Contents The Google Kindle Crunch 1. Why Selling Through Amazon Is Smarter... 3 2. Backlinks from Niche Related Sites... 9 3. Blog Commenting... 13 4. Guest Blog Posts... 16 5. Article Marketing Backlinks... 20 6. Social Networking Backlinks... 22 7. Press Release Submission... 25 8. Forum Postings... 28 9. Conclusion and Outsourcing Tips... 30 2
1. Why Selling Through Amazon Is Smarter In this chapter, I ll explain how you can reap the benefits of an amazing opportunity that allows anyone to make a lot of money by selling Kindle books. So, you re probably wondering why Kindle books and not regular PDF ebooks. Well, for one simple reason: Because selling PDF ebooks is DAMN HARD! You see, if you want to sell a PDF ebook you ll need to jump through a lot of hoops before you have everything set up and ready to go. And even after you take care of all the technical chores, you still have the most difficult task ahead of you I m talking about advertising, of course. Using AdWords to advertise your ebook just won t pay off. Chances are you ll end up spending a lot more than you ll earn, unless you re some kind of an AdWords expert, but then I don t think you would be here listening to me. So, summa summarum it s near to impossible to make a real business and a real income by selling PDF ebooks. However, there is another path This path is much easier and it can make you more money than any PDF ebook ever could. So, let s first talk about why it is easier. I ll explain why selling directly through Amazon is not only smarter, but will also save you a lot of advertising money (and your nerves) as it requires much less work than any other way of selling ebooks. There are a plethora of reasons as to why it s easier, but I ll just name a few: no fancy sales letter needed you don t need to write a 10 feet long sales letter that nobody will even read; less hassle with backlinks when it comes to driving traffic, many marketing experts claim that the highest conversion traffic is organic traffic, which I agree with. And later in this course, I ll explain exactly what the deal is with backlinks; established credibility when you sell an ebook through Amazon, your credibility is already established for you as people tend to think that a site like Amazon doesn t sell low-quality ebooks. Although this can happen and occasionally bad ebooks can be found on Amazon, people see you as an authority either way. Good luck making people see you as an authority when you re trying to sell them an ebook through a 10 feet-long sales letter; Advertising done-for-you Amazon takes care of the advertising for you. They will recommend your book to people who buy books similar to your book topic. Oh, and did you know that for every 100 paperback books sold, Amazon sells 115 Kindle ebooks? This means that the traffic on and sales figures for Kindle ebooks are huge which is great for us. 3
Okay, now that we cleared the air and you know why Amazon is better, let s move on. You see, Amazon is such a powerful site that its pages get ranked in Google as soon as they appear. Just image what could happen to these pages if someone were to build backlinks. The rankings would simply skyrocket! But don t take my word for it, check it out for yourself: According to Alexa, Amazon is ranked as the number 10 site in the world and number 5 in the US for the amount of traffic that it s receiving. What this means for you is that you can take advantage of the massive link juice that Amazon s pages have. In case you re not familiar with the term link juice, let me break it down for you link juice is something that is referred to as Google currency, or as a secret sauce that can help a site with a lot of link juice beat another site with less link juice. Of course, there are other factors that affect a site s ranking, but link juice is by far the most important aspect of dominating Google. And to understand Google, you have to understand link juice, and in order to increase your juice you need to get more links, especially from sites that have a lot of juice. Okay, now that you understand what link juice is, let me tell you that you don t have to worry about how to get it! That s because Amazon s site is already full of link juice. With over 541,000,000 indexed in Google, and 1,790,000,000 external pages linking back to Amazon, you can count on the link juice to be pretty high! And yeah, that s 541 million internal pages and almost 2 billion external links!! 4
I bet you never saw a higher number when it comes to Google results! So now let s check out some real live examples. Let s first do a search for how to market and sell your ebook. And, as you can see, this ebook ranks #2 out of 85 million results! That s amazing Now let s check out the ebook s sales page and see how fancy it is. 5
The only thing I can see here is the editorial review and a short 200-word description on what the ebook is about. No fancy sales letter, no thousands of dollars spent on copywriters and no hours wasted on setting up a sales copy! Another reason as to why Amazon is better. Let s check out another live example of how easy it is. This is another example of an ebook that is doing very well on Amazon and it ranks number one for a keyword with over 1,470,000 competing pages. 6
