The Amazonian Profit Plan
The
Amazonian Profit Plan A Step by Step Blueprint for Making Money with the Amazon Associates Program
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Table of Contents I’m a bit of an ebook junkie… ......................................................................................... 4 So who are we? .............................................................................................................. 5 The most important thing you need to know before you begin… ................................. 6 How does this work? ...................................................................................................... 7 Amazon only pays 4% commission…how can I make a living from that? ...................... 8 Registering with the Amazon Associates Program......................................................... 9 Step 1: Choose a niche...forget it, just choose the product! ....................................... 11 How to choose a product to promote ...................................................................... 11 Here are the criteria! ................................................................................................. 12 An example of how to search for products .............................................................. 13 Step 2: Time for some keyword research… .................................................................. 17 Step 3: Check out the competition ............................................................................... 23 Step 4: Write the review ............................................................................................... 31 How do you write the review? .................................................................................. 31 Our method for writing reviews ............................................................................... 31 A step-by-step to writing reviews ............................................................................. 32 Do you need to own the product before writing a review? ..................................... 42 What if you don’t want to write the review yourself? ............................................. 43 How long should your product review be? ............................................................... 43 The good, the bad, the ugly – how do you write about the negatives..................... 43 Step 5: Upload to your website .................................................................................... 45 Steps in uploading a page to Wordpress .................................................................. 46 Step 6: Get that traffic .................................................................................................. 48 What are backlinks? .................................................................................................. 48 So how do you get backlinks and traffic? ................................................................. 49 Guest Blogging........................................................................................................... 49 Where to from here… ................................................................................................... 56 And finally…. ................................................................................................................. 58 Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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Attachment 1: Amazon Product Idea Checklist ............................................................ 59 Attachment 2: Keyword List ......................................................................................... 60 Attachment 3: Example Format to Submit to Elance ................................................... 61 Attachment 4: Product Review Example ...................................................................... 62 Attachment 5: Guest Blogging Example Emails ........................................................... 66 Attachment 6: How to Add an Amazon Image to Your Product Review ..................... 67 Attachment 7: How to Weave a Story into Your Product Reviews .............................. 71
Warning: This ebook is copyrighted 2010 to Amazonian Profit Plan. If you have received or purchased this ebook from anywhere other than the Amazonian Profit Plan website (http://www.amazonianprofitplan.com/) you have received a stolen copy. If you suspect this has been stolen, please send us an email at
[email protected]
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I’m a bit of an ebook junkie… Yes I admit it… I still to this day buy internet marketing related ebooks looking for that extra something that will take us to the next level. This is despite the fact that we already make enough online not to have to work in a regular 9 to 5 job. I figure even if we only get one thing out of it then it is well worth the money. But even so, I constantly find that even some of the better ebooks lack the detail that most people want and need to see, especially for those new to making money online. Or worse they don’t know how to write step-by-step guides correctly and miss out on vital information that leaves the reader guessing on where to go next…and some even leave out information on purpose as they don’t want to give away all their secrets. I knew we could do better and this is our goal with this ebook. We want you to have every step you’ll need to make a living online. So we are giving you our complete blueprint of what we do to make thousands of dollars a month online simply by promoting Amazon products.
Why are we writing this ebook? Now I can just hear those skeptics out there who are wondering why we would give away our secrets in an ebook when we are already making enough money from Amazon to not have to make an extra few dollars on an ebook. Well there are a few reasons why we are prepared to do this: First of all, there are literally thousands of different products that can be promoted in Amazon so there is no problem with having to worry about competition. Second, we know that it is time for us to diversify so providing our own informational product instead of promoting someone else’s is a good way to do it. And third, we want to start building up our email list. I keep hearing that the money is in the list so I want to prove it for myself.
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So who are we? Many of you have probably never heard of us before. There’s a reason for that. We’ve been making enough money online to not have to worry about promoting ourselves. We just don’t need to – we make money from methods that don’t require an email list or networking tactics or joint ventures. So we’ve been pretty quiet up until now and probably will stay pretty quiet apart from a few information products we want to develop…like the one you are reading now for instance. For those few that do know us, it’s probably via our internet marketing blog at http://www.affiliateblogonline.com. This is really our play blog. We created that blog because we like to share information about our online business – at this stage, it doesn’t make much money at all. In fact, at this point in time we have no intention of even trying to make money from that blog – we do so much better via Amazon products which means that we can just enjoy the affiliate marketing blog for what it is. We’ve been around since about 2004 dabbling in online marketing but didn’t really get serious until around a couple of years ago. We’ve learnt from some of the best in the business through various ebooks and guides. When you’ve been around as long as we have you start to pick up what works and what doesn’t and we’ve learnt to pick the best of the best from each of our mentors and combine it into the ultimate money making model which is what we are going to give you in this ebook. We would love to see you make a success of your online business and we know that with this book and your persistence you will be able to reach your goals. Just stay focused and you will succeed! Best Wishes from
Paula & Wanda www.affiliateblogonline.com
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The most important thing you need to know before you begin… If you want to make money online then there is one really important thing you need to know. It’s really quite simple but most people don’t do it. This is what prevents most people from making money because when it comes down to it, most methods for making money online work. However there is usually only ONE reason why they don’t….it’s because most people never give it a chance…they just don’t stick at it long enough for it to succeed. They expect miracles and to be making money within a day, a week or a month. Sorry to disappoint but that rarely if ever happens. For most people who work at it, it will take at least three months and sometimes longer before they start seeing some sort of money trickle in. Most others have given up by then and they sit and complain that it’s impossible to make money online or they move on to yet another money making scheme and eventually give up on that as well. You HAVE to keep at it if you are going to make it online. You have to get the concept of giving up right out of your head. Just don’t make it an option. Do this and you will be a success!
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How does this work? The process is pretty simple really. It involves six steps and for each of those steps we are going to provide as much detail as possible. Each of the steps listed below is absolutely critical in the process. If you miss one, then you just won’t get the success you are after so keep to the plan and don’t deviate. In a nutshell these are the steps you need to take: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Choose five products in Amazon using our criteria. Do a bit of keyword research. Check out the competition. Write a review for that product using our format…it’s not as hard as you think. Post the review to your blog or website. Get traffic to those pages.
That’s it really! Now you may be thinking that this is nothing new. Thousands of affiliate marketers promote Amazon products don’t they? That’s correct, but we do it soooo much better. We have individual pages on our blogs that are making over $500 a week and at least one that is making over $1000….yes, that’s just one page of content linking to one product on Amazon. That’s a full-time income from just one page of content. Now imagine if you had 5 pages making that sort of money…sounds good doesn’t it?
Why we use Amazon? Amazon has many advantages over using other merchants but the main advantage is that it converts so well. When we started with affiliate marketing we were promoting products from merchants in Commission Junction, ShareaSale and Linkshare. We were getting sales but it really wasn’t all that impressive. We certainly weren’t making a full time income from it. It was only when we decided to add Amazon links that we started seeing real results. To be absolutely honest, we were astounded at the difference in sales.
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It comes down to the fact that people trust Amazon and they are used to shopping on the site so when they see a link to Amazon on a webpage they are more likely to click through. Also, once they get to Amazon they tend to buy other things as well…not just what you sent them there for. So you may get more than one sale per click through. To illustrate this with a real life example, in November 2009 we had 2292 sales on one of our Amazon accounts. Of those 2292 sales, 524 were for products we were promoting. The other 1768 were for products that had nothing to do with our site. So we actually sold more unrelated products than related products. Go figure!
Amazon only pays 4% commission…how can I make a living from that? It’s true that Amazon only pays a 4% commission…however that is only for the first 6 items you sell in a month. It goes up progressively to 8.5% depending on the quantities you sell. We regularly hit 7.5% in the first few days of each month and it goes up from there over the month. Keep in mind however that for consumer electronics the referral rate stays at 4% regardless of the number of sales.
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Registering with the Amazon Associates Program In order to promote Amazon products you will need to sign up with the Amazon Associates Program…it’s free to join. Note that at this point in time, residents of Colorado, North Carolina or Rhode Island are not eligible to participate in the Amazon Associates Program. You can sign up to the Amazon Affiliate Program using this link: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html If you are planning on promoting Amazon products to a country other than the US then simply select the drop-down in the top right corner on the Amazon Associates home page and select your desired country. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/landing/main.html
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But enough of the talk, let’s get started….. This book is set up on a step by step basis. We suggest you read it from beginning to end before taking action. Then read it again. There may be some things that seem to be a little difficult to get your head around at first so reading it a few times before you even start will make things a little easier as you progress through the steps. Once you are ready to begin follow each step exactly. This is the complete blueprint for how we make money from Amazon and it works so don’t try to deviate.
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Step 1: Choose a niche...forget it, just choose the product! There are so many ebooks that go into detail about choosing a niche, creating a website based around that niche and then writing hundreds of pages of content in order to build up a massive website. This is how we started but we no longer work this way. It takes a lot of work and hard work is something we try to avoid. We do things a little differently with our method. Instead of choosing niches, we choose products and we no longer write page after page of content in a frantic attempt to build up our websites. The reason for this is that we found that out of the thousands of pages we had on our sites only a small number of them were consistently making any money. And when I say a small number, I’m talking less than 20 pages. So keep this in mind when you are making your way through this ebook. You don’t need to write hundreds of product reviews to make a decent income online. You just have to choose the right products.
How to choose a product to promote When choosing a product to promote we use specific criteria when searching through Amazon. This criteria ensures that you choose a product that WILL convert. Your goal is to find a list of 5 products that meet the criteria listed below. Why 5?...because our goal is to only focus on a handful of products at any one time. This is how we run our business. We find 5 products on Amazon, write 5 reviews and then spend the rest of our time getting traffic to those 5 pages. When those 5 pages are making sales we move on to the next 5 products. If you are relatively new to all of this, then you might want to just focus on 1 or 2 products at a time instead of 5. That’s okay too – just do what works for you. Just bear in mind when using the criteria that you don’t have to be 100% spot on. For example, if you see that the product is a few dollars under $150 but all the other criteria matches up then that’s okay – you are only out by a little. Just use your common sense here – just try as much as possible to meet the criteria but don’t worry if you are out a little.
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Here are the criteria! Use the table in Attachment 1 at the end of this document to write up your 5 products using the criteria below. 1. The product has a price tag over $150 – It’s important that you get a good
commission on each sale. A product that is only worth $20 will see you getting a commission of anywhere between 80c and $1.60. You will need to sell a lot of products to make a healthy income. So stick to products over $150 and preferably over $200. Just remember that prices fluctuate in Amazon so one day you might see a product over $150 and then next day it might be under. Don’t be too concerned – our goal is to keep the price somewhere over the $150 mark. Also try not to only go with very expensive products. You are more likely to sell products around the $200 mark than products over $500. Have a mix of both. 2. The product has received at least 20 reviews from consumers on Amazon –
Why?...because it means it is a popular product that sells and it also gives your readers the confidence that other people have used it and are happy with it. This equates to a better conversion rate. It will also help you when it comes to writing up the review…more on that later. (Note that out of the 5 criteria listed here, this is one that you can waver a bit on. If all the other 4 criteria fit and this one only has say 10 reviews that’s okay – try not to go any less than 10 though.) 3. The product has a 4 to 5 star rating – A good rating means that consumers are
happy with the product. Unless you are able to purchase the product yourself, the only way you are going to know if the product is worth buying is if you can see that other people are happy with it. You don’t want to promote products that aren’t worth promoting. You want to find the best products available and ones that consumers are extremely happy with. This will help to sell your product. 4. There is enough information available to write about the product – You are
going to be writing a review for this product so you want to ensure that you have enough information available to write about it. The Amazon product page itself will oftentimes have plenty of info so this is a good place to start. But you don’t want to just rehash the information on Amazon in your review so you will also want to look at the manufacturer’s website. If neither Amazon Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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nor the manufacturer has enough information then you will have difficulty getting a good product review together. 5. The first few product reviews are positive – Scroll down to the bottom of the
product page on Amazon to the review section. The first few reviews you see are the ones that are voted by other consumers as helpful reviews. These reviews need to be positive (ie 4 or 5 stars) because these will be the first reviews your reader sees when they hit that product page. If they aren’t absolutely positive you will have a harder time making a sale.
An example of how to search for products We don’t have any flash or fancy way of searching for products on Amazon. We simply start on the Amazon directory page here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/site-directory/ref=topnav_sad And then we select a category that interests us or one that will suit one of our niche product sites. For instance, if my site were about power tools I would select the ‘Power and Hand Tools’ option which brings up the following page:
From this page alone I can get some nice ideas just from browsing the left hand sidebar but in this case I am going to select Power Drills. The resulting page provides me with plenty of drills but I am going to narrow it down even further by clicking ‘Cordless Drills’ from the left hand menu – (see image below). Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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This now gives me 620 cordless drills to choose from (see image below). Now I just need to work out which ones match our criteria. The first one looks promising. It’s over $150, it has a 4.5 star rating and has 251 reviews. Excellent!...that product meets 3 of our criteria.
Now we have to check to see whether it meets the final two criteria ie. Is there enough information to write about the product and are the first few product reviews positive. To do that we just click on that product - this takes me to the full product page (see image below).
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This looks good. There is a lot of information about the product including features, specifications, technical details and more. So I will have plenty of information to write about. Now I just need to scroll down the page a little further to see if the first few product reviews on that page are positive. As you can see from the image below, it’s not looking good. The first review is glowing but the second two are not happy at all. This is going to kill conversion rates. So it’s back to the drawing board.
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I go back to my cordless drill page and look for another product. Further on down the page is a Panasonic drill. It is over $150, has 203 reviews and is rated 4.5. That’s a good start.
Let’s see if this one meets our last two criteria. When I click on the product I can see that like the previous drill there is a ton of information to work with so I shouldn’t have any problem with getting ideas for when I come to write up the review. Now I scroll down to check out those first few reviews and….YES, we have success! The first few reviews are absolutely glowing with all giving this product a 5 star rating. We now have our first product which we add to our list.
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Step 2: Time for some keyword research… Now that you have a list of at least five products you need to see whether any of them has the potential to generate enough traffic for you. There’s no point creating a beautiful review if no one is going to see it. So this is going to mean a bit of keyword research. Now keyword research isn’t one of our most favorite tasks so you won’t see us spending hours trawling through keyword tools to find a huge list of keywords...at least not at this point in the process. For now, we simply want to see whether there are enough people searching for each of our products. To do this we use the Google Keyword Tool. This free tool allows us to see the volume of searches for particular keyword queries. (Note that if you have your own keyword tool then by all means use that instead. We recommend Market Samurai. You can try it out for a couple of weeks for free.) So, head over to the Google Keyword Tool now to begin searching. Google Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal The first thing you need to do when you get there is to select the country that you are going to be promoting your products to. Remember that Amazon only ships to certain countries around the world. We live in Australia but we promote all of our products to the US market so we select ‘English, United States’ as shown in the image below. Just click the Advanced Options link (see image below) to change to your desired country.
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In the ‘Word or phrase’ field enter one of the products that you came up with in Step 1 and press the Search button. But don’t just enter the whole product name – start with two or three of the main keywords and try as many different variations as you can. So for instance if one of the products you found in Amazon is described as the ‘Blue Jane Convertible Day Bed Model XYJ123’ then you could enter the following variations:
Blue Jane Day Bed Blue Jane Bed Blue Jane Convertible Day Bed Blue Jane Convertible Bed XYJ123 Blue Jane XYJ123 Day Beds Day Bed Convertible Beds Convertible Day Beds Convertible day bed reviews Day bed reviews Etc…
Let’s take a real life example using a product from Amazon to explain this in more detail. Example: Panasonic EY6432GQKW 15.6-Volt NiMH 1/2-Inch Cordless Drill/Driver Kit I’ve chosen a Panasonic cordless drill as one of my potential products so my first step is to create a quick list of keyword variations right off the top of my head that I can use in the Google Keyword Tool. My list might look something like this:
Panasonic cordless drill Panasonic EY6432GQKW Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill Panasonic NiMH drill Panasonic NiMH cordless drill Cordless drills Cordless drill EY6432GQKW 15.6 volt cordless drills
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15.6 volt Panasonic cordless drills cordless drill reviews You can see that there are plenty of variations to go with and I have only just started. So when I type in the first keyword on my list and click SEARCH, I get the following results:
Now before we analyze the results, we just need to tidy up the list by selecting Exact from the Match Type options (see image below).
Selecting an Exact match will display search amounts that match the exact phrase you entered. If you keep it at Broad then Google will display search volumes on similar phrases and variations of those keywords. We really don’t want that at this point so make sure you select Exact. Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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Here are the results:
For our purposes we want to look at the results under the ‘Local Monthly Searches’ column. In this case, Google tells us that approximately 2,400 searches were performed in a month for the keyword phrase “Panasonic cordless drill”. If we work that out over 31 days in an average month then that is around 77 searches a day. What this means is that you have the potential to get 77 people clicking through to your site on a daily basis if you were ranked in the number one position on Google for that keyword phrase. However, bear in mind that being in the number 1 position in the Google search engine for a keyword doesn’t guarantee that everyone who searches for that keyword will click your website when they do a search. They could just as easily click the second search result or even the third. But this exercise at least gives us a rough idea of the amount of traffic we might get. To illustrate this further, here are some figures to get your head around. These figures1 are approximate but in general they will give you a feel for the type of traffic you are likely to get based on your position in the search engines:
#1 position receives 42.1 % of clicks #2 position receives 11.9 % of clicks #3 position receives 8.5 % of clicks #4 position receives 6.1 % of clicks #5 position receives 4.9 % of clicks #6 position receives 4.1 % of clicks #7 position receives 3.4 % of clicks #8 position receives 3.0 % of clicks #9 position receives 2.8 % of clicks #10 position receives 3.0 % of clicks
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Now let’s try another keyword: ‘Panasonic EY6432GQKW’
You can see that in this case that keyword has approximately 1000 local monthly searches or 32 people per day. You can also see as we are doing this that Google has been very helpful and provided us with similar keyword phrases. So we can add any relevant ones to our list as well. So after I have finished with each keyword my list might look something like this. (Note: Refer to Attachment 2 for this template) Keyword Panasonic cordless drill Panasonic cordless drills Panasonic EY6432GQKW Panasonic drill Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill Panasonic drills best cordless drill best cordless drills Panasonic power tools cordless power tools cordless drills cordless drill cordless drill review cordless drill reviews TOTAL
Local Monthly Searches 2400 1000 1000 2400 210 1000 2900 880 1600 33100 90500 74000 880 3600 215,470 (6950 daily searches)
This list might be longer if I spent more time but as I said, I try to avoid keyword research so this is enough for me. If you would prefer to continue on and get as many as possible…that’s okay too. It can help for some of the next steps and also when working on generating backlinks and traffic. But at this point, I personally don’t feel the need to go any further as I can see already from this little exercise that this product has a lot of interest with a lot of people searching for it on a daily basis.
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You can see from the list above that we have not only focused on specific product keywords like “Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill” but also generic keywords like “cordless drill review”. Your goal is to rank for both product specific and generic keywords so make sure you list both. Generic keyword phrases are going to be a lot harder to rank for but they are worth focusing on as they tend to generate more traffic. Product specific phrases are generally easier to rank for but can send you less traffic. They do however tend to convert better than generic keyword phrases. Your ultimate goal with this step is to get a total of at least 1000 daily searches using a variety of keyword phrases. You can see from the example we went through above that this product does that quite easily with 6950 daily searches and we didn’t even scratch the surface to find other relevant keywords. Now you need to do this exercise for all 5 of your products. Use the template at the end of this ebook (Attachment 2) to enter your data.
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Step 3: Check out the competition The next step involves checking out the competition. This is probably going to be the most time consuming part of the process but the more you do this, the quicker the process will become so stick at it. ‘Checking out the competition’ means determining whether each of the products you have chosen are ones that you can easily rank for in Google. Your goal is to get your product reviews on the first page of Google for all of the keywords in your list but if there are too many other strong websites trying to do the same thing then it will be a lot harder for you to compete. Now there are a few ways to do this and what you read here may be contrary to a lot of other methods being touted out there but this is how we do it and it’s what works for us. Firstly, we don’t use quotes around our keywords in Google search to determine the number of competing websites. In fact, we don’t really care about the NUMBER of competing websites. We are really only interested in those websites on the first page of Google for our keyword phrases. They are the websites we want to beat so we’re not concerned about the thousands or millions of other websites on page 2 and onwards. Let’s use our Panasonic drill keywords as an example of how we go about this. If I take one of the keywords on our list ‘Panasonic ey6432gqke’ and type that into a Google search I will end up with the following results:
The first three websites displayed are the sites you want to beat to get into one of those top three positions in Google for the keyword phrase “Panasonic ey6432gqkw”.
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So let’s take the first link on that page which is a link to Amazon and is coincidentally a link to the product we want to promote. Now you might think that Amazon would be tough to compete with but I can tell you now that we easily outrank Amazon for a lot of keywords. They are not that difficult to beat. I now click on that link…
…which takes me to the Amazon website where I copy the URL at the top of the screen.
Then I head over to www.yahoo.com and paste that URL into the search field and in front of that URL I type in the word ‘link’ with a colon after it so it looks like this: link:http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-EY6432GQKW-15-6-Volt-2-InchCordless/dp/B00009KDGX
Using the word ‘link:’ in the search field before the URL gives us the number of websites that are linking to that Amazon page. The reason we want to know the number of websites linking to this Amazon page is that Google ranks pages in their Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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search engine based on a number of criteria one of which is the number of links (also called backlinks, inlinks or backward links) that are pointing to that page. Google thinks that if a lot of quality websites are linking to a page of content, then that page of content must be important so they rank it higher in their search results. Once I hit the ‘Web Search’ button I get the following results:
As you can see the results are showing 700 links coming into that page. So there are 700 websites (or more specifically web pages) linking to that Amazon page. That on its own looks like quite a lot but what those results are showing are the links coming into that page from both external and internal websites. In other words, Amazon has linked to that page from other pages on its own site – these are called internal links. What we really want to see are the links coming in from external websites only as these types of links carry more weight than internal links. To see the external links only, we select ‘Except from this domain’ from the Show Inlinks drop down box (see image below).
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Now this is looking a bit better with only 9 links displaying. This means that only 9 other external web pages on the internet are linking to that Amazon page. That’s great news! The less links pointing to that page the better as it means we will have less work to do to match that or beat it. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves because those 9 links might look easy to beat but it’s all about the quality of the links rather than quantity. It’s not just a matter of getting 10 external web pages linking to our web page for us to beat them into that number 1 position…that would be nice, but unfortunately it’s not that easy. Those 9 websites linking to that Amazon page might be poor quality websites or they might be strong solid sites and the stronger those websites are then the stronger that Amazon page will be and the harder it will be to beat them. Now let’s just stop for a minute here as some of you may be feeling a bit confused at this point…that’s understandable. Google uses a number of criteria to rank pages in their search engine and unfortunately nobody really knows exactly what that is, which makes it confusing for everyone. The main thing to remember is that one of the most important criteria for ranking a page of content on a website is the backlinks coming into that page. Google assumes that if other websites are linking to that page then it must be important so it ranks that page higher than others in the search engine. So if you have really strong websites linking to your page then that is much better than the number of websites linking to that page. Quality is always better than quantity.
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So let’s get back to our example… We now need to see if those 9 websites are strong sites. How do we do that? Well there are two ways to do this – one is a long convoluted way which would take us forever but probably would be a lot more accurate. The other is a quick and easy way that isn’t as accurate but gives us a basic idea. Don’t ask me how to do it the ‘long convoluted’ way because I’ve never bothered with that method. I am not one for making things more difficult than they need to be so I always choose the easy way and it is the one I am going to share with you here. What I use is the Google pagerank toolbar as my gauge. If you don’t have this on your computer you can download it from here. Make sure you enable the pagerank so that it displays on the toolbar. To do this, just click the little spanner looking icon on the toolbar once you’ve downloaded it and select the Tools menu option….you should see a checkbox in there for Pagerank (see image below).
Google pagerank is not something you want to treat as gospel. We just use it simply to give us a basic idea of the strength of a website. If you have the Google pagerank loaded take a look at the pagerank of www.google.com for instance. If you hold your cursor over the little green bar you will get a little pop-up that shows the pagerank of that page. Google has a pagerank of 10 (see image below).
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That is the best pagerank you can possibly get and shows an extremely strong site. Most websites have pageranks that range from around zero to a six with six being very strong. So basically, the higher the pagerank the better. Now we need to take each of those 9 web pages and determine their pagerank. To do this we take the first URL from our list on Yahoo and type it into the Google search to bring up the page.
This one is interesting. The URL is http://amzn.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=561138 . It looks like another version of the Amazon website...perhaps a mirror site. It doesn’t matter really as all we are interested in is the pagerank which when I hold my cursor Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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over the pagerank bar I see that the current page is not ranked by Google. That’s good news – Google doesn’t even recognize it as having pagerank. Now let’s try the second url.
Again we are directed to the Amazon site and we have another pagerank that is not recognized by Google. In fact, as I move down my list 8 of the 9 sites are the Amazon site itself and none of those 8 pages have any pagerank. Excellent news! And the final website when I check it has a pagerank of zero. This is great! We could easily beat this Amazon page and get into that top position simply by getting some good quality backlinks to our own review page. We’ll go into more detail on how to do this further in this ebook. Once we have completed this exercise we need to move on to another keyword in our list and go the through the whole process again. Yes, it’s a lot of work but keep thinking of that recurring income. Do the work once and sit back and reap the rewards. For this exercise we are only went through the first search result but you would also need to go through the same steps for the other 2 websites in the top 3. And personally, if they look too competitive I would look at positions 4 to 10 as well as you can still get some nice traffic from being in any of those other spots. Fortunately, this example only had 9 web pages to check for pagerank. However, you may come across ones that have hundreds of websites that you need to check. So do you go through each of those hundreds of websites to check out their page rank? Seems like a lot of work doesn’t it?...I’m not going to lie to you, it is. But there are easier ways. You can use tools like Mass Pagerank for instance Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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http://www.masspagerank.com/. This is a free tool that allows you to check the pagerank of up to 50 website urls at a time. I am sure there are others that do a similar job, simply have a search around in Google. So What Does This All Mean? Just remember that your ultimate goal with this step is to see if you can get your own product review page into one of those top 3 spots in Google for a variety of different keywords. So let’s look at it this way: If those 9 sites we just found all had pageranks of 6 (indicating very strong sites) then I would know that it would take a heap of work to beat that Amazon page for that keyword. If they all had page ranks of 2 or 3 then I know it might take a little work but I know I could beat them. If they had a combination of high pageranks of 5 and 6 and low pageranks of 1 or 2 then it might be tough but doable. If none of those nine have any pagerank (which is the case with our example) then I would go ‘Woohoo, I can beat this easily!’
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Step 4: Write the review The review is what is going to make the sale for you. This is so important and yet most people neglect this bit when they promote Amazon products. Hey, we did the same thing in the past. When we were thinking of the money first and our readers second, our reviews were lacking detail and really didn't provide enough good quality information. Even today, a lot of our blogs are still filled with lack luster reviews that provide no value whatsoever. But we're slowly reworking them because we see the true potential in making them better for our readers. Just remember that people want to be told what to buy. Most don’t want to have to do the research themselves and just want someone to help them with making a decision. This is where you come in.
How do you write the review? Writing reviews can be a struggle for some but we’ve come up with a formula that makes the whole process super easy. With this formula you will have a beautiful review written in no time at all. And the more you do them, the easier they will get. And don’t spend days trying to get the review to be absolutely perfect ….ours never are to start with. The longer you try and tweak it the longer it will take to get that page up on the net and making money. We just make sure we have done the best we can and then post it to one of our blogs and start getting traffic to it. While we are working on getting traffic to the page we keep reworking the review until it is as perfect as it can be. So don’t sweat it to start with if you think it’s not quite as good as you hoped.
