Get More & Better Reviews For Your Book On Amazon With Debbie Drum

Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results Podcast!  If
you are an author, or want to be an author, or even if you have a
book or physical product on Amazon, you are going to want to read
over what we have for you today.  Debbie Drum is a
content production expert.  Not only has she produced
and published many books, but she also takes action when it comes
to marketing her business.  In this session, Debbie is
going to share her secrets on how to get more and better reviews
for your products, specifically on Amazon.com.  This
training will focus on getting book reviews, but the
information found herein will not only apply to books. 
Debbie, thank you for taking the time to be on the show today.
Today's Promise: More Amazon Book Reviews The big promise for you
is to simply get more book reviews because the equation is “More
Book Reviews = More Sales”.  While there are many ways to go
about getting book reviews, there are more effective ways than
others, and we are going to be outlining those ways today. 
You definitely want to keep cracking away and taking action because
if you keep at it, you know, that’s what made me where I am
today.  I never quit.  Every single day I wake up doing,
doing, doing…failing…succeeding.  That’s what it’s all about.
A Bit About Debbie I started internet marketing in 2010 by
literally Googling the words, “How to make money online”.  It
all started from there.  The very first week that I started
making money was actually with publishing. I was working a
full-time job, and I was traveling a lot--in sales.  I have a
sales background.  I was working and publishing a book a week.
I loved it so much because that’s where I was seeing real
results.  And, the sales person, of course, came out and said,
“Hey, I’ve got to teach people what I am doing.”  So, that’s a
little bit about how I got started. The Process of Getting More
Book Reviews Basically, the big picture, and the “Why” behind this
is having more reviews is essentially like having an army of people
selling your book 24/7, 365 days out of the year with you being
hands-off.  They never sleep.  Reviews stay there
forever. The more reviews you have, and obviously the
more positive reviews you have, will work in your favor for more
people to click that “buy” button. The reason is that we live in a
very social world.  I don’t have to tell you that.
 Everything is about, “Well, what are other people
saying?”  If I’m going to dedicate the next 2 hours to
reading a book, or if I’m going to dedicate a day buying a Groupon
package, I’m going to see what other people are saying.
It’s our job as the product creators, as the marketers, as the
authors to get those reviews because it’s not going to happen quick
enough naturally.  One of the quickest and most
effective ways that I have found to get reviews is to look at
people who are already reviewing other books in my
niche.  The thing is that you want to be publishing
in niches where there are tons of competitors because that means
it’s a market that has buyers. So, don’t be scared if you see other
books that have thousands of reviews and thousands of sales because
that means you’re on the right path to finding money. 
What you want to do is go into Amazon and make a list of
the top 50 books that compete against your book, or are in the same
niche, the same genre, as your book. There are some books
that you will find, if you’re in the right niches, that have
thousands of reviewers, or hundreds of reviewers even. 
Those are the people that I have found throughout the past
six years of doing this that I call influencers. 
Those people, they want to share cool things with their
friends.  They want to be savvy, they want to be “in the
know”, and that’s how they want to be seen. A lot of these people
will review books, especially the ones in your niche. Sometimes
they have Facebook groups where one message can reach 2,000 or
3,000 people at a click.  Those are the kind of people that we
are finding, and striving to find, inside of Amazon. How
to find book reviewers: Figure out what books in your niche
have a lot of reviews. Then, go and identify reviewers of those
books. It’s highly likely that if they like a book on a similar
topic, or even the same topic, they would want to review your book
as well. Third, the reviewers themselves are influence centers, or
potential influence centers. That’s a very cool thing because if
they like your work, and they like your book, then you’ve basically
got social proof, and you’ve got a built-in third-party endorsement
that’s completely unbiased.  These folks are basically grading
you on the work itself.  You know, they get nothing out of it,
essentially. Other than they’re feeding their community, and they
want to be seen as somebody that is “in the know”, or is on the
cutting edge of whatever that topic is. Contacting Potential Book
Reviewers Once you’ve found your book--let’s say this book has
1,000 reviewers.  There’s a hyperlink on that number of
reviews.  Inside of Amazon, you want to click inside
of that hyperlink, and it brings you to a page where you can see
about 10-15 reviewers per page.  Depending on how
many reviews they have, there’s page after page of all these
reviews. Each individual reviewer has a profile page.  You can
click on their name to find their profile page.  What you
will find is that a certain percentage of these people will
actually have contact information.  So, it’s not 100% of the
people, unfortunately for us.  Every one of us, as buyers on
Amazon, we all have a profile page whether we like it or not. And,
it’s up to us to say whether or not we want to show our contact
information, meaning our website and/or our email address.
After about six years of this, after our research, it has
been proven that about 10-15% of the reviewers of a certain book
will have contact information on their profile
pages.  This is an amazing opportunity to contact the
specific people that we need to target and contact to review our
book. However, it turns out that this is a very manual process. I
learned this very quickly. Back in 2012, I was trying to figure out
different ways to get reviewers, as opposed to asking my dad and my
mom, and asking Aunt Cindy, and asking my best friend.  And,
I’m glad that I did this because, you as authors, you might be
realizing that Amazon is actually taking away reviews because of
these connections that they’re finding.  You
definitely don’t want the same person, like your group of author
community, to be reviewing all of your books because that will
raise red flags inside of Amazon. A lot of the time,
people provide their contact information because they are
interested in reviewing other people’s work, or at least there’s a
stronger probability that they are.  The benefit that they get
out of it is sharing cool things, which we have already talked
about, and #2 is getting a free book, which a lot of people are
after too.  There’s a whole business of this, you know, with