Before I move on to teaching you how to make these things happen for your own books, I just want to get one more thing out of the way. I don t know how familiar you are with backlinks, but there is a huge difference between building backlinks for a regular website and building backlinks for an Amazon page. Let me ask you, have you ever heard of BLOOP? No? Most people didn t. But this is a very serious thing that can occur when you re building backlinks hoping to rank your web pages. BLOOP stands for BackLink Over Optimization Penalty. So let s say you spend a few hundred bucks and a good chunk of your time working on building backlinks to your page in the hope of getting organic traffic. But we all know Google doesn t support backlink building. They think it should come naturally. Fortunately, Google cannot tell for sure if you re building backlinks yourself or if websites are simply linking to your pages because you have good content. However, over the years Google s algorithm became so smart and intuitive that it can actually get pretty close to figuring out if the backlinks you re getting are being built naturally, or by an SEO company who is just stuffing pages with your links without knowing what they re actually doing. It shouldn t come as a surprise that this algorithm of theirs works so well. After all, it s Google we re talking about. It s a company with a multi-billion dollar budget so it s not a problem for them to invest a few hundred million dollars to come up with such a smart algorithm. But long story short you can get punished if you build backlinks to your site, especially if your site is brand new. A lot of things can happen to your site, it can experience a sudden drop in rankings, link devaluation, total website ban, de-indexing, etc. Here s exactly what Google has to say about this issue: "Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links are links to your site that develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links are links to your site placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines." But here s the good part: if you build links to your Amazon pages, this CANNOT happen! There s no way in hell Google can ban or punish Amazon for lots of backlinks being built all of a sudden. And since your books are going to be hosted on Amazon, you can forget all about getting punished and you can worrying about getting banned or de-indexed. Google is used to indexing a lot of links to Amazon pages and will gladly rank these pages very high in the search engine results. Other than the reasons I already mentioned, another thing that works in favor for Amazon is the fact that you don t need to waste any time on performing on-page optimization. If you were to host your ebook your own another domain name you would have to work on optimizing the site as well. But when it comes to Amazon, the site is already optimized to perfection, just as Google likes. Amazon s SEO experts made sure that every page is optimized as well as it 7
possibly can to achieve the best results in the search engines and to make more sales. Don t forget the more sales you make, the more money Amazon makes as well, so Amazon is on your side and it s a partner you can rely on. So this is why using Amazon to host, advertise and sell your books is the best way to sell on the Internet! In the next chapters I ll describe the best methods for building backlinks. First, I ll explain how these methods work so that you understand what you re getting into, and then I ll refer you to some of the best SEO service providers on the web that can do all the tedious tasks for you. This way you ll be able to focus on what s really important building your business and setting up new ebooks to sell. Let s get started! 8
2. Backlinks from Niche Related Sites Backlinks from niche related sites are probably the most powerful backlinks a page can get. These backlinks come from sites that are closely related to your topic. So, for example, if you have an ebook about weight loss and some other page related to weight loss links back to you then this is considered a backlink from a niche related site. Google gives these links a lot of power because they like seeing sites within the same niche linking to each other. What this means for you is that you need to build only a few of these links to skyrocket your Amazon ebook page in the search engine rankings. And these links also need to be one-way links. That means that you shouldn t link back to the site that is linking to you, but this isn t going to be a problem since you ll be using Amazon pages and you ll only purchase one-way backlinks. Building these links is a little more difficult, more time consuming and probably a little more expensive, but they are well worth the extra work and extra price. One way to go about building these links is by becoming a part of a private membership site which provides one-way backlinks from high PR and niche related sites. The most famous one out there is SEO Link Vine at seolinkvine.com. As search engines are becoming stricter day by day on manipulative link building strategies, you cannot take chances here, but you should choose your link building strategies very cautiously. Finding a safe and proven provider to build backlinks for you is one of the safest ways to build links for your page. It is important for your niche related links to be built in a very natural fashion. With these links, you can easily boost the rank of your Amazon ebook page in just a few weeks, if not even days. All because Amazon already has such a high reputation built with Google and other search engines. Other than SEO Link Vine which I mentioned a minute ago, there are a few more SEO providers who offer these packages, so let s check out one of them and see what they promise to deliver. The first one that we ll check out is Submit Edge at submitedge.com. The service that we re looking for on Submit Edge is called Niche Plus Link Building Service. So let s see what they have to say about their services 9
