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When it comes to low content books, not many people invest in building a brand. But like in every other business, building a brand for your KDP business is something that should be very high on your list.
In this article, we are going to talk about how to establish a brand outside of Amazon and use that to get more sales for your books.

Creating a FREE website/landing page for your brand

Building a brand means interacting with your customers, and Amazon makes this very hard since you don’t get to see any buyers’ information. Having your own website/landing page set up for your brand helps you build an email list that you can then use to notify previous buyers when you publish a new book.

If you have been in online marketing for a while, you probably know how to get a domain name and host to set up a website. You probably also know that having a domain and hosting a website have a cost (which is not that high), but if you want to avoid that you can follow our step-by-step guide on how to do it for free. So without further ado, let’s get into the step-by-step process of setting up a landing page for your brand.

Head over to WordPress.com and click on Start your website

Enter the name of your brand and select the free option that provides you with the web address yourbrandname.wordpress.com

For the next step, choose Start with a free site

After that, you will be presented with the dashboard of your new website:

On the left side of the dashboard, you’ll have a menu that lets you change the design of your website, add new pages, create a blog, etc. For this example, we went with a theme called Redhill since it matches our brand colors:

If you find a theme that you like and the colors don’t match your brand, you can always customize it by changing the colors with the ones that you want.

After adding a logo, background image, and a call to action button, this is how our landing page created on WordPress looks like:

Our landing page consists of a summary about the brand, a banner that shows previous publications, and a call to action that people can use to sign up for our email list.

Creating an email list

Now that we got our landing page ready, we need to capture emails using the call to action button. To create an email list, we are going to use a very popular email marketing service called MailChimp.

MailChimp makes it very easy to set up a page for collecting emails by offering you the landing page option right after you sign up:

Give the landing page a name and proceed with the next step where you can edit the design:

Since we are already using WordPress as our main landing page/website, the purpose of the MailChimp landing page will be only to collect emails and that’s why we are going with a clean design containing our logo and a message that tells people to subscribe to our list.

The next step is to take the MailChimp landing page we created and connect it with the Sign Up button on our WordPress homepage. We do that by selecting Pages from the main menu in our WordPress dashboard and then clicking on Edit next to the Home page:

Now we have to select the Sign Up button, and paste the URL that MailChimp generated for our email collecting landing page:

Our landing page/website is now complete with everything we need to create an email list.

Sending buyers to your landing page/website

As you may already know, Amazon doesn’t allow links on product pages, so the only way to advertise your landing page is to include a link inside of your books. The easiest way to do this is to include a QR code that can be scanned and will redirect people to your website.

To generate the QR code, go to https://www.qrcode-monkey.com/, paste your URL and select the style you want your QR code to be, then download it.

The next step is to add the QR code to your interior, preferably on the first few pages. You can also add it to the back of your cover, but since Amazon already adds a barcode to it, having another QR code would make it look too crowded. Here’s how a page that has a QR code should look:

Making use of your email list

The emails of all the buyers that subscribe on your list will appear on your MailChimp account in the audience section:

In the campaign section, you can start creating an email campaign for the email list you collected:

You can create a campaign to welcome people when they subscribe to your list, send out emails to subscribers when you publish a new book, and even ask people for reviews if they have already bought your books.

Respecting your subscribers/email list

Only collect emails from your subscribers – it is always best to focus on collecting email addresses directly from people who know your brand and opt-in from the website/landing page that you built, or from your social media profiles. Then, you can make sure that everyone who is on your list actually wants to be on it.

Make it clear who you are – When sending out emails, always use your brand name in the “sent from” field so that your emails don’t look spammy to your subscribers and actually encourage them to open the emails.

Send quality emailsYou have probably signed up for email newsletters at some point and thought that they would be better than they actually turned out to be. You don’t want your subscribers to be disappointed by their emails, nor you want them to change their mind and assume that your newsletters are spam. That’s why it’s important to put effort into making your newsletters the best that they can be. Take the time to craft helpful, useful and interesting content for each newsletter.

Don’t spam your subscribers – This is the most important part! Just because your subscribers have decided to sign up for your email newsletter does not mean that they want to receive an endless barrage of emails from you. Try to compile multiple messages into one handy email rather than sending multiple emails a day.

Wrapping It Up

This wraps up the guide on how you can actually build a real brand, interact with YOUR customers, and get a bunch of reviews in the process.

Amazon makes it difficult to build a brand on your own, but with a little time and effort putting these techniques into place, eventually you will have a solid email list that you can hit up each and every time you create a new book.

Remember though, you need to treat your email list like a real business. That means that if you are building your business or brand around children’s books, you should ONLY email your list about those books. Subscribers would not want to get an email containing dirty jokes or something that does NOT fit the brand image.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. We would love to hear from you!

Good luck building your next brand and interacting with your customers!

5 Comment

  1. Joy

    Do you still need a website if you have an author page in Author Central? I know I would still need a landing page to get an email list. Just curious!

    1. admin

      If you want to college emails or have more control, a landing page of a website would be really helpful but you don’t NEED one.

  2. Rhonda

    Thank you for your information, it truly is an eye-opener. I have a couple of questions and that is as I plan on having a few different types of books, such as logbooks, kids and adult activity type books, etc, would I require more than one website? Or would I say that there are different types of categories and have the books easily viewed on the website?

    1. admin

      You would use a single website with different categories. That would make it a lot easier.

  3. Terence

    I thought Amazon went crazy if you added your own links into your book and could potentially ban you. What’s the low down here?

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