Here Is Why You Are Failing

     Making money online is all a numbers game. I don't care what anyone else says, if you want to make dough online, you have to produce good numbers. But what does that really mean? Do I need more traffic? Is the traffic I have ok if it is targeted? Where do I even get traffic? What's more important, clicks or conversions? It seems like there are a million questions that everyone likes to be vague about when it comes to making money online. I can answer 90% of them by simply stating, "It's all a numbers game."

Self Publishing?  Why Kindle Unlimited Is Killing Your Publishing Business

     Most of the time 'more' of anything is good. If you have more money, then you are obviously happy with that. If you have more trash though.... not so good. When working online, everything comes down to traffic. The more eyes you have viewing whatever you are promoting is usually a good thing. The catch is, you have to get a lot of people to view what you are promoting who are actually interested in what you are promoting. If you have a lot of people who are coming to your site, but have no interest in what you are promoting, they are going to leave quickly, or worse, leave bad reviews. 

    Having targeted traffic is great. If you can get a lot of people to look at what you are trying to promote, and are interested in the niche you are promoting in, generally you are doing great. If you have a bad product though, it wouldn't matter how targeted the traffic is, you aren't going to make a lot of money. People might be interested in the niche that you are in, but they dislike your product. 

Struggling for Traffic? Read This Article

     Maybe you have a great product. You have a very targeted traffic source, and plenty of it, but you still aren't converting. What could be the problem then? If this is you, chances are your promotional information isn't good enough. Your website could be turning people off. Your sales copy could look spammy. This is where a lot of online marketers do what is called 'split testing' or A/B testing. They try a few different things to see what works the best and then use that method. Some things you split test might work for one product, but not for another. That is why making money online isn't a science as much of an art. You have to figure out what works best for what you are trying to promote, and most of the time, no two products promote the same way twice. 

     Whats the right way to do things then? Well there is no right or wrong way to do things when it comes to making money online. That is why so many people fail at making any money online. Guru's make it seem like it is a science. All you have to do is follow this formula that they just so happen to have and you'll make billions. Making money online is more of an art form than a science and it takes a whole lot of testing to see what works best. If what you are doing isn't working, start from the beginning and test different things till you get it right. 

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Why Kindle Unlimited Is Killing Your Publishing Business

 

     Kindle is the best traffic source for ebooks hands down. There are a lot of ebook self-publishing platforms out there, but none compare to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (or KDP). It has has a reputation for making a lot of people money quickly and easily. But what you don't know about KDP or Amazon is that they don't have a reputation for playing nice with their vendors or publishers. Amazon over the years has taken a very hard-line stance at protecting customers. So much so that they even will terminate accounts with vendors and publishers over the smallest of infractions, or even worse, no infractions at all.
   
     Think of it from Amazon's prospective. You are profiting off of their platform and they take a cut of that profit. They have unlimited businesses who try to make money from Amazon's different services. If they feel that the customer is negatively impacted in any form, they will cut ties with your business.

     Let's take Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program. It is basically the "Netflix of books". Customers pay a 10$ monthly subscription to read as many books as their little hearts desire. You as the publisher, enroll your book into the Kindle Select program so that you can get extra profit from Kindle Unlimited members. You agree to only sell your book on Kindle in exchange for a second revenue stream. So now not only do you get paid sales, but you also get a second revenue stream for your same books.

     You get paid 1/2 cent roughly per page read of your book. Seems like a pretty sweet deal until you break down the numbers. Let's say your book is an even 300 pages. you sell that book for 2.99 in the Kindle book store. You are going to get around $2 per sale after Amazon takes their cut. Now lets say you get around 10 people to buy your book. You are going to net around $20 in profit. Now here is where the second revenue stream, KENP (Kindle Enrolled Nominal Pages) comes in. Let's say you get 10 people to download your book. If your book is 300 pages and they are valued at 1/2 cent per page, that gives you a total of $15 bucks! Here's the problem, of those 10 people, statistically only one will read the whole book. The other nine will read varying amounts but the majority wont read it past the first chapter, if at all.

     Out of those 10 People, you are looking more at around 500 pages read, or $2.50 dollars. Now take a look at things from a different perspective. If you were to not enroll your book into KDP Select and place your book on all the other platforms plus promote the book yourself from your own site (I show you how to do this here), Do you think you can make more than $2.50 dollars? I'm guessing you definitely can crush that number by selling your books on other platforms as well as selling it yourself.

