17 Minutes Only!

Wednesday 25 February 2015

How to Transform Your Life in 6 Minutes a Day


Oh, you’re busy? Weird, I thought it was just me.
No matter where you are in life at this moment, there is at least one thing that you and I have in common: We want to improve our lives and ourselves. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with us, but as human beings we’re born with a desire to continuously grow and improve. I believe it’s within all of us. Yet most people wake up each day and life pretty much stays the same.
If success and fulfillment were measured on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s safe to say that everyone would want to live every aspect of their lives at a Level 10.
Here’s the catch: To create the Level 10 life that you ultimately want, you must first dedicate time each day to becoming a Level 10 person who is capable of creating and sustaining that level of success.
But who has time for that, right? Luckily, there is a method to do it in as little as six minutes a day.
Enter the life SAVERS, a sequence that combines the six most effective personal development practices known to man. While someone could invest hours on these practices, it only takes one minute for each -- or six minutes total -- to see extraordinary results.
Just imagine if the first six minutes of every morning began like this:

Minute 1: S is for silence.

Instead of hitting the snooze button, and then rushing through your day feeling stressed and overwhelmed, invest your first minute in sitting in purposeful silence. Sit quietly, calm and peaceful and breathe deeply. Maybe you meditate. Center yourself and create an optimum state of mind that will lead you effectively through the rest of your day.
Maybe you say a prayer of gratitude and appreciate the moment. As you sit in silence, you quiet your mind, relax your body and allow your stress to melt away. You develop a deeper sense of clarity, purpose, and direction.

Minute 2: A is for Affirmations.

Pull out and read your page of affirmations -- written statements that remind you of your unlimited potential, your most important goals and the actions you must take today to achieve them. Reading over reminders of how capable you really are motivates you. Looking over which actions you must take, re-energizes you to focus on doing what’s necessary today to takeyour life to the next level.

Minute 3. V is for visualization.

Close your eyes and visualize what it will look like and feel like when you reach your goals. Seeing your ideal vision increases your belief that it’s possible and your desire to make it a reality.

Minute 4. E is for exercise.

Stand up and move your body for 60 seconds, long enough to increase the flow of blood and oxygen to your brain. You could easily do a minute of jumping jacks, push-ups, or sit-ups. The point is that you raise your heart rate, generate energy and increase your ability to be alert and focused.

Minute 5. R is for reading.

Grab the self-help book you’re currently reading and read one page, maybe two. Learn a new idea, something you can incorporate into your day, which will improve your results at work or in your relationships. Discover something new that you can use to think better, feel better and live better.

Minute 6. S is for scribing.

Pull out your journal and take one minute to write down something you’re grateful for, something you’re proud of and the top one to three results that you’re committed to creating that day. In doing so, you create the clarity and motivation that you need to take action.

Start today.

How would you feel if that’s how you used the first six minutes of each day? How would the quality of your day -- and your life -- improve? We can all agree that investing a minimum of six minutes into becoming the person that we need to be to create the lives we truly want is not only reasonable. It’s an absolute must.

Sunday 22 February 2015

101 Simple Tips To Increase Website Traffic


 

web-trafficMost online businesses dream of having a highly popular blog. It’s good for your brand and ultimately serves to drive wave after wave of potential customers your way.
However, dreaming about it won’t get you there — taking action is the key.
Contrary to seemingly popular belief, there is no huge secret to building up your blog traffic. It all comes down to hard work, consistent effort over a long term period, and understanding basic marketing fundamentals.
There are an almost unlimited number of ways to increase traffic to your blog, but if you’re stuck for ideas, here are 101 simple tips to get you started. Enjoy!