Our method for writing reviews We have been writing product reviews for a number of years now and in the early days they did make sales but as we said previously it really wasn’t all that spectacular. Then one day we decided to write up a review using a different format than we were used to. We had noticed that the typical landing page style format was quite successful with internet marketers for promoting ebooks and membership sites. If you’ve never seen a landing page before, they are quite long and use lots of subheadings and short paragraphs and dot-points. Of course, we knew we had to change
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it slightly to suit physical products and not hype it up as much but essentially we thought we would give this a shot and see how it went. Well the results were amazing and to this day we continue to use this approach. We have refined it somewhat to suit Amazon products but essentially the landing page style seems to work. So let’s begin….
A step-by-step to writing reviews We’re going to use an example here to illustrate just how we write up reviews. I am going to go with our Panasonic cordless drill. Bear in mind that at this point I know nothing about cordless drills and I mean nothing. It doesn’t matter because I will know enough about it by the time I finish writing the review. If you choose a product that you know something about then the process will obviously be a whole lot easier but what I want to do here is illustrate that you don’t need to know anything about the product to write a good review.
1: Gather Together Everything You Can About the Product The first step is finding out everything you can about the product. Now I can just hear you all groaning at this point thinking that this is already too much work. But just remember that you only need a handful of reviews to potentially make a good income online. You should only have to spend about a day writing a really good review and once it’s done it’s done. After that, you only really need to tweak it. So at most a day of work can result in thousands of dollars in recurring income. So the first thing I do is go to the product page on Amazon and take the first bit of content I see which in this case are the Technical Details:
I then take this info and convert it into content for the review. So I start with the first dot point from the Technical Details information above which is: ‘15.6 Ni-MH volt drill ½ inch cordless drill/driver kit with keyless chuck’. Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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Hmm, I have no idea what any of that means. I’ve used a drill a couple of times in the past but that’s about it, so I need to do a bit of research first. I go to my browser window and do a Google search and type in “what to look for in a cordless drill”. This gives me quite a few different sites for research. I also get a bit more specific and type in searches such as “what is an NiMH cordless drill” and “cordless drill volts”. And finally, I quickly scan the manufacturer’s site to see what they have to say. Now after reading a couple of websites and getting a bit of background info on what the volts and NiMH actually mean I realize that they are quite important when it comes to a cordless drill. As I read the information on those sites I’ve been taking notes and come up with the following: 15.6 volt NiMH cordless drill The number of volts is one of the most important components of a cordless drill. The greater the volts the faster the motor spins and therefore the more powerful the drill. The downside with having too many volts is that the battery will be heavier and therefore the drill will be heavier. Most consider the Ni-MH battery to be one of the best for cordless drill use. Compared to NiCad batteries, NiMH batteries last longer. NiMH batteries are also lighter than NiCad batteries. NiMH batteries have a quick recharging time. The Panasonic website mentions that for this cordless drill the battery charges in as little as 55 minutes and also features a 5 minute emergency charge. But I still don’t know what the next part means - ‘½-inch cordless drill/drive with keyless chuck’. So I do another couple of searches in Google with “what is a 1/2inch cordless drill” and “what is a keyless chuck” and come up with the following information: ½ inch cordless drill with keyless chuck The keyless chuck means you that can hand tighten the bits so you don’t need extra tools to do it.
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Most cordless drills have a 3/8 inch chuck whereas the Panasonic has a ½ inch chuck. This means that larger drill bits can be used giving you greater flexibility. Already you can see we are gathering quite a bit of information and we are still only on the first dot point of the Technical Details list from the Amazon website! Notice also, that each dot point doesn’t just talk about the features. Instead I have taken each feature and written the benefit of that feature. For instance, if I were only talking about the features I might say: “The Panasonic Cordless drill has an NiMH battery”. However, if I were to talk about the benefits I might say: “The Panasonic cordless drill has an NiMH battery which is lighter than NiCad batteries and has a quick recharging time.” Your readers will want to see how the products you promote are going to benefit them. They don’t just want to see a list of features. So, once I have created my first list of dot points I go back to the Amazon Technical Details information to the next bit of information which talks about dual speed ranges, 390 pounds of torque and so on and do exactly the same thing. This results in even more dot points to add to my already growing list. Once I have done that I move on to the next piece of content in Amazon which is the Product Description (see image below) and pretty much do the same thing.
I just take each sentence in the Product Description and see if I can create a list of dot points about it. Sometimes the information in the Product Description may be the same as the information in the Technical Details list. If that is the case, just keep reading the Product Description to see if you can find anything new that you haven’t already written up your own dot points for. Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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Then I move on to the next section and do exactly the same thing again. The next section for this product is the Product Details:
I can quickly see that there is probably nothing major that I can write about here although I can talk about the Average Customer Review which is rated at 4.5 out of 5 so I add that to my list of dot points as well. It might look something like this: Amazon Rating Consumers in Amazon have given this product a 4.5 star rating. Now I head on over to the manufacturer’s website and do exactly the same thing. The Panasonic site has a wealth of information I can use. I just work my way through each sentence of information to see if I can find anything new that I haven’t already written dot points for. By the time I am finished I will have a big list of dot points on all aspects of the drill
2. Converting Your Dot Points into a Product Review Although we have a lot of information at this point we don’t want a review that is totally made up of dot points so we want to form those dot points into sentences and paragraphs. So what I do is grab each of the dot points I created and form them into coherent sentences. Take a look below to see how I converted each dot point into sentences and paragraphs. I also create a heading for each list of dot points.
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Here is my list: 15.6 volt NiMH cordless drill The number of volts is one of the most important components of a cordless drill. The greater the volts the faster the motor spins and therefore the more powerful the drill. The downside with having too many volts is that the battery will be heavier and therefore the drill will be heavier. Most consider the Ni-MH battery to be one of the best for cordless drill use. Compared to NiCad batteries, NiMH batteries last longer. NiMH batteries are also lighter than NiCad batteries. NiMH batteries have a quick recharging time. The Panasonic website mentions that for this cordless drill the battery charges in as little as 55 minutes and also features a 5 minute emergency charge. And this is how it turned out: How Many Volts? One of the most important components of a cordless drill is the number of volts. The greater the volts the faster the motor spins and therefore the more powerful the drill. It does have a downside however in that generally the more volts you have the heavier the battery and therefore the heavier the drill will be. So you need to keep this in mind when choosing a drill. Think about whether you will be using it for long periods. If so, you don’t want anything too heavy – you will really be feeling it by the end of the day. This Panasonic Cordless drill is 15.6 volts making it quite powerful but still lightweight at 4.8lbs so that it won’t put undue pressure on your wrist. It’s all about the battery… This drill uses a Ni-MH battery which is considered one of the best for cordless drill use. Compared to NiCad batteries which are commonly used in cordless drills, NiMH batteries last longer and are lighter. They also have a quick recharging time so you can get back to your job much quicker. According to the Panasonic website, the battery charges in as little as “55 minutes…and features a 5 minute emergency charge that charges the pack to 15% of its capacity”. Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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If you compare the dot point list with the final result, you’ll notice that there really isn’t too much difference between them. I’ve added a few extra words here and there but basically it’s fairly similar. This is why you should always use this dot point method if you have trouble writing reviews. It makes the process a lot easier when you chunk it down like this to start. Let’s take the next lot of dot points and do the same thing. This is the list of dot points: ½ inch cordless drill with keyless chuck The keyless chuck means you that can hand tighten the bits so you don’t need extra tools to do it. Most cordless drills have a 3/8 inch chuck whereas the Panasonic has a ½ inch chuck. This means that larger drill bits can be used giving you greater flexibility. And this is what I came up with: Size Does Matter! The Panasonic EY6432 Cordless Drill has a ½ inch chuck. You will generally find that most cordless drills have a 3/8 inch chuck. What this means is that you can use drill bits that are up to ½ inch in diameter giving you greater flexibility. The keyless chuck means you can hand tighten the bits. You won’t need to be searching for tools to do the job. This makes it quick and easy to change the drill bits. Now we just need to continue on with this process until all of our dot points are converted into sentences and paragraphs.
3: The Introduction Take your time with writing the introduction. It needs to draw the person in so that they continue to read your entire review. You don’t want to make it boring and by boring I mean you don’t want to start if off like so many reviews I’ve seen with the words “Today I am going to review the Panasonic Cordless Drill…” or “The Panasonic Cordless Drill is a great product and I am going to show you why”.
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Those sorts of introductions are not terrible but they just don’t grab the attention of your reader. We find that the best way to write an introduction for a review is to make it personal, almost like you are talking to a friend. So for my Panasonic Review I might write something like the following: I have a friend who is in the market for a drill. Sounds simple right?…just send them down to the local hardware store and buy one. Well, it’s not that easy. There are so many to choose from and if you don’t know what you are doing you could end up buying something that really doesn’t do the job. So I decided to take it upon myself to do the research for him to find the best cordless drill on the market today and eventually came up with the Panasonic 15-6 Volt 1/2Inch Cordless Drill (EY6432GQKW). I’ll think you’ll agree that it sounds a bit better than “Today I am going to review the Panasonic Cordless Drill…” Now I’m not advocating that you make things up….apart from the fact that it’s really not good karma, you want to create a level of trust with your readers. That was just an example to show how you can weave a story into it to make it a little more interesting. If you can’t think of a story that relates to you then you can write something like the following: I love writing reviews and decided it was time to check out the range of cordless drills. I’ve used cordless drills in the past but have never really researched them. I just assumed that a drill was a drill and that I just needed to buy one that suited my budget. How wrong was I? There is more to cordless drills than meets the eye so I took some time to really get into the detail to find out the best cordless drill on the market today. My extensive research finally led me to the Panasonic 15-6 Volt 1/2-Inch Cordless Drill (EY6432GQKW). See Attachment 7 for more detailed information on weaving a story into your product reviews. One other important thing to remember when writing your introduction is to add a couple of relevant keywords if you can. This is where the keyword list you came up with in Step 2 comes in handy. Notice in my intro I have included the keywords
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“cordless drills”, “best cordless drill” and “Panasonic 15-6 Volt 1/2-Inch Cordless Drill (EY6432GQKW)”. Don’t overdo it with your keywords as your review will start to sound a little odd. You are better off writing naturally rather than trying to stuff keywords in where they don’t really fit.
4: The Conclusion The conclusion is one of the simplest parts of your review. Simple, because you won’t need to write a conclusion at all. All we want to do at this point is send the reader off to Amazon so create a couple of headings with the following titles: “Where Can I Buy the Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill?” “Where Can I Read More Reviews for the Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill?” Under each of the headings write a little info and create a link to Amazon. So for instance for my Panasonic Cordless Drill it might look like this: Where Can I Buy the Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill? You can buy this Panasonic Cordless Drill on Amazon. At the moment they include free shipping and from what I can tell when comparing prices with other online merchants, Amazon do currently have the best deal especially with the free shipping option. Click here to view on Amazon. Where Can I Read More Reviews for the Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill? The best place for reviews from people who actually use the product is Amazon. Click here to read more. Try not to use the same wording for every review you write. Try to change it around a little and use your own words rather than mine.
5: The Title The title is the last thing you need to do but it is extremely important. You need to ensure that you get some good keywords in your title plus make it interesting enough that people will click on your link in the search engines. This can sometimes be difficult especially if the title of the product is quite long. We are limited to 70
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characters and that includes spaces (as that is all that the Google search engine will display) so you want to ensure you make the most of it. If we go back to our cordless drill example the actual product name is: Panasonic EY6432GQKW 15.6-Volt NiMH 1/2-Inch Cordless Drill/Driver Kit. That on its own is 70 characters and really isn’t terribly interesting as a title plus we really want to get the word ‘review’ in the title. So what we need to do is go back to our keyword list and take a look at the most promising keywords and use those in the title. Keyword Panasonic cordless drill Panasonic cordless drills Panasonic EY6432GQKW Panasonic drill Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill Panasonic drills best cordless drill best cordless drills Panasonic power tools cordless power tools cordless drills cordless drill cordless drill review cordless drill reviews TOTAL
Local Monthly Searches 2400 1000 1000 2400 210 1000 2900 880 1600 33100 90500 74000 880 3600 215,470 (6950 daily searches)
What I normally do is take a look at the list and look for the most common keywords. In this case they are:
Panasonic Cordless Drill Drills Best EY6432GQKW Power Tools Review
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Now it would be nice to get all of those keywords into a readable title but that isn’t always possible but I would just do my best. Here are some potential titles using those keywords:
Best Panasonic Cordless Drill Review Best Cordless Drill: Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill Review Best Cordless Drill Review: Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill Cordless Drill Reviews: Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill
You could even include titles like:
My Favorite Cordless Drill: Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill My Review of the Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill My Personal Review of the Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill I Love the Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill. Read Why! I Love the Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill. Read My Review
People like to read real reviews by real people so when they see a title like this in the Google search they are more likely to click it. And although our keyword list didn’t include the words “15.6 volt” or “NiMH” which were in the original product title, you could still include these if you have room. Just make sure the title makes sense. For example: Best Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill Review Cordless Drill Reviews: Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill
6: Other things to add to your review We usually add each of the following to each review. Whats Included – we like to include a section in each review detailing what is actually included. You will pretty much always find this information on the Amazon site. So for our cordless drill it would look like this: What’s Included
Cordless drill 2 NiMH batteries 1 hour charger Hard plastic carrying case
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Consumer reviews – oftentimes we will include consumer reviews found on the internet. Generally these will come from Amazon itself. Sometimes we might put complete reviews in and other times we will just add short sentences like the following for instance: What Others Are Saying This drill has received rave reviews from most consumers on the net with an average of 4.5 out of 5 from most reviewers on Amazon and the Panasonic website itself. Here are some of the comments to date:
“Terrific combination of power, weight, size, & ergnomics...” “Awesome” “Best overall drill” “Great cordless drill/screwdriver for home projects” “You can’t go wrong with a Panasonic screw gun” “Panasonic cordlesses have become contagious in the building trades” “This drill gets 6 stars”
How Much? – We’re often asked if we should include the price in our reviews. We don’t normally do this as prices can fluctuate from day to day. If we are going to include the price it will be more of a generic phrase like: “You shouldn’t really pay any more than $200 for this Panasonic Cordless Drill” OR “These types of cordless drills generally range in price from $150 to $300.”
Do you need to own the product before writing a review? The best product reviews are those that are written by people who have actually used the product. However, you DON’T need to own it in order to write a good review. What we normally do is pick a product in Amazon, write a review and get traffic to that page. Then once we start seeing a large number of sales for that product we immediately go and purchase it ourselves. We are then able to add to the review with our own experiences, personal photos and even video. This improves the conversion rate even more so.
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What if you don’t want to write the review yourself? If after reading the information above you find that you just aren’t able to write the review yourself then you might like to outsource the job using Elance or other similar company. There are thousands of writers willing to do the work for you. If you prefer this option then go to Attachment 3 in this document as we have included an outsourcing document that you can submit to Elance.
How long should your product review be? We’ve found that the best converting reviews are around 1000 words or longer. Don’t stress if you can’t make 1000 words – just do your best. You can always add to it later as you find more info. You are better getting something up rather than nothing at all.
The good, the bad, the ugly – how do you write about the negatives Most products have their negatives and you shouldn’t ignore them but at the same time you shouldn’t go into too much detail either. The whole point of using our criteria in Step 1 is that you choose a product that doesn’t have too many negatives to begin with. If you do this then you really won’t have to focus too much on any negatives. The way to determine if a product has any issues or problems is to read through the customer reviews on Amazon but you have to do it the right way. Don’t write about every negative you see. If you have 50 customer reviews and only 1 person out of that 50 says something bad about that product then you don’t include that negative. That is just one persons opinion. If on the other hand, 30 of those fifty people talk about that negative then you know that it is an issue for a lot of people and should be discussed in your review. Even so you can sometimes turn negatives into positives. For instance, one of the complaints for the Panasonic drill was that it is difficult to center small bits in the chuck. Another reviewer answered it by saying it’s “a result of the chuck being open too far – simply close up the chuck more before inserting the bit”. Nice one, this reviewer basically turned a negative into a positive so if I was going to write that up on my review it might sound something like this:
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One complaint concerning this drill was that it is difficult to center small bits in the chuck. This can be rectified by simply closing up the chuck a little more before inserting the drill bit.
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Step 5: Upload to your website Now you are ready to add your review to your website. Just be aware that the actual structure of the website really doesn’t matter too much. So you can go with one of the following options when deciding on how you want to promote these Amazon products: 1. Create a website based on a particular niche…eg. Gardening website, baby blog, fishing blog, cordless drill review site, home improvement site 2. Create a website that covers a wide range of niches…eg. Gift site, shopping blog or portal. 3. Use a website or blog that you already have set up… you will probably want to choose products that in some way match your sites topic. 4. Create a Hubpage, Squidoo page etc…just ensure that they allow affiliate links. (Not recommended however as you have limited control and they change their rules constantly – go with your own site wherever possible). 5. Create a free blog using Blogger or Wordpress.com – (Again, not recommended as you have limited control. Only use if you can’t afford to create your own website or blog). Any of these will work…we have used all five methods in the past. With our method it is all about the pages not the actual structure of the website. Remember that Google ranks pages not websites. Each page on the internet is given its own ranking by Google so you don’t need to worry so much about the actual website itself. And there is no need to create a separate website for each individual product you find in Amazon. It can work but what can happen is a product no longer becomes available for some reason and you have a website that is basically useless. Our preference, out of the five options above, is to use a self-hosted Wordpress blog (ie. not the free Wordpress blogs). For us it is the simplest method and it has so many more options over the other methods. When adding the product reviews to our blogs we don’t really do anything particularly special. However, what we do differently is create Pages rather than Posts. Why?...mostly because it gives us the ability to remove the sidebar. The reason we do this is that it reduces the amount of distractions for the reader. We want them to solely focus on the review and not be distracted by the links in the
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sidebar. So removing the sidebar creates a full page review but still includes our normal header. However, not all Wordpress templates allow you to remove the sidebar on individual pages. We use the Flexsqueeze theme because we can easily remove the sidebar. I am sure there are other templates that do the same thing but you will need to search around a bit to find them. But honestly, don’t fret over it if you can’t. This is not going to make or break you so if you have to leave the sidebar in your theme then that’s okay. If that’s the case then you won’t need to create Pages – you can stick with creating Posts. NOTE: The only problem we find with adding a Page instead of a Post is that the Page is added to the navigation menu of your blog which you don’t really want especially if you are going to be adding lots of review pages. To prevent this from happening just download a free plugin called Exclude Pages. This plugin places a checkbox on the Add or Edit Page in Wordpress to enable you to exclude that particular page from showing up in the navigation menu. These are the steps we use when adding a product review to our site:
Steps in uploading a page to Wordpress 1. Click on Add Page from your Wordpress navigation menu. You can also click Add Post if you prefer to add the review as a post. 2. Insert the title of the review. This will be the title you created for your product review in Step 5. 3. Paste in the content of the review. Obviously you might want to do a little formatting to make sure the review looks okay. Bold any headings and subheadings and make them larger than the rest of the text so they stand out. Use dot points here and there and separate long strings of text into separate paragraphs to make it easier to read. 4. Add images to the review – You can use images from Amazon for your review. We normally take the main photo from the Amazon product page and save it to our computer. Then we upload it to our product review at the very top and right or left align it so the text sits aligned to the image. It just looks better that way. (See
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Attachment 6 on how to add Amazon images to your product review.) 5. Add Amazon affiliate links to the review - In a 1000 word review we might add between 4 and 6 links. I wouldn’t use any less than this and you can use more but just don’t overdo it. The links are text and image links only. We don’t use widgets. You can include links in the following places:
when the actual product name is used whenever the word ‘Amazon’ is mentioned in the conclusion when you are talking about where to buy the product behind each image – see Attachment 6 on instructions on how to do this
Take a look at the completed review at the end of this ebook. We have highlighted the links in blue where we would normally add our links. 6. Add tags – Use the keywords from your keyword list as the tags. 7. Select a Category – The category will depend on how you have structured your website. If my website were only about cordless drills then I would create a separate category titled ‘Panasonic Cordless Drill Reviews’. If instead my site were a generic shopping site that catered for all sorts of products then my category might be Cordless Drill Reviews. 8. Publish the review.
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Step 6: Get that traffic This is probably the most critical part of this process but unfortunately it is the one thing that most people give up on. Whenever I hear that people aren’t making it online the main reason is always because they aren’t getting enough traffic. If you can get this right then you will be streets ahead of the rest of those struggling to make it online. Once you have the traffic then it means that all you need to do is tweak your pages to improve conversions. Getting traffic can be a lot of work but it is well worth the effort. We concentrate mostly on organic traffic – in other words free traffic from search engines. If you have experience with Pay Per Click then by all means use that to get traffic to your product review pages. It doesn’t matter where the traffic comes from – the most important thing is that it is targeted traffic. You want people coming to your site who are interested in what you have to say and want to buy what you have to offer.
What are backlinks? Google ranks web pages in their search engine based on a number of factors – the only problem with that is that no one outside of Google really knows what those factors are exactly. However, most generally agree that what makes a site rank well is the number of backlinks pointing to that website. A backlink is a link on someone else’s website that points to your website. Google thinks that if a lot of important websites are linking to your website then your website must be important. And Google will rank you higher in their search engine as a result. And the higher you are ranked, the more traffic you are likely to get to your site. And the more traffic you get, the more money you are likely to make. However, it is not so much the number of backlinks but the quality of those backlinks. So the more important the site that links to you the more important your site is considered in the eyes of Google and the more likely you are to rank on the first page of Google. So getting 10 good quality backlinks is oftentimes better than getting hundreds of poor quality backlinks. And just to make it even more complicated, the keyword or keyword phrase used in that backlink is important too as it will determine where you are ranked in Google for that keyword. Let’s use an example to make it a little simpler. Say my site is about dog products and I want to rank in the #1 spot in Google for the search term ‘dog beds’. My goal will be Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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to get as many other websites to link to me using that keyword phrase in their link. So, on their website they might have a link that looks like this - Dog Beds – and that blue link links back to my website. So ultimately, your goal is to get other websites to link to you using the keywords you want to rank for in Google. (This is where your keyword list from Step 2 comes in handy). In the words of Google, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
So how do you get backlinks and traffic? We use a number of methods but these are our favorites: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Guest Blogging Blog Comments Adding content Contests Forum posting Press releases Social bookmarking/networking Best Blog
These methods are super solid high quality methods of getting backlinks and traffic. When you use these methods you will be focusing on quality rather than quantity. You don’t have to use every method listed above but you should choose at least three. And at least one of the three should be Guest Blogging and this is the one we are really going to be focusing on in this ebook. If you want detailed information on the other methods just refer to our 7 Super Powerful Methods for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog ebook which you can download for free if you don’t already have it.
Guest Blogging The goal with guest blogging is to take an article that you wrote and give it to another website owner to place on their blog. In that article you include two or three links back to your product reviews. It’s kind of a win-win for both parties – they get a free well written article and you get a few backlinks and possibly some traffic back to your site.
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Now I know we call this “guest blogging” but you don’t have to limit yourself to only submitting articles to other bloggers. Any type of website is fine – it doesn’t have to be a blog and in fact, you can often get better backlinks from regular websites which is why we often focus on them first before going to bloggers. Just keep in mind that this is a slow build-up of backlinks but honestly this one is well worth the effort. It will build strong backlinks that Google will love. But because this is a slow build-up, you need to work on other methods of traffic building at the same time so ensure you refer to our 7 Super Powerful Methods for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog ebook and apply some of the other methods.
Things to consider A prospective site owner will most likely take a look at your website before agreeing to take an article - after all they will be including a link on their website to your website. So consider the following before starting to send emails to prospective sites: 1. 2. 3.
4.
Does your website look professional? Is your website still under construction? - A site may disregard you if your site looks unfinished. Do you already have well written articles on your website? - A site will probably look at the articles on your website to gauge how well they are written. Is your site full of spammy ads and pop-ups?
Finding Sites to Submit Articles To When we first started searching for sites we found it quite difficult and had about a 1 in 30 response rate. When we started to use the following technique the response increased dramatically. So firstly, here is what we don't do: We don't look for merchant/shopping cart websites - these sites generally either don't take articles or they are big enough to have their own writers. We don't look for sites that are in direct competition to us - in other words I wouldn't go looking for any sites that already sell cordless drills. So here is what we do: We look for sites that already accept articles or have articles on their website (and we don't mean article directories).
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To find these sites we just type in variations of our keywords with the words 'submit article' or 'articles' in the Google search field. BUT we don't just use our keywords as this is very limiting. Instead we look at the big picture. For instance, cordless drills of this type are generally used by do-ityourselfers and people at home for fixing things around the house. So I would go searching for home related sites like home decor, home improvement or DIY type sites. If we take the cordless drills example we might type in the following search phrases in Google to find these types of websites:
Cordless drills submit article Home improvement articles Do it yourself submit article handyman articles home decor article home renovation submit articles home design submit article home decor articles home hints submit article
Another way to find sites is by typing in the keyword 'newsletters' as a variation (eg. ‘home improvement newsletters’. There are thousands of websites that send out newsletters and would love content to add. Ensure that they also place the newsletter on their website otherwise you won't get the value of the links. Once you have finished with using the keyword 'newsletters' then you can start using the keyword 'blogs' or 'blog' or ‘guest blogger’. So you would start searching for 'home renovation blog submit articles' or 'home hints blog articles' and so on. Or alternatively you could start searching using the Google blog search which will only search for blogs: http://blogsearch.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wb You can see how many variations of the keywords you can use to find sites willing to accept articles. With time it gets easier and easier and you will find that your response rate gets better and better.
The Criteria for Selecting Sites We don’t choose a site simply because they accept articles. We also ensure that they are strong in the eyes of Google or are sites that are getting lots of traffic. We determine the strength of a site by using the Google Pagerank Tool. If the site has a pagerank of at least 3 on their home page then we will add that site to our list. Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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If the site doesn’t have a pagerank of 3 or more but still gets good traffic then we will add them to our list. We can tell if a blog gets a lot of traffic by looking at how many comments are left. If they regularly get 20 or more comments left on their blog then they have an active blog with lots of regular visitors stopping by. These are good blogs to add articles to as your article will get lots of views and hopefully a lot of people clicking through to your site.
Sending the email Once we have a list of prospective sites we then email them. We have a standard email that we use and we are constantly adjusting it. (You can see a couple of examples in Attachment 5 at the end of this ebook.) Basically we just start off by asking if they are currently accepting articles, then tell them that we are willing to provide them with a couple of unique well written articles. We also add that in return we would like two to three links back to our website within each article. We often give them some topic ideas but also let them know that they can choose a topic if they like.
Once we have a positive response When we get an email back to say they want an article we immediately respond to them to let them know that we will get to work on the article. We then go through our bank of articles if we have already had some articles written up and rework one so that it suits the site. If none are suitable we will generally write our own. We then add our links and send it back to the website. Usually we send two articles to each website but sometimes three if they are a particularly strong website.
Article Topics Because you are promoting Amazon products the guest articles you write need to relate in some way to your product. In this case our product is a cordless drill so we need to write up guest posts that relate to that topic. The best types of posts are: How-to’s Top 7 Tips (or whatever number you like) Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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What to Look for… What is… So for our cordless drill review our article topics might include:
How to choose a cordless drill What to look for when buying a cordless drill How to clean your cordless drill 7 Tips for buying a cordless drill How to maintain your cordless drill What is the best drill for home handymen?
Helpful articles are what any website owner craves. They want this type of content on their blog or website so if you can write this type of informative article they will snap it up.
How to Write Guest Articles You write your guest articles exactly the same way you write any other piece of content on your blog. The only difference is that you need to include keywords in the guest article that you want to rank for. So say for instance that I want to rank for the keyword “Panasonic EY6432GQKW”. In my article I would need to include this keyword at least once. So it might read like this: Top 7 Tips for Choosing a Cordless Drill When choosing a cordless drill one thing you need to consider is the number of volts. The greater the volts the more powerful the drill. The downside to this however is that the greater the volts the heavier the battery and therefore the heavier the drill. One of the best drills we’ve found that provides a good balance of weight to power ratio is the Panasonic EY6432GQKW. This drill…..etc, etc.” Wherever possible, try to include at least three keywords in the article.
Should You Write the Articles Yourself? You can write the articles yourself or have them professionally written by a writer in Elance. It will just depend on how good that writer is. Some are better than others. We used to write all our guest articles ourselves until we finally found a good writer who did the job better than us.
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Just be aware that the site owner will probably look at your site first and check out the quality of your articles. They will probably base their decision on whether to take your article by looking at the quality of your articles on your blog. If you end up giving them an article that doesn’t match the quality of those on your blog then they will most likely reject the article. The article you send to them has to be good. It has to be as good as anything you put on your own site – in fact, it often has to be better. So my advice is that unless you have a really good writer, you should write your own guest articles wherever possible. However, if you want to give the Elance writers a go then you can use the following example as a guide for writing up your job proposal. This is how we write them up: 10 Articles Required at 500+ Words on Cordless Drills We would like 10 articles written at 500+ words on cordless drills. The topics are as follows:
How to choose a cordless drill What to look for when buying a cordless drill How to clean your cordless drill 7 Tips for buying a cordless drill Etc, etc.
That's it really. We don't tell them to use keywords in specific places or provide any detail on what we want in each article. We leave it to them. We also add the basic info such as - it should be unique content, must be informative and written naturally. We will usually accept at least two different writers for each project. That way we get two unique articles on the same topic. The articles will cost anywhere between $6 and $15 each. When choosing a writer in Elance go for one that has had extensive feedback and has a number of repeat buyers. Don’t just choose the cheapest – you get what you pay for when it comes to Elance writers.
Adding Links to Your Articles The final step you need to take before you send your article to the blog or website owner is to add a few links to your article.
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Now assuming you are using Microsoft Word you simply highlight the keyword/s you want to rank for, then right click your mouse and click the Hyperlink option. Then paste in the url of your product review page. Hopefully you have added at least three keywords in your article. These are the keywords you want to add a link to. So the paragraph we wrote previously in this section might look like this with our link included: Top 7 Tips for Choosing a Cordless Drill When choosing a cordless drill one thing you need to consider are the number of volts. The greater the volts the more powerful the drill. The downside to this however is that the greater the volts the heavier the battery and therefore the heavier the drill. One of the best drills we’ve found that provides a good balance of weight to power ratio is the Panasonic EY6432GQKW. This drill…..etc, etc.” You then add another one or two links in the article and that’s it! You can now send your article off. Just remember, this guest blogging process is a numbers game. You might email 100 websites and only get 10 responses or you might get more. Just keep at it…it will be worth it!
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Where to from here… The goal with this entire process is to focus on quality not quantity. Remember that you don’t need hundreds of product reviews in order to make a decent income online. Stick with 5 product reviews at a time and stay focused on those 5 reviews until they start making sales. You almost have to treat those product reviews like treasured objects…nurture them and keep making those pages better and better. But most importantly keep working on getting traffic to each of those pages. This will be critical to your success. If you come back to us in a couple of month’s time complaining that this isn’t working we will know that it is because you don’t have enough traffic. We want you to be asking yourself every day – “How can I get more traffic to my product review pages?” We want you to be working on getting traffic to those product review pages every single day. We want you to be the ultimate expert on generating traffic. We DON’T want you frantically building more product review pages – instead we want you frantically working on building traffic. Traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic…… Can we say it enough? Without it you’re just not going to succeed so make traffic generating your number one task. So to summarize this is what you should be working on once your product reviews are up: 1. Spend 80% of your time on generating traffic. 2. Continue working on tweaking those pages so that they are the best they can be. 3. Start writing short articles of around 300 to 500 words to add to your website. The point of these short articles is that they help to boost your website and can bring traffic. These articles are written in the same vein as the articles you submit to other websites when you are guest blogging. They are informational type articles like howto’s and so on. Within each of these articles you add links back to your product review pages. This is what is known as internal linking where you are linking to pages within your own site. This helps to boost those product reviews. They aren’t as strong as external links of Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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course but even so they can do a lot to improving the rank of those product reviews. The search engines think that if you consistently keep linking to certain pages on your site then it must be important. So for instance, if I had 5 product reviews on the following products….
Panasonic Cordless Drill Makita Cordless Drill Ingersoll Quiet Sander Stanley Hand Saw Smithson Tool Shed
…I might write 5 articles on the following topics:
Top 7 Tips for Choosing a Cordless Drill Are Makita cordless drills the best on the market? How to Choose a Sander How to Sharpen Your Hand Saw Why Some Garden Sheds are Better Than Others
Each of those articles would go up on my blog as a post and within each of those articles I would link back to my product review pages. And for some of those articles like the Top 7 Tips, I could actually link back to two product reviews ie. The Panasonic cordless drill review and the Makita drill review. Ideally you would want each product review to have around 5 to 10 articles linking to it. Can you add affiliate links to those articles? Yes definitely. We will often add Adsense ads to generate income from those pages. You can also add Amazon links as well or any other type of affiliate link for that matter. It doesn’t really matter. The ultimate goal however is for these articles to help to boost your product review pages.
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And finally…. In order for this entire process to be a success, you need to focus on quality rather than quantity in everything you do. We found that once we started doing this we had greater conversions and greater success overall. We also found that we had more time in the day and we felt more relaxed as we didn’t have to frantically add content day after day in order to maintain the momentum. Stay focused and provide quality to your readers and you can’t help but succeed.
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Attachment 1: Amazon Product Idea Checklist Product Name
Amazon Product Page URL
Price (should be over $150)
No. of reviews (should be over 20)
Star Rating (should be at least 4)
Are the first few reviews positive?
Is there enough information to write about the product?
1 2 3 4 5
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Attachment 2: Keyword List Amazon Product: ___________________________________________ Keyword
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Local Monthly Searches
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Attachment 3: Example Format to Submit to Elance 5 Product Reviews – 1000+ Words Each on Cordless Drills I require 5 product reviews for my website. These product reviews are for cordless drill products. Requirements 1. I would like each review written using multiple sub-headings and dot points. 2. These reviews must be a minimum of 1000 words however you can write as much as you like. 3. The reviews must be unique. Please don’t copy content from other websites. We will be checking each article for uniqueness. 4. Please don’t just list the features of the product. Instead for each feature write at least a paragraph describing the benefits of that feature. 5. I would like each review written in a light-hearted way using your own unique personality. The review should be engaging and easy to read. 6. Please provide examples of reviews you have written recently. 7. Please don’t say that you own the product in the review unless of course you actually do. Please see attached an example of the style of review I am looking for. (Include the review in Attachment 4 to this proposal when submitting to Elance). Here is the list of 5 products to review: 1. Product Name: Product URL: (Insert Amazon product link) 2. Product Name: Product URL: (Insert Amazon product link) 3. Product Name Product URL: (insert Amazon product link) 4. Product Name: Product URL: (Insert Amazon product link) 5. Product Name: Product URL: (Insert Amazon Product link)
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Attachment 4: Product Review Example This is an example of a completed product review. However, although we would post this to our blog as is, we wouldn’t stop there. Once the post is up we would continue tweaking it and adding new information as we find it. So we might find information relating to the torque and perhaps add a few more benefits to buying the drill. We might take a look at the product manual which we can download on Amazon or the manufacturer’s website to see if there is anything in it that we haven’t already discussed. In other words, this review is an ongoing project until we get it just right.
My Review of the Panasonic EY6432GQKW Cordless Drill I love writing reviews and decided it was time to check out the range of cordless drills. I’ve used cordless drills in the past but have never really researched them. I just assumed that a drill was a drill and that I just needed to buy one that suited my budget. How wrong was I? There is more to cordless drills than meets the eye so I took some time to really get into the detail and find the best cordless drill on the market today for the home handyman. My extensive research finally led me to the Panasonic 15-6 Volt ½Inch Cordless Drill (EY6432GQKW). What to Look for When Buying a Drill It didn’t take my long to realize that there are a few important things to keep in mind when buying a drill. These are:
The number of volts The battery The weight of the drill The speed The brake
If you just buy the first drill you see based on price alone then you are destined for trouble particularly if you are going to be using the drill on a regular basis. So stick Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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with me here as I will be explaining each of these in relation to the Panasonic EY6432GQW cordless drill. How Many Volts? One of the most important components of a cordless drill is the number of volts. The greater the volts the faster the motor spins and therefore the more powerful the drill. It does have a downside however in that generally the more volts you have the heavier the battery and therefore the heavier the drill will be. So you need to keep this in mind when choosing a drill. Think about whether you will be using it for long periods. If so, you don’t want anything too heavy – you will really be feeling it by the end of the day. This Panasonic Cordless drill is 15.6 volts making it quite powerful but still lightweight at 4.8lbs so that it won’t put undue pressure on your wrist. It’s all about the battery… This drill uses a Ni-MH battery which is considered one of the best for cordless drill use. Compared to NiCad batteries which are commonly used in cordless drills, NiMH batteries last longer and are lighter. They also have a quick recharging time so you can get back to your job much quicker. According to the Panasonic website, the battery charges in as little as “55 minutes…and features a 5 minute emergency charge that charges the pack to 15% of its capacity”. Size Does Matter! The Panasonic EY6432 Cordless Drill has a ½ inch chuck. You will generally find that most cordless drills have a 3/8 inch chuck. What this means is that you can use drill bits that are up to ½ inch in diameter giving you greater flexibility. The keyless chuck means you can hand tighten the bits. You won’t need to be searching for tools to do the job. This makes it quick and easy to change the drill bits. Dual Speed Ranges Have you ever tried to drive a screw at high speed? What can often happen is that the screw jumps out of the slot. Not only is it annoying but it can be dangerous. The beauty of this Panasonic cordless drill is that it has dual speed ranges of 0-400/01300rpm. What this means is that you have the option of adjusting the speed of the
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drill. You can slow it down resulting in more control - so you have less chance of screws flying across the room. Electronic Brake One thing you won’t find on cheaper drills is a brake. The Panasonic has an electric brake which means that when you release the trigger to stop drilling, the drill stops spinning immediately. This is a great safety feature not only for you but for any kids or pets you have in the house who might inadvertently touch the drill when you have just finished using it. How Much Should You Expect to Pay? The Panasonic EY6432GQKW cordless drill is available on the Panasonic website for $257 but you really shouldn’t be paying any more than $220 for this drill. The cheapest we have seen it is on Amazon who consistently sell this drill for under $200. What’s Included
Cordless drill 2 NiMH batteries 1 hour charger Hard plastic carrying case
Does it include a Warranty? Yes, the Panasonic EY6432GQKW includes a 1 year warranty What Others Are Saying This drill has received rave reviews from most consumers on the net with an average of 4.5 out of 5 from most reviewers on Amazon and the Panasonic website itself. Here are some of the comments to date:
“Terrific combination of power, weight, size, & ergnomics...” “Awesome” “Best overall drill” “Great cordless drill/screwdriver for home projects” “You can’t go wrong with a Panasonic screw gun” “Panasonic cordlesses have become contagious in the building trades” “This drill gets 6 stars”
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Any complaints? I found very few complaints for this drill on consumer sites around the internet. One consumer did express concern that it is difficult to center small bits in the chuck. This can be rectified by simply closing up the chuck a little more before inserting the drill bit. Where Can You Buy the Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill? You can buy this Panasonic Cordless Drill from Amazon. At the moment they include free shipping and from what I can tell when comparing prices with other online merchants, Amazon do currently have the best deal especially with the free shipping option. Click here to view on Amazon. Where Can You Read More Reviews for the Panasonic 15.6 Volt NiMH Cordless Drill? The best place for reviews from people who actually use the product is Amazon. Click here to read more.
