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Content
[NOTICE]
You Do Not Have the Right to Reprint, Distribute, or Resell This Report. You Do Not Have The Right To Give Away, Sell, or Share Any Content Found Within This Report.
If You Obtained A Copy Of This Report Anywhere Other Than Websitename.com or from The Warrior Forum Then You Have a Pirated Copy. Please Help Us Stop Online Thievery by Reporting (Anonymously or Otherwise) the Illegal Source to [email protected] Copyright © 2012 Jerome Yip
No part of this consumer report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the author. This electronic book is optimized for viewing on a personal computer screen, but is optimally organized so that it can be printed out and assembled in a traditional book form. Since this electronic book is optimized for viewing on a personal computer screen, the type used is larger than that of which is traditionally utilized in printed book.
[DISCLAIMER]
This report was diligently researched and compiled with the intent to provide information for persons wishing to learn about making a profit using online resources. Throughout the making of this consumer report, every effort has been made to ensure the highest amount of accuracy and effectiveness for the techniques suggested by the author. The report may contain contextual as well as typographical mistakes. No information provided in this report constitutes a warranty of any kind; nor shall readers of this report rely solely on any such information or advice. All content, products, and services are not to be considered as legal, financial, or professional advice and are to be used for personal use and information purposes only. This report makes no warranties or guarantees express or implied, as to the results provided by the strategies, techniques, and advice presented in this report. The publishers of this report expressly disclaim any liability arising from any strategies, techniques, and advice presented in this report. The purpose of this consumer report is to educate and guide. Neither the publisher nor the author warrant that the information contained within this consumer report is free of omissions or errors and is fully complete. Furthermore, neither the publisher nor the author shall have responsibility or liability to any entity or person as a result of any damage or loss alleged to be caused or caused indirectly or directly by this report.
[EXTREMELY IMPORTANT REMINDER]
Please do not ask any questions in the WSO Thread of the Warrior Forum or any other public place that reveal any sources, techniques, strategies, or methods that are laid out within this course. This will ensure that the course you paid for will remain exclusive to you and others who have purchased the information. If you have questions regarding the information provided within this course, you can get any answers you may need by contacting our support desk: [email protected] You may also send a private message via the Warrior Forum to the user ID “Jerome Y.” though this may not receive answers as quickly as an email.
Please allow up to two (2) business days for your response.
To your success,
Jerome Yip “If you start with the mind-set that you know nothing, you will learn a lot that nobody knew before.”
– David Moranis
Module 5: Advanced Book Payment
1. INTRODUCTION TO CROWD FUNDING Welcome to the world of Crowd Funding, this is a method that many do not even know about until now. In this course we will be focusing on how to get funded for a book, but don’t let that limit you as crowd funding can literally be for anything as long as you know what to do. The money you are potentially able to receive can be enough for you to even outsource your next few books, entirely covered for free. Basically, crowd funding is a system that allows people from all over the world, through the power of the internet, to give you the funds to start your desired project. But as with anything, there is a catch. People aren’t just going to give you money for nothing. This is where incentives come in, these are small rewards that are given to them as a token of thanks for their money. This is also a good way to test the idea of your Kindle book. If your book doesn’t get enough funding, that may be an indicator that your book may not be a winner. In that case, nothing is lost and instead you have gotten some valuable feedback. On the flip side, if your book does get funded, you may even make profits even after factoring in outsourcing costs. In essence, people have just paid you to write a book. How does it work? There are many crowd funding networks out there but I will go into the two biggest crowd funding sites. Just to make it complete I will also list out some of the other more popular crowd funding sites and what they are mainly used for.
Believers Fund – This site is mainly used for Mobile App funding. They have a strong number of funders there and is the go-to place if you ever want to get an app funded. All apps funded are yours, you claim 100% ownership of your application. Rockethub – A leading crowd funding website for creative projects. This site has been steadily increasing in size, especially in terms of funders. Quirky – A crowd funding site for inventors. Have a great idea for an invention? Join Quirky to see if your inventions make the cut and get backed! Start Some Good -A crowd funding website for Social Entrepreneurs. There are many non-profit Entrepreneurs there, but also for profit socially responsible entrepreneurs. Causes – A crowd funding site for registered nonprofits to raise money, often times it is used for launching boycott and petition campaigns. Crowdrise – A crowd funding site for charities to raise money. Indiegogo
Indiegogo is the world’s largest and earliest (founded in 2008) crowd funding website. They have helped to raise millions of dollars for over 30,000 campaigns, across 194 countries. Fund Raising Schemes Indiegogo has 2 different fund raising schemes.