     In the end Amazon wants content. Customers pay Amazon $10 per month to be a Kindle Unlimited member and they can't afford to pay you more than that per person without losing money. Amazon came up with a way around this by raising or lowering the per page payout and thus your profits and other authors profits. Amazon is essentially using your books for cheap content to fuel its Kindle Unlimited program.

     My suggestion would be to not enroll in KDP select anymore. In fact, My suggestion would be to sell your books on your own website and drive traffic to your website. You could sell your books at $5 dollars easily for a good quality book and there are tons of FREE ways to promote your books. You Keep 100% of the profits as well as 100% of the traffic.
When your book is on Amazon, its their website and they are out to sell everything and anything. You drive traffic to your books on Amazon, and they in turn post tons of stuff on your books sales page. "Other people bought this", "You might like this" bla bla bla. Its not your sales page, its Amazon's and they are going to sell on it. I could consider any money that you made selling your ebooks on platforms as Icing on the cake instead of the whole business model.

     You are selling yourself short so you can use Amazon's traffic. They don't care about you unless you are buying something. Buy into yourself and reach your full potential instead of scrambling for the scraps that Amazon was so gracious to leave you.

Changing How You Get Traffic To Your eBooks

I have really been focused on traffic lately. In my personal mastermind group, I have impressed the importance of traffic. It is the life blood of any online enterprise.

I feel that I personally have been going about traffic the wrong way. From all the experts I have pooled together about Kindle Publishing, it has always been stressed to hit up FB groups. Build a Twitter following, Build your list etc... While all of things are important, I feel there is an overall better way of doing things.

First off, I couldn’t figure out why would I want to send traffic from so many different places to so many other different places? Why would I work my tail off sending my traffic to Amazon? I know that is where my books are, but all my books have different links. If I send someone to my link and they actually go, Amazon has all these distractions around my book! I might have just sent them to go buy someone else’s book.

I feel a blog is the best way to circumvent this. When you send people a link and ask them to read your book, it’s a lot like showing up at their house unannounced and soliciting them. It has that Jehovah’s Witness feel when you send them a link like that. I would just rather warm them up and prepare them for what I'm about to send them. That is what an article or a blog post can do for you. People are more likely to click on an intriguing blog post than an overstuffed keyword filled eBook title. I mean what would you click on, "7 Hot New trends in Internet Marketing! You'll never believe #4!" or "Internet Marketing: trendy trends that are trending ‪#‎Trends‬."

You also get the added bonus of having the biggest search engines working for you as well as Amazon. You will rank for your keywords in Google, Bing, and Yahoo just to name a few. Driving traffic to your blog is so much easier when you can have a better worded title that doesn’t need to be keyword stuffed like on Amazon.

Social media means a whole lot more to you when you can promote a blog posting instead of an eBook title. 7 Hot New trends in Internet Marketing! You'll never believe #4!" is great click bait if your niche is Internet marketing. People what to click on your link just to see what the hell #4 is.

Your blog post should be written as an informative article using your book as a citation. You are basically reviewing your eBook in your article and linking it to Amazon.

You will also be able to create an authority site which will be able to support different ads which will also make you money. People will come to your site to get info on whatever your niche is.

You will be able to review other affiliate products as well as your books to earn commissions. This is an obvious home run.

On your own blog, you will be able to integrate an opt in page a whole lot more places. Building your email list is the second most important thing in your publishing business behind actually producing books.

These are the types of things I have been working on with my clients and with my mastermind group. I have just recently opened it up for everyone who wants to join. I don’t know how long I will keep the door to my mastermind group open for so I would get in now.

Gain access now https://www.facebook.com/groups/levelupmastermind/

I would like to thank you for your time and reading this post. I hope you have found great value in reading it and I look forward to discussing everything with you guys!

The Best Traffic Source That You Just Have to See NOW!

