The Publishing Performance Show

William Gasner - Why Micro-Influencers Beat Celebrities for Book Marketing (And Cost 90% Less)

• Teddy Smith • Episode 103

Share episode

William Gasner is the founder and CMO of Stack Influence, an influencer marketing platform that specializes in connecting brands with micro and nano-influencers. With extensive experience in e-commerce and digital marketing, William has helped thousands of brands scale their marketing efforts through authentic influencer partnerships. Stack Influence operates as a marketplace platform where vetted influencers can choose products they genuinely want to promote, creating more authentic and effective campaigns. His expertise in leveraging smaller creators for product seeding campaigns has helped numerous authors and publishers reach new audiences and boost their Amazon rankings through external traffic strategies.

In this episode:

  • Why micro and nano-influencers are more effective than celebrity influencers
  • The difference between mega, macro, micro, and nano-influencer categories
  • How authentic word-of-mouth marketing scales through smaller creators
  • Why books are perfect products for influencer marketing campaigns
  • Budget considerations for different influencer tiers and campaign sizes
  • Finding the right influencers through hashtag research and niche targeting
  • Creative content strategies including trending formats like "book face"
  • Tracking ROI beyond immediate sales: content, awareness, and algorithm benefits
  • How external traffic from influencers boosts Amazon algorithm rankings
  • The Stack Influence marketplace model and community approach
  • Case studies showing 3X to 15X ROI improvements
  • Starting strategies for authors with limited budgets


Resources mentioned:


Book Recommendations:


Connect with William Gasner:


Connect with Teddy Smith:



Support the show

[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Hi everyone and welcome to the Publishing Performance Show. Today I'm delighted to be joined by William Gasner, who's the founder and the CMO of Stack Influence. So welcome to the show, William. 

[00:00:14] William Gasner: Thank you for having me on Teddy. 

[00:00:16] Teddy Smith: Well, I thought I'd always try and start with a relatively big question. So why should in authors care about influencer marketing.

[00:00:23] William Gasner: Great question. so first off, influencer marketing spans quite a variety of different categories, right? when most people think of influencer marketing, they think of celebrities, the Kardashians, et cetera, people with millions of followers on social media. but there are, there's a spectrum to different types of influencers to kind of dive in a bit deep into this, 

[00:00:47] You have the celebrities on one side, but what's now the trend of the market has evolved into collaborating with smaller creators, which now the industry calls nano or micro influencers, people with maybe only a few thousand followers. and why an author should really care about. Either working with a celebrity or working with a smaller creator is an authentic way to get the word out about their product.

[00:01:15] Right? I like to, when influencers are truly authentic, it's basically word of mouth marketing at scale. And I always, when I'm talking actually about influencers, I usually use books as an example because, When I get my book recommendations, a lot of times I get them from my friends, right? And I ask my friend who, whether I'm interested in a fictional book or a nonfiction book, whoever's really interested in that topic, I'll get their advice on it.

[00:01:43] I. And that's my trust acquaintance. They, they, they might not be a professional in the space. They might not be an author themself. but I know that they really love reading these types of things and I trust their opinion on it. And that is the essence of influencers in general. And think just scaling those out.

[00:02:01] so that you can get a much larger reach in the social media platform. Yeah. So that's basically the why someone should, really pursue it in 2025 as an author. and it's just an authentic way to, to get the word out and, promote your brand. Yeah, and we can dive deeper into any of those topics if you'd like.

[00:02:18] Teddy Smith: Yeah, of course. Yeah, because I, I always think of influencers as, you know, girls in bikinis showing off their bums, you know, ly. But what does a, what does a micro influencer or a nano influencer look like? What, what sorts of figures are we looking at for their following count? And, you know, are they on different platforms or, you know, give us a hundred percent.

[00:02:36] William Gasner: Great question. so the standard definitions, and depending on who you talk to or what company promotes this, they can vary. but on average mega influencers, which are the celebrity types, are a million plus. Yeah. And you have macro influencers, which are usually defined as a hundred thousand to a million.

[00:02:56] Yeah. Micro influencers as less than a hundred thousand followers. And nano influencers has less than 10,000 followers. 

[00:03:02] Teddy Smith: Okay. 

[00:03:03] William Gasner: Now, the advantage, again, to working with these smaller creators, which is actually what my platform stack influence focuses on, is that I. They're more trustworthy and at the end of the day, they're more real, you could say.

[00:03:19] and when I say real, it's a interesting definition. Not, I'm not talking about AI necessarily, but, what's happened in the celebrity world, which is how influencing in essence started, is that I. Consumers started to realize that celebrities or people with millions of followers were getting paid crazy amounts of money to promote brands, right?

[00:03:39] They didn't necessarily care about the brand. And at the end of the day, we're as a consumer or a social media user, we're bombarded by content consistently and. We don't necessarily, it's hard to know what to trust these days, right? You have fake news, you have ads, you have these huge kind of influencers who are promoting products and getting paid tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds or millions of dollars.

[00:04:02] And at the end of the day, we want real truthful, authentic kind of promotions to us if we're going to actually be swayed by some sort of, social media posts to buy something right now. Smaller creators, these nano and micro influencers, why they're effective is because a lot of times they're not getting paid a huge amount of money to promote a product.

[00:04:24] Many times they're not even getting paid anything, they're just getting a free product, right? So they're doing kind of promotions in a more authentic way, doing a promotion, putting an effort because they actually truly believe in the product that they're kind of promoting. I like to basically redefine.

[00:04:45] These smaller creators more than an influencer, but more of a passion promoter, right? Yeah. if you're passionate about fiction books, right, or fiction novels, like you are willing a lot of times to promote something that you actually really love, that you're passionate about, and you don't, you don't have to get paid a huge amount of money to do it because it's something you love to do.

[00:05:05] You might do it for free and you might. Automatically do it on your social profiles anyway. Right? So you might as well get some free stuff in the meantime or get some monetary benefits or be rewarded for doing it. And that's true influence in essence, right? It's, it's that the oldest and most powerful type of marketing in the history of the world, which is word of mouth marketing.

[00:05:26] So basically the idea with these smaller creators is that you can really tap into this trusted audience. Now, the difficulty here is that you do need to work with a lot of them. They have a limited follower base, right? If you're dealing with a nano influencer with only a few thousand followers, you're not gonna have the most effective promotion by only working with a handful of them.

[00:05:47] So you really wanna scale them up, and that's where a challenge comes into play. And one thing that our platform helps with, but basically the strategy behind the nano micro influence, even if you're doing it yourself, is try to find a hundred or maybe a few hundred of them. if you're really trying to scale, you can go after thousands.

[00:06:04] But, basically if you think about it and you aggregate a hundred people with 10,000 followers each, you're getting a total reach of a million, right? And now you're getting that celebrity reach, but you're aggregating. A lot more of these higher engagement, trustworthy promotions. You're diversifying your risk across a lot more people.

[00:06:23] At the end of the day. Sometimes social promotions can be hit or miss. you're kind of subjected to an algorithm to dictate how. Far your social post gets seen. And so if you can diversify that risk across a lot more social promotions as opposed, as opposed to putting all your eggs in one basket, you're gonna just have a much better ROI and a much more effective campaign.

[00:06:44] Teddy Smith: Yeah, that makes sense. And so, 'cause a lot of the influencers that people think about first, like the ones you're talking about, Kardashians and people like that, they can essentially promote any product. But are the ones you are talking about, do they generally stick to particular niches? 

[00:06:57] William Gasner: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:06:59] So, If you're, so our platform is focused on what the industry calls product seeding or, or gifting campaigns, right? People willing to do things in exchange for a free product. Now, you're not gonna do any sort of promotion or every single promotion for any given product, right? it has to be a product that you actually truly care about.

[00:07:19] So there are some products that. Don't necessarily work super well if you have a very thin or niche amount of people who are interested in your product and you can't scale it out. So micro nano influencers aren't always effective for any single product. Beauty products work fantastic. but athletes', foot cream, people don't want to go on social media talk about.

[00:07:41] Right. and then there's certain niches specifically in Kind of the novel or book industry as an example, someone came to us recently and wanted to promote a book, very niche hiking book on a specific trail in Northern Canada. Right. And it's like there's only a few amount of people who are going to be interested in reading this book and is are going to be planning this hike at this specific time.

[00:08:05] Yes, there's someone who probably would promote that and might be. Absolutely amazing at promoting it. Right? that's true passion if you can find those people. But finding them and aggregating them kind of in mass may be very difficult for you to accomplish. Right. Versus, a book that might apply to a wide range of people who are interested in promoting it, right?

[00:08:27] Yeah. but at the end of the day, books work really, really well because for influencers, because at the end of the day, you also want. Not only the social profile to be authentic, but you want the promotion also to be kind of utilized in an authentic way, in the sense that like integrate into your natural lifestyle and a book is a very natural thing to post, right?

[00:08:50] Yeah. Like you could be drinking your morning coffee and reading a book. You could be relaxing at the end of the day. You could be on a beach reading a book, right? So the content that's produced is. Again, more real or more authentic, and that at the end of the day converts better as opposed to being something like a bit more shocking where it's like pictures of your kids and you doing things with your normal life and videos and then all of a sudden something that is like you talking about foot focus on your social profile, you know?

[00:09:20] Teddy Smith: Do you, when you are finding influencers to promote books, are you generally looking for influencers who promote books generally or are you trying to find like adjacent influencers? Like for example, if you're a romance author, would you be looking for someone who does like romance or poetry or you know, maybe even sex type, uh, influence things would, or you really looking for people who promote books?

[00:09:41] William Gasner: Great question. So. We find that a lot of people also think that you need to find someone who is, their social profile is only about one specific niche, right? Yeah. If you're promoting a makeup product, you're promoting the someone who's a makeup artist. If you're talking about a book, you're promoting someone who's like only post, like maybe a fantasy book.

[00:10:03] You're. Promoting to only people who are like promoting fantasy things consistently. Right? and that works and, and I recommend doing that, right? That is your niche audience and it's a targeted audience and it can be very effective. but influence, especially in the nano micro world. Can be, we'll get people who are just a normal person who loves a fantasy book or who loves, a romantic novel, right?

[00:10:28] that person actually to their audience, most likely, the people who are following them are their friends, their family, people with like-minded ideas. And so they actually, again, are trusted when they promote and they can actually, they don't have to necessarily. Their whole essence and their whole profile be catered to that specific niche.

[00:10:50] Right? Yeah. now if you're dealing with a celebrity or someone, you're paying tens of thousands of dollars, you might want to go very, very specific of like, I'm not gonna promote my fantasy product to some random celebrity. I'm only gonna do it to someone who. Is only specifically aligned exactly with my brand.

[00:11:08] Right? Because again, you're putting a lot of risk in one person. but you'd be surprised, like we've done campaigns with certain books that the, the influencers that had kind of like their profile didn't necessarily paint the picture of the novel's niche. Yeah. And they converted at a much higher rate than even some of the people who.

[00:11:28] Were you could think more aligned with that niche of product or that profile. Perceived was perceived to be, if that makes sense. Yeah, 

[00:11:37] Teddy Smith: that's really interesting because yeah, I'm, I think, you know, you wouldn't necessarily just want someone who's promoting books all the time, but who has that trusted audience within that adjacent niche.

[00:11:45] I think that is, uh, that is really interesting. One thing you touched on just, just before that point was you talked about some of these nano influencers, especially promoting books essentially for a free book or maybe even a quite a small budget now. Obviously when you've got these huge audiences, you're looking at it being quite expensive and I'm guessing the amount of money you pay is kind of goes up quite a lot when you go to.

[00:12:07] Quite high amounts, but what sort of budget should we be looking at for like different levels of amounts of followers? 

[00:12:14] William Gasner: Great question. So the average going rate is about $10 for every thousand followers someone has. so it goes up quite rapidly, right? but again. There's multiple ways to monetize someone.

[00:12:27] So, sorry. And that would just 

[00:12:27] Teddy Smith: be for like one post? Sorry. That would be for one. That's just one 

[00:12:30] William Gasner: post. Yeah. Yeah. So again, 10 bucks for, you got a thousand followers. If you got, 10,000 followers, right? You're looking at, few hundred dollars potentially. And you'll be like, people charge rates across the board.

[00:12:43] So that's kind of industry standard. But like, you'll talk to one person with 5,000 followers and they'll say. 50 bucks and then the next person will save $500. So, 

[00:12:52] Teddy Smith: yeah. 

[00:12:52] William Gasner: there's a lot of negotiation that goes on in the monetary payment world, especially as you get higher up in the rings. Finding people who are incentivized by your product is the most authentic form, right?

[00:13:03] Yeah. Because it means that they actually really care about what they're promoting, and it's gonna be more cost effective for you to actually scale it out, which is kind of the name of the game. Yeah, of course. Now there's alternative ways to also compensate someone. You can incentivize them through providing commissions.

[00:13:18] On the sales that they actually drive, you can reward them for the results of the social promotions. Maybe instead of paying them a thousand dollars for every follower they have, or $10 for every a thousand followers they have, you reward them $10 for how many people actually see the post. Right. because social media has also changed in the past few years to where now.

[00:13:45] Follower base can sometimes be a vanity metric. People focus on it a lot because it used to be kind of like the only thing that really mattered. but now you could have a hundred thousand followers and literally have a thousand people who see your post when you do something because social media only shows it to those who, who are engaged.

[00:14:02] And you could have 3000 followers and also have a thousand people who see it because your audience loves the content that you produce. and now even with the advent of TikTok. And Instagram reels. your post can also, you could have a hundred followers and you can get a post that gets millions of views.

[00:14:20] So it comes down to actually the content you produce now and how engaging that content is, and if it's really engaging and really enticing. Social media platforms are gonna really show it beyond your follower base and you can get viral posts and, and that's the kind of advantage to, trying to work with smaller creators and incentivizing them in ways.

[00:14:37] To reward them for the content that they actually produce. 

[00:14:41] Teddy Smith: Yeah, that's so interesting. With the, talking about the posts that go viral, obviously there's different ways that that could happen, but when you are thinking about creating that content, is there anything that the authors should be doing or is it mostly a case of giving the book to the influencer and say, Hey, go and do your thing and come back with the results?

