Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy
In mid-December, I published my book Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy on Kindle. At 20,000 words, its is more of an extended technique than a full size 100,000 word book, however, the Kindle publishing market is providing new opportunities for writers to publish useful techniques,novellas and full fledged novels on any digital platform – Web, Kindle, iPad and Android devices. Freelance writers now have an easy mechanism to publish and get paid for their work without having to forgo the variety of royalties. I won’t go into an entire post on the Kindle publishing process, but over the next few months, I’ll be sharing a few useful kindle marketing tips for Kindle authors.
The major draw of the Kindle platform is Amazon’s sales platform and its global reach. If you are a solo-entrepreneur exploring selling digital products for the first time, Amazon provides low barriers to entry and you don’t have to worry about integrating an e-commerce shopping cart into your blog. You also don’t need to be a search engine optimization expert to get people to view your book.
(Ofcourse, it helps if you can apply some on-page search engine optimization to the Amazon book description)
Kindle Marketing Baseline
As a point of reference, I setup the following sales parameters for my Amazon book.
Price point: $7.99
Enrolled in KDP Select: Yes
Date Published: December 13, 2013
A lot of Kindle publishing books will advise a $2.99 price point and the sage advice of testing to find the optimum price point. I picked $7.99 since it was cheaper than competing books in the project management interview question domain and quite honestly, I think perspective job seekers can afford $8 bucks for an excellent career advice book! I’ll test the pricing to see the different monthly results.
Kindle Marketing Actions
In hind site, releasing a business book a few weeks before the Christmas holiday, when a lot of people take vacation time, wasn’t the best timing. However, remaining weeks in December, I took the following actions:
- Sent 1 Tweet to my Twitter followers (Result 1 sale on the first day)
- Posted Update on Tactical Project Management Facebook Page
- Posted a update to my LinkedIn Profile and posted in a few relevant project management LinkedIn discussion forums
- Posted a link to the book in a ProjectManagement.com discussion forum
- Add a link to the book on the Tactical Project Management blog and main homepage.
- Posted the link to my Google Plus profile
- Created a discussion post with a link Quora – What is your favorite project management interview question
- Added the book cover image to my Project Management Pinterest page
- Sent out one newsletter to my Tactical Project Management subscribers
- Posted on Facebook 2nd time
- Continued with discussion forums – LinkedIn and ProjectManagement with links back to the book
- Submitted PM Interview Question to the PMHUB Group – A Yahoo/Google Groups listserve
- Created a presentation, narrated it and published it to YouTube – Project Management Interview Questions
- Published the presentation to Scribed
- Scheduled my free book promotion for January 9 and 10th
- Tweaked the Amazon book description to enable HTML tags so it had greater on-page SEO value.
Example – Project Management Interview Questions Video
Kindle Marketing Results
As of December 31st, I’ve sold 16 books and the book was borrowed 3 times.
At $7.99 * 16 * 70% = $89 bucks!
(I know … don’t quit the day job yet)
Considering the book has only been on the market for 2 weeks and it was during a holiday, I was happy just to see a few sales!
As the links are found in the search engines, the book should perform well in the search engine rankings. It is already ranked #10 for my keyword so seeing it on the first page of Google within 2 weeks is pretty good!
Kindle Marketing Actions for Next Month
In January, I’ll be taking the following marketing actions:
- Include a link to my book in the About the Author line for several blogs where I publish articles each month
- Email my newsletter subscribers for the free Amazon promotion day
- Promote the free promotion on two Facebook groups
- Create a Squidoo lens on the topic
- Post the video and presentation to other project management forums
- Submit a press release
- Identify project management related podcasts and other key project management related websites where I can reach the target audience with my book.
Stay Tune for Next Month’s Update
Be sure to sign-up for the Smart Ideas for Smart Business newsletter and I’ll keep you updated on my latest kindle marketing and share the results of my kindle marketing strategy. Ofcourse, if you want to see what a great book in Kindle looks like – check out Project Management Interview Questions Made Easy
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