physical products. People are looking to get free products for
reviews.  This is very important: As long as you are
contacting people and asking for honest reviews, honest feedback,
that is staying within Amazon’s terms of service. 
What you don’t want to do is say, “Hey, can you give me a five-star
review?”  That’s not going to fly, and a lot of these
reviewers are savvy, and they know what’s right and what’s wrong
when it comes to this. You definitely do not want to purchase
reviews! When you contact people, don’t say that you’ll
give them any type of compensation.  All they are getting is a
free copy of your book.  Amazon is trying to create
an atmosphere that makes for a wonderful experience for
people.  They don’t want their buying atmosphere being filled
with fake reviews because people will stop trusting their
marketplace.  That’s something, as you probably can imagine,
Amazon takes very seriously. Amazon is even going as far as suing
third parties over fake reviews.  So, somehow they’re figuring
it out.  With all of their algorithms they can do it. If you
go to Fiverr.com, you’ll see people who are willing and able to
review your book for $5.  You might be thinking, “Okay. 
Well, if they’re going to give me an honest review, what does it
matter?”  It does matter.  So, to be really
clear: Do Not Buy Reviews.  Do Not Ask for Five-Star
Reviews.  The only thing that’s good to do is ask for
honest reviews, free of compensation. Save Your Time and Outsource
When you finally start diving in, it’s like finding a needle in a
haystack.  We literally wouldn’t have time to do anything like
write our books, market our books, market our products, do videos,
and all of this other important stuff that we need to do in our
business. Marketing would need to be tabled, and that’s not
something that we’d want to do.  So, this bright idea
that I had, going through all of these different reviewers,
suddenly came crashing down because it wasn’t realistic for me to
do this all day long. To put that information together in
a spreadsheet and then make it available for me to quickly contact
people.  It might take days to actually aggregate this. 
If you have more time than money, however, it may be worth doing it
this way.  There’s actually two other ways to go about this
though. Another way that you could go about this would be
to outsource the work.  You could send this project
to an outsourcer.  For instance, you could go to any
outsourcing site like Fiverr.com, Upwork.com, or Guru.com. 
There are people just waiting for this kind of work. 
Generally, using the 10-15% rule of thumb, if you’re looking at a
book with 1,000 reviewers, then you’ll probably get 100-150 emails
out of that.  These workers sometimes work as a team, and they
sometimes work individually.  After a couple of days, a couple
of hundred dollars later, you’ll probably get 100 or 150 emails
returned to you. It’s a numbers game. So the more you do, the more
of an outcome you’re going to get. I know that most authors, most
self-publishers, are not really sitting around with a whole team of
people waiting to do this kind of thing all day long.  There
are tons of other things that we need outsourcers for as well.
 It’s a very slow and tedious process trying to do
this manually.  You can actually do this yourself
based on what you have learned today, but I do have a software
service that does this all automatically for you.  I do want
to be very clear about the fact that you do not have to go and buy
this.  You’ve been given step-by-step instructions on how to
do this by yourself, but if you see the value in this and you have
more money than time, I do want you to know about my software. Book
Review Targeter Software Basically, it does exactly what the manual
process does.  So, you first would start out finding your
related books, right?  Then, instead of you or a team
member going through the pages and pages of reviewers, to find
those “needles in a haystack”, the software goes through all of
those pages for you.  It finds the ones that have
contact information (email and/or website), and then kicks out all
of the other ones that don’t.  It’s taking a very manual
process and automating it. Once you have extracted these email
addresses, the software actually allows you to mail merge with an
application within Gmail to essentially send out requests for folks
to review your book.  So, it automates a large part of it and
certainly makes it go a lot faster.  This particular piece of
software has gotten a lot of reviews itself, and people love it
because it does save so much time.  At the bottom of these
show notes, there’s a link that you can click on to learn more
about this software. It’s great to get those email addresses, of
course, so that you can start contacting people. But, I want you to
look at it from the point of view that these one-to-one connections
that you are making with people are so effective for not only now,
but for your whole entire career.  Just one connection
can change your life.  Even if you’re only finding 10
emails, or 20 emails, these might seem like small numbers. But
those are 20 additional people that you would have never found
without the software.  Authors who are using this are making
these connections and meeting people who will give them video
testimonials on Amazon, which are amazing! Then, on your next book,
you can say, “Hey Carol!  You reviewed my last book.  Can
you review this book, or this product?”  That’s what you’re
creating; so it’s much bigger than just an email address. 
This business is like every other business.  It is a people
business.  It is a relationship business. This idea that you
can find brand new people who already like your work
extensively. They like it enough to actually give you a good
review. They are golden.  That’s a really, really important
person that can potentially help you in so many other ways later
on. Connect With Debbie I normally hang out at
DebbieDrum.com.  From there, you can get to my YouTube
channel, or Facebook.  I’m pretty much everywhere. Daniel's
Real Fast Results Tips: Book Reviews

Do the research - Look for people that are already reviewing
books in your niche.

When you are emailing potential book reviewers, make sure
they know you are not compensating them. The only item they are
getting is a free book for an honest review. Do not ask for a 5
star review. You just want an honest one.

If you don't have the time, then outsource!

Resources Replay Training Demoing Debbies
Software: Click here ==>
 https://debbiedrum.leadpages.co/daniel-hall-getting-book-reviews/
Debbie's Software: The Book Review Targeter
Outsourcing Sites: Fiverr.com Upwork.com
Guru.com.  Real Fast Results Community If you are
diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real
Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to
iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it,
and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of
course, we also want to know your results. Please share those
results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As
always, go make results happen!