I stumbled on this simple tactic that influences searches on Amazon entirely by accident.
That is, it wasn’t by design, but having discovered it (by way of my good friend and PR Master – Alex Singleton) I realised that anyone can use this to help them get more exposure for their books.
A word of warning first. This could be heavily abused, and no doubt will be now the cat’s out of the bag, and could even result in your book being banned if it is so obvious it is being used to affect search results.
So what is this great secret?
Citation Citation Citation
The buzz word around the internet at the moment is the magic and stupidly academic word ‘graph’. Facebook call it the ‘Open Graph’. Google call it the ‘Knowledge Graph’.
Call it what you like, it uses so-called ‘semantic’ logic to connect things together that otherwise may not be associated. It’s something our human brains do every second with no problem at all.
But as with all things technical it takes a while for this stuff to emerge out there in the ‘real world’.
I don’t know if Amazon are using such techniques, but they are certainly making connections that weren’t there until fairly recently.
So What Did You Do Then?
On page 165 of my book, Step by Step Marketing, I mentioned Drayton Bird’s book Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing. I didn’t do it for any reason other than recommending it for further reading at a point my book where it was very relevant.
And so what good did that do? Well, if you go on Amazon UK and search for the term ‘commonsense direct and digital marketing’ up pops Drayton’s book, but in 4th place is mine.
Very nice.
From now on I will be recommending other books and helping as many good and relevant authors as I can 🙂
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