Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running Amazon ads for my new 10 Commandments book.
One ad campaign is “automatic targeting,” where Amazon simply tries to put my book in front of shoppers on its other pages. The ad reporting shows me which of these other pages resulted in clicks and sales for my book.
I’ve also been heavily promoting my new 10 Commandments book to my own list. Since I’m using an Amazon affiliate link (this is apparently against Amazon policies, but I love to live dangerous), I can see some of the other stuff that people who clicked on my affiliate link also bought.
If you just felt a chill rush up your back, as though you’ve been stripped naked in public, calm down. I cannot tell who specifically is buying anything, only that some people who bought my new 10 Commandments book (hundreds so far) or who clicked on my affiliate link (thousands) were also in the market for other things.
As you can guess, people who ended up buying my book were also in the market for dozens of ordinary, everyday purchases such as computer cables and supplement gummies and of course a “4.4 inch fixed-blade SEAX knife with a sheepsfoot blade.”
My readers were also in the market for a bunch of books that are in some way related to my own book, such as Jim Camp’s Start With No and Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship — both of which I reference in my book — as well as Made to Stick, which is one of my go-to books for effective communication.
So far, so milquetoast. But then, my readers bought some quirky things I would not have expected or even known about had I not done this Amazon sleuthing. The top 3:
#1: How To Be The Jerk Women Love — a 1991 guide to picking up women by acting the jerk, written by “F.J. Shark.” A 5-star Amazon review by a shopper who goes by “The King of Jerks”:
“Some women made fun of me for praising this book. The laugh is on them. It ended up they were dumped by bigger jerks than me. What goes around comes around.”
#2: What is Wrong with Men — a feminist social critique, I guess written in reaction to F.J. Shark’s book and its positive reviews. “What is Wrong with Men” was only published a few days ago and doesn’t have any positive Amazon reviews yet, but the NY Times called it a “kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis. Reeled me in, like Absolut and cranberry. What a pairing!”
#3, and most intriguingly: Grade 23 Titanium Externally Threaded Nipple Bar Barbell Rings. For those who are too busy living life to worry either about acting the jerk or the jerks in their lives.
I’m telling you all this as a little hack so you can safely, legally, and ethically peek into the private shopping carts of your customers.
Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace. An estimated 64,000 metric tons of stuff pass through their warehouses every day. I just gave you a couple of ways to see what some of that stuff is, so you can adjust what and how you sell to your audience.
If you’d like to contribute to that data (don’t worry, it’s all anonymized), or more importantly, if you’d like to read my new 10 Commandments book — about effective communication, and magic and showmanship, and one secret negotiating trick of Jim Camp that he did not reveal in Start With No — then here is my Amazon affiliate link, ready to serve you: