One of These Can Increase Amazon Sales - the Other Could Kill Your Site

Published: Thu, 06/20/13

My Take on Two Heavily Promoted Products

I can't be the only who has been receiving a lot of promotional emails this week. Two products with great titles came out today and they're being mentioned all over the place.

One I ended up buying and the other I don't like at all. Here's my take on each plus some tips on how to increase your Amazon sales by using one of them.

Amazon Treasure Hunter 2.0

Gaz Cooper launched Amazon Treasure Hunter 2.0. Gaz is a well known Amazon super affiliate for whom I have a lot of respect. He puts a lot of work into his products and I believe he cares about other peoples' success. That's important to me.

Before I wrote about the product, though, I wanted to get my hands on it. I purchased the product (not a review copy) and have been playing around with it for hours. I've got some tips for you below on how to get the most out of it and why I think you should give it a try.

Whether you've bought it already or not, you're going to want to read this - ESPECIALLY those of you who were heavy Squid Pro Quo users and are finding Squidoo a little too difficult to work with these days.

First, Amazon Treasure Hunter 2.0 is a desktop application with built in Amazon browser. You navigate to a selection of items on Amazon, download the product titles and use the application to find out whether or not there's a YouTube video ranking on the first page of Google for those product titles. If there isn't, then you make a video of your own and try to grab the open spot for a video on that first page of Google.

The software is very slick, easy to install, and is a time saver for anyone who is going to use video to promote their sites or Amazon content.

THREE TIPS:

Some product names are VERY long. The application has a shortener button that will cut the product name down but it just strips off characters from the end of the product name. Sometimes that cuts out important words. I suggest manually shortening your titles.

The basic application doesn't tell you the Google monthly search volume for the product names. Export your final list of products that don't have videos on the first page of Google. Open the text file with a spreadsheet software (it's comma delimited). Take the entire list of keywords and paste them into the Google Keyword Tool. Sort the results based on monthly search volume from high to low and prioritize your efforts on those that have search volume. This will maximize the returns you get for your time.

The keyword strategy in Squid Pro Quo is still extremely effective at finding low competition keywords for which you can rank more easily. You can ADD keywords to Amazon Treasure Hunter and have it check any phrases you want to see if there's a video on the first page of Google. I took my SPQ keywords and ran it through and almost NONE of them had videos ranking!

This week, I started my own site where I could build Squid Pro Quo pages all I want. I made my first two sales yesterday (they showed in today's Amazon report).

I'm mixing in posts that don't have links to help balance out the content. (OBI members can read about how I did this here:
http://onlinebusinessinsiders.com/forum/amazon-affiliate-marketing-with-erica-stone/1802-this-is-where-i-m-moving-my-locked-lenses)

So, if you're looking to replace Squidoo but concerned you won't have the same link juice from their platform, do this:

Build your own site
Use SPQ to create the posts of your site but keep the affiliate links on each SPQ post to about 20 per page
Write posts without affiliate links to balance out the content
Use a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, and Google Plus Page to share links to your posts
Run each post title that is a SPQ keyword through Amazon Treasure Hunter 2.0 and find those that don't have a video, make a video, submit to YouTube and link it to the related post on your site
Create Pinterest boards for your best converting keywords
Submit your video to other video sites

You'll have nofollow links on popular, heavily trafficked, trusted domains that can help your content get indexed and receive traffic and no one can change the rules about your content but YOU.

You might also end up with a post, a video or two, and a Pinterest board ALL on the first page of Google for multiple keywords. Plenty of time to get this done before Christmas shopping rolls around again!

I believe Gaz is about to start doing dimesale pricing on his product very shortly so if you're at all interested go here to read more:

AMAZON TREASURE HUNTER 2.0

One more tip: Have SquidCrafter? Take the Amazon URL you analyzed in Amazon Treasure Hunter 2.0 and paste it into SquidCrafter. You'll have the same list of products you analyzed available to you to create a SPQ style post. Create your post, do a few videos based on the Amazon Treasure Hunter 2.0 results and you could have all of the pieces for creating a post and implementing video promotion done pretty quickly.

SEO Omega

The product claims to get high search engine rankings in a very short period of time. There are at least 3 examples that I could explore to get some idea about the effectiveness of the strategy.

First example - ranking #1 for "seo outsourcing". Checking in Google, yes, they are ranking #1. However, a look at the backlinks shows a number of purchased links on high page rank pages. Just look at the page rank and sidebars of these sites:

PR 6 http://www.dynamist.com/blog
PR 6 http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/
PR 5 http://www.smartertimes.com/

All links are dofollow. To claim you're ranking well for a powerful keyword when you've obviously purchased the links to do so is misleading.

Second example - ranking #1 for "checkweigher system". There are a couple of issues with this one. First, the screenshot shows the position for "checkweigher system" but the yellow highlighted text next to the screenshot says they ranked their client #1 for the phrase "weighchecker". I checked Google and the site is ranking towards the bottom of the second page for "weighchecker", not on the first page. Second, the Google Keyword Tool shows that the phrase for which they are #1 - "checkweigher system" gets less than 10 exact global searches a month. That's not really an astounding SEO claim.

Third example - ranking #1 for "kamasutra pdf". They do, in fact, rank #1 for that phrase (and that assumes that really is a site they worked on) but that's not a buying keyword, in my opinion, and the SEO competition for that keyword is really low. Checking the backlinks shows, again, that they're using a high page rank blog network or purchased links to get the rankings. See the links to the site (and to the checkweigh site, too) on these pages:

http://www.aystsg.com/
http://www.wctb08.com/
http://www.huayuqh.com/

Buying dofollow links is bad business. Maybe that's not the strategy they're selling, however, it is the strategy they're using to give you proof that they can rank easily and that's why I'm not going anywhere near it.