So, as you can see, it s important that this service is a natural link building strategy and in my experience it s immensely important that you get great customer support. And the fact that they assign you a dedicated account manager to work with you until your order is complete means a lot. If you ve stumbled upon any service with bad customer support on the Internet, then you probably know how it is when you re not taken care of properly even though you paid good money to get the whole deal. Now let s check out some of the features of these types of links. 10
So, for us it s important that these links are obtained from niche relevant pages. That s what gives them more power than non-niche related links. Another thing that we don t want is to have articles that are not unique and the good thing is that Submit Edge offers unique content. The links are also going to come from websites with high page rank which provide more link juice than sites with low page rank (PR). And last, but not least, if some of your links become non-functional or get de-indexed, they will be replaced free of charge. Now that s what I call a good service! The prices for these types of services are a little higher than regular links, but they re wellworth the money. 11
However, I only recommend using niche related backlinks in case you re going for a really competitive term. First you should try to rank by using other backlinking methods that I ll discuss in this course, and if you don t see results with those backlinks then you can turn to niche related backlinks. Another way of getting these backlinks is to hire outsource workers through sites like odesk and Elance, but I would rather trust and give my money to a reputable SEO company than to an outsource worker. The benefit of doing this through an outsource worker is that you will definitely pay less, but you get no guarantee that the links are going to be built the right way so that they look natural to Google. Even though backlinks from niche related sites are the first backlinking method we re talking about, it should be one of the last methods to use. Because of the fact that these backlinks are quite expensive, you should only use them in case other methods don t give any major results. Using these backlinks right away might result in an unnecessary waste of funds as you will probably be able to rank your ebook by building other, less expensive backlinks. Another thing you might want to consider doing is using these backlinks early on, but using only a few. Purchase about 5 to 10 high PR niche related backlinks, don t go all out and buy a huge packages of 50 backlinks. 12
3. Blog Commenting Blog commenting is a great way to get started when building backlinks for an Amazon page. Even though it might not be as powerful as other linkbuilding methods, it is cheaper and it can be done really fast. So, what s important for blog comments? First of all, it s important that your blog comments actually get published on the blog. If they don t appear on the blog then it s all useless as no search engine will see them. If you re not familiar with blog commenting then you might be a little confused and you re probably wondering: why the heck won t the comments appear if I submit them? Well, many blogs have the hold comments until approved option turned on which means that a moderator needs to approve your comment first. Over the last couple of years there have been many spammers sending hundreds of unrelated comments with the only goal in their mind being to get backlinks. These comments were usually totally unrelated to the blog topic, so blog owners are now a lot more careful when accepting to publish a comment. And you can t blame them This is why it s important to find someone who is going to post genuine comments that are actually related to the blog post. In this case 80% of your comments will get approved and you ll get a backlink. For a blog comment it s also important that the blog is do-follow which means that it doesn t have the option no-follow activated. What this no-follow option does is tell the search engine spiders not to crawl the page. And that also means that if the page doesn t get crawled, your links won t get indexed. This is why it s important to post comments on blogs that don t have the no-follow option activated. And in the end you need to make sure that the blogs are not brand new and that you are using anchor texts and not just posting a raw link. So you would post a comment with How To Market And Sell Your ebook and link it to your Amazon page and not post a raw link like this http://www.amazon.com/market-sell-your-ebook-ebook/dp/b0058j480q. Blog comments can be built both by software and by hand. Of course, it s always better when they re built manually. That s why I recommend you look for a service provider who can provide manual backlinks rather than software-built links. The reason for this is that if you do it through a software, chances are the comments are going to be completely unrelated, thus the spamming I just mentioned. And they won t get accepted by blog owners, so I might as well say this buying blog comments that are not going to be delivered by real humans is a total waste of money. I will also say that if a service doesn t offer a guarantee to get all the comments that you pay for published, you should think twice before buying services from them. 13