I am really big into software. I think if you want to take your online business to the next level, you need to invest in proper tools.
If you want to really lock down your publishing business, email marketing, or online business in general, you NEED traffic. You can pay tons of money buying that traffic in the forms of ads, or you can spend weeks and months building up free traffic sources. I found a piece of software that takes free traffic and builds it up fast for you! It’s called Mass Planner and it’s a staple in my online publishing business as well as my email marketing.
The jest of the method is to buy or make massive amounts of FaceBook, Pinterest, Twtter, and Instagram accounts and let this software grow the accounts for my while directing traffic to where ever I choose. To do this, I will also need a VPN and lots of Proxies.
Think of a fire hose that has gone unchecked and is spewing water recklessly all over the place. At any time I can grab the hose and point it at an email list, a book, or an affiliate product or website and drive mass amounts of traffic to it. Imaging having hundreds of accounts in all of the platforms listed above directing traffic to whatever you want. Imagine the instant success of whatever book you just published.
This software automatically grows the accounts for you. No more having to manually add tons of people each day. This software actually will target people in a specified niche for you.
Not only can this software grow accounts and post to mass amounts of people but it also has the benefit of making whatever you want go viral! You can have all the accounts that you have in the software from all the different social media platforms actually share and like a post from a single account. This has a ripple effect across the internet instantly making whatever you want go viral. This is the same method that large sites like buzzfeed . com and daily . com use.
Get this software working hard for your business now, go to www.massplanner.com

How I Turned 5 eBooks Into a Small Kindle Empire In 3 Months

First off, I would like to preface this with yes, I am going to promote myself. I want to get that out of the way right off the bat. I have a great story to tell along the way, but alas, I really just want you to buy my books. Actually I want you to borrow them.

Visit my Author Profile for Amazon Here!

My journey takes place a lot longer than three months ago. I have always been a fan of Internet Marketing. I treated it as an interest that I would one day pursue or a hobby I liked to dabble and daydream about. Along the way I have tried a great many things in my vain attempt to make money online. (For you marketers, I used the keyword “make money online” when I really didn’t have to just to increase my keyword count.) I don’t want this to come off sounding like a sales pitch because honestly I rather like my story. Suffice it to say though, that I did try a lot of things in the Internet Marketing realm and some of them I’m not so proud of. (As a devout Christian, I even tried uploading porn for paid sign-ups until my morality grabbed hold of my common sense and beat the tar out of it.)

I stumbled across Kindle Publishing Direct, or KDP earlier this year and instantly fell in love with it. I am an avid reader and call myself something of a writer. (I suck.) There was something about Kindle Publishing that really called my name. I guess it was the idea of publishing some of my works as well as running a business all in one that really sold it for me.

This is where my Journey for this Reddit post begins. I published my first book in July and had mediocre success in the publishing world, but as an author it was a complete bomb. I didn’t have a clue on what I was doing even with my Internet Marketing background. I doubled down my efforts and went to work researching everything I could on Kindle Publishing Direct. Like any sane person does after searching for minutes with no luck, I went to YouTube. I told myself I was going to look up videos on KDP but really I wanted to check out funny cat videos. I availed myself to search out KDP after a few small hours of hardly laughs, (damn cats get me every time!) and came across a guy who was somewhat of an expert in KDP. I rabidly watched every video in record time.

This actually took me quite a while to do in reality as he had over 50 videos on KDP and most of them were 20+ minutes long but that doesn’t make for good writing. Over the course of a month I started applying some of the strategies I learned from YouTube on my lone book. I learned how to target a keyword instead of a category to increase my sales rank. I learned something else that really increased my sales. Kindle Direct Publishing had just recently changed their payout structure which really hurt a lot of people. They packed up their businesses and went looking for greener pastures. I found this to be a great opportunity.

KDP used to pay people two ways. It would pay you for whatever direct sales you made at whatever price point you set for your book, as well as anyone who borrowed your book through its Prime membership. People made a killing by having their eBooks borrowed by Prime users and it was a win for everyone but Amazon. Big Daddy Amazon of course made changes and wrecked everyone’s free lunch. They changed their borrowed structure by starting a new program called Kindle Unlimited. Members pay 9.99$ a month and basically get to Netflix books. It changed from paying per borrow (which was around 1.35$ per book the lucky bastards) to paying per page read (which is around .0048$ now….mean face!)

This is where my empire truly formed. If you have an eBook that is 300 pages you’ll get about 1.44$ granted the person who borrowed it reads the entire thing. But here’s the catch, most people don’t read past the first chapters of even very popular books (I still haven’t finished the Hunger Games!) You need to get the reader to the end of the book to get all your pages read.

