52. Amazon Link Anatomy And Why We Need to Understand This

Welcome to the Book Marketing Show Podcast, where each week we'll show you exactly how to sell more books and have fun doing it. And now, your host, Dave Cheson.

Hey guys, welcome to the latest episode of the Book Marketing Show podcast. I'm Dave Chesson from KindlePrinter.com coming to you and talking to you about a subject that shocked the author world when it first came out. As you guys know from previous episodes, one of the best ways to get your book to show up higher in Amazon rankings for keywords is when people type in that keyword, they then go to your book and they select it and buy it.

That right there is a natural way for Amazon to say, hey, when people type in this keyword, this is the book that people want. So therefore, we should move it up higher in the ranks so that we make more money because that's what Amazon's all about is more money. Well, here's the thing. A couple of years ago, a bunch of marketing gurus or self-proclaimed gurus came out and said, you know, there's a way to trick Amazon to believe that people do this. All you have to do is go to Amazon.com.

type in that particular keyword you want, click search, scroll down, find your book, and then you look at the URL at the top and use that link to send to your fans. What they believed was that when somebody clicked on that link, in Amazon's mind, instead of the person clicking the link, it was as if that person had gone to Amazon, typed in that keyword, found your book, and then purchased it.

So all these people thought they were tricking Amazon into making it believe that that was happening. Well, the problem is, is that this does not work. When Amazon creates that link, they use this thing called a QID. You'll notice it if you go to amazon.com and you do what we just talked about. You'll see it say QID equals. Then there's this big number. That number...

is the number of seconds since 1980, January 1st, okay? So it's a timestamp. It also stamps that you were the one who created the link itself. So now when you take that link and you send it out to, say, your email list, your friends, you post it on Facebook, whatever it be, Amazon now knows that not only did you create it, but then you sent these people to go buy your book. It's my strong belief that this is one of the reasons why a lot of people are losing reviews

Now, I don't think this is the only reason. Matter of fact, I think there are lots of reasons. And I think that Amazon kind of uses, once they see a couple of things happen, they'll just automatically remove your review. So I don't think this one thing does it, but I think it's a couple of things. But here's the thing. Doing that... only increases your chances that Amazon believes that you are sending people and they are leaving reviews, aka more chance you lose reviews.

So if you're doing this on purpose, if you're trying to game the system or trick Amazon, I think it's actually hurting you, okay? Now, I've got an article that goes into detail about the link structures. And if you just type into Google... Amazon link anatomy, you'll be able to learn all about what all that crazy stuff does. But if you'd like to learn more about what I just talked about, just type in Amazon super URLs. That's kind of the name that people have coined for this.

tactic and find the Kindlepreneur article there and it will go into more details. But the one thing I want to focus on in this episode is understanding link structure and how this may affect our books. And later on, I'm gonna bring on a super guest who has actually created a whole company centered around Amazon links. And we're gonna get some inside details about what's going on.

What are his recommendations and ways that we as authors can move forward so that our links aren't jeopardizing our reviews? So to give you a quick synopsis, the first thing is, is that the bare URL is the most important URL that you should send to people. This is amazon.com forward slash C's forward slash and then your ASIN number. That ASIN number is Amazon's ISBN number and they assign it to your book. That is the bare URL. Anything after that is just waste.

Don't copy that. Use the bare one. The bare one is the real one. If you do have other stuff, and maybe you're one of those people who didn't know this and did it by mistake, it's okay. It doesn't mean the end of the world, but just stop doing that. Just use the bare URL. So let me talk about today's guest. Now, Jesse Lake created a company called Genius Links. And Genius Links, and you can find it at geni.us, genius, it's pretty genius to tell you the truth.

What it does is that you can sign up for them and they will create a universal link that will redirect somebody to that particular market. So say, for example, you have your book published on the us amazon.com market, the Japanese, the UK, Indian, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if you send somebody the Amazon.com, which is the US market link, and that person is not in the US, then they've now got to go to their own market.

Okay, so they have to go to like amazon.uk or amazon.in or any of the other ones. Then search for your book and find it. Most of the time when people have to do this, they're not going to do it. They're going to stop what they're doing and they're going to be like, whatever, and move on. So in this case, though, if you use a Genius link and you send that out, if the person is in the UK and they click the link, it will automatically take them to your book in the UK.

If the person's in India and they click that link, it will automatically take them to the India Amazon website and buy it there. Now, for a lot of us, this could actually increase our sales because we may be losing people when we send this out. But for some of us, this might not help. So keep that in mind as we talk about Genius Links, as well as some other options, and we talk about some of the things that are going on in Amazon, their links, and things that we need to know. Let's check it out.