Don t let the cheap prices of some SEO companies trick you. Cheaper definitely doesn t mean better in this case. I recommend purchasing blog comments that come with an approval guarantee. Otherwise you re just throwing your money away and you won t get any results. If you want guaranteed quality you can check out Submit Edge s blog commenting service at http://submitedge.com/blog-commenting.html If you re looking for cheaper comments, check out One Hour Backlinks at http://onehourbacklinks.com/ Submit Edge prices: One Hour Backlinks prices: The price difference is quite big, but Submit Edge guarantees a lot of things; 14
As you can see, the anchor text links are guaranteed, you also get 100% do-follow backlinks, spam-free, from established blogs, and most importantly the approval is ensured! Without ensured approval it s quite a big gamble and you may expect to see only about 30% to 40% of comments actually getting approved. Blog comments should be one of the first backlinks to use. They are cheap and usually get indexed fast and might sometimes alone be enough to get you on a good position in Google. It is a good idea to combine these backlinks with other backlinks that are more powerful, like niche related backlinks, guest blog posts or article marketing backlinks. 15
4. Guest Blog Posts So what is a guest blog post? Well, that s basically a well written article providing solid content. The blogger arranges to publish an article on the blogger s site for free. The guest post belongs to the author and he receives full credits for the post. The guest blog post can contain backlinks to any link and it is totally up to the author of the article which sites to link to within the post and it is up to the blog owner to reject or accept the contribution. So, in a nutshell, this is how to concept works: 1. The author writes an article and shows it to the blogger; 2. The blogger decides if the article fits his blog and if yes, publishes it on the site. It should be fairly obvious by now that the article author (the guest blogger) benefits from this by getting a few backlinks to his site. But what s in it for the blog owners? How do they benefit from this? That should actually be pretty obvious as well. They get free content for their blog, so it shouldn t be a problem for them to provide a couple of free backlinks. Before I tell you on which side you re on, I just need to mention some basic rules of thumb when it comes to guest blog posting. There are only two rules that need to be followed, or two principles that need to be respected in order to make this agreement work for both parties. Here are the rules: 1. The author should provide unique content (no re-publishing); 2. The blog owner should not edit the author's article without discussing the edits with the author, except for minor grammar mistakes. You probably guessed it by now you re on the author s side. You need to get an article written and then find someone willing to publish your article. This is a great way to get related backlinks for your Amazon page and boost those rankings through the roof in no time! And believe it or not, finding people willing to publish your articles is easier than you thought. In fact, it s that easy that it can get done in just a few minutes and I ll show you exactly how to do it. The service of my preference is My Blog Guest located at http://myblogguest.com/ 16
This service comes both in a free and paid version, but the free version works for us perfectly fine. Let s first go through the registration process. Just enter the required information and click the Register button to continue. On the next step you can read about the four steps needed to properly set up your account; Step 1: Provide Your Social Media Profile Names this is not necessary and it won t affect your backlinks, so you don t have to provide any social media profile names. Feel free to skip this step. Step 2: Link up Your Blogs! since we re only interested in posting article to other people s blogs, we don t care about posting links to our blogs, so this step can also be skipped. Step 3: Personalize Your Account when it comes to personalizing your account, it s something that I recommend doing. This way, you look more trustworthy and blog owners will give you 17
more authority over those with non-personalized accounts. So definitely put up an avatar and write a few things about you before you start. Step 4: Participate! Okay, so let s participate. Now that the account is up and running, let s find some blog owners in need for content. Let s go and check out the forum. The section that we are after is Looking for a guest author, so let s open it and find ourselves a blog owner to work with. And here s a great thread for any Internet marketing related articles. Let s check out the requirements and blog description 18