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Attachment 5: Guest Blogging Example Emails Here are a couple of sample emails that you can send to prospective sites that might take an article. Change them to suit your needs. These are just basic ideas that you can work with. Example Email 1 Hi I just came across your site and was wondering whether you would be interested in a free article. I have a website on a similar subject (include website url) and would be able to write a unique, informative article that would suit your audience. The type of article I would have in mind would relate to tips and hints for choosing a cordless drill and would be a minimum of 500 words. All I ask in return is to include 2 or 3 links in the article back to my website. If you are interested please let me know and I will get to work writing up this article for you. Example Email 2 Hi Love your site, lots of interesting stories and information about home improvement. This got me to thinking how we could work together so that we both could benefit. So I am just wondering if you would accept a couple of articles to place on your site, absolutely free of course. These articles, if accepted by you, would be exclusive to your website. I am well aware of how Google dislikes duplicate content. In return for a couple of well written articles, I would ask that I have 2-3 direct links within the article back to my website. The articles could be typically 'how-to' type articles, hints and tips or informative articles on a suitable topic related to your website. Or if you would prefer you can select the topics and I will tailor the article around the subject of your choosing. If you are interested please let me know and we will go to work writing up these articles for you, right away.
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Attachment 6: How to Add an Amazon Image to Your Product Review Step 1: Upload an Image First you need to find an image of the product. To do this, go to the product page on Amazon. At the top left hand corner of every product page is an image of the actual product. You just need to save that image to your computer – so right click on the image and select Save As. It doesn’t matter where you save it as long as you remember where. Now you just want to upload the image to your product review page. You should be on your ‘Add New Post’ page in Wordpress at this point so simply click your mouse just before the first word in your review (as that is where we want the image to be placed) and then click the ‘Add an Image’ icon. (See the image below.)
From the pop-up that appears click on ‘Select Files’ and browse your computer to find the image that you saved. Once you found it, click on that file and click ‘Open’. The image will now be displayed on the ‘Add an Image’ pop up window. Now just add some text in the ‘Alternate Text’ field – this will be a keyword phrase from your keyword list. Then select either Left or Right depending on whether your want the image displayed to the left or right of your text – we prefer the left. You can also change the size of the image by selecting Medium, Large or Full Size. And finally click the ‘Insert into Post’ button. (See image below). Copyright 2010: Amazonian Profit Plan
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You should now have an image of the product displaying on your blog post. At this point however it still doesn’t have a link to Amazon. In other words, if a reader were to click the image it would take them nowhere. Step 2: Grab the Code To get the image to link through to Amazon you need to add a bit of code behind it. To do this you need to head back to Amazon to the product page you were on and click the LINK TO THIS PAGE option on the top menu bar (see image below). You need to be logged into your Amazon affiliate account in order to see this.
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On the pop-up that appears select the Image Only option (see image below). This will display some code in the html box below it. Now you need to pick up some of the code from that html box but we don’t want the entire piece of code. We actually just want everything between the first and second lot of quotes (see underlined in RED in the image below). Just copy that code as we will need it for the next step. Make sure you don’t include the quotation marks themselves. We just want everything from http to the next lot of quotation marks.
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Step 3: Add the Code Now head back to your blog post. Click on the product image in your blog post to highlight it and then click the INSERT/EDIT LINK menu option on the blog post menu bar (see image below).
You should get a little pop-up that lets you add a link. Just paste the code that you grabbed from Amazon into the LINK URL field. Click UPDATE and you are done.
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Attachment 7: How to Weave a Story into Your Product Reviews The information below has been taken directly from our blog at Affiliate Blog Online and adapted for this ebook. This article explains in more detail how to include a story in your product reviews. The reason we add a story is that it makes the story more interesting and entices the reader to continue reading. Let's put it this way, which version do you find more interesting? This one: "Today I am going to review the iPod Touch. This has just been released by Apple and is the equivalent of the iPhone without the phone. This makes it perfect for those who don't need another phone or want to sign up to a phone plan. The features of this great little device are extensive and I will be going through each of them today." Or this one: ” When Wanda and I were in the US attending a conference, we happened upon the Apple Store in New York. If you’ve ever been there you’ll know what an experience that is, but we happened to be there the day after the iPhone was released to the world, actually we were on a hop on hop off tourist bus and when the guide pointed out the iPod store – we hopped off. Well, what can I say, we were hooked, but unfortunately we couldn't buy one because they wouldn't have worked back home in Australia. It was only later when the iPod Touch was released that we ended up buying one of those instead and we are so glad we did.” The first one is okay but I much prefer the second one. I know I would keep reading to see what happens next. Weaving a story into a product review lightens up the post and makes it more readable. It also lets the reader know that you are a real person and most people love reviews written by real people. But what do you do if you don't have a story? First of all, you don't need to have a story for every single product review you write. We have hundreds of reviews online and believe me; they don't all have a story. But
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when we do have the opportunity we use a story. And that means when we have a real life story to use. So we don't recommend you making one up. You want your readers to trust you. If they see a whole lot of different stories on different reviews on your website they are going to start to get a little suspicious and the trust factor will disappear in a flash. The story about me and Wanda in New York was 100% accurate. We did get off the bus to check out the Apple store as we really wanted to see the iPhone and we did end up buying an iPod Touch when they were eventually released in Australia. But let's assume that didn't happen and I don't own an iPod Touch. What I would do is attempt to create a story out of my personal feelings for the product or those of family and friends. For instance:
my opinion of the iPod Touch before I purchased it was that it looked like a lot of fun and I really had to have one a work mate at my last full time job loves gadgets and discussed this product with me a few times I know my niece would love one of these if she saw it in action
So that's just three simple (truthful) statements that relate to me and family and friends. Now I take those statements and see if I can create a story from one or all of them. Just remember that a story doesn't mean making something up - it simply means making the product review more personal. So my opening paragraph for my review might sound like this: "My niece’s birthday is coming up and I have been thinking about what to get her. I am a real fan of gadgets and I know she is too so I thought that perhaps an iPod Touch might be a good choice. I personally want one of these myself so may just end up buying two but either way I think it might be a great gift. So because I never buy anything without doing the research, I've spent a considerable amount of time checking them out to see if they are actually worth the money. Here's what I found out..." You can see how I took something as simple as one statement about a family member and created a story from it. It's only a couple of sentences of personal stuff but it gets the reader in and interested in what I have to day.
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The Amazonian Profit Plan
Here's another version: "In my last job, I had a work mate who loved gadgets. Since I am the gadget queen we would speak extensively about the latest devices and gizmos. One gadget that came up often in our discussions was the iPod Touch. This is one amazing little device. Some call it the iPhone without a phone and that is essentially what it is. It can pretty much do everything the iPhone can do except make a phone call or take photos. This means the iPod Touch is cheaper and you don't have to sign up to any lengthy phone plans. I like that!" For the rest of your review you can discuss the product and its benefits as you would normally do. And if you like, you can also throw in a few personal touches as you go. For instance:
"I really like this feature" "I really like how the iPod Touch has a wifi function so you can connect to the internet and email when you are out and about." "This isn't a feature I would use but I know others would find it super convenient" "When my friend spoke about this, he mentioned that..."
Making your reviews more personal really does improve conversion rates so take a little extra time if you can to come up with something to suit your product review.
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The Amazonian Profit Plan References 1
http://www.webuildpages.com/jim/click-rate-for-top-10-search-results/
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