When you first start a web based business you need every bit of help you can get to make yourself known to your potential clients. With a couple of hours work and research you can get the most famous internet business working for you. I developed this idea after reading Jay Levison and Seth Godin's book 'Guerrilla marketing fort eh home based business.
I doesn't matter if you are selling ships or shoes or sealing wax, or even cabbages or kings, there will be books about your product. No matter what your niche Amazon will be selling books about it.
The obvious use of Amazon.com is to join the associate program and sell books and other goods for a commission. But a less known feature of Amazon is that you can also use it to build targeted traffic.
Here's how I did it. My niche is varietal wines, so I found the best selling half-dozen books about wine at Amazon. I then added a few of my favourites to get about ten books.
Then I used these books to build a 'So you'd like to...' guide in which I put some references to my Vinodiversity site.
So you'd like to guides are better than listmania lists because you get more opportunity to put in some copy. Try to write some copy rather than just listing the books or other products. This will establish you as some sort of expert in your niche.
Your guide will be displayed whenever anyone searches for any of the products you include. It is important to use a few of the most popular books to get your guide in front of a larger audience.
In may case the most popular book was 'Wine for Dummies' so I gave my piece the title 'So you'd like to graduate from the wine dummy class' a theme related title to tease viewers to have a look.
To see what I have done go to amazon.com and do a search for 'wine for dummies'. My guide will be displayed at the left of screen.
I must say I have not had huge amounts of traffic from this source, but I have had a few useful contacts. I have also got the name of my business spread around the web more. And when you are just starting out every little bit helps.
About the author:
Darby Higgs is the founder and manager of Vinodiversity, a web based information site about wines made from alternative grape varieties in Australia. See
http://www.vinodiversity.com