Content Is King

  1. Write eye-catching headlines.
  2. Write excellent content — make a name for blog as a source of informative, useful, funny, entertaining, or inspiring articles.
  3. Write longer posts — expand on your content, fill out your blog posts and create truly epic content.
  4. Write shorter posts — follow Seth Godin’s example with short but sweet posts.
  5. Write more often — the more content you can produce, the better.
  6. Blog on a consistent schedule so your readers know when to expect new content.
  7. Write list blog posts — they get more traffic than any other kind of post.
  8. Write about current news stories.
  9. Write about topics trending on Twitter and in Google trends.
  10. Search forums in your niche to see what people are talking about and write an article about it.
  11. Ask your readers what they’d like you to write about.
  12. Write about something controversial and start a debate.
  13. Use link bait techniques to write content that promotes massive sharing.
  14. Explore your analytics, find out which is your most popular content and create more of the same.
  15. Interview influential people in your niche/industry.
  16. Create a “best blogs” list post and let the bloggers know you’ve included them — a bit of flattery can go a long way.

Enhance With Multimedia

  1. Use eye-catching photos and graphics to draw attention to your posts.
  2. Create Pinterest-friendly graphics with text on top of images to encourage people to pin your posts.
  3. Create an interesting infographic and share it with everyone you can think of.
  4. Upload videos to YouTube and Vimeo — make sure a link to your site is in the description and the video.
  5. Produce a podcast and distribute it through iTunes.
  6. Convert some of your content into a presentation and upload it to SlideShare.
  7. Host or take part in a webinar.
  8. Transcribe your videos and webinars for extra content.

Be Social

  1. Create a Facebook page for your blog. Use it to communicate with your readers and post a notification every time you publish a new blog article.
  2. Tweet all your posts when you publish them.
  3. Link to your posts on your Google+ page when you publish them.
  4. Use social media scheduling software like Buffer to post automatically on social media at the best times of the day.
  5. Link to your old posts periodically from your social media accounts.
  6. Join a collaborative Pinterest board and tap into the audiences of all the other bloggers pinning to that board.
  7. Regularly pin images from other sites. The more you pin, the more followers you’ll attract on Pinterest. Make sure your blog address is in your profile!
  8. Create a Tumblr blog and add content related to your niche as well as re-blogging content from your own site.
  9. Set up an Instagram account and tell your followers when you publish a new post.
  10. Comment on other blogs with insightful, useful comments.
  11. Link out to other bloggers generously.
  12. Share others’ posts on Facebook and retweet useful information to your readers.
  13. Reach out to other bloggers through their blog, by email or on social media — build relationships.
  14. Follow all the followers of other influential bloggers in your niche on Twitter.
  15. Include social sharing buttons on all your posts.
  16. Swap sidebar links and buttons with other sites.
  17. Include quotable phrases in your content and use Clicktotweet to encourage sharing on Twitter.
  18. Encourage engagement on your blog by ending your posts with a question.
  19. Link to all your posts with StumbleUpon.
  20. Add some of the users Twitter recommends you to follow every day — a percentage will follow you back.
  21. Reply to your comments and emails — show your readership that you’re interested in what they have to say
  22. Join blogger Facebook groups and communities to share knowledge and help to promote each other’s content.
  23. Create a LinkedIn profile with a link to your blog and contribute to groups and discussions in your field.
  24. Submit your best posts to Digg and Reddit.
  25. Add your favorite blogs to your blogroll – they’ll notice and may return the favor.
  26. Ask your blogger friends to include you in their blogroll.
  27. Collaborate with other bloggers to produce and share content.

Guest Posting And Link Building

  1. Guest post on other blogs — try pitching to one new blog every week.
  2. Include a link to your blog in every single online profile you have.
  3. Set up a free blog related to your niche with supplementary content on BloggerLivejournal,Typepad etc. and reference back to your main blog.
  4. Invite others to guest post on your blog — they’ll send traffic your way when they link to the post.
  5. List your blog in as many free blog directories as you can find.
  6. Do interviews for other blogs.
  7. Take part in link parties and blog carnivals.
  8. Include your blog’s URL in your email signature.
  9. Post helpful information in forums related to your niche and include your blog’s URL in your signature.
  10. Post helpful articles on sites like Hubpages and Squidoo with links back to your blog.
  11. Submit articles to syndicated article directories like Ezine Articles. If your article is re-published on another blog you’ll benefit from extra links.
  12. Write and syndicate a press release linking back to your blog.
  13. Use a link inspection tool like Open Site Explorer to find where your competitors are getting links from and copy them.
  14. Add your blog to Technorati.
  15. Syndicate your blog on Amazon Kindle.

