Welcome back to my weekly blog. This week, I’m discussing more marketing tips. In particular, Keywords. We’ve discussed how important it is for a great cover and the book blurb or teaser to draw in your prospective audience. There’s one more piece to all of this and that’s being found in the first place. You do that with keywords. 

Keywords play an important part in book marketing. You have to be discovered and to do this, you need to structure keywords so prospective readers will find you. Your awesome cover and cleverly written teaser won’t do you any good if you’re not being found in the first place.

If you self-publish on Amazon, there are seven slots on the book configuration page, that are given for your keywords. These slots are not only just for one word. You can use phrases and word groups to help you in Amazon’s search engine. You have to figure out what words or phrases customers are searching for. To do this, there are a few tools out there. The first one is free. It’s actually integrated right into the Amazon search field. When you choose Kindle Store on Amazon, you can begin by typing your first keyword. Amazon will tell you what customers are searching for. Then, you can pick those words and phrases and plug them into your keyword slots for your book.

I’ll use an example to give you an idea. If you’ve written a science fiction book, you could try typing science fiction in the search field and see what Amazon comes up with.

As you can see in my example, Amazon fills in some ideas for you. Science fiction kindle books, books, romance, fantasy, short stories, and megapack are just a few of the ideas for keywords. But, will these actual keywords work for you?

The answer to that question is complicated. Sure, customers are actually typing those search terms.

However, how much competition is there for that particular keyword phrase? There’s another tool out there that will tell you how popular the phrase is and how easy or hard it will be for your book to show up on the top pages, or will your book get buried below hundreds or even thousands of other books.

This tool is called KDPRocket and it costs about a hundred bucks. The good news is, that’s a one-time fee to unlock the secrets of keywords. You also get free updates and access to new tools as they are developed.

What this tool does is rank the keyword phrase by how often it’s searched for as well as how likely your book will appear with the number of competitors there are.

Here’s how this tool looks. I used ‘science fiction military’ in my search and this is a sample of what the KDPRocket tool returns. For the first search, you can see less than a hundred searches in a month are done with a competitive score of 45, meaning is moderately difficult for your book to show. However, as you can see just adding ‘books’ to the end of the keyword phrase, bumps up the searches per month to over sixteen hundred with the same competitive score. You’ll have a better chance of being discovered. This tool also shows you the average monthly earnings, the average price of the books and how many competitors there are.

It can take a ton of time researching keywords and phrases that will actually work, but then if you own this tool, it literally saves you hours of time. 

You can find this tool at kindlepreneur.com. Dave Chesson has been called the kindlepreneur of Amazon and has been recognized by Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Huffington Post. This site is a tremendous source of tools available as well as a web course that you can watch to help with all your marketing needs.

As a self-published author, we’re really a jack of all trades. Aside from writing an amazing book, you need to learn how to format your book as well as marketing, have it edited, get book cover design, and learn how to write a successful book teaser. All these things will help you get your book in front of your prospective audience.

Keywords are just as important if not the most important item you need to understand. However, you also must understand that once you find the right keywords and phrases to use, prospective customers, change how they search for things all the time. This means, your keywords can go stale. So, having this keyword tool will help you discover what’s working currently. Changing up your keywords is a must. I find that if these aren’t updated, your books will fall to the bottom of the search engines. Bring them up to the top by refreshing and using new words every few months. If you find the right words, you’ll know when it’s time to change it up by gauging your sales and free downloads. If your sales begin to trend downward, then it’s time to dedicate some time to finding fresh keywords, because keywords are your keys to becoming a successful self-published author.

Until next time, this is author Brian K. Larson, sparking imaginations, one book at a time.