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Bestseller Spying

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Bestseller Spying

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Bestseller Spying

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Bestseller Spying ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bestseller Spying In this Guide… 

The simple, 9-Step Bestseller Spying tactic that allows you to reveal priceless market research from the biggest book publishers in the world (And you’ll even see how to confirm your hunches and find the most profitable topics too!)(Starts on pg.5)…

Bestseller Spying

Picking a winner every time… “Risky” That’s not a word we like to hear when it comes to investing time and resources in our business. No…we like to pick winners. Don’t forget how expensive traditional book publishing is…and therefore how risky it can be. Think about the risk associated with traditional book publishing…the author, content, topic, trends, printing costs, distribution costs, marketing, etc. And that’s good news for us! (Huh!) No, I haven’t lost my mind. I’ll explain everything in the next couple of pages. But let me just sum up the “BIG Idea” with this:

Because of the enormous costs (and risks) associated with traditional book publishing, it’s the perfect place to BEGIN your research whenever you’re picking the topic of your project! Got that? Ok…Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And, let’s face the facts. Huge companies like McGraw-Hill have entire research departments and spend millions of dollars each year making sure the books they publish will end up being very profitable for their company. Why not use this information to your advantage? (I’m sure if you’re anything like me, you take pride in “working smarter, and not harder”…and this is just another great way to take advantage of the Information Age and “piggyback” on the millions of dollars already spent in book market research!) Ok. Copyright 2016 MarketBold.com. All Rights Reserved. | Bestseller Spying

Bestseller Spying Enough “chit chat”. Let me show you the simple, step-by-step Bestseller Spying method that you can use whenever you’re looking for a great market/topic for your project… Ready? Ok…let’s dive in…

1: Begin at the #1 Online Bookstore… The first thing I want you to do is head over to the World’s Largest Bookstore, Amazon.com. We’re going to leverage the power of their search tools, ranking system, etc. to get the information we are looking for. (By the way, I’m including step-by-step visuals in this report to make it super simple for you to follow along. ) Once you’re there, go ahead and click on the Books category so you can have access to the Advanced Search Menu:

After you’ve done that, you should see a link at the top for the Advanced search feature:

Bestseller Spying That will bring you to this form:

And we’re going to use this form to “make some magic happen”. 

2: Use “Topical Publisher’s” research… Now, in order to really tap into the millions of dollars spent on market research in traditional publishing, we need to force our search results to display BIG Book Publishing companies…and not small print on demand or vanity publishers. And this is where the magic starts to happen too. Watch this.  We’re going to focus on 1) Large publishing companies & 2) Topical book publishing departments. Don’t worry if the lightbulb hasn’t gone off yet. It will. Let me help “throw the switch”. Copyright 2016 MarketBold.com. All Rights Reserved. | Bestseller Spying

Bestseller Spying Since you’re already at the Advanced Book Search page, I want you to simply type in two words in the Title field (include the quotation marks) :

“for dummies”

Also, make sure to choose “Bestselling” from the “Sort Results by:” drop down box. Now, click Search. Do you see what we just did? You should now be looking at a huge list of 1) topical books from a 2) large publishing company arranged in bestselling order (Amazon sales rank). Look at the topics in the titles. It really doesn’t get too much easier than that. Hang on though. We’ve still got a lot to cover (or uncover). Go ahead and click on that first result you see and let’s just walk through a couple of things that would be good to point out.

Bestseller Spying

3: Dig a little bit deeper … You should now be looking at the main results page for the first listing:

Now, scroll down the page until you see the “Product Details section”…

I want you to pay close attention to the Publisher: value. That’s going to become an important place to look from now on. (Probably something you never even noticed or cared about before)

Bestseller Spying

4: Refine your search further… Now…go ahead and hit the “Back” button in your browser to get back to the Advanced Search page. I want to show you how to refine your search in order to restrict your results to just the publishers you want to search for. (Note: In this example, the publisher happens to have the same name as the book series…but that won’t always be the case, which is why this extra step is helpful to make sure our search results are perfect.) Go ahead and type the name of the Publisher (from the Product Details section) into the Publisher field and click Search:

