I’ve been tossing around a book marketing idea for a while. I’m going to throw it up here and ask for some feed back.
For lack of a better name, I call it an “Amazon Affiliate Campaign”.
Before I go into the details, though, here is some background info to help you understand where I’m coming from.
A long time ago we used to do a thing call a reciprocal linking campaign (or just “linking campaign” for short). The idea was to search out sites and ask them to put in a link to your site if you, in turn, put in a link to their site.
Back in the egalitarian days of the Internet, this strategy worked pretty well. But those days have been gone for a long time. People just don’t link to strange sites anymore without good reason.
So here is my twist on this…find Amazon Affiliate stores that contain books on the same subject as the one you are promoting, and make a request that they add your book to their store.
Quick side note here to explain an Amazon Affiliate, for those who don’t know. Amazon.com provides a program whereby sites can list books in Amazon.com’s inventory and get a cut of any sales that result. No one outside of Amazon.com knows for sure how many affiliate stores exist, but the estimate is in the hundreds of thousands. So there are plenty of prospects to choose from.
The big trick, of course, is how does one go about finding Amazon Affiliates to approach. There is no public list (at least that I’m aware of). But I think I’ve figured it out.
Enter this into the advanced search screen of Google:
In the blank labeled: with all of the words, enter these words (include quotes):
“In association with Amazon.com”, bookstore, (KEYWORDS DESCRIBING YOUR BOOK.)
Then go to the heading labeled: Domain, change the pull-down menu value from only to don’t, then enter “amazon.com” in the blank.
What this does:
It tells Google: “Find pages that have the keywords “amazon.com”, “bookstore” and (YOUR KEYWORDS), but don’t show me anything from amazon.com itself.”
You should get, among other things, a list of Amazon Affiliate bookstores that have books on subjects similar to your book.
For example, let’s say your book is about birds. Entering the following:
“In association with Amazon.com”, “bookstore”, “birds”
and
“Don’t return results from the site or domain: amazon.com”
Will yield results like this:
http://www.parrotparrot.com/bookstore/
http://www.surfbirds.com/Book%20Store/bkstoreindex.shtml
http://www.hikingwebsite.com/stores/books/
You then approach these people. Tell them your book is listed on Amazon.com. Ask them if they will put a link to your book in their store.
Some variations on the search:
+ substitute: “In association with Amazon.com” in the search string with just: “amazon.com”.
+ try the search with a variety of keywords related to your book, not just one or two.
Some caveats:
1.) Not every result will be a bookstore, or a site you’ll want to deal with. You’re going to get a lot of junk and duplicate sites. You’ll need to pick through the rubble to find the gems.
2.) You might need to send the store owner a review copy before he or she agrees to add your book. Personally, I think this is a better use of review copies. The likelihood someone will actually look at it is much higher. Most review copies sent to traditional book reviewers end up in the garbage.
3.) These instructions call for using Google as your search tool. You’ll get more refined results if you use metasearch software – basically software that sends the search query to multiple search engines at once and deletes the duplicates before showing you the results. The best tool for Windows PCs I’ve found for doing this is Arelis. It is actually a tool specifically for doing traditional linking campaigns, but it can be easily adapted for this specific purpose. Unfortunately, there isn’t as good a tool for the Mac crowd (of which I am now part). The best tool I’ve found so far for the Mac is DEVONAgent.
This strategy is much better than simply asking a bunch of sites to link to your book. You are helping people make more money and improve their bookstores versus asking for a free link. Plus it is easy. Adding an additional book to their store is trivial since the book is already in Amazon.com’s database.
I’d love to hear feedback on what authors think of this idea. Add them to the comments section below.