Day 28: Amazon, Amazon, Amazon!

17 Jul, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

This is day 28 of my 30 day marketing challenge to bring in new visitors to this website. I also want to demonstrate that starting a blog can be a profitable and inexpensive business to start.

My three tasks for the day are…

1. Updated Information On Amazon.com

My book on how to start a home based business finally appeared on Amazon.com today.

The images didn’t show up however, and the formatting of the text could use some work, so I spent some time correcting it. The text hasn’t updated yet, but the new images are there.

2. I Created a “Listmania” on Amazon.com

Listmania lists on Amazon represent a marketing opportunity (I got this idea from Yanik Silver by the way). I titled the one I created “How to start a business“, and it not only includes my book, but many other popular business books that are out right now.

If I add the most popular business books to my list, that means I get to capitalize on the tons of traffic they are getting because my listmania shows up on each of their pages. I think my listmania list to gain some popularity though before it will start showing up. Amazon seems like it is only showing the top three for now, but I think the idea is solid even if it doesn’t work right away.

3. Changed the Sub-title of the book on Amazon

Notice that I also changed the sub-title of the book from “Fire Your Boss, Toss Your Alarm Clock, and Double Your Income With An Easy Transition Into Self-Employment” to “How To Work At Home With The Perfect Small Business Opportunity” for the Amazon copy.

Why did I do this? Keywords.

People search Amazon just like they search Google, and based on the keyword research very few people search for terms like “breaking free”, “fire your boss”, or “self-employment”.

I want my book to come up for the most popular searches on Amazon, so I put some popular keywords in the sub-title such as “work at home”, “small business”, and “business opportunity”.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

6 Comments so far »

JJ said,

Wrote on July 17, 2007 @ 5:55 pm

I followed a link to your site a few days ago, and I’m very interested in your current topic. I’m looking into starting a blog and may set up a website later. Perhaps someone can post whether or not that sequence would work, or if it’s better to set up the website first. I’m wondering how difficult it would be to change the URL of the blog to the web address, and if (assuming someone had actually subscribed to my blog) the feed would still work.

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Dorm Room Biz said,

Wrote on July 17, 2007 @ 6:11 pm

@ JJ - First, a blog is a website. So you have to determine what your difference will be between a blog and a website. If you are going to have a blog on a topic and then create a website on something else then get seperate domain names. If you are going to create a blog about a company and then turn it into your companies website, set up the domain name as the company website and have the blog as a section of it. It depends on what you want to accomplish with each. You can even have your blog be your full website (if you were thinking about having seperate ones). Hope that helps a little bit!

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Niels said,

Wrote on July 17, 2007 @ 8:15 pm

I am intrigued by your site and your book. I want to try the book. But when I looked at your book page, I saw that you offer Seth Godin’s e-book “unleashing the idea virus” for free. That is remarkable since it is a free e-book already. So is this an illustration of your work? Is that whay you mean when you say that you don’t have to be original? I don’t get it.

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JJ said,

Wrote on July 17, 2007 @ 10:18 pm

Thanks, dorm room biz, that does help.

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Dorm Room Biz said,

Wrote on July 17, 2007 @ 10:20 pm

Glad to help you out some!

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Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 18, 2007 @ 11:55 pm

Dorm Room Biz: good advice. I agree. JJ, if I were you I would just start the blog first. You’ll most likely find that this is the only website you need. As you can see on this site, I have other static “pages” at the top just like a regular website, but the majority of content comes from the posts. Blogs tend to get more traffic and better search engine rankings than regular websites.

Niels: yes you are right its a free ebook, part of the free bonuses you get when you buy mine. Seth Godin is great. I’d recommend people read it whether you read my book or not.

Brian

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