If flexible funding is chosen, you get to keep whatever you have earned regardless if you have hit your goal. However, Indiegogo will take 9% of your earnings as well as 3% for credit card processing. Another 25% wire fee is imposed for non-US users. If you have hit your goal, Indiegogo only takes 4%. If fixed funding is chosen, it’s an all or nothing scheme. If you hit your goal, you get paid, otherwise you will receive no money and the funding project will be considered a failure.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is another major powerhouse in the crowd funding world and over 30.000 projects have been funded. Fund Raising Scheme Unlike Indiegogo, there is only one type of fund raising scheme in Kickstarter which is the all or nothing scheme. Kickstarter takes a 5% application fee and an additional 3-5% credit card processing fee through Amazon Payments. If your funding campaign didn’t reach its goals, no fees will be charged to you. Kickstarter is strictly for U.S users only, if you aren’t from U.S, Indiegogo is a great alternative as well. **Take note that for both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, no charity or cause funding campaigns should be started, these are against both site’s project guidelines.*
Incentives & Rewards So why does crowd funding work? Because of incentives! People will fund your projects if they find your incentives to be enticing enough for them. Generally, the more they choose to pledge, the more enticing your incentives & rewards have to be. Once your fund raising campaign has been successfully funded, you are obliged to deliver on your promises of incentives & rewards. Although there is no real way to hold you accountable to upholding your promises and Kickstarter will not refund any of your backers, you should hold your end of the bargain and deliver on your promises if you want to gain loyal backers. Also, you have complete 100% ownership of your work, none of your backers can claim to have any part in your work. This is a great way for many people who are thinking of getting started in Kindle but don’t have much money to outsource. If all you need is some startup money of a few hundred dollars, this is very achievable goal with crowd funding. I have personally seen projects that have raised thousands of dollars. Note: The following tips and techniques taught will be applicable to both Kickstarter as well as Indiegogo. There are some slight differences but the main crowd funding concepts apply. There are certain features in each of them that are unique to them so you have to judge how you can use each of them to your advantage.
2. SUCCESSFUL FUNDING PROJECTS RESEARCH When choosing which niche/topic to go into, it is important for you to determine your end goal. Is your end goal to earn some profits off crowd funding or to get the funds to start your eBook and eventually earn money through Kindle? Since this course is aimed at getting the book funding for Kindle, that is what I would recommend you stick to. There is definitely some good money to be made off crowd funding, but that should not be your aim. I would much prefer you to use crowd funding to get whatever startup amount you need and move onto Kindle to sell your books. Building a successful author name in Kindle is worth more than 1 or 2 successful crowd funding campaigns, in my opinion the long term strategy is better. Although I have no doubt that there are people who have mastered the art of raising successful crowd funding campaigns for any type of project. I will cover how you can find out which are the best niches to go into in Module 1, but for now I will show you how you can find successful crowd fund book campaigns and emulate their success by seeing what they’re doing right and maybe will even learn which book genres are more popular in these crowd funding sites. I will cover Indiegogo first, followed by Kickstarter.
Go to “Advanced Search” and search for “book” or “ebook”. Next, under Category select “Writing” and select “Success” under Status. This will show us all the projects that are under the Writing section and have successfully funded their campaigns. We also choose Goal Type to be “All” so that we have the complete search results for all successful book funding projects. For Kickstarter, there isn’t an option to do an advanced search so the same method cannot be applied to Kickstarter. What you can do is browse categories under “Publishing”. Kickstarter shows a lot of information for each category. From Most Funded to Staff Picks, you can see more of each as well.
I hope you can see how useful this is by now, since Kickstarter lets you see every successfully campaign in existence, past or present (so does Indiegogo), there are countless other successful projects that you can research and emulate.
3. SETTING UP A CROWDFUNDING PROJECT KICKSTARTER
This is the process chart of setting up a crowd funding campaign. I will go through the individual components and tell you briefly what each of which entails. Basics
Project Image: This is the image thumbnail that will represent your project when visitors are browsing the site. Keep in mind that these thumbnails should catch people’s attention because they are seeing about 3-6 different projects at any time. This image will not be shown when users click to see more details of your project. Short Blurbs: It is suggested under “Short Blurbs” that you describe your project in one tweet or less. This is the description visitors will see
when they are browsing all projects. Your descriptions should be as accurate and as interesting as possible.
Funding duration: The optimal length for a project I have found is to be around 30 to 40 days. If you are unsure of how long you should set your project for, I would recommend you go for the default 30 days. Funding goals: We have to be realistic here, people will not fund a project for $50,000 and above unless your project has a very good concept or can be justified by hefty costs (such as building of schools, film making, etc). In general people know that writing a book costs less than that and you may want to set a goal lesser than $10,000. But don’t let that stop you
from setting a high goal if you can justify it to your backers, I have seen book projects that have set goals of $20,000 and above. If you just need start-up money to do outsourcing, your chances of achieving your goal will be much higher. Rewards
Pledge Amount: Here you will decide the rewards and incentives you will provide to backers that decide to support your project. You can set any amount, from as low as $1. Description: Write what you will give to your backers for supporting your project. Est. delivery date: This is the date by which you will have to deliver on your reward should your project get successfully funded. You want to
estimate this correctly especially if your incentives involve shipping over physical items. You can also limit the number of backers that will receive this incentive by checking the “Limit # available” box. There is also an option of adding another reward, you can add as many rewards as you want. I will go into more detail on how you should structure your incentives and rewards in the next section. Story
Project Video: This video will be the first thing visitors see when they go to your crowd funding project page to get more details.