As you can see, the blog has a nice PR and it is therefore definitely something worth writing for. You would have to submit an article with solid content and you get to post more than one backlink! This is a great offer. See how easy that was? Now what you need to do is find a writer to write an article for you. Or you can do it yourself if you re in the mood for writing. You can find an outsource worker on odesk.com, Elance.com or even the Warrior Forum at WarriorForum.com in the section Warriors for Hire. You ll probably end up paying about $8 to $12 for the article and you ll get a couple of niche related links for your Amazon page. That s a great deal! Way better than buying niche related links for $12 a link Before we move on to the next list-building method I just wanted to mention that you might want to take some time and post a few posts in the forum before you try to submit your articles. If you have no posts you won t be looked at like someone who is trustworthy and you ll probably get refused or you ll be asked to provide more words than other people or something along those lines. So to make sure this doesn t happen, just write 15 to 20 short posts in the other sections on the forum and you should be good to go. Guest blog posts are a great way to get high PR backlinks and the way I look at guest blog posts is as niche related backlinks, but cheaper. Posting a guest blog post is, of course, free, so all you need to do is pay someone to write the article for you. I recommend using these right away, in a combination with blog comments. 19
5. Article Marketing Backlinks The Google Kindle Crunch Article marketing is the backlinking method that has suffered the most upon Google s latest algorithm change called Google Panda. February 2011 is going to be remembered by article marketers for quite a long time as it was the month when Panda came out and change the game of a lot of marketers. After this change, many websites suffered significantly. Their search engine rankings dropped dramatically and often from one of the top places on the first page to page 3 and below. This was especially hurtful to those sites with little or no unique content, so aggregators whose only purpose is to publish loads of duplicate content that can be found all over the web learned their lesson the hard way. That s what I call tough love from Google. The biggest surprise was to see huge and established sites like Ezine Articles, Review Center, Article Base, Buzzle, Hub Pages and Squidoo drop in rankings. Rankings are more than ever about content and not just links and fortunately good content even got a boost with the Panda update. So, while it created huge losses for those following the traditional way, those who adapted early enough are making more money with their articles than ever before. But don t let this scare you. Good old article marketing still works, you just can t play dirty anymore. You have to provide good content if you want good backlinks. And in this chapter I ll explain exactly how to get backlinks build with article marketing, what to do and what to stay away from. In our case we ll focus more on getting backlinks than driving traffic directly from articles, but it is possible to get hits to your page from people who are actually reading the article you published. As I mentioned earlier in one of the previous chapters, there are some automation tools that can speed things up for you, but by using these tools the process of linkbuilding doesn t look natural. The same applies for article marketing and so I want to make it clear that marketing tools for article marketing might not be the best thing to go with. Here s why While I have to admit that these tools make everything happen much faster, they also do some things that Google is catching up with. The tools have a module called article spinning and what this does is take one article and spin it into hundreds of versions. And Google is catching up on this and won t give you a good score for all these similar articles. This doesn t mean that you won t get any link juice out of it, but it s just not as effective as before. This is why manual backlink building with article marketing is the best way to get valuable backlinks. You ll need a lot of unique content though. 20
There is one more thing that is not that great about article marketing; the top article directories are usually no-follow, except for the resource boxes which are limited to one or two links, so you won t be able to get a lot of different backlinks from one article. So my advice would be to find a professional SEO company that has experience with article marketing. I recommend checking on the Warriors for Hire section of the Warrior Forum as there are a lot of SEO specialists offering great deals on article marketing. Just make sure they re panda compliant. If it is panda compliant then it should say so somewhere in the thread. If panda isn t mentioned, then they re probably doing the things that used to work before, so stay away from that. Even though article marketing went through a rough patch lately, it is still a good method of getting backlinks quickly. The article marketing database sites are popular and so they also have a high PR and all the backlinks posted on them will get indexed fast. I recommend using article marketing after building a few high PR backlinks and after getting some blog comments. 21
6. Social Networking Backlinks The Google Kindle Crunch Finally, we got the part where tools can actually help without hurting us. But why social networking backlinks? Well, because Google loves them! Especially after the panda hit that affected article directory sites. And when I say social networking sites, I don t necessarily mean Facebook and Twitter. We will talk about these as well, but there are hundreds of other social networking sites that you might have not heard of but that have a high page rank (PR). And as you know by now, any page with a high page rank can provide a nice amount of Google s secret sauce, or link juice as we called it earlier. Social media is a great starting point for backlinks, and since popular articles are usually shared multiple times, the amount of backlinks multiplies over time. If this happens, not only will you see increased