Okay, guys, I've got Jesse Lake, who is the creator of Geniuslink, one of my favorite programs out there. Hey, Jesse, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Absolutely. It's a real pleasure to be here. It's awesome having you here because you're like the guy who not only knows Amazon's link structure better than anybody else, but you've been in the weeds. You've been like under the hood.

working with how Amazon creates links and what that does to customers from the inside. Is there anything you've learned about Amazon and how they operate that people should know, especially authors?

That's a great question. I think there's a lot of little nuances there. And I think that's honestly probably the first real lesson is there are so many nuances there. You look at an Amazon link most of the time and it's so long, it's so full of all these different parameters, all this different information. So I guess the first kind of real...

word of wisdom is just to be careful it's totally fine to do little tweaks on your link as long as you know what's going on and if you're experimenting kind of in a safe environment but it's really encourage people not to

cut different chunks away from the link unless they really know what's going on or try to fake anything without really fully understanding the repercussions of that. Amazon's a massive beast and it takes a lot of testing to get a deep understanding of the different pieces. So I guess that's the first rule of wisdom.

The second piece of that to kind of add on to that is we like to make things simple when possible. So if I'm actually going to Amazon and I'm going to grab a link that I need to use for whatever, I'll actually trim it all the way down to just the ASIN. So ASIN is Amazon's standard identification number. It's pretty obvious. It's like the ISBN number. Exactly. I think it's like 10 digits instead of 13. Like that's the difference.

I believe, yeah, you're exactly right. So typically anything after that is important things for them to do their tracking, but the core link is really just that short piece there. Again, be careful with this. Test your links. Always, always, always, always, always test your links before you send them out.

But that's typically what we'll do is just kind of get rid of some of that extraneous stuff that only works sometimes, blah, blah, blah. But if you're up for a little bit of experimentation, that's probably the first real experiment to do with an Amazon link is to just see how many parameters you can get rid of. and still have that proper product when you click on that link.

So guys, the big thing that I got from what Jesse just said was number one, Amazon tracks. All of that other gobbledygook is their way of figuring out what's going on in their website. Now it's not cloak and dagger crap, right? It's really just knowing where. people were, what they came from, what's going on, and they're tracking these things, okay? So they are tracking. But number two, though, is that make sure that the links that you're using are clean, that they're good.

Two wonderful points on that. Now, Jesse, the other thing, too, is that there's also all the other markets, right? I mean, there's the UK, there's India, there's Canada, etc., right? What are some of the things you've learned having to deal with all of the different Amazon markets? I mean, you would think they would just get it down to just one Amazon.

That's really where I've focused my professional career, honestly, in the last nine years now. We call it geofragmentation now. Amazon's the only people that do this, but the idea that a global brand will create different country and region-specific storefronts to...

help with conversion rates in those specific regions so if you have a reader in germany they probably want to read about a product in german they probably want to buy in euros and if it's a physical product they probably want some sort of shipping that's quick and affordable

So Amazon has created Amazon.de, right? Very, very geared towards that German-speaking audience in Central Europe, and then Amazon India, etc. So 14 different Amazon storefronts now, 12 different Amazon affiliate programs. And it was really... a head-scratcher for the longest time about why they didn't all work so seamlessly together. Amazon is definitely taking some steps towards that. Some would argue that those steps they're taking are pretty lackadaisical.

But it's interesting to see that they've kind of now admitted that it's a problem to some degree and that you really should have some sort of link that ideally works with your global audience. So much of the internet is now global that... If you have readers around the world, it's really kind of a bummer to send them on a wild goose chase to buy that product they were interested in buying.

Yeah, that's been a big situation. There's a lot of authors. And guys, you can always go to your KDP account and see what your book sales are. But the problem, though, is that if you have readers on your email list and you're sending them to Amazon.com, you've basically lost those guys. guys, because ain't nobody going to go and stop and go find your book on a different market, etc.

So, I mean, that's very important to understand. And like we all heard on episode five, where Mark McClough came on and talked about international rights selling, is that there really is a great opportunity to sell your book in other countries. You just got to give it a little love. And if you're not sure about that, go ahead and check out that episode. But another thing that's really important about this too is that, like Jesse just said, with the international markets...

Amazon was kind of smart to think that, hey, we should kind of create Amazon.com where this is a group that focuses on the U.S. And then we'll do the German where they do the German. Because as we learned in episode five. is that the markets are so different. Mark had said that just changing the cover for the Japanese market was like a big deal. At first, he thought it was a terrible cover.

And then the Japanese publisher was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Believe me, we got this. And they did. They understood it. So to have an Amazon that focuses on that mentality and changes things, it's a beautiful thing. But for us authors, on the other hand, you're losing it if you're using the wrong link. You mentioned your mailing list, right? And your mailing list is often managed by some sort of third-party tool.