Project Description: This is the FULL description for your project. This will be shown in your actual project page when visitors click to view more on your project. Risks and Challenges: This is where you explain and justify your situations and why you need help. You want to show as best as possible, all your difficulties and how you will be using their money. People want to feel that their money is being spent wisely. About You Alright, this part is pretty much self-explanatory. Always have a profile picture, write a good biography and link to your website if you have one , which I highly recommend you do(even a blogger site is better than nothing). Having a website will give your potential backers a platform to find more information about you. This will give you the credibility you need and raise your chances of doing a successful crowd funding campaign. Account This is the section where you set up your Amazon payments, verify your identification and contact details. You may want to configure this up properly so that you can receive your payments accurately.
INDIEGOGO To start a campaign, click on create on the top bar, you should be brought to this page.
We would choose the “Writing” category, although I think choosing another category that suits your niche is fine too. So let’s say your book is about photography, you could try setting the category to “Photography” instead of “Writing”. This is something you can play around with to see which works best.
Choose your desired fund raising goal and like before, the same applies here, similar to what we discussed on Kickstarter. Try to be realistic as well. There is a minimum of $500 for goal setting. Now you want to receive the funds as an individual or registered business if you already have one. If you have a registered business for your book publishing or even for your Internet Business, you could use that. Also instead of looking like an individual, you could leverage on your company to look more professional than you might be.
Likewise, add your small image, this image will be shown as a thumbnail when people browse Indiegogo. Title – Self Explanatory Short Description – This is similar to the short blurb in Kickstarter Campaign Link – This is normally decided by Indiegogo but you can change the link to something easier to remember so when you spread the links around it’s much easier for them.
This is where you choose your funding type. Remember, Indiegogo allows for flexible funding, which means you keep everything you raise regardless of your target goal. This is one advantage Indiegogo has over Kickstarter. Deadline – You can choose a specific length of time or date.
Your Story – This part is basically your main body text and remember the same concepts apply when writing a description. Indiegogo has also given you some guidelines in the box to guide you on what you can write. Also remember you can always refer to other campaigns to see how they structure their description and emulate their format. Pitch Media – I can’t stress this enough, get a video! I will talk more on videos later on.
Next, add your perks. These are your incentives to your backers. I will also cover this in detail.
Adding outside links - This is great for your SEO efforts and this is something we discussed on marketing and promotion. You will see later on how this is good for more than just SEO.
You can also add more media like other video updates, new images and new file. If you have a second video, it would definitely boost your campaign more. You can also use this as video updates, people like to watch videos and a video update will get more attention than updates in text form. Your Campaign is now LIVE!
GOGO FACTOR GoGo Factor is something unique to Indiegogo, I don’t think Kickstarter has implemented this. So what is GoGo Factor? It is basically a chance to get featured on Indiegogo’s homepage!
GoGo Factor is run by an algorithm, almost like Indiegogo’s “SEO” and everyone has a fair chance at it. Basically, to be featured you want to get your GoGo Factor raised as much as you can. It’s algorithm is based on your campaign’s activeness/ activity. It tracks EVERYTHING. Everything from how much gets funded on your campaign page, to promotions, comments and how frequently you update. Remember that your GoGo Factor is relative to other campaigns. The perks of getting featured is huge, you get a shout you out on their homepage, include you in their weekly newsletter, push you out onto their social media channels (twitter,facebook,etc.) and your placement in some of their press initiatives in global publications. Indiegogo also gives updates on tips to get your GoGo Factor so check back to their Twitter and Facebook page. Also remember to interact with them!
4. INCENTIVES & REWARDS Reward Structure The basic idea here is to start with low amount pledges first. An example of a typical pledging structure would be something like this. Pledge: $1 or more Pledge: $7 or more Pledge: $27 or more Pledge: $47 or more Pledge: $77 or more Pledge: $107 or more And so on. Now, you don’t have to follow this if you think you have more suitable pricing, I just chose to go with 7s because of the psychology of selling and how the number 7 is more enticing to visitors but you could technically put your own pricings as long as you stick to some basic guidelines. Guidelines 1. Keep your reward pledges tight! This is important! When you keep your pledge amounts tight with small intervals, you give people a chance to find their “level of comfort” when deciding how much they would like to pledge towards your project. Depending on your goal, you might want to raise the intervals slightly. For example, if your goal is $1000, after a pledge of $50, you might want to consider jumping straight to $90-$100. The Increasing Pledge Amounts
reason for this is because if your intervals are too small, you may find yourself requiring a lot more backers to achieve the same goal. The idea here is to find the highest level of comfort your backers are willing to pledge. There’s no way you can find the appropriate pledge amounts to cater to everyone, just try to aim for the majority of your potential backers. 2. Always start from $1 You may be thinking, why $1?! Now there is a reason for this, there are many projects that set pledges with low amounts such as $1 with incentives such as these below.
As you can see, these rewards literally cost you NOTHING and that’s why it’s so great. People are more likely to give you $1 for a simple “Thank You”, either through Facebook, Twitter or even expressing thanks as a pledge reward. You don’t want to raise this reward to $5, because even for $5, this type of reward can come across as being a little cheap. For the example above, if the project starter had not put this pledge amount, it would be an extra $13 that we might not have gotten for free! You will find many projects that do this, browse around projects to see what kind of incentives they are giving for low pledges.