Now, just to be clear, let me state what we now have in front of us: You are looking at all the “XXXXXX for Dummies” books, arranged in order from highest selling to lowest selling, for today. (Quick Tip: Books, like everything else in life, have “seasons”…that is, topics trend up and down all the time. At the time of this writing, the bestselling books are clearly related to college/high school subjects. Amazon Sales Rank values are calculated on an hourly basis for books with a sales rank of < 10,000 and a daily basis for books with a sales rank of < 100,000. Everything ranked above is calculated once a month.)

Bestseller Spying

5. Decipher the Amazon Sales Rank… Next, let’s go ahead and take a look at the Amazon Sales Rank, and see what it can tell us about one of these topical books. First of all, go ahead and grab a title that you are interested in, and copy the Title of the book to your clipboard. I’m going to just start working with this interesting book:

Now, I simply copy the title of the book and perform a NEW search in the main Amazon search field.

Go ahead and click Search. (Don’t worry if this seems pointless, you’ll see why we do this in just a second.) Now, click on the result that matches your search. You’ll now see a new piece of data in the Product Details section, called Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

Bestseller Spying Let me just explain what this number means, in simple terms. In our example, this book has an Amazon Best Sellers Rank of 3,637 in Books. That means that there are exactly 3,636 books at Amazon.com that are selling more copies per day than this book. (Calculated per hour, for this book. See previous tip.) Not too shabby for a book about raising chickens.  And that’s ALL books being sold at Amazon… Now…the next little bit may be a bit controversial, but I’ll pass it along anyway. There are plenty of people who have “taken a crack” at decyphering what these numbers really mean. I’ve come to think that the table below is probably a pretty accurate estimate you can go by: Amazon Sales Rank 1-75 75-100 100-200 200-300 450-750 750-3,000 3,001-9,000 9,001+

# Books Sold Per Day 500+ 274-499 201-273 101-200 76-100 21-75 6-20 1-5

Of course, these are just estimates based on what can be gathered from publishers who have related their actual sales volume and their current Amazon Best Seller Rank. So, in this case, a good estimate is that our chicken book is selling at least 20 copies per day…but possibly more. (Keep in mind that this book was written in 2009 and isn’t being actively marketed anymore, beyond Amazon.com)

Bestseller Spying

6. Leverage the “Content Editing”… Ever read those boring “Ackowledgement” sections of a book. Yeah. That part. The part where they thank the editor and call him a saint while secretly uttering, “You big jerk…I really liked Chapter 7!”… All kidding aside, big publishers have top notch (high paid) editors. And the millions spent on market research isn’t just spent on selecting the topic and title for these books…no…the “big bucks” are also spent on the CONTENT. What to include…and what to cut. (Sorry Chapter 7 ) That’s also good news for us. Because we can use the brilliant little Amazon Search Inside feature and the Table of Contents and Index to determine exactly what subtopics made it past the editor! Take the example we’ve been using. Hover over the book to see a list of page sections that Amazon has scanned:

Bestseller Spying Clicking on Table of Contents takes us directly to a scanned image of the contents of this book:

Take a close look at the section and chapter topics…because that’s exactly what the editor decided needed to be covered in order for the book to sell and make a profit, based on the research dollars ($$$,$$$) spent on this topic. If you want nice little “subtopic snapshots”, be sure to also look at the Index of the book as well:

(Hot Tip: Think of these index terms as “Million Dollar Keyword Research” from the biggest Fortune 500 companies in the world! If I wanted to dominate the “raising chickens” market, this index is priceless to find ALL the keyword groups I should be targetging to get 80-90% of the market traffic! It’s a keyword snapshot of the entire book, and we’ve already discussed how much research money goes into traditional book publishing research on these topics. This is an absolute gold mine for keywords in your market!) Copyright 2016 MarketBold.com. All Rights Reserved. | Bestseller Spying

