Creating is fun. It’s invigorating, calming and so much more. I love to create in a variety of mediums. One of my goals with my creativity is to sell pieces of art and products. As you will notice if you browse this website, which is my online store, I have a range of products meeting a number of needs of my clients. As with anyone building an online store, the developing is great, but there is a need for sales.
What is the best way to increase sales? What is the best way to drive traffic to one’s products?
These are great questions. To answer them I have been doing some research both on YouTube and a few specific blogs. The video shown here gives a little insight into some of the research happening behind the scenes.
Watching a number of videos of those who are being successful selling online, I am hearing more and more about the benefit of using FaceBook ads. I decided to give it a try. My first attempt was working on boosting a post from my author page. I had posted something related to my book about OT entitled “Healing Your Life Through Activity” Undecided as to what product to promote first on this store, I thought, why not promote my book? So I got to work to promote the most recent post and found that it was a tad more complicated than I expected.
Oh dear, some fields just did not make sense. I had read enough articles warning about the risk of wasting money if you do not set up your campaign correctly. As a result I put the idea on hold. Better do a bit more learning! That’s just what I have been doing.
Yesterday I completed learning a module on a Udemy course related to digital marketing. The module was all about FB ads. Great. This sounded like something I could do. It answered some of my questions. One question was still left unanswered. That is, what campaign do we set up to drive traffic to a book being sold on Amazon? Yes, I could just drive traffic to this site, but I had wondered how to increase traffic to my book on Amazon. Is it possible with FB ads or do I need to learn and begin Amazon ads?
More questions? It seems so! Sigh!
In order to discover the answer, I began designing the graphic that would go with the ad campaign. The image at the top of this post is the first attempt. I liked how it looked, I enjoyed the hidden circle and how that leads the eye between the question as to whether someone knows about Occupational Therapy and the pic of the cover of the book. It took a bit of time to get to the next step, but I decided to give it a go.
Step number two was creating the ad campaign. I did not find an option to increase traffic to a book or product on Amazon, so selected the field to drive traffic to my website. Will it work? I am not sure yet. I have not reached that part of the process. The first step in setting up the campaign was adding a description and photograph. I elected to add the photograph / graphic first.
Having uploaded the graphic I received notification that there is too much text. Evidently a graphic for an ad campaign needs to have fewer words. So I set to work to reduce the wording. The next image is my second attempt.
There is always something to learn. After revising my graphic for this ad campaign, I discovered that one has to have just 20% of the graphic as text. Now that is a challenge, especially when it comes to the right side of the graphic containing the cover of my book that already has words or text on it.
Well, I am off to return to the drawing board. I thought I’d give a peak at what goes into the process of learning how to set up FaceBook ads. There is actually quite a lot that goes into it. Yes, I could outsource and have someone else do the work, but being a creative person and one that loves to learn, I am on a mission to master this myself.
What are your thoughts about the design featured here? What do you like and what do you think needs tweeking? Post your comments in the comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the progress of this graphic.