By Vincent B. Davis II, @vbdavisii

There are two kinds of traffic for your book: Own Traffic and Organic Traffic.

Own Traffic is anything that comes from your website, blog, social media, email list, or former readership. You will build your base with Own Traffic, and it’s how you’ll establish a stable readership throughout your creative career.

The other kind is Organic Traffic. That’s how we get our book in front of total strangers. A few Organic Traffic options are Amazon Marketing Services campaigns, free day or 99c promotions, press releases, etc. Anything that gets you and your book in front of people you wouldn’t have had the ability to connect with otherwise.

Both are necessary for your book to be successful. Organic Traffic creates spikes in sales, and helps keep your book at the top of its categories and Amazon searches (thus creating more organic traffic), but if we can’t convert Organic Traffic to Own Traffic, than we will have a hard time developing longevity in our writing life.

Today, we’re going to discuss one of the incredible new ways to create both kinds of traffic at once. Amazon giveaways.

This is different than the free days I’ve mentioned previous in my Book Launch series. This type of giveaway doesn’t require that you list your book for free for a certain amount of time, and it doesn’t require any third-party marketing.

The type of giveaway I’m talking about exists outside of your sales platform.

Have you ever seen this? If you scroll down past your book’s reviews, you’ll find the option to list your book as a giveaway.

By doing this, you will make your book (digital or paperback) available to one (or more) lucky winner/s. And what do you gain in return? Well, there are a number of options.

You can have entrants follow your author profile, follow you on twitter, tweet a message, watch a video, or answer a poll.

All of these options have their place and can be very useful, but I’d like to highlight the first option.

By offering your book for free, you can ask entrants to follow your author profile. That means that every time you release a new book, they are notified. We all know how laborious and difficult it can be to create and groom your own email list. By asking entrants to follow your page, you are creating a pseudo-email list.

You don’t own their emails, and you can’t contact them with blog posts or other content. But for the purpose of book launches, it operates much the same way. Your Amazon followers will be notified as soon as you publish a new book, or put it up for preorder. The best part about this is that they are unlike to feel spammed by Amazon itself. When they open that email, they experience it the same as if Amazon itself is recommending your book.

The power of this strategy can’t be overstated.

There are uses for the other options as well. Obviously building up your twitter following is important. You can also request that they tweet a message, such as promoting your next big book launch. Another option would be to ask them to watch a video, such as a book trailer or author interview. The last option is to have the entrants answer a poll. This can be useful if you are trying to decide on the title of your next book, and you’ll get instant feedback from the very people who you want to read it!

Since I discovered this giveaway platform, I’ve tried it out a few times. Here are my results:

The first picture shows the campaigns that have already been completed. The first campaign (listed for 15) days, had 255 entrants. The second (5 days) had 149 entrants.

The second picture lists a campaign I am that just ended yesterday. There were 173 entrants (over 5 days).

That all equals up to 577 new followers for my Amazon page, 577 new people who will be made aware of my next launch, 577 people who are interested in my genre.

I want to state again that I am only giving away one copy of my book here. And it is the digital copy. The entire price for each campaign is $3, which comes to a grand total of $9 dollars for all three campaigns. That is $9 for 577 new people to follow me on Amazon. On top of that, I have three new readers who will be thrilled to win the drawing, and are more likely to read and review.

Can you think of a more impressive ROI (return-on-investment) available to authors?

One last thing I want to mention: giveaways are not limited to your book. You can set up a giveaway for anything within Amazon’s guidelines. If there is a movie or tv series that relates to your genre, give it away. If you write bible studies, set up a giveaway for a decorative journal or stationary. The options are limitless, but the entrant requirements stay the same.

The Amazon Giveaway platform gives you loads of Organic Traffic, which is easily converted into Own Traffic. This leads to a happy, successful book launch.

Have you tried Amazon Giveaways? How about Goodreads? If so, what were the results? Let us know in the comments!

Vincent B. Davis II is an entrepreneur, soldier, and freelance writer. In December 2016, he founded Thirteenth Press, LLC. His first novel, “The Man with Two Names” is available on Amazon now. You can connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or on his website at vincentbdavisii.com. He loves hearing from other authors! If you would like to be featured on Blueridgeconference.com, e-mail him at vincent@thirteenthpress.com with the subject line “Blog Query”.