I applied one of the strategies I learned from YouTube and offered the reader another eBook right off the bat. I made a pretty and shiny red button that was clickable and said “FREE!” and placed it right below the headline “Get My eBook ‘insert eBook title here’ Now!” The Button would take them to the back of the book where they could click on a link which would take them to a landing page where I collected there email address so I could send them a copy of the eBook as promised.

I don’t know if you saw what I did but it was a huge gold mine which makes me a lot of money. When someone clicks on the link it takes them to the back of the book. It actually counts all the pages as read! I have to take a minute here and place my own interjections in here. I emailed Amazon to see if I was actually allowed to do that and it was encouraged! As per Amazons TOS they want you to have a clickable (Hyperlinked) Table of Contents. I asked them one more question, do they allow Boxsets or Collections of books in one book. When I got the “affirmative” from Amazon that, Yes, I could box up my works of writing into one eBook that’s exactly what I did.

I started writing my other four books. I don’t know if you know this, but if you have 5 eBooks there are 20 different ways you can package them, (One book can have 4 others in it, totaling 5 complete books in all.) Some of the overall page lengths for these books are 1,500 pages long. That combined with my Free gift at the front means a 7.20$ profit for me. I make around 1.44$ to 7.20 every time someone borrows my book and collects their free book. The books retail for 2.99$ so as you can see I’d rather you borrow my books than buy them.

There is one subtle thing that was missed in all of this which makes up over half of my income and that’s the email addresses I have collected. There is an Industry standard in Internet Marketing that states “each email address should account for 1$ a month in sales.” Thus far I have collected over 5,000 emails. Now I will say that I don’t make 5k a month from my email list (spammers really do profit). But between my Kindle sales and my email profits, I don’t have to work a conventional job.

Yes I am planning on scaling up my business. No I’m not going to coach you. Yes you can do this too. Those are the three most common questions I get when I breach this topic so I thought I’d just go ahead and answer ‘em now. I would ask that you support me though and borrow my books if you are in Kindle Unlimited and collect your free gift while also putting some coin in my pocket. I do have expenses to cover such as an autoresponder (30$ whole dollars a month) as well as junk food I eat while providing you with great value, (and for the more ambitious readers, an income.)

Visit my Author Profile for Amazon Here!

Mass Twitter Traffic In 90 Days!

There is a reason that Twitter still hangs on strong with followers. Its because of its ability to share ideas lighting quick. It's whole platform was built on speed. You are only alotted 160 characters to get an idea across to the masses. What truely makes Twitter awesome is its ability to make topics go viral with retweets and hashtags. Lets see if we can tap into some of that awesome sauce today!

How To Beat Instagram's New Ad Features

     Well boys and girls, we knew it was coming. Facebook bought Instagram and thus will implement its marketing format on its new acquisition. You don't spend a million dollars on a company for giggles. No, no, they're in for the moolah. So what does that mean for us social media marketer's and and traffic generators?

Getting Your Links To Stick!

One of the hardest things to do as a blogger is to get traffic! There are a million different ways to get traffic but they all take an incredible amount of work to accomplish. There is nothing more frustrating then spending a day building back-links only to find that some or most didn't stick. The links that you planted on blogs, forums and websites were deleted by moderators who took it as spam. Well there are a few things you can do to get your links to land and stay!

Niche Blending: A Social Media How-To

     Hot Cars and Fast women... Fat stacks of hundred dollar bills... Sex, drugs and rock and roll! There is a reason that marketing has used tried and true ideas in order to get people to buy into what they are selling. Mostly because people will always want hot new toys and to let lose, have fun, and of course have lots of sex! If you can capture that idea and wrap it around your product then you have a sure fire sale. But how do you do that and how does that relate to social media?

Social Apps: Untapped

     So we all know about the major social networks, your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr... These sites and sites like them (MySpace, Hahahaha) have been the bread and butter to Internet Marketers since they were created. They still continue to be power houses for those who know how to use them effectively. There have been tons of articles and blogs on how to use social media sites to generate traffic to your site. The truth is that most of these sites have become over saturated with people trying to peddle their affiliate links in any manner possible. Most of the people whom you are trying to target to your site can see right through doing this method and all you end up doing is irritating your followers. You can use these sites still and very effectively but that's for a different article. There are however, sites that mimic the top tier social media sites and you can use those sites to funnel traffic to your target.