traffic to your Amazon page, but you will see your Amazon page ranking highly in Google as well. Also, I will give you some tips on how to execute a social media backlinking strategy that will save your time and effort. Before we start discussing the tools, I want to quickly cover how you can get backlinks from Facebook. Even though all Facebook links are no-follow, your links will still get indexed. It is not clear yet how Google actually views no-follow links, but many have noticed their pages getting indexed from a link located a no-follow site, so the search engines might not consider them as powerful as do follow links, but it looks like there is something there after all. So if you have a Facebook group, or are a part of a Facebook group, don t forget to post a link to your Amazon s ebook if you have a chance. Facebook has a page rank of 9 out of 10. And that means that you will get a lot of link juice for the links posted on it. Now let s turn to automated tools. These automated tools will build backlinks for you faster. Even though not all social networks have a PR of 9 like Facebook, there is still a lot of power laying in these networks, so it s definitely something you need to do when it comes to building backlinks. Okay, let s get to the tools 1. OnlyWire OnlyWire is a Social Media Engine that provides publishers, bloggers, and SEO Professionals the ability to auto-submit content to the highest ranked and leading Social Media sites. Onlywire eliminates the need to log into 50+ sites to manually input content and status updates because Onlywire automates this all for you. It enables users to reach billions of readers globally by support 50 of the leading Social Media sites. 22
It has both free and paid versions, but I take it that you re serious about getting fast results, so I m not going to waste anybody s time by talking about the free version. The Pro version is much more effective and it s quite cheap as well. For just $10 you get up to 1,000 submissions monthly, which potentially can turn into 1000 backlinks! If we apply some math, we ll get that for just 1 you get one backlink. To be more correct, here is how OnlyWire defines a submission: Submissions are measured as 1 post to 1 service. For example, 1 article submitted to Twitter. If you are using 50 services, a single article or post may use up 50 submissions. The $10 monthly package should be enough if you re just starting out. Another thing that you definitely want to consider getting is the captcha solver. Without it, you ll have to watch over the submission process and enter the captcha yourself. Captcha Solver is a critical service provided by the OnlyWire staff. They'll instantly fill out all captcha for you, so you don't have to. Even though it is optional, it is highly recommended. So that will bring up your monthly membership at $13. 2. Social Bookmarking Demon Social Bookmarking Demon is similar to OnlyWire, however it has many more sites you can submit to and more advanced features like; the ability to create randomized usernames; 23
unlimited access to Scuttle and Pligg sites; ability to create multiple title and descriptions for each social network; automatically pings your bookmarks; allows scheduling; auto verifies your emails; ability to use proxy servers to avoid possible problems from multiple submissions from one IP; RSS camouflage to make the URLs look more natural; and more These features are great, but the trick is that it costs a lot more than OnlyWire. This piece of software is priced at $147 and even though it might seem like a lot compared to the $13 you would pay monthly for OnlyWire, this is a one-time payment with life-time updates. So once you buy it, it s yours to keep. Another thing that I should probably mention about it is that it only works on Windows, so you won t be able to use it on a Mac. 3. Social Marker For those of you who would rather use a free version for testing how things work, Social Marker is the perfect site for that. Social Marker is a service designed to help in the process of submitting websites and web pages to social bookmarking and social news sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon to name a few. In a few days after it was launched in late 2007 it became one of the most used service of its kind mainly because satisfied people wrote about it and made a buzz. But after a few years, they had to shorten the number of social networking sites and now they re only submitting to 17 sites. When they started out they used to submit to over 40 sites, but since it s a 100% free service, my guess is that their resources wore out and they operate on a budget. But that s not really something we should be concerned about. 4. Purchasing Submissions If you don t want to waste any time with software, you could purchase these services. The costs will be higher as you ll have to pay for someone to do the submissions, but you won t have to lift a finger. I know building backlinks can get quite boring sometimes and it s not something that every entrepreneur wants to do. Entrepreneurs should come up with new business ideas and make business decisions, not spend their time building backlinks. So, to wrap things up on the social networking backlinks if you don t mind lifting a finger then go ahead and use OnlyWire or Bookmarking Daemon, otherwise hire an SEO company to do the job for you. 24