[00:14:59] William Gasner: Great question. authors should always prompt. Influencers in some sort of way while like giving them broad guidelines, while still allowing them creative control, right? Yeah. You'd be surprised what people come up with on their own. But there should be some standards that you want them to do, right? You want to make sure that they properly tag, you might use specific hashtags that are related to your specific novel, right?

[00:15:29] things that they might not be aware of, that you actually understand. And then it's always good to kind of like prompt them with certain. Ideas, right? Doesn't mean that you need to force them to do one thing, but, there's certain trends that are super cool, and this doesn't apply to every single book, but, there's a trend called Bookface where if you had a novel that had kind of like.

[00:15:50] A part face on it, as the graphic people would put it up to their face, right? And it would be like half their face of the novel, half their face being actually shown. Right? And there was funny trends along in the book industry and prompting, and a lot, a few of those actually went pretty viral, right?

[00:16:07] so if you see something that works for your specific niche, really well prompt influencers to do that. Kind of give them, push them in the right direction. But, When you're doing a seating campaign or compensating someone with the product, there's only so much you can also force someone to do. Yeah.

[00:16:20] And we find it just putting creative control in, the hands of the influencers for the most part, ends up surprising you. And sometimes you don't, you think you know what's gonna work really well. But, these creators, they do this a lot of times for, their, their full-time gig. So it's like they know what hooks to use, they know what their audience resonates with and and that's what's important at the end of the day, is them being also authentic.

[00:16:46] Teddy Smith: Yeah. That's really interesting. Now, when you are working with influencers and especially thinking about working with Stack Influence, especially say it is your first campaign, what sort of budget do you think you should be looking at to put aside to do an influencer campaign? 

[00:16:59] William Gasner: I. Great question. so one cool thing about influencer marketing is it's kind of one of the most cost effective forms of marketing out there.

[00:17:06] Like to start running Google ads. Yes. Or Facebook ads. You have to, you can start small, but like you're bidding against a huge amount of other companies that are much larger. You're only gonna drive so many sales. And the beautiful thing of influencer marketing is that you're getting kind of this plethora of value.

[00:17:24] you're not just getting the performance marketing side of like. I'm driving people seeing my product, and so they're gonna buy it, right? Which is obviously an important metric and a main reason people do things. But you're also getting this awareness across the board. You're getting your product in the hands of people who actually love it, which just even doing that has a tremendous amount of value.

[00:17:45] Like they might talk to their friends about it. They're, again, just real IRL. Word of mouth Marketing in its essence is a value prop. you're getting content, so image and video content, if you have the influencer give you the rights to utilize that content, you can use that on your website as social proof.

[00:18:03] You can, if you decide to run ads, you can use that in your advertisements, social media, marketing material, you name it. so, and then potentially you can create these longer term relationships on an affiliate basis with these influencers who are promoting your product. On an ongoing basis. Now, going back to your question of how much it costs, depends on who you're going after.

[00:18:24] I would always try to budget at least a thousand dollars. And I know for certain brands starting out, that might seem like a lot. if you have time, right? And to put in a bit sweat equity, you can literally get influencer campaigns going for just. The cost of your books. Right? Right. Like, and you should have books on hand when you're first starting out, unless you're kind of having print on demand through Amazon, et cetera.

[00:18:53] But make sure you have, if you're, you have zero marketing budget, right? Have at least 50 books, that you have physical copies of that you can ship out to these influencers. And again, you're gonna put in a decent amount of manual effort into this. But, start DMing people on Instagram. I. Reaching out to them on TikTok and seeing if they'd be willing to do a promotion in exchange for just your product.

[00:19:17] Right. Um, you're gonna have to manually ship it to them. You're gonna have to kind of negotiate a bunch of fees. Not everyone's gonna take you up on the offer. You're gonna have to, you'll find that some people might, Steal your product or not do the post on time. you'll run into a few issues along that way, but you can get it done and you can do that very, very cost effectively.

[00:19:36] Teddy Smith: and could you do it just by shipping the books directly from Amazon? 'cause I know a lot of authors that I work with are just like print on demand so they don't have 50 books sitting on shelf somewhere. 

[00:19:44] William Gasner: Absolutely. You a hundred percent can do that. Yeah. Something that actually we do at Stack Influence is we prompt influencers to actually become a real consumer of a brand before they actually collaborate with them.

[00:19:58] So, and then reward them once they finish that collaboration. Only if they finish that collaboration. So, That way you don't run into that issue. It's actually a more effective tactic than just simply shipping something out to someone, because with then you have no recourse if they don't do what you ask them to do.

[00:20:16] Right? Yeah. but if they're actually buying a product and then, getting monetarily rewarded or giving their money back once they complete that social promotion. Yeah. Now you only pay for something. You actually receive. 

[00:20:29] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Nice. And so you're talking about that budget of a thousand, I'm guessing that's a reasonably big launch that would be getting your book in front of quite a few people.

[00:20:37] Say you wanted to start with something small, and I know you said you can just give a book away for free, but I feel like that's not gonna be as popular 'cause a book's not like as valuable with something like something electronic or you know, some beauty products or things like that. So what, what would really be the starting budget that you could start with that would give you a reasonable ROI.

[00:20:58] William Gasner: Again, you're going to want to, you're gonna want to work with people with around five to 10,000 followers. Yeah. and if you're looking to like, pay them, right. You're, you're looking at 50 to a hundred bucks per person. Yeah. Now, if you're going a hundred bucks, why say, like even go with a thousand dollars starting budget is like, you want to kind of diversify and test it out like.

[00:21:22] You want to kind of work with at least 10, to see what works and what doesn't. 'cause not every promotion is going to work. And what a lot of people do is like, they start off with like three or two. and you can do that. Absolutely. I mean, you can start off with one person and pay them a. Like a hundred dollars, right?

[00:21:38] But you're not, that might put a bad taste in your mouth, right? Like, and people give up like they're like, that didn't drive me a single sale. And it was like you promoted at the wrong time, you've promoted with the wrong person, and now you kind of gave up on this strategy that was really effective. and that's where, that's why I recommend that a thousand dollars.

[00:21:56] But I will say. You will find people who are willing to do your, promote your product or book without getting paid. you may think that there's other products out there that are like way more valuable, but like the average micro nano influencer promotion, people are willing to do products between usually 15 to a hundred bucks.

[00:22:16] So, sometimes even promoting products that are too expensive, like might not even be worth your while, because you have your expenses of shipping them out are quite. quite a lot. So it's just about finding the right person who's the right fit for you. Right? And so a strategy around that is find people, people will tag, specific.

[00:22:36] Book niches, right? Like, romance novels, like hashtag romance novels, right? It's not just gonna be authors tagging that on social media. It's gonna be a lot of people who are really interested in this kind of genre. maybe there's a super popular author in your niche, right? find people who are tagging that author.

[00:22:54] And see if they're talking about the books 

[00:22:57] Teddy Smith: on TikTok or in Instagram, that sort of thing. Yeah, 

[00:22:58] William Gasner: that's exactly right. Yeah. and reach out to them. Like that's if, if you like, and I know starting out as a brand, as an author, like you might not have a thousand dollars to spend, you might not have $200 to spend.

[00:23:10] Right? you might be printing everything on Amazon. You spent kind of all of your money getting things like up and going, your. Best way to get your feet wet is the product seeding model, right? Because you're at least gonna test things out and figure out what works and what doesn't for your brand, and for your specific book because, every sort of promotion can be different and certain books work more effectively than others, which is across different products as well.

[00:23:38] So. You wanna test, test the waters before you dive deep, basically. 

[00:23:44] Teddy Smith: Yeah, that's really good advice. Now, one thing we talked about just then was ROI and the budget, but what, what are the, what are we tracking to make sure that we are getting a good ROI and you know, are there particular data points and also are there any like benchmarks or any good things we should be looking for?

[00:24:00] William Gasner: Absolutely. So ROI again, but a lot of people just stick only on. The sales ROI side of things on When you're doing an influencer campaign, so people think, okay, I'm gonna give away a book. That book is worth $5. I wanna make $15. Right? and that makes total sense, and there's ways to track that. You can use affiliate links.

[00:24:23] You can kind of have a link that's either in your bio that you're tagging and having the influencer go through your profile and you track those sales directly, right? Mm-hmm. Now. There's alternative things that you should absolutely take into consideration when doing an influencer campaign and look at the overall value.

[00:24:43] because one thing to realize is that as opposed to running an ad, influencer promotions sometimes aren't just an instant sale. It sometimes takes time for a post to actually get views. And be seen. It's not like it goes live and within an hour if I didn't make any sales, like it was a waste of money, right?

[00:25:02] Sometimes it can take a week for things to actually even gain traction and gain awareness. I. So there's a few things that you wanna calculate when you're looking at ROI. first, absolutely. Look at how many sales you drove through a tracking link that was either in your bio or the influencer's bio, et cetera.

[00:25:20] Yeah. the second metric is how have your sales gone up over time? Like, is there any organic traffic you're seeing maybe on your website or your Amazon profile, or you name it. Right. is there any way to, for you to track that and, and using. Looking at understanding your own metrics of how your book is already getting viewed is very also really important.

[00:25:42] Like, how many people are looking at my social profile? Because there's a lot of halo effects that come from influencer promotions. Third factor is how much you value content, right? it's a hard thing to value, but it's like what value do you put into a website? What value do you put into a brand, right?

[00:26:00] and a very simple way is like if you are running any online ads, you can very easily integrate content and you'll quickly see, Hey, did this increase my conversions? Did it decrease my ad costs? Sometimes you get an ROI simply from that, The fourth way to track is, did I create any longer term affiliate, kind of ongoing relationships with these influencers, right?

[00:26:22] I gave away a product, maybe that first promotion didn't drive me any sales, and then they were incentivized to keep promoting. And over a month and a two month timeframe, they kept promoting my product to their audience. and I drove 20 sales, right? And I gave them a 10% cut from that. So those ongoing benefits.

[00:26:42] And the final ROI aspect, and this is specifically for online marketplaces like Amazon, is Amazon these days. values, external traffic strategies for where you're positioned within the marketplace. Amazon's starting out as a marketplace specifically for books. It's very competitive for every single type of book novel.

[00:27:03] Right? And a lot of people think like, Hey, you're gonna throw up a book there, and 50% of every single consumer in the US is on Amazon. I'm gonna make, I'm gonna become a millionaire. I'm gonna instantly like sell out and be a bestseller. Right? And just because I have it on Amazon, there's all these people searching on Amazon.

[00:27:21] So like, I'm gonna make a huge amount of money. and the reality is, is. You're competing with about 3000 sellers who join every single day, right? Yeah. It might not be all booksellers, but that's the industry stat of how many people actually join Amazon. huge amount of competition. The other basic stat is that 75, sometimes people say, depending on what the keyword is, 80% of people don't go past the first page when they search for something.

[00:27:46] Yes. And there's about 40 listings on the first page, right? the top three listings also generate about 60% of. All of the sales for the people who go to the first page. Yeah. Right. The 

[00:27:57] Teddy Smith: click through rate of, uh, row one is 35% and it drops to 15 for row two. That's how big it drops off. 

[00:28:03] William Gasner: Absolutely. So, and for any given niche, like there might be hundreds of pages, right?

[00:28:08] Yeah. so it's like. When you are first there, you're not shown anywhere and you're not gonna make any sales. and so the name of the game there is how do you position yourself? How do you tell Amazon I'm worthy? Right? Yeah. and it's a hard solution for Amazon to solve because they call it the Cold Star problem.

[00:28:28] it's a risk for Amazon to show you because if. No one likes your book. you're not gonna make any, like, you're gonna be losing Amazon money if they showed you there. But it's also a risk for Amazon not to show you because what if you have the next bestseller and you're gonna convert 10 times better than every other, listing That's on that first page.

[00:28:47] Yeah. Or in the top three. so what Amazon does is test you. But why influencer marketing is a fantastic strategy for Amazon growth specifically. And a way to actually calculate your ROI is you can, influencers are high converting, right? Even if you are promoting to someone with a thousand followers and they drove 10 people to your listing and five of them bought, right, you got a 50% conversion rate.

[00:29:16] So it might have been a very small amount of people. But you have very trusted promotions. So on average, your conversions are much higher. that is the data Amazon wants to see in order to position you. It's giving Amazon, Hey, if you show me this, is are the possible results that we could drive internally because I externally showed you that.

[00:29:38] I'm worthy, basically. And we've seen influencer marketing campaigns like very rapidly get listings to be shown on the first page for list for, keywords, some very high volume search keywords, increase your category positioning and literally, like I've seen 15 XROI only on Amazon, and that means like you were doing a hundred sales a month.

[00:30:03] And then all of a sudden you're doing, 1500 sales a month, or like 3000 sales a month. Right? and the reason behind that is like. You went pa from page 50 to page one, and now all of a sudden you had tens of thousands of people searching for or seeing your listing, and now you're no longer relying on any sort of external traffic marketing.

[00:30:24] You're no longer relying on PPC ads. You're at that position. And as long as you convert at that new, you could say plateau. that is a massive ROI and understanding that as a calculation metric is also a really, really, I. important thing to look at as if you were an Amazon seller selling your book on Amazon.

[00:30:43] Teddy Smith: Yeah. I love that you said that because it's one of the things that. That comes up on this podcast the most is I'm tell people it's so important to make sure you are getting that ranking. And Amazon loves outside traffic 'cause they're basically getting free sales so they don't have to advertise for it, they have to do anything for it.

[00:30:57] So Amazon really does boost your ranking when you get that. And it's a big impact on the algorithm. So. I'm really happy said that it kind of backs up things that I've said before. 

[00:31:06] William Gasner: A hundred percent. Yeah. The key to it as well is making sure your listing is optimized though, so you can get to a higher, it loves external traffic and you'll get to that position.

[00:31:18] But also a key is to be sticky and stay there. And if you don't have the right keywords, you're not gonna be shown in the right places. Yeah. And you also have to have a highly converting, like investing graphics, investing content. Another advantage to. Influencer campaigns, you're gonna actually have real, social proof, you could say.

[00:31:35] So do all of the things before you invest in, external traffic strategy, but it's, it works wonders. 

[00:31:41] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Now I know that stack influence works slightly differently to other influence marketplaces, so why don't you give us an overview of like how stack influences works, especially for authors.

[00:31:51] And if you've got any case studies about successful campaigns, that'd be really helpful too. 

[00:31:55] William Gasner: Absolutely. so. The unique aspect of Stack Influencers, we're a marketplace platform. We're not just a SaaS product or, a random kind of tool with a database of influencers we've never even connected to, right?

[00:32:10] We have a dedicated community of hundreds of thousands of influencers who are vetted as part of our platform. They've joined this platform's community, and they interact with products that they actually desire. So. A lot of other influencer tools, what they did was like, they got a massive database of influencer contact info and they act as a, as a way to just outreach to them.

[00:32:36] So you pay a big monthly fee and they're like, you can reach out to a hundred influencers a month, right? But who knows, maybe only one of them responds to you and that one who responds to you tries to charge you thousands of dollars to do a promotion, right? So, there's no guarantees to that system and.

[00:32:52] I personally used to be an e-commerce seller myself. and how my co-founders and I started Stack Influence was actually building out solutions that we needed for our own brands. And we used all these different tools and they were actually decently effective for larger influencer promotions, right when we were trying to find a very specific person who we were planning to pay, like.

[00:33:13] Thousands of dollars to, they worked well because if you're paying thousands of dollars to someone, like they're gonna respond to you. and you need to also use a lot of filtering tools to find the right person so you don't waste all your money. But with the micro nano influencer collaborations, especially product seeding, for every a hundred people we reach out to, maybe we only got a response from a handful of them.

[00:33:33] And outta that handful, only a few of them would be really the right fit for us. and. It became this big numbers game and what we learned was. One, it was hard to scale, but two, it was when we even found the people, it was really hard to manage, like getting people to buy products or just even like post on time when we ship them products, communicating value, props to them, making sure to analyze the results, track everything.

[00:34:01] Like it was a full-time job, but we had hired out like a team of virtual assistants to do this, and we still weren't doing it effectively. And so what we started to build out were these automation tools. To really streamline the process, streamline getting people product, streamline the communications, make sure we could use kind of some tools to automatically analyze the important things that we wanted in the social posts once they submitted into our system.

[00:34:26] and also make sure that we could scale this out. And the best effective way to scale it was kind of developing this dedicated community and giving influencers the option to choose us. So. What we did is we built kind of a shopping marketplace ourself where influencer, once they're approved, we survey them, in different categories.

[00:34:49] So if you're interested in specific things, you're gonna tell us what those specific things are. We're gonna also look at your profiles. We're gonna kind of make assumptions based off of what things we see, and then we're gonna cater a specific. You could say catalog of products to this person, that we believe are going to be the right fit for them.

[00:35:10] And now we allow them to choose the specific brand that they want to collaborate with. And we don't just kind of, force something on them because I. Maybe we think that they like fiction novels, but because they like had something in their profile or, they were like talking about Dungeons and Dragons in their profile or something, but they actually like, were making fun of it or they weren't actually interested in it.

[00:35:32] Right? and so you could make these assumptions, but unless someone actually gives you some sort of intent, themselves, it's hard to determine if they desire something and they, if they desire it at a. specific moment in time, which is important. And so by having that them select products and also become real consumers of the brands themself, it creates this ideal fit that ensures that the people who are collaborating with a specific brand or a specific book actually desire it, actually want it.

[00:36:04] and their social promotion's gonna be truly. Authentic and like a real customer testimonial. so in a nutshell and very high level, to summarize all of that, stack influence helps brands automate and scale micro influencer marketing. And does it, by simply only. Gifting products. So a brand can come to us, they can give away products, they can set their goals.

[00:36:30] Um, maybe they want a hundred influencers, maybe they want a thousand influencers in a specific timeframe. They can upload their specific guidelines as we discussed, so their guardrails, and then they can sit back, relax, and let the platform do the hand heavy lifting while having a system to track the entire process as it progresses.

[00:36:49] The last thing, and I know I've been on a bit of a rant, but, a few just results we've seen like, things so have huge amount of success on Amazon and online marketplaces. Again, 'cause you're getting this extra value from external traffic. not to say that websites don't work, but we have a variety of different case studies going over.

[00:37:12] A bunch of the different tracking metrics I talked about previously, right? Like there's some that only did these types of collaborations for content and they got a fantastic ROI by increasing. We had one brand that increased their conversions on Facebook ads once running that content by five x. 

[00:37:29] We had another brand that eight Xed, their ROI on Amazon, or the recurring revenue, right. And they ran it. One campaign. They got to a higher position within Amazon and they didn't have to run any, any more influencer marketing because once they got there, they actually were a really good book. People loved the book.

[00:37:47] and they started actually converting on that organic traffic and then. Those now internal sales maintained their growth in the long run. and then we've had other brands that got three XROI just simply from the social promotions themself. and brands that have accumulated a community of advocates who were promoting the product in the long run as affiliate marketers.

[00:38:08] and utilize our system to kind of create that first touch point, that first relationship, and then leverage that. They, they worked with, I think it was 300 influencers and ended up. Getting 50 people who were these really great advocates and they're still working with them today, who are consistently driving sales in the long run for them, consistently making content and they're not paying them any extra money besides when they actually drive a sale.

[00:38:31] they're not also having to send any more product. The final thing is, in the online ad world, we've had a lot of success with what's called whitelisting ads. So getting influencers to, give permission to run advertisements, utilizing their own social profile, seeing some amazing results. And we're actually building out some new automation features for, that system right now.

[00:38:54] Teddy Smith: Amazing. And so if people were want to come to you with their first book and they want to start getting influencers for it, they upload the book to stack influence first, and then influencers, ask if they can be the front of that campaign, or are you finding influencers through the camp, through the, the, the, the marketplace?

[00:39:10] William Gasner: Great question. So, To get started, you can go to stack info.com. at the top right you can click sign up. This will prompt you to speak with a representative on our team. So the first thing is we've run thousands upon thousands of different products. Our team now understands what works and what doesn't.

[00:39:28] So, your book may be a fantastic fit for us and it may not be a fit, and we'll let you know right off the bat. We don't wanna waste your time. if we are skeptical at all, we sometimes survey influencers as part of our community before we put it out in front of them. because again, we don't want.

[00:39:44] We're also a guaranteed pay as you go system. Yeah. So how we charge at stock Influence is we charge you a flat fee for each successful post. the fee ranges between $20 to $40, depending on the scale that you're doing. Yeah. If you don't get a post, you don't, you don't pay anything. And, if we don't believe it's going to work for our influencers right, we don't wanna put it in front of them.

[00:40:08] 'cause we want to make sure the products that we put in front of them, they actually really desire not to say that. Your book, no one wants to read it, but it just might not fit the audience and demographics that we currently have in the platform. so we don't wanna waste their time. We don't also wanna waste your time, right?

[00:40:24] because you're gonna get your hopes up. You're gonna actually spend some, a bit of time like uploading your product info, setting your goals, speaking with our team, and, paying some initial money. And if we don't reach your goals, right, you'll only pay for what? You have achieved in the system, but we still want to achieve your scalability, right?

[00:40:44] Um, if you wanna work with a hundred people and we only get you two people, yes, you've only paid for two. You didn't lose money on anything that you didn't achieve, but you might not have got the total reach that you were looking for, right? So we'll be very upfront with you. we'll look at your listings, whether it's a website listing, whether it's a listing on Amazon.

[00:41:02] We'll give you advice on strategies of growth, how much external traffic you probably need to grow, in order to actually see good results. We'll look at your niche. How competitive it is. we don't deal with any Amazon optimization stuff in that world or any marketplace optimization focus on influencer marketing specifically.

[00:41:20] Yeah. but our team is also very attuned to when things are optimized or not. And again, we want long-term success for our clients, so. If you have just thrown up a listing and you have no content and you haven't built out your keywords, like we're gonna tell you to go back to the drawing board and make sure that you, have your duck before you proceed.

[00:41:40] Teddy Smith: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, William. It's been fantastic chance. You, I mean, I, it's not too much. I know. I dunno too much about influencer marketing. So I've actually been like scribbling notes down without like, looking at the papers. I'm just gonna have a, gonna read through afterwards, but it's been great chatting if.

[00:41:55] If people wanna get in touch with you or to get in touch with, more importantly, to get in touch with Stack Influence, where, where's the best place to go for that? 

[00:42:01] William Gasner: So best place is simply again, going to stack influence.com. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, at William Gasner. search my name.

[00:42:09] Feel free to get in touch with us on any of the social platforms at Stack Influence. We basically have every single one. and yeah, that's the best way. you can also send us an email at contact@stackinfluence.com. 

[00:42:20] Teddy Smith: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining the show, and it's been great chatting. We'll speak again soon.

[00:42:24] William Gasner: Thanks for having me on, Teddy. Bye. 

[00:42:27] Teddy Smith: Thank you so much for tuning into the Publishing performance podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring. I love chatting to authors, writers, and people in the publishing world. Now, just before we wrap up, let me tell you about publishing performance, the number one platform for authors who want to increase Amazon book sales, but I'm not really sure where to start.

[00:42:46] Now, this show is all about helping you to sell more books. And if you are looking to boost your publishing game and to maximize your book's potential on Amazon, then publishing Formants is designed to help authors just like you to grow your readership and to reach a much wider audience. Now I know who the Amazon ads can be slightly complicated, which is why publishing Formants is like having a personalized ad account manager to create your ad campaigns, to choose your best keywords and to make adjustments in real time.

[00:43:15] Now if you are investing in ads, you really want to make sure that your investment is being used effectively and publishing performance does just that It aims to make your budget go further, improve your organic rank, and target keywords more effectively. Just go to publishing performance.com to get started with Amazon ads for just $1.