And I got a lot of really good feedback

Kasim [00:04:42] People, you know, hitting me up, messaging me, emailing me

Kasim [00:04:45] like, Hey man, good on you

Kasim [00:04:46] Tough spot to be in, et cetera, et cetera

Kasim [00:04:47] So, built some goodwill, put some books in people's hands, helped some folks

Kasim [00:04:50] hit number one across all of Amazon, which is a feat worldwide, number

Kasim [00:04:55] one, marketing, advertising you versus Google, and the book is still free

Kasim [00:04:58] By the way, if you wanna download the free ebook, you can go

Kasim [00:05:00] to so lake.com/free-book, or

Kasim [00:05:03] Maybe we can buy it

Kasim [00:05:03] Give us $3 or whatever it ends up being now

Kasim [00:05:05] So that was it

Kasim [00:05:06] I just wanted to share that story with you 'cause I thought it

Kasim [00:05:08] was kind of cool to be honest

Kasim [00:05:09] And if you plan on launching a book, that's the way to do it

Kasim [00:05:11] So I hope this is helpful

Kasim [00:05:13] I shoot a video every day