3. Only give rewards that cost you something for pledges that are relatively high. I would recommend any pledge amount below $35 should be given a reward that costs you nothing or cheap to deliver. This amount can vary, depending on whether you have better ideas on rewards that are relatively cheap and something backers would like to have. Ideas on rewards that would cost you something would be T-shirts, a physical copy of your book, a signed copy of your book, a special handmade thank you card, mugs, or even a chance to have one of your characters named after them in your book! For high amounts like $1,000 I would generally advise that you give rewards that really give value to your backer, such as a 2 full page advertisement for a sponsor.
This is an actual pledge from a successful project. If you notice the incentive is really attractive and you can really feel that a lot of value is given for such a high pledge. This is something I would advise you only do if you have something of real value to offer to backers. 4. Next progressive pledge should include rewards from previous lower pledge. Let me illustrate this point with pictures from an actual project.
The rewards for the $25 pledge which are, a signed book, a handwritten thank-you note, includes U.S Shipping and 4 printed Doggitude note cards, are inclusive of the rewards from the $5 pledge as well. The same applies for the $60 pledge and so on.
This eliminates backers who prefer certain incentives that might be at a lower pledge level when they could actually afford to pledge an amount higher than the pledge level their preferred reward is at. It encourages backers to pledge their highest affordable amount knowing that they are getting everything that a lower amount pledge is rewarding.
5. HOW TO OPTIMIZE PROJECT SUCCESS RATE Project Video Projects with videos actually have a 50% increase in success rate as compared to projects WITHOUT a video. If this doesn’t compel you to create a video for your project, I don’t know what will. Your videos don’t have to be professionally done, even a video made on Animoto will do the trick. If you do not have any money to start-up, do a simple Windows Movie Maker video, it will definitely do better than leaving your project page without a video. You can learn to do a simple video by going to YouTube and searching for Windows Movie Maker tutorials. However, if you can spare $5, head over to Fiverr and you can get a video done. Make sure your video conveys what your book is about. If a picture speaks a thousand words, videos would speak much more. Your video will further showcase your book contents and may even get people who initially didn’t think much of your book to be interested. Show that you are a real person and get on camera. I know many people are uncomfortable with getting on camera and this is perfectly fine. I would recommend you spend some money to get this outsourced and get someone who looks presentable to represent you and be the face of your book. Like I have mentioned before, Fiverr is an excellent resource for works such as this. Just spare $5 and you will be able to get a short video of someone talking about your book. If you can’t spare $5, I think it’s time to get out of your comfort zone.
Inject humor into your videos! People love to watch videos that have humor in them! Believe it or not, if your video has good humor, people will back your project solely based on your video! I have seen this before and it is a form of marketing. Below are some projects with good videos that I think are worth viewing to get an idea of what a video should look like. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kristinsample/north-shore-southshore-a-novel Look for the bloopers at the back of the video, I thought this was hilarious! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/490092097/amalfi-blue-lost-andfound-in-the-south-of-italy The book author goes on camera on this video and shows off her personality. Updates You want to always keep your page updated with your progress on your book, estimated launch dates, etc. I have seen projects that did well initially, but lost momentum due to the lack of updates on their page. Potential backers will look at your update page to see if your project is still work in progress. No potential backer will give their money to you if they see that you are not doing anything. Show them you are doing something, anything at all just to reassure that you are actually in the midst of your book
creation. Even if you are still in the planning stage, you could update your page on how you are re-organizing your book. If you choose to adopt the flexible funding on Indiegogo, you may have an easier time with updates. You can get started as soon as you see enough money needed for outsourcing. Updates will definitely be easier to post as there will be some real progress on the book.
6. MARKETING & PROMOTION Many projects don’t actually have any real SEO work done on their pages, so by doing a couple of back linking done, you could do much better than majority of the projects in terms of SEO. Because this isn’t a course on SEO, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of how to build back links, etc. I have mentioned ways to get your book promoted and marketed on Kindle in Module 3. Many of the techniques can also be applied to promoting your crowd funding projects. Please head over to that module to read more on marketing and promotion of your crowd funding project.
LIST OF SITES Video Creation Services http://animoto.com/ http://fiverr.com/ http://videohive.net/ http://www.onetruemedia.com/ http://studio.stupeflix.com/en/ http://www.flixpress.com/ http://www.videozee.com/ http://www.sparkol.com/
CreateSpace CreateSpace is great because it allows us to create paperback books on demand! No worrying about keeping lots of inventory for books that you might not even sell! They take care of your manufacturing and shipping. The cost is pretty cheap and if you followed the incentive pricing, there should be no problems making a profit even after taking into account the cost of creating the paperback. You can also choose to give an mp3 version of your book, an audio book! You can either do the voice over yourself or get it outsourced on Fiverr, etc. and offer that on CreateSpace as well. The audio book can also be used as a incentive for higher pledges. They also offer video copies in the form of DVDs. I only recommend you do this if you have the money and time to create these DVDs. They are typically going to be more expensive but can be a great incentive for your backers. Like before, this can be added as an incentive for higher pledges. They also have a community forum where you can ask questions and see what other people are doing.
