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find the perfect topic to write about on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Social Pilot, the social media and marketing tool for bloggers and small businesses. Join over 20,000 social media pros at serve. No master dot com Backslash social pilot today Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Recently, I read a block post recommending a information source. There's a company that does really intent analytics of Amazon categories and topics and areas to focus on. I'd seen this company before I thought about buying one of their research pack. I was interested to see. Are these people really doing research better than me? And so I bought there area for non fiction mode in the self help motivation type space, which a lot of my books in those categories. Howto find yourself how to start your own business, how to make your dreams come true. And I went to this entire report and they charged me $24 not too much money. Fortunately, at the end, they basically said every single categories in here too hard. You're wasting your time. I was amazed that they're willing to sell a report that only had bad news. And the person who recommended this source is another author who I follow some of the stuff that she talks about. It writes about she's successful author, but she's a heavily fiction author, so I know that the report she read was a fiction report Different. This place has about 30 fiction reports. Only two nonfiction reports, as I was going through the report from this person, is supposed to be the greatest source of analysis. The expert on really researching Amazon I discovered a lot of mistakes in the report. There were pulling keywords and recommending categories that clearly hadn't looked at. Everything was fully automated, and so I want to cover exactly what this report did wrong. Some mistakes don't happen to you The first thing that I noticed is the key word section, the number one key. Were they recommend, or the second key word was happiness and cyanide. That's a Web comic that's very irreverent, but it is certainly not anything to do a self help. So I realize they're pulling keywords from Amazon or pulling. Q. It's Google more likely and kind of assigning these statistics to them without paying attention to relevance and relevance is everything. There's some really wonderful key words that no one will ever type into Amazon. I only know about happiness inside that happens to be a Web comic that I read. It's very funny, you know, It's a three panel comic that's been out for 10 years, very reverent, very much targeting my generation. The millennials. As you know, I'm the oldest you can be and still be a millennial. What I found so fascinating is that I looked at the other keywords and realized just by looking based on my experience, most these key words were garbage. I could tell they weren't real search terms, that they were either the specific name of a book or they were the name of something specific outside of Amazon, and a key word like happiness isn't very useful. It's too broad. Unless your book is called Happiness, you're wasting your time. And happiness is a huge niche on Amazon, so it's not one worth targeting anyways. I then noticed that they really hard on this. It oh, the best of the categories. We recommend it of all the ones who looked at this journal writing, and you could look at yourself right now if you want to. It's inside of the self help space. Self help subcategories journal writing. And I said, I've seen that category before. I don't think it's a good one, but they kept saying, Oh, it's a small category but the competition is so low, it's worth it. It's easy to win in this category because no one's fighting for, because there's no customers. Normally, I don't go for categories where there's no money to be made. But I said, maybe I'm missing something I wouldn't look. And the 1st 6 books in the category are not about journal writing about other topics. What Amazon has our categories that are dead, their topics that no one goes into, and so other authors will put their books into those categories is an easy way to rank. If you put your book in the microscopes category and you sell one book a month, you'll be an Amazon bestseller in the microscopes category. Because no one buys books on microscopes, there are very few people that want to read a book that just has stories about 100 different microscopes. Another dead category for interested is the business etiquette category. You look a etiquette inside a business, and very few of the books are about etiquette. If you only do level one research, you'll get really bad data. So when you're looking at key words and you find a cure, that's interesting. What you do is type that search in the Amazon. A look at the results. As you know, I use kindles by and that allows me to quickly see how many books on the page are making money. So I look at how many books are relevant and how many of them are actually making money. Sometimes you'll type in a keyword is only the first book is making money. The rest aren't that tells me it's a false positive. It tells me that the first book happens to rank from that turn. But it's not a term people search and they're buying a bunch of stuff for. That's what we're really looking for. And we're looking at categories. You want to look for categories where they're actually books about that category there. The other thing I notice is they then began to recommend categories that I would never go after because they're so hard. Their categories where you have to sell 100 books, sedate him in the top 20. That's very hard to get two on Amazon. It's very hard to sell that many books a day. You have to have a huge following. You have to build something very big, and it takes a lot of work to get there. When I look for in a category, really are. I like to 20th books. I want the first book to be ranked something kind of chief. I want to be below 10,000 and I was 20. Book to be below 30,000. That's what I really look for. That's the sweet spot that tells me. Okay, if you're number one, you're gonna make a lot of money. And if you're doing okay, Your book will still be on the front page. Book will still be there where people look for it. Thio really sell a lot of every book a day. You have to start to have 50 or 100 books, and so when you're first starting out, that's too hard to achieve. So what I want you to d'oh when you're thinking about categories is be careful, infested. It's in your research. Every time you come up with a great category, go look at the numbers and make sure that books are relevant and that they're actually making sales. That balance is what you really need to look for. A lot of this other data sources. They don't do that. It would be very easy for me to create the exact same report this other company did. The graphs look amazing. They have really great visuals, but at the end of the day, they didn't recommend to me any good categories. Second, after journal writing, which is pretty much a dead category, they started recommending categories that about self help, that in other areas, and they recommend one about Children, there's a growing up category. Children growing up in developing category, and I wouldn't look in that category. And the top 20 books are all Harry Potter and Hunger Games books. They're not nonfiction books are not self help books at all. It's a totally non relevant category. At this point, I realized that I spent $24 on a report that's basically worthless. This other author I looked up to recommended them, and probably because they're giving her commission for sales. How can I recommend a source that basically said everything you looked at garbage? Nothing you recommend is any good. So I look at all these different categories, and every time they gave it a positive, I looked. It was a false positive. Maybe they're fiction. Reports are much better. But since I'm primarily non fiction author and I know that they don't double check their numbers, I don't have a great deal of trust for them with any of the keywords tools I use. Whether it's Kindle Spy or Katie Peerakit, it's easy to get false positive. You have to check them and confirm them. And so now I know this is a research company doesn't do that part. That's the part I want you to understand you want to look at a category and see. Is there enough traffic for me to make money? Are people buying these books? Number two is the competition light enough that I could get my book ranking? So the people that look for this category would find my book and number three. Are the books in this category relevant? Are these actually people interesting, this topic or these other authors trying to game the system and look, we all game the system. I do it a little bit, too. It's just part of the way Amazon works. Until they tighten up a category. There'll be non relevant books, and half the time the wrong books were put there by Amazon. Anyways, the authors didn't actively do it. So we're trying to find that perfect category when trying to find the perfect topic really put in the research. The research phase is the most important face of putting your book together. It's that critical key part of the entire process, and when you do that right, you can put out a book that will make you money for years and years. You want to find that the competition is not too tough that there's money to be made and that it's worth your time when you have those things together. When those three things intersect, that's when you have the perfect topic for your next book. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller, serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode.