Rearranging A Hybrid Sales Funnel

I just finished testing different types of content for my hybrid vacation rental / book publishing business, and now I want to tell you about Part 2: rearranging a sales funnel. I have been catching up on how different algorithms for social media and Amazon have changed to figure out how to connect the stages of a sales funnel that looks like:

• social media / ads
• book sales
• vacation rental bookings

But along the way, we had the following results:

• social media growth (IG reels / YT shorts / Tiktok)
• rental house nearly profitable (more on that later)
• book sales completely flat...

Amazon wasn't recommending us to readers at all. I figured out through studying new algorithm marketing that Amazon now refuses to recommend books organically until an author builds up consistent sales over a very long period of time. I would have to publish about 3-5 books for the next 10-15 years to get any organic traction at all. For comparison, about 10 years ago, one of my first novels hit the top of the Amazon top 100 free bestseller lists through organic marketing and gave away 8,000 copies in 5 days. Not so much anymore. And I'm even in a bigger genre category now.

So, I'm rearranging the sales funnel on this hybrid business to look like this instead:

• social media organic / ads
• YT short story telling and vlogging
• Amazon on the back end of the funnel after testing content before committing to books but continuing to publish over time
• rental house bookings based on ads and organic travel and nature / relaxation content that has been popular

Packaging Vacations and Experience Marketing

One other note: the way we recently got the rental house to near profitability after a year and a half is that we are packaging vacations into the Airbnb/VRBO rental rate next year. I'm still working out details, but more or less I'm creating a relaxed vacation experience in our neighborhood so guests can enjoy the beaches, pizza parlor and sweet shop across the road, local gym, a boat cruise discount, and coffee from the shop across the street the minute they walk in the door. Our neighborhood is still being redeveloped, so this is my solution to not having the budget for any other improvements that would justify us raising rental rates before the neighborhood improvements are complete.

I hope these tips help someone out there building the same kind of business! If you have any questions or comments about what I forgot to include here, hit me up on socials @lorelaiauthor @croniclepress or @silversideshouse.