You Do Not Have the Right to Reprint, Distribute, or Resell This Report. You Do Not Have The Right To Give Away, Sell, or Share Any Content Found Within This Report.
If You Obtained A Copy Of This Report Anywhere Other Than Websitename.com or from The Warrior Forum Then You Have a Pirated Copy. Please Help Us Stop Online Thievery by Reporting (Anonymously or Otherwise) the Illegal Source to [email protected] Copyright © 2012 Jerome Yip
No part of this consumer report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the author. This electronic book is optimized for viewing on a personal computer screen, but is optimally organized so that it can be printed out and assembled in a traditional book form. Since this electronic book is optimized for viewing on a personal computer screen, the type used is larger than that of which is traditionally utilized in printed book.
[DISCLAIMER]
This report was diligently researched and compiled with the intent to provide information for persons wishing to learn about making a profit using online resources. Throughout the making of this consumer report, every effort has been made to ensure the highest amount of accuracy and effectiveness for the techniques suggested by the author. The report may contain contextual as well as typographical mistakes. No information provided in this report constitutes a warranty of any kind; nor shall readers of this report rely solely on any such information or advice. All content, products, and services are not to be considered as legal, financial, or professional advice and are to be used for personal use and information purposes only. This report makes no warranties or guarantees express or implied, as to the results provided by the strategies, techniques, and advice presented in this report. The publishers of this report expressly disclaim any liability arising from any strategies, techniques, and advice presented in this report. The purpose of this consumer report is to educate and guide. Neither the publisher nor the author warrant that the information contained within this consumer report is free of omissions or errors and is fully complete. Furthermore, neither the publisher nor the author shall have responsibility or liability to any entity or person as a result of any damage or loss alleged to be caused or caused indirectly or directly by this report.
[EXTREMELY IMPORTANT REMINDER]
Please do not ask any questions in the WSO Thread of the Warrior Forum or any other public place that reveal any sources, techniques, strategies, or methods that are laid out within this course. This will ensure that the course you paid for will remain exclusive to you and others who have purchased the information. If you have questions regarding the information provided within this course, you can get any answers you may need by contacting our support desk: [email protected] You may also send a private message via the Warrior Forum to the user ID “Jerome Y.” though this may not receive answers as quickly as an email.
Please allow up to two (2) business days for your response.
To your success,
Jerome Yip “If you start with the mind-set that you know nothing, you will learn a lot that nobody knew before.”
– David Moranis
Module 5: Advanced Book Payment
1. INTRODUCTION TO CROWD FUNDING Welcome to the world of Crowd Funding, this is a method that many do not even know about until now. In this course we will be focusing on how to get funded for a book, but don’t let that limit you as crowd funding can literally be for anything as long as you know what to do. The money you are potentially able to receive can be enough for you to even outsource your next few books, entirely covered for free. Basically, crowd funding is a system that allows people from all over the world, through the power of the internet, to give you the funds to start your desired project. But as with anything, there is a catch. People aren’t just going to give you money for nothing. This is where incentives come in, these are small rewards that are given to them as a token of thanks for their money. This is also a good way to test the idea of your Kindle book. If your book doesn’t get enough funding, that may be an indicator that your book may not be a winner. In that case, nothing is lost and instead you have gotten some valuable feedback. On the flip side, if your book does get funded, you may even make profits even after factoring in outsourcing costs. In essence, people have just paid you to write a book. How does it work? There are many crowd funding networks out there but I will go into the two biggest crowd funding sites. Just to make it complete I will also list out some of the other more popular crowd funding sites and what they are mainly used for.
Believers Fund – This site is mainly used for Mobile App funding. They have a strong number of funders there and is the go-to place if you ever want to get an app funded. All apps funded are yours, you claim 100% ownership of your application. Rockethub – A leading crowd funding website for creative projects. This site has been steadily increasing in size, especially in terms of funders. Quirky – A crowd funding site for inventors. Have a great idea for an invention? Join Quirky to see if your inventions make the cut and get backed! Start Some Good -A crowd funding website for Social Entrepreneurs. There are many non-profit Entrepreneurs there, but also for profit socially responsible entrepreneurs. Causes – A crowd funding site for registered nonprofits to raise money, often times it is used for launching boycott and petition campaigns. Crowdrise – A crowd funding site for charities to raise money. Indiegogo
Indiegogo is the world’s largest and earliest (founded in 2008) crowd funding website. They have helped to raise millions of dollars for over 30,000 campaigns, across 194 countries. Fund Raising Schemes Indiegogo has 2 different fund raising schemes.