MailChimp, PostContact, etc. They often have some pretty good reporting in regards to where those emails are being opened up around the world. I'd really encourage your listeners and your authors out there to look and try to understand.

who's actually engaging with your email, because that's going to give you some pretty good insights into what's going on. You may find that you have a huge audience in Australia or a huge audience in Japan that may be a complete surprise. So education is honestly one of the biggest challenges we come across where people are.

so focused on the day-to-day, they don't kind of see the bigger picture of this community they've worked so hard on billing is really global. Sorry to stand on that so far. No, that's actually an amazing point. I almost forget that too.

It's funny is, is that if I go to kindlepreneur.com's Google Analytics, not even just email, if I look at analytics, I've got quite the following in India. And there was one other country and it's not coming to mind. It was kind of funny, but it was like four or 5%.

of my readers. And it was a small country. I was like, what's going on here? But the thing is, is though I never would have understood that if I didn't look at that. So that's a wonderful point. Hey, Jesse, are there anything else that authors should think about when dealing with Amazon links?

Any stories or anything you've heard from some of your clients and what it was like? So again, kind of going back to beating on the education drum, the more you know about what's going on with the links, the better off you are. And Amazon does a great job of giving you...

some tools to help you out. But unfortunately, a lot of people will maybe just use the Amazon short link, the amzn.to link, or they'll just copy a link directly out of Amazon. And with that, you really don't have any metrics. You don't have any idea of what's going on. Are you getting clicks? Are you not getting clicks?

Are you getting clicks from a certain country, et cetera? And one of the things I love to hear, again, I'm a little bit biased here, but is that when a reader will all of a sudden, like you just said, find out they've got this following in a country and they can start to do something about that. And within, you know.

a few quick tasks, you know, a new cover, whatever it may be, they're seeing some real financial reward from that education. So again, just knowing those clicks, knowing where they're coming from is pretty important, pretty huge. The second thing, and I've

I think you elaborated on it a little bit earlier, is around the Amazon's affiliate program, something called the associates program. It can be a really interesting way to get some additional revenue from referring people to buy your book on Amazon. But again, it also opens up a whole new Pandora's box on what you can learn, seeing what people bought where. It takes a little bit to kind of dive into that, but it's really going to be quite interesting to see, hey, I'm selling a ton of books.

The UK or Germany or wherever it may be and you really don't know that unless you can kind of piece these different pieces together So that was a little bit of a rabbit hole there, but there's some really interesting stories that we've heard by A, not only knowing about their analytics, but B, kind of tie that into their affiliate program or Amazon's affiliate program and see more of what can happen.

That's a really good point. And just something for authors to understand is it is okay to do an affiliate link, an Amazon associate link to your own book. They used to expressly state that, that, hey, you can do that. Then they just removed just that statement. But if you get in the minutia of all the other details in their terms of service, they're cool with you pointing to your own product. So have no fear about that, authors. You can do it.

Awesome, Jesse. Well, thank you so much for joining on the show. Seriously, it's been wonderful. I've had a lot of fun talking with you over the years. But before you go, is there one last thing you would like to let the listeners know or anything I should have asked but didn't?

While their primary job is probably writing amazing stories, if they can put their marketing hat on for just a little bit and really kind of focus in on that, I know it's not everyone's favorite thing. You can do some pretty amazing things when you fix your mind to focus on marketing for a day a month or a week a month or whatever it may be. Awesome, buddy. Great words of wisdom. All right, man, you take care. And again, thanks so much for coming on the show. My absolute pleasure. Cheers.

All right, guys, so we just heard from Jesse Lakes, and through this episode, I hope you understand that there's a lot that goes into an Amazon link. Beyond the Amazon Bear URL that we talked about, Amazon puts in all this code, and that helps them to figure out what's going on. Now, a bare URL will still send them to the same place as all that other gobbledygook at the end of it, but the gobbledygook tells Amazon things like, who generated the link? When was the link generated? And...

what kind of connections does the person who generated it and the person that clicked it have? As you can see, there are a lot of... potential problems that can arise from this. If you would like to learn more about Amazon links, be sure to check out the articles in the show notes. My Amazon link anatomy article.

goes through explaining every little bit in detail. Now you may say to yourself, that's overkill. The truth is what you just need to know is use the bare Amazon URL. But if you want to know more about what Amazon's doing on the inside, be sure to check that out. And if you're thinking about creating one link that is able to send people to the different markets, check out Geniuslink, G-E-N-I dot U-S. Also, if you guys are on Draft2Digital, they have a free...

tool that does the same thing called Booklinker. So you can actually create the link and then make sure that it goes to the different markets. But if you're using Amazon Associate, then Geniuslink is by far the one to go with. So keep those in mind. Make sure you're using the right link and be sure to check out the notes to learn a little bit more. And with that, I'm Dave Chesson of the Book Marketing Show podcast, signing off.