Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Improving Your Amazon.com Rankings



Rankings... they are either a marketer's greatest friend or worst enemy. Despite what you may believe, having a blend of positive and negative reviews can work in your favor.


Upon releasing the second edition of my book, SEO Made Simple (second edition), I received some significant insight into how books are ranked on Amazon.com. Based on vendor feedback and viewing actual results, I was better able to determine why my book's ranking changed on a regular basis. If you ever wondered how books are ranked on Amazon.com, you may want to follow along.


As you know, Amazon provides a Sales Rank for each item in its catalog to show how it is selling. The lower the Sales Rank number, the higher the sales are for that particular item in a specified period.


I have seem Sales Ranks updated on an hourly basis to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on Amazon.com, and many factors must be taken into account when monitoring your book’s Amazon.com Sales Rank, including what time of day it is and how many people have purchased books during that time. This makes the algorithm a bit challenging to decode but makes sense when trying to evaluate a books popularity.


Because of this, a particular item’s Sales Rank does not absolutely reflect its sales. While monitoring your book’s Amazon.com Sales Rank may be helpful in gaining insight into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other initiatives to drive book sales, it is not an accurate way to track your book’s sales.


At the end of the day, getting a top sales rank on Amazon is relative to your book's sales compared to others in your category. If there was an easy way to get a top ranking, no one would be able to hold onto the top spot. The best advice I can give you is to promote your book using a launch date - driving as many people as you can to buy the book on a single day - and then managing a sustained marketing campaign over time. From my perspective, that's really the only way you'll ever generate online sales over the long term.



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