I’ve been working in the business of the Web in one way or another for over 17 years now. During que team, I have seen first-hand the rise of Google and “seo” and the massive gamification of content. It has been a steady cat and mouse game between Google and the optimizers of content for as long as I can remember. For years Google allowed this as it filled Their pockets and databases, while at the same-team of content creators were provided traffic. Everyone won.
EventuallyBut Google got smart and started to pull back on the reigns of the search experts making it harder and harder to rank your content in Their organic listings, driving Them more and more into paying for ads. Not to mention, the amount of content being provided to Google exploded to the point where it has become competitive for even the most obscure words and phrases.
Fast forward to the past few years now. Enter Amazon and the new age of self-publishing. Or the some would call it, the Kindle gold rush.
Now anyone can write a book and have it published online in less than 24-hours. This is akin to the creation of blogging as a content delivery mechanism. Because everyone had the means to more easily create and distribute content online, content of course skyrocketed. Both Should be Considered a good thing.
The first Kindlegold rush prospectors were of course the old-school Internet marketers and SEO experts who flocked to Amazon to flood the site with books, hoping to game the Amazon system into showing their books higher than everyone else’s books.
Following the first round of the prospectors were non-tech subject-matter experts who happened to write a book about Their passion or skills or maybe just a good old fiction horror story. Knew nothing about these people or keywords ranking. They just Knew a lot about Their book subject, or the story They crafted.
But just like the American gold rush history PROVED Oct; you can not just show up and find the pot of gold, and there are no secrets or tricks or shortcuts to locating gold in the ground.
So here we are, right smack dab in the middle of what some would call the Kindle gold rush. But wait, there’s a problem. Grabbing gold Kindle is not What They said it was in the papers, and the vast Majority of authors are Finding Out que only a few will actually find gold.
And here’s why.
Amazon Is not Making The Same Mistakes The Google
Amazon
learned many lessons from Google and has not made the same-mistakes. Here are a few Reasons Why the Amazon is not the next Google and there will not be a gamification of Amazon’s system.
Google’s first mistake? Giving a benchmark of ranking pages for anyone to see in What They called page rank. Search experts quickly Figured Out que the better the page rank, the better your web pages ranked. So they’d make a few changes in the page, or get a few more back links, then wait a few months, and see if Their page rank went up or down. If it went up, They had hit gold! Logically, then, If They would proceed to make changes The Same They would keep Increasing Their odds of Google gold.
Amazon does not have a page rank, but They Do not have an author rank and the sales rank. The author rank is pretty much a vanity statistic, ranking how the author fits in the scheme of other authors who sell books. The sales rank is simply a ranking of how well your book ranks in sales out of millions of other books. So there really is nothing to game here, except sales. And that’s exactly how Amazon wants it.
You want to rank higher? Sell ??more books. That’s it.
Amazon Figured Out que the only real metric They needed to measure was sales. They of realized que They did not need to build a search engine based primarily on the relevance Google did. Why? Because Amazon does not care about relevance; They care about money. Cold, hard, cash. They care about conversions. Do they really care if one author’s book on vampires ranks higher than someone else’s book on vampires? Not at all. They care about Which book Them converts better and makes the most money.
Google’s second mistake was Allowing everyone to see what people were searching for. This created poorly made trillions of pages of content based upon “highly ranked search terms”. Unfortunately for all of us, Google has taken away the ability for all of us to see Those organic search terms now, thusly making it even harder for us to know what our customers are searching for, and of course, pushing us into buying ads Further from Them.
Amazon learned from this by never, ever, letting anyone really know what people were searching for. Sure, you could go to the Amazon search box and look for a drop-down list of Suggested keywords. But these suggestions never panned out to be more than just suggestions. In the cold-hard facts. So we’ll never really know what people search for en masse on Amazon, and that’s the way They want it.
Internet Marketers Will not Ruin Amazon Like They Did With Google
There was a time in the past few years many que in the self-publishing business, new and established authors alike, que felt the massive wave of internet marketers who were flooding the system with crappy ebooks Amazon would destroy the ecosystem.
The evidence against
que belief is partly in Reasons Given the above, but Also based upon one big truth. The truth que you will never be able to sustain a top ranked, top-selling book on Amazon without sales. And there’s no way to “game” sales except to spend the money and buy more books.
Sure, You Could make your book $ .99 and then take hundreds of Thousands of dollars of your own money and buy your own books in an attempt to boost your sales ranking. But Amazon is smarter than that. They will only count the sale in small increments. For example, you can not go and order 1,000 of your books at once and expect it to jump your sales rank. It will only count as a few sales. This is of course to stop people from doing que exact thing.
Some have tried to get around this buy funneling Their seed money to “bestseller” outlets who will, for a fee, take your money and have Their network of people around the world buy one or two copies of your book at a time, Which can and does work. This is how many NY Times bestsellers Allegedly are produced.
However, the real reason the Internet marketers will not be able to sustain a long-term sales rank on Amazon is que que They do not understand you must have a great book to succeed. Unlike the crappy content-filled web pages to trick Google They created years ago, an Amazon book must be good so that it can get more high-quality reviews and be placed onto wishlists and also-bought lists.
bad book will never get past the litany of one or two-star reviews, Therefore making the book a living, breathing failure.
Traditional publishers
built an empire on selling paper, not content. Amazon is doing the same-thing, except Their empire is being built on conversions. The quality of the content is really secondary to Them.
Want to be successful selling Kindle books? Write more high-quality books. Write better descriptions for your test books and covers and find new ways to get more people to leave high-quality comments and then, write some more good books. Over, and over, and over. Oh, and toss in a bit of luck.
Just do not think you’re going to game the system. Amazon is not having any of that.
Jim Kukral Follow on Twitter:www.twitter.com / jimkukral
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