With a Little Help from Your Friends ...

 

 .
How friends and family can help to improve your Amazon Ranking will be a reminder today, short before the holiday season starts.  They indeed can help you so much - they even don't need to buy the book (again).  Amazon can give a great book a big boost to “be discovered”.  

These little features take only a few seconds, but can make a big difference in your Amazon ranking - and subsequently in the success of your book. . Ask all your acquaintances, friends, family to:
.

• Write a REVIEW of your book. Even if the book already has lots of reviews already. As more reviews as better for the author and as more potential buyers can see the popularity of the work. Amazon rules are against family members' reviews.  So ask only the ones with a different name/address for a review. They need an Amazon account and at least made previously one purchase of a physical or digital item.
  .
• LISTMANIA: Amazon allows all account holders to create a “list” of their favorite things…such as books and it is called, Listmania!  So if you have written a book, your friends and even you can create a Listmania! list, and certainly include your own book.
  .
• "HIGHLIGHTS" in your book Just another item in Amazon’s algorithm list for book popularity: If you friends have a Kindle, let them highlight some wise or fun quotations from the book. If enough people share their highlights, they’ll show up in your e-book. Amazon will display these “Popular Highlights” by combining the highlights of all Kindle customers and identifying the passages with the most highlights.
  .
• Good old-fashioned word of mouth. Let your friends and family brag about your books, or mention it in their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ sites or in their emails with a link to your site or your Amazon page. To help them send regularly images and info about you or your books that they can copy/paste into their social media sites.
  .
• Help with “blurbs”. Your friends or family members might have websites and blogs. Ask them to consider sending out a short note about your book, which can help you sell more books. If they allow you to use their words in your “praise” section on your author website.
  .
• Rate useful reviews:  This is an important one!  Amazon asks readers "Was this review helpful to you? YES or NO?  Rating the existing reviews as “helpful” or “unhelpful” makes a significant impact. Reviews with the most “helpful” votes appear on the BUY page "Most Helpful Customer Reviews".
  
  .
  By voting for the most informative and helpful reviews, your friends have the power to get them moved to the head of the line. Raising the position of the most descriptive reviews is especially helpful if the publisher missed to give the book an impressive blurb.
  .

How many reviews did YOU write?  It's a give and take... Compare two books with identical sales numbers: the one which has been promoted with these features is much higher in the (intern) ranks, which means it will be more featured on Amazon and subsequently will sell better in the future.  However, don't be too worried about your books' rank: Just like being popular in high school, it may not mean all that much in the real world.

<><><><><> 

Hyper Smash

Pingate

How to Improve Your Amazon Rankings?

.

.
What About Contests to Improve Your Amazon Rankings?
Why are reviews and rankings at Amazon so important for authors?  Rankings get you noticed. It means Amazon can reach people with your book who would never have heard of it otherwise.
That’s why authors should organize friends, acquaintances and family to order all on the same day, resulting in better ratings. Let me give you two examples:

Mike Litman's advice
Have you ever heard about this world bestseller “Chicken Soup for the Soul“?   Sure, you have! Mike Litman the co-author and co-founder gives every author this valuable advice:
“Hitting #1 at Amazon as first-time self-published authors using no money, no PR, no public speaking and doing it all in 76 days seems like a powerful enough story to warrant a spot in the Self-Publishing Hall of Fame. We did it by leveraging the email lists of other people by first serving them and coming from a place of willingness to help them first.

How They Did it:
We asked 12 of them for their help, they gladly sent a notice to their email lists with an offer for the book on Amazon.com, all on the same day to help push us to the top. We made an irresistible offer of digital products as bonuses for anyone who purchased the book from Amazon.com by midnight that night. The digital products sent out by email didn’t cost us anything to give them, so it was a win-win offer and the people who sent the notice to their lists were viewed as heroes for making such a great offer to their lists!”

Another author, Guido Henkel, had lots of success via a contest he started through his website and blog, writing to friends and acquaintances:

“I want you to “Share” my books and tell the world about it. So, go to my books on Amazon and for every book in the list, click the “Like” button found on the product page. Next, a small pop-up box will appear and there, click on the “F” symbol to share your love with your Facebook friends so that they can see it, or click on the Twitter icon to share the love with your Tweets. A share takes no more than two mouse-clicks — not a whole lot, considering what you could win in the bargain. Count how many of the books you shared this way.
Next, please go to the list of my books on Barnes & Noble’s website. On the product page for each book, click on the “F” to share the love with your Facebook friends and also click on the “+1” symbol to share it with your Google+ circles. Again, two mouse-clicks are all that required. Once again, count how many of the books you shared this way.
Then simply send me an email to contest@guidohenkel.com and put “Shared: xxx” in the subject line. “xxx” would, naturally, stand for the number of your total shares.  As you can see, this is really easy and no purchase is necessary. You can share my books even if you’ve never even read one. In fact, I would love for you to share information about the books anyway, because even if they are not your bag, maybe some of your friends like Victorian era supernatural mysteries.
At the end of the give-away, on October 22, I will then randomly draw winners from the shares and get their great prices (my guess: maybe an iPad?) to them. So, with any luck you might find some of these goodies in your mailbox.”
.
Want to check your Sales Rank?
http://www.salesrankexpress.com/


.

.

.

<><><><><>