If flexible funding is chosen, you get to keep whatever you have earned regardless if you have hit your goal. However, Indiegogo will take 9% of your earnings as well as 3% for credit card processing. Another 25% wire fee is imposed for non-US users. If you have hit your goal, Indiegogo only takes 4%. If fixed funding is chosen, it’s an all or nothing scheme. If you hit your goal, you get paid, otherwise you will receive no money and the funding project will be considered a failure.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is another major powerhouse in the crowd funding world and over 30.000 projects have been funded. Fund Raising Scheme Unlike Indiegogo, there is only one type of fund raising scheme in Kickstarter which is the all or nothing scheme. Kickstarter takes a 5% application fee and an additional 3-5% credit card processing fee through Amazon Payments. If your funding campaign didn’t reach its goals, no fees will be charged to you. Kickstarter is strictly for U.S users only, if you aren’t from U.S, Indiegogo is a great alternative as well. **Take note that for both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, no charity or cause funding campaigns should be started, these are against both site’s project guidelines.*
Incentives & Rewards So why does crowd funding work? Because of incentives! People will fund your projects if they find your incentives to be enticing enough for them. Generally, the more they choose to pledge, the more enticing your incentives & rewards have to be. Once your fund raising campaign has been successfully funded, you are obliged to deliver on your promises of incentives & rewards. Although there is no real way to hold you accountable to upholding your promises and Kickstarter will not refund any of your backers, you should hold your end of the bargain and deliver on your promises if you want to gain loyal backers. Also, you have complete 100% ownership of your work, none of your backers can claim to have any part in your work. This is a great way for many people who are thinking of getting started in Kindle but don’t have much money to outsource. If all you need is some startup money of a few hundred dollars, this is very achievable goal with crowd funding. I have personally seen projects that have raised thousands of dollars. Note: The following tips and techniques taught will be applicable to both Kickstarter as well as Indiegogo. There are some slight differences but the main crowd funding concepts apply. There are certain features in each of them that are unique to them so you have to judge how you can use each of them to your advantage.
2. SUCCESSFUL FUNDING PROJECTS RESEARCH When choosing which niche/topic to go into, it is important for you to determine your end goal. Is your end goal to earn some profits off crowd funding or to get the funds to start your eBook and eventually earn money through Kindle? Since this course is aimed at getting the book funding for Kindle, that is what I would recommend you stick to. There is definitely some good money to be made off crowd funding, but that should not be your aim. I would much prefer you to use crowd funding to get whatever startup amount you need and move onto Kindle to sell your books. Building a successful author name in Kindle is worth more than 1 or 2 successful crowd funding campaigns, in my opinion the long term strategy is better. Although I have no doubt that there are people who have mastered the art of raising successful crowd funding campaigns for any type of project. I will cover how you can find out which are the best niches to go into in Module 1, but for now I will show you how you can find successful crowd fund book campaigns and emulate their success by seeing what they’re doing right and maybe will even learn which book genres are more popular in these crowd funding sites. I will cover Indiegogo first, followed by Kickstarter.
Go to “Advanced Search” and search for “book” or “ebook”. Next, under Category select “Writing” and select “Success” under Status. This will show us all the projects that are under the Writing section and have successfully funded their campaigns. We also choose Goal Type to be “All” so that we have the complete search results for all successful book funding projects. For Kickstarter, there isn’t an option to do an advanced search so the same method cannot be applied to Kickstarter. What you can do is browse categories under “Publishing”. Kickstarter shows a lot of information for each category. From Most Funded to Staff Picks, you can see more of each as well.
I hope you can see how useful this is by now, since Kickstarter lets you see every successfully campaign in existence, past or present (so does Indiegogo), there are countless other successful projects that you can research and emulate.
3. SETTING UP A CROWDFUNDING PROJECT KICKSTARTER
This is the process chart of setting up a crowd funding campaign. I will go through the individual components and tell you briefly what each of which entails. Basics
Project Image: This is the image thumbnail that will represent your project when visitors are browsing the site. Keep in mind that these thumbnails should catch people’s attention because they are seeing about 3-6 different projects at any time. This image will not be shown when users click to see more details of your project. Short Blurbs: It is suggested under “Short Blurbs” that you describe your project in one tweet or less. This is the description visitors will see
when they are browsing all projects. Your descriptions should be as accurate and as interesting as possible.
Funding duration: The optimal length for a project I have found is to be around 30 to 40 days. If you are unsure of how long you should set your project for, I would recommend you go for the default 30 days. Funding goals: We have to be realistic here, people will not fund a project for $50,000 and above unless your project has a very good concept or can be justified by hefty costs (such as building of schools, film making, etc). In general people know that writing a book costs less than that and you may want to set a goal lesser than $10,000. But don’t let that stop you
from setting a high goal if you can justify it to your backers, I have seen book projects that have set goals of $20,000 and above. If you just need start-up money to do outsourcing, your chances of achieving your goal will be much higher. Rewards
Pledge Amount: Here you will decide the rewards and incentives you will provide to backers that decide to support your project. You can set any amount, from as low as $1. Description: Write what you will give to your backers for supporting your project. Est. delivery date: This is the date by which you will have to deliver on your reward should your project get successfully funded. You want to
estimate this correctly especially if your incentives involve shipping over physical items. You can also limit the number of backers that will receive this incentive by checking the “Limit # available” box. There is also an option of adding another reward, you can add as many rewards as you want. I will go into more detail on how you should structure your incentives and rewards in the next section. Story
Project Video: This video will be the first thing visitors see when they go to your crowd funding project page to get more details.