7. Press Release Submission Press releases have been around for many years, but are only now being used in the Internet marketing world. Today, submitting press releases over the internet is the most innovative way in which to increase your search engine rankings, drive traffic to your website, and bring unique visitors that will result in making more sales. When working with press releases one of the important things is making sure your press release is keyword searchable for the best search terms in your niche or industry. This is critical to its success. That s why you need someone to analyze your release and optimize it around key search terms that increase your chances of being noticed by the search engines. I consider a press release to be one of the cheaper ways to get backlinks. The way I see press releases is as a combination of article marketing and social bookmarking. When you submit a press release, it gets spread around a few news sites on the Internet and that looks like social bookmarking. But what s better than social bookmarking is that press releases go along with an article. So it s not just a link. You get to blast your article across multiple ezine sites, blogs, news sites, etc. They re not as powerful as they used to be because of Google s panda update, but you can still get a decent link juice to your Amazon page which will definitely help boost your rankings. So let s see exactly how this works. The most famous press release distribution site is PR Web, so we ll analyze how PR Web works. A PR Web press release can earn you big media publicity in a few simple steps. It also does much more than that. It puts your name everywhere people look online, helps you climb the search engines, and attracts new customers to your website. And it s easy to do there s no expertise needed to do it yourself. Here s how it works. You write a news announcement about your business if you re not experienced with writing press release material, you might be better off hiring someone to write it for you, or you could check out the tips, press release examples from customers, sample press release formats and even free online tutorials all offered by PR web. That s everything you need to get started. Then you pick the online press release package that feels right for you. You can add video, optimize your story for search engines, and choose extra distribution options. Enter your story into their ready-made press release template. The good thing is that there is nothing to format or code. PR Web does it all. 25
After your release gets double-checked by their staff, it will get pushed to huge press release distribution networks like Yahoo! News and search engines like Google and Bing as well as over 30,000 journalists and bloggers. There are a few packages for you to choose from. The cheapest package starts at $89 and it might be a good thing to try out and see what kind of results you can get. After trying out the basic package, you might be interested in the Premium package. I don t recommend going all out and getting the Premium package right away. The Premium package should be used only if you have already established a nice rating for your ebook on Amazon and if you re going for a more competitive keyword. Your news goes to premier news outlets like the New York Times, USA Today and more, through the Associated Press. Other than the paid options, there are also free press release distribution sites. Of course, there is a huge difference between a free press release distribution site and a site like PR Web. Free services will probably blast your release to less than a hundred sites and maybe 30% of those links will turn out to be permanent links. However, there are a lot of free sites and if you were to submit your article to 10 or 15 of these, you might see some nice results. For an Amazon ebook it is very useful to use press releases. In fact, that s what press releases are meant to be used for. All you need to do is find a writer specialized in press releases, set it all up and get yourself and your book published on major news sites. If you dig around PR Web s website, you ll notice that they offer to write a press release for you as well, but the price is $325 which is too much. You can find a press release specialist on odesk or Elance for less than $100. 26
For me, press releases are much more than just backlinks. You get a lot of publicity which is excellent for an author who released an ebook on Amazon. 27
8. Forum Postings The last backlinking method that we ll discuss in this course is the forum postings method. There are two methods to get backlinks from forums. The first method is by posting a link along with your forum post. If you want to earn a backlink this way, your post needs to provide real value. And even though you post real value, some forums might choose to remove your post. This depends entirely on the forum rules, so before you go all out and try to get backlinks this way, make sure you read the forum rules. The second method provides more backlinks and it has to do with signatures. You will be able to post your link in your signature, so whenever you post something on a forum, your signature is always there and it will always leave a backlink. But again, it might not be accepted by all forums so make sure you read all the forum rules to make sure you re allowed to use links in your signature. Some forums require you to make a certain number of posts before you can use a signature. It all depends on the forum rules. For forum postings backlinks you can also hire outsource workers to build the backlinks for you, or you can do it yourself. One thing I like to do is to employ the person who wrote the Kindle ebook for me to work on forum