Woke up this morning to discover that my book Channels of Growth is currently ranking #2 on Amazon for readers who search for “Growth Marketing”.
This honestly should not be possible. 👀
“Growth Marketing” is a pretty major search term.
With only 18 reviews Channels of Growth as of writing this post is beating out Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis, a mammoth with 1,437 reviews.
This was actually the major success goal I had set out to achieve when launching this thing. If I could write a “top 3” book for Growth Marketing this whole project would be classified a success.
But I honestly figured i’d need hundreds of reviews to get to this point. I was shocked how easy this was to rank.
Here’s my tin-foil-hat breakdown of why this happened.
First - Despite having 1,437 reviews, Hacking Growth only has a 4.5 star average rating.
My book, despite only have 18 reviews, has a 4.8 star rating. It was previously ranking #8-#10 for the search query “Growth Marketing” and it had only made the jump to the #2 placement once the most recent review came through, bumping it from a 4.7 to a 4.8 AND giving it that gold “five stars” round up.
This is pretty wild.
It tells me that Amazon places a VERY heavy emphasis on the average rating. So much so that if you can get a really strong average rating it will help you beat out competitive products with thousands more reviews.
Second - I had a spike of sales.
I’ve noticed this previously, that as my sales went up or down slightly that my position within Amazon would also fluctuate.
To be clear though, this most recent spike wasn’t “crazy” and there were previous times it had gone viral in certain communities which drove bigger sales spikes. And this definitely had helped in the past, but it had never hit the #2 slot, or even the top 5 before.
Third - My keywords are super optimized.
I built the entire book around ranking for “Growth Marketing” on Amazon. It’s in the title, it’s in the description, it’s my entire career.
Growth Hacker Marketing & Hacking Growth are reallyyyyy close to “Growth Marketing” but it’s not the same thing.
I set out to write the #1 book very specifically for Growth Marketing, to dominate this little niche that I have found myself. Optimizing the keywords across the entire “book-as-a-product” I believe has definitely helped it rank way way better than it deserves to.
… Put all 3 of these things together, and you have a textbook example of dominating a Channel of Growth. :)
Done well, a tiny baby product can out compete giants.
If you haven’t yet make sure to pick up a copy. ️🔥