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

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I wanna teach you how to lie your way to the bestseller list on Amazon.

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Just kidding.

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But sort of.

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So we wrote a book you may or may not know you versus Google the very

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unauthorized guide to Google ads.

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And it was number one worldwide in both marketing and advertising,

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which are two Google's or two of Amazon's toughest categories.

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Within the Kindle ebook rankings.

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And I've done that before.

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I've done it once before with my other book the Seven Critical Principles

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of Effective Digital Marketing.

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Didn't think that title through.

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Just try to rip off Stephen Covey and the way generally this works,

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by the way, and this is the model.

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So if you're gonna write a book and you wanna hit number

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one this works pretty well.

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Instead of launching the book and trying to market it That doesn't work because

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Amazon resets its rankings daily.

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And so everybody who bought today doesn't apply to your ranking

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tomorrow and so on and so forth.

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It's, on this 24 hour rolling pattern.

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So what you wanna do is market the book from a pre-launch perspective.

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So we started marketing and we ran ads.

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We did YouTube videos.

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We sent out emails to our list saying, Hey, we wrote a book.

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Versus Google.

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It's, gonna be amazing.

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It's, the authoritative guide.

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Everybody's been waiting for it, I'm gonna give it to you for 99 cents for a day.

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And I'm pretty sure that Amazon's promotional window, by the way,

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requires you to list it for a little bit more than that.

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I don't remember exactly, but.

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You, still, you're gonna, you know, mark it down to nine, 9 cents for

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a short period and then put it back to where you want it to go.

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And the reason you're doing this is because you get a

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bunch of people to opt in.

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So you run the ads, you send out the emails, you go to your

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list and you say, Hey, I'm gonna give you this book for 99 cents.

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I'm only going to give it away for nine, 9 cents for a day.

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And I'm not gonna tell you when it is, opt in, if you wanna get

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alerted when the promotion goes live.

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It's, you know, sometime in May or whatever the month

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is that you're doing this.

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So we've got thousands of people to opt in, literally thousands

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of people to opt into our list.

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And we've got this huge list and we've promised everybody this book

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for 99 cents, the ebook, right?

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You're not gonna get the physical book.

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It costs me, I think it costs me $20 to print this damn thing.

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Look at this.

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It's unbelievable and it's color.

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Which is great.

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It looks great.

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So we get thousands of people to opt in for the ebook.

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I go.

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To set the promotion inside of K D P, which is the Amazon publishing portal,

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and Amazon has this weird obscure rule that if you are the file size

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of your ebook exceeds a certain size.

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You can't list it at 99 cents.

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The lowest you can list it is at like two point 99.

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And so now I'm like, I just promised.

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Thousands of people, this book for nine, 9 cents, , now it's 2 99.

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you might say, well that's, it's $2.

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Who cares?

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Breaking a promise in the world of marketing, catastrophic error, complete

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reach of trust, etiquette integrity.

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Like if you tell people you're gonna do something, you better do it, especially

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if they don't really know who you are.

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And so it was this, this horrible inflection point where I was

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like, well, what do we do?

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We can't.

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like Amazon will not allow us to mark this book down to 99 cents.

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The lowest we can go down is two point 99.

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We need to launch the book.

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We've made a bunch of promises and had obligations and whatnot.

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So what we decided to do is I sent out an email to everybody who opted

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in and I said the subject line was, I've made a horrible mistake.

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And then we split tested that with, I lied to you and I'm pretty sure that I lied to

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you, outperformed the horrible mistake.

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Regardless.

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It's a pretty compelling subject line.

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Got a much better open rate than what would've expected to get otherwise,

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and I just told everybody the truth.

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I said, Hey, I promise you this book for nine 9 cents, Amazon won't let me

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mark it down to nine 9 cents because of their file size policy screenshot

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of, the error message I was getting.

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So I'm just gonna give you the book for free.

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And then I created an opt-in page where they could go fill out a

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form and get the ebook for free.

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We just sent 'em a P D F file, and then I went on to say, however, I'm

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still trying to hit the number one spot, so if you wouldn't mind buying

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the book, I'd be really grateful.

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I have it marked down to 2 99.

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If you don't want to totally get it, no big deal.

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Here's what's interesting, the people on the list, a ton of

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people downloaded the free ebook.

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Far fewer bought the book than I would've expected otherwise if it was 99 cents.

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However, that was the initial blast.

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What ended up happening though, is that page, the free book page.

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Went pseudo viral.

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People started sharing it like, Hey, you can get the Solutions eight

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book for free by going to this page.

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And on the page, I had a video of myself explaining the exact same situation.

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Look, we don't wanna give this away for free.

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We worked for hard, you know, really hard on it.

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It's 18 months of my life, but I made this mistake I'm giving

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away for free for a short period.

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However, if you want to help us hit number one, please go by the book.

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And we got it.

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Must have been.

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Five times as many sales as I expected based off of that promotion because

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a ton, you know, far more people downloaded their free ebook, but

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enough people were, you know, kind and empathic and helpful and clicked through

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and bought the book that we ended up being number one in both marketing.

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And advertising.

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And one of those is much bigger than the other.

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By the way, in my previous book, I only hit number one for the smaller of the two.

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I think advertising is bigger than marketing or vice versa, whatever.

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I should know that marketing's bigger.

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Who knows?

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We'll find out.

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Regardless, It was a great way to turn a bat into a good,

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a negative, into a positive.

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And I got a lot of really good feedback.

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People, you know, hitting me up, messaging me, emailing me

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like, Hey man, good on you.

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Tough spot to be in, et cetera, et cetera.

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So, built some goodwill, put some books in people's hands, helped some folks

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hit number one across all of Amazon, which is a feat worldwide, number

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one, marketing, advertising you versus Google, and the book is still free.

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By the way, if you wanna download the free ebook, you can go

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to so lake.com/free-book, or.

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Maybe we can buy it.

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Give us $3 or whatever it ends up being now.

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So that was it.

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I just wanted to share that story with you 'cause I thought it

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was kind of cool to be honest.

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And if you plan on launching a book, that's the way to do it.

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So I hope this is helpful.

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I shoot a video every day.