postings. If you want to do it yourself, it will be a little time consuming, but if it s a niche you re genuinely interested in then it is a good idea to participate in the forum discussions and learn a thing or two from people with similar interests as yours. The good thing about forum postings is that, besides the fact that it provides solid backlinks, it can also bring traffic directly. If you re seen as an authority on a forum, if you post solid content and if you have a link to an ebook that is in the same niche as the forum chances are people are going to click on your link and buy your ebook. It s important to only participate in forums related to your niche for a few reasons; some forum moderators might punish you for posting a non-related backlink in your signature; people use a lot of your main keyword s related keywords in discussions, and Google likes it; ability to get backlinks from forum posts as well, not only signatures. Let s assume you re selling an ebook on weight loss and are a member of a forum related to cake baking. There is no way you could write an article and post it in the forum with a link to your weight loss ebook. The people on the forum are interested in baking cakes, not losing weight. These are some of the reasons as to why it s important to participate in a niche related forum. 28
And here s how to find a forum in your niche: Simply do a search for your niche + forums, like I did here by typing cake baking forums. After you find a forum you are interested in, register and then make sure to read the forum rules before you start posting. If you start right away with backlinks you might even get permanently banned from the forum. Forum owners don t mind people posting backlinks as long as they participate in the discussions and provide value to the other members. 29
9. Conclusion and Outsourcing Tips After learning all about building backlinks for your Amazon page, there is not much left to say, but assuming that you re mainly going to outsource backlink building, I want to provide a few tips for successful outsourcing. Successful outsourcing will not only allow you to focus on what you do best, but also find other ways to satisfy clients and expand your business. By building relationships with your subcontractors that are based on trust and respect, you will be able to create a team that can accomplish just about anything and give you a day or two off in the process. When working with outsource workers it s important to clearly define the terms and schedule of your project. This might seem obvious, but any successful outsourced project always starts with a clear statement of what you are hoping to accomplish. Define your project requirements up front. Service providers need accurate, complete information to present you with realistic proposals and to quote you a reasonable price. Be specific about the deliverables you expect the vendor provide. Give vendors as much information as you can about what you need delivered and the way in which you need the work done. Also, be clear and realistic about your schedule requirements - project schedules can have a huge impact on costs. Though it might be tempting, never select a vendor based solely on price. Experienced buyers who have outsourced many projects and evaluated hundreds of proposals almost always recommend discarding the highest-priced and lowest-priced bid. Buyers report that their most successful projects are the ones where they felt the vendor offered a balance of good value and quality results. From experience I can say that it takes a lot of negotiating when you re hiring one person to do the job for you. So always try to find an SEO company or a small SEO agency that will do the job for you. One of the best ways to find suitable people is the Warrior Forum. Go to the Warriors for Hire section of the forum and start searching for the type of backlinks that you need. Only hire those who have an established business with a solid reputation and a lot of testimonials. You don t want to be someone s guinea pig. Now that you know exactly what to do in order to drive traffic and get sales by using backlinks, there s nothing that can stop you, but you need to move as soon as possible. One of the biggest problems for entrepreneurs is not taking action. You have all the information that I personally use to make thousands of dollars from Amazon and THIS WORKS! So stop looking for excuses and stop making up reasons as to why this might not work. Give it a try and you ll see for yourself how well it works. The good thing about it is that you don t really have to worry about over optimizing it and building more backlinks that you should. It s Amazon and Google is not going to punish it, so feel free to build as many backlinks as you want, there s no way you ll get punished. The biggest 30
problem when it comes to SEO, or should I say the biggest excuse when it comes to SEO is that people are afraid of their site getting de-indexed so they just prefer to skip it. But there s nothing better than getting daily organic traffic and not spending a single dime on traffic. And now that you don t have to worry about getting de-indexed, I really can t think of any reasons for not doing what I tell you to. With this, I ll wrap things up and end the course. I hope you enjoyed learning new tricks on how to build backlinks and I honestly hope you won t be one of those entrepreneurs who never take action on this. It s such a simple system and absolutely anyone can make it work for them and their business. Best of luck! 31