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Along with being one of the world’s biggest book stores, Amazon also offers some interesting user generated content avenues that could lead to a bit of exposure for small business owners who explore them.
- Amazon user profile - this is much like any social network profile and allows you to add a description of your business and link back to your website - here’s my profile - of course one of the ways to enhance your profile and get it viewed is to review products and books. These will link to your profile and your reviews produce and RSS feed so you can run them back on your site if you like.
- Listmania this is a tool that allows you to create lists of books that you like or that related somehow. Here’s another example. Doing so and linking the list back to a group or tag gets your list and your profile some exposure. Here’s an example of a customer community that you can participate in by tagging your lists.
- Video reviews - Amazon is on a big push to get video reviews of books and products. These will for the moment rise to the top of the reviews for a product. If you product a thoughtful review of a hot book you may get some nice exposure from this. They won’t publish overt ads so focus on creating a real, useful reviews that make sense for your business. Simply login, scroll down to reviews and click submit a review and choose the video option. Then upload your video and add some comments.
- Amazon Connect - If you are an author, and this can be an ebook that you publish through Amazon or upload to Amazon, you can have your own blog. They also allow you to republish an RSS feed so you can, as I do, port your existing blog here and perhaps gain some more readers. If you visit the page for my book Duct Tape Marketing and scroll down the page you will find my blog posts.
- Links in reviews - again if you are an author you can review other books and products and link to your book on Amazon in the signature of your review - here’s an example
Comments
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at Jun 19, 08 | 5:51 am and is filed under Social Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
John,
I’ve been looking into Amazon myself recently. I decided to take a blog post I wrote of my Top 5 Photoshop CS3 books and convert it to a Listmania. Twice the exposure half the work. I just did this yesterday and here you are the next day recommending it. Great minds think alike. Thanks for the additional insight regarding options for authors. I guess I better get cracking on my book.
@Roger - I only scratched the surface here too - Amazon has done a great job of getting others to create tons of content for them. It’s a model others drool over from a community standpoint.
John –
These are some great ideas. I had never thought about using an Amazon profile and writing things like reviews to get exposure for something like a business or a blog. I’ll have to explore that further.
Thanks for the great tips! I never suspected Amazon was offering user-generated content, outsisde the book reviews.