Bestseller Spying

7. Embrace Negativity … Repeat after me: “Negative book reviews are a great source of income…” You will often find comments like,

“I wanted to give this book 5 stars but the author completely forgot to talk about x,y,and z, which is the only reason I bought the book in the first place.” Or “This book is ok if you’re just wanting some pictures, but it’s really basic info anyone can find online. I was looking for detailed steps on xxxx.” BINGO. Ding..ding…ding. Grab a pen and paper because all those negative comments translate directly into perfect ideas for positioning and writing a bestselling short report! Think of your report as “the missing Chapter” that WASN’T included in the bestselling books on XXXX topic. Go ahead… …For once you get to really enjoy the negative comments.  Make sure to take note of which comments come from the bestselling books for any topic. Chances are there are hundreds of people who will feel the same way when they read the book. (Or when they read the negative comment!)

Bestseller Spying

8. Confirm your hunches… Now, you can simply do a nifty little search at Google.com to dig a little deeper into what people really think about the bestselling titles at Amazon.com. Here’s one search query you can try:

Notice that we used the Title of the book, with the phrase “review of” in quotes. We also added the last part to make sure that we didn’t just get pages and pages of Amazon.com reviews that we’ve already seen. Also, get creative. You’re goal with this is to find conversations where people are discussing the topical book you are researching. Think about how people talk (and type). And make sure to write down your best “Conversation Clues” to use for all your future research. (Waste not, want not!) How about this search:

And look what we discovered. 

And I can tell you that if you were studying this topic and you clicked on that link, you’d get a whole host of great ideas from that forum thread! Copyright 2016 MarketBold.com. All Rights Reserved. | Bestseller Spying

Bestseller Spying Here’s one more…just to get the “brain juices” flowing good…

With this search string, we’re specifically targeting forum conversations about the book…which is a great way to find out what people did and didn’t like about the book! (you still have that pen and paper handy, don’t you?)  And again, this search turns up another real gem:

Also, make sure to click the link to get even more discussions too! (Hot Tip: Make sure to make a list of any forums related to the BIG market you choose, because these are great places to become and active member and promote your report in the signature link!)

Bestseller Spying

9. Listen to the market pulse… Now, we can actually leverage the power of the world’s largest social network, Facebook, to find any comments about the bestselling book (or topic) we are reasearching. You’ll need to have a Facebook account to perform this search, but this is how easy it is:

(Tip: It’s probably best to put your search in quotes to keep the results highly relevant.) You can use this social search on either the book title itself, or just at the topic level (i.e. “raising chickens”) to see what people are talking about right now.

Bestseller Spying

10. Persist and Prosper… Wow. We’ve covered a lot of ground in just a few pages! I hope you’ve seen first hand how to leverage the power of Big Publishing Company research and narrow down to a specific topic that you leverage for your project! One last final tip… Always stay highly observant. Always be looking for new “spying opportunities”… For instance, in this guide we worked only with the “for Dummies” series… But there are dozens (hundreds?) of topical book publishers that you can use this step-by-step plan with. Just make sure that you’re researching a large book publisher. A publisher that you’re certain has spent considerable money on market research BEFORE they published a book. That’s the glue that holds this technique together. Let me give you a few other “topical book publishers” that you can also dig into… The Complete Idiot’s Guide to XXX - Alpha How to Do Everything: XXX - McGraw-Hill Step-by-Step – Microsoft Press Pocket Reference – O’Reilly Media The Everything XXXX – Adams Media Visual Dictionary – DK Made Easy – DK K.I.S.S. Guide to XXX – DK Adult And on..and on..and on… (Just keep your eyes wide open) Copyright 2016 MarketBold.com. All Rights Reserved. | Bestseller Spying

Bestseller Spying

That list should at least keep you busy for….well….quite awhile.  And keep your eye’s wide open for even more that show up when you begin spying I hope you have enjoyed this little guide. More importantly, I hope you can take away valuable information that will make you even more prosperous in your business! To Your Success,

MarketBold.com

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