Project Description: This is the FULL description for your project. This will be shown in your actual project page when visitors click to view more on your project. Risks and Challenges: This is where you explain and justify your situations and why you need help. You want to show as best as possible, all your difficulties and how you will be using their money. People want to feel that their money is being spent wisely. About You Alright, this part is pretty much self-explanatory. Always have a profile picture, write a good biography and link to your website if you have one , which I highly recommend you do(even a blogger site is better than nothing). Having a website will give your potential backers a platform to find more information about you. This will give you the credibility you need and raise your chances of doing a successful crowd funding campaign. Account This is the section where you set up your Amazon payments, verify your identification and contact details. You may want to configure this up properly so that you can receive your payments accurately.
INDIEGOGO To start a campaign, click on create on the top bar, you should be brought to this page.
We would choose the “Writing” category, although I think choosing another category that suits your niche is fine too. So let’s say your book is about photography, you could try setting the category to “Photography” instead of “Writing”. This is something you can play around with to see which works best.
Choose your desired fund raising goal and like before, the same applies here, similar to what we discussed on Kickstarter. Try to be realistic as well. There is a minimum of $500 for goal setting. Now you want to receive the funds as an individual or registered business if you already have one. If you have a registered business for your book publishing or even for your Internet Business, you could use that. Also instead of looking like an individual, you could leverage on your company to look more professional than you might be.
Likewise, add your small image, this image will be shown as a thumbnail when people browse Indiegogo. Title – Self Explanatory Short Description – This is similar to the short blurb in Kickstarter Campaign Link – This is normally decided by Indiegogo but you can change the link to something easier to remember so when you spread the links around it’s much easier for them.
This is where you choose your funding type. Remember, Indiegogo allows for flexible funding, which means you keep everything you raise regardless of your target goal. This is one advantage Indiegogo has over Kickstarter. Deadline – You can choose a specific length of time or date.
Your Story – This part is basically your main body text and remember the same concepts apply when writing a description. Indiegogo has also given you some guidelines in the box to guide you on what you can write. Also remember you can always refer to other campaigns to see how they structure their description and emulate their format. Pitch Media – I can’t stress this enough, get a video! I will talk more on videos later on.
Next, add your perks. These are your incentives to your backers. I will also cover this in detail.
Adding outside links - This is great for your SEO efforts and this is something we discussed on marketing and promotion. You will see later on how this is good for more than just SEO.
You can also add more media like other video updates, new images and new file. If you have a second video, it would definitely boost your campaign more. You can also use this as video updates, people like to watch videos and a video update will get more attention than updates in text form. Your Campaign is now LIVE!
GOGO FACTOR GoGo Factor is something unique to Indiegogo, I don’t think Kickstarter has implemented this. So what is GoGo Factor? It is basically a chance to get featured on Indiegogo’s homepage!
GoGo Factor is run by an algorithm, almost like Indiegogo’s “SEO” and everyone has a fair chance at it. Basically, to be featured you want to get your GoGo Factor raised as much as you can. It’s algorithm is based on your campaign’s activeness/ activity. It tracks EVERYTHING. Everything from how much gets funded on your campaign page, to promotions, comments and how frequently you update. Remember that your GoGo Factor is relative to other campaigns. The perks of getting featured is huge, you get a shout you out on their homepage, include you in their weekly newsletter, push you out onto their social media channels (twitter,facebook,etc.) and your placement in some of their press initiatives in global publications. Indiegogo also gives updates on tips to get your GoGo Factor so check back to their Twitter and Facebook page. Also remember to interact with them!
4. INCENTIVES & REWARDS Reward Structure The basic idea here is to start with low amount pledges first. An example of a typical pledging structure would be something like this. Pledge: $1 or more Pledge: $7 or more Pledge: $27 or more Pledge: $47 or more Pledge: $77 or more Pledge: $107 or more And so on. Now, you don’t have to follow this if you think you have more suitable pricing, I just chose to go with 7s because of the psychology of selling and how the number 7 is more enticing to visitors but you could technically put your own pricings as long as you stick to some basic guidelines. Guidelines 1. Keep your reward pledges tight! This is important! When you keep your pledge amounts tight with small intervals, you give people a chance to find their “level of comfort” when deciding how much they would like to pledge towards your project. Depending on your goal, you might want to raise the intervals slightly. For example, if your goal is $1000, after a pledge of $50, you might want to consider jumping straight to $90-$100. The Increasing Pledge Amounts
reason for this is because if your intervals are too small, you may find yourself requiring a lot more backers to achieve the same goal. The idea here is to find the highest level of comfort your backers are willing to pledge. There’s no way you can find the appropriate pledge amounts to cater to everyone, just try to aim for the majority of your potential backers. 2. Always start from $1 You may be thinking, why $1?! Now there is a reason for this, there are many projects that set pledges with low amounts such as $1 with incentives such as these below.
As you can see, these rewards literally cost you NOTHING and that’s why it’s so great. People are more likely to give you $1 for a simple “Thank You”, either through Facebook, Twitter or even expressing thanks as a pledge reward. You don’t want to raise this reward to $5, because even for $5, this type of reward can come across as being a little cheap. For the example above, if the project starter had not put this pledge amount, it would be an extra $13 that we might not have gotten for free! You will find many projects that do this, browse around projects to see what kind of incentives they are giving for low pledges.
3. Only give rewards that cost you something for pledges that are relatively high. I would recommend any pledge amount below $35 should be given a reward that costs you nothing or cheap to deliver. This amount can vary, depending on whether you have better ideas on rewards that are relatively cheap and something backers would like to have. Ideas on rewards that would cost you something would be T-shirts, a physical copy of your book, a signed copy of your book, a special handmade thank you card, mugs, or even a chance to have one of your characters named after them in your book! For high amounts like $1,000 I would generally advise that you give rewards that really give value to your backer, such as a 2 full page advertisement for a sponsor.
This is an actual pledge from a successful project. If you notice the incentive is really attractive and you can really feel that a lot of value is given for such a high pledge. This is something I would advise you only do if you have something of real value to offer to backers. 4. Next progressive pledge should include rewards from previous lower pledge. Let me illustrate this point with pictures from an actual project.
The rewards for the $25 pledge which are, a signed book, a handwritten thank-you note, includes U.S Shipping and 4 printed Doggitude note cards, are inclusive of the rewards from the $5 pledge as well. The same applies for the $60 pledge and so on.
This eliminates backers who prefer certain incentives that might be at a lower pledge level when they could actually afford to pledge an amount higher than the pledge level their preferred reward is at. It encourages backers to pledge their highest affordable amount knowing that they are getting everything that a lower amount pledge is rewarding.
5. HOW TO OPTIMIZE PROJECT SUCCESS RATE Project Video Projects with videos actually have a 50% increase in success rate as compared to projects WITHOUT a video. If this doesn’t compel you to create a video for your project, I don’t know what will. Your videos don’t have to be professionally done, even a video made on Animoto will do the trick. If you do not have any money to start-up, do a simple Windows Movie Maker video, it will definitely do better than leaving your project page without a video. You can learn to do a simple video by going to YouTube and searching for Windows Movie Maker tutorials. However, if you can spare $5, head over to Fiverr and you can get a video done. Make sure your video conveys what your book is about. If a picture speaks a thousand words, videos would speak much more. Your video will further showcase your book contents and may even get people who initially didn’t think much of your book to be interested. Show that you are a real person and get on camera. I know many people are uncomfortable with getting on camera and this is perfectly fine. I would recommend you spend some money to get this outsourced and get someone who looks presentable to represent you and be the face of your book. Like I have mentioned before, Fiverr is an excellent resource for works such as this. Just spare $5 and you will be able to get a short video of someone talking about your book. If you can’t spare $5, I think it’s time to get out of your comfort zone.
Inject humor into your videos! People love to watch videos that have humor in them! Believe it or not, if your video has good humor, people will back your project solely based on your video! I have seen this before and it is a form of marketing. Below are some projects with good videos that I think are worth viewing to get an idea of what a video should look like. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kristinsample/north-shore-southshore-a-novel Look for the bloopers at the back of the video, I thought this was hilarious! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/490092097/amalfi-blue-lost-andfound-in-the-south-of-italy The book author goes on camera on this video and shows off her personality. Updates You want to always keep your page updated with your progress on your book, estimated launch dates, etc. I have seen projects that did well initially, but lost momentum due to the lack of updates on their page. Potential backers will look at your update page to see if your project is still work in progress. No potential backer will give their money to you if they see that you are not doing anything. Show them you are doing something, anything at all just to reassure that you are actually in the midst of your book
creation. Even if you are still in the planning stage, you could update your page on how you are re-organizing your book. If you choose to adopt the flexible funding on Indiegogo, you may have an easier time with updates. You can get started as soon as you see enough money needed for outsourcing. Updates will definitely be easier to post as there will be some real progress on the book.
6. MARKETING & PROMOTION Many projects don’t actually have any real SEO work done on their pages, so by doing a couple of back linking done, you could do much better than majority of the projects in terms of SEO. Because this isn’t a course on SEO, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of how to build back links, etc. I have mentioned ways to get your book promoted and marketed on Kindle in Module 3. Many of the techniques can also be applied to promoting your crowd funding projects. Please head over to that module to read more on marketing and promotion of your crowd funding project.
LIST OF SITES Video Creation Services http://animoto.com/ http://fiverr.com/ http://videohive.net/ http://www.onetruemedia.com/ http://studio.stupeflix.com/en/ http://www.flixpress.com/ http://www.videozee.com/ http://www.sparkol.com/
CreateSpace CreateSpace is great because it allows us to create paperback books on demand! No worrying about keeping lots of inventory for books that you might not even sell! They take care of your manufacturing and shipping. The cost is pretty cheap and if you followed the incentive pricing, there should be no problems making a profit even after taking into account the cost of creating the paperback. You can also choose to give an mp3 version of your book, an audio book! You can either do the voice over yourself or get it outsourced on Fiverr, etc. and offer that on CreateSpace as well. The audio book can also be used as a incentive for higher pledges. They also offer video copies in the form of DVDs. I only recommend you do this if you have the money and time to create these DVDs. They are typically going to be more expensive but can be a great incentive for your backers. Like before, this can be added as an incentive for higher pledges. They also have a community forum where you can ask questions and see what other people are doing.