SEO

  1. Interlink your blog posts — link to old posts from new ones and edit old posts to link to more recent ones.
  2. Install a related content plugin to link each post to several other related posts.
  3. Use keyword research tools to write about the things that many people are searching for.
  4. Install an SEO plugin like All in One SEO Pack or the Yoast SEO plugin and optimize your site for search engines.
  5. Use relevant keywords in your image file names and alt tags.
  6. Use keywords in your post title and subheadings.
  7. Link out to authority sites in your niche.
  8. Set up Google authorship on your blog.

E-books And Freebies

  1. Run a blog giveaway or competition.
  2. Put an opt-in form on your website and send out a free newsletter.
  3. Publish an e-book and sell it or offer it for free on Amazon Kindle. Make sure your web address is in the first 10% of the book so it shows up in the sample.
  4. Write an e-book and offer a generous affiliate commission to encourage others to distribute it and link to your site.
  5. Create a free report and get site visitors to tweet or post about your site on Facebook to access it
  6. Offer a free e-course or digital product and encourage your readers to tell people about it.

Offline Ideas

  1. Include your blog’s URL on your printed business cards and give them out to everyone you meet.
  2. Attend blogging conferences and networking events — distribute your business cards!
  3. Speak at conferences and special events.
  4. Tell your friends and family about your blog.

Other Miscellaneous Ideas

  1. Enter blogging competitions — your blog will usually be promoted on the website hosting the competition and social media for free.
  2. Answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and leave a link to your website.
  3. Ping your blog posts with a tool like Pingomatic.
  4. Create a WordPress theme and include a link to your site in the footer.
  5. Choose a beautiful theme for your blog.
  6. Review products and share your content with brands. They may link to your site from their social media accounts
  7. Ask a bigger blogger to be your mentor and start a case study about improving your blog.
  8. Submit photographs to free stock photography sites and Flickr and ask for a credit link back to your site.
  9. Include a link to your RSS feed.
  10. Include links to read your blog via Bloglovin‘.
  11. Link to your best and most popular posts from your sidebar.
  12. Go back to old posts and edit them to update and improve them from time to time
  13. Optimize your website for viewing on mobile devices.
  14. Include different ways to access your content such as category and date archives
  15. Include a search function on your blog.
  16. Create an app for iPhone or Android.
  17. Be helpful and be nice — be likeable and help to solve people’s problems and they will send traffic your way with no encouragement required.
That should be more than enough to get you started but if you have any other ideas, please let us know in the comments.

Thursday 19 February 2015

Top 10 Analytical Tools Every Affiliate Marketer MUST Use


Successful affiliate marketers wouldn’t be found dead without their bag of analytical tools.
To be one yourself, you ought to equip yourself with the best you can find. To scale the heights of online marketing, the following should be your weapons of choice:
Affiliate Marketing
1. CrazyEgg
This is one of the best tools out there. It offers a bunch of cool visual tracking methods to fully understand how your visitors are navigating on your site.
Apart from the ‘Heatmap’ and the ‘scrollmap’ that gives you a picture of where and how far the visitors on your site are going. It helps to recognize problem areas (places where the visitors are quitting or moving away) and make changes that increase actions on your site. It even goes as far as giving you the number of clicks generated by individual elements of the page.
This is an awesome way to get a complete representation of the clicks with the highest significance to your site.
2. Google Insights
If you want to see if the popularity of a keyword is going up or pin down the best months or seasons for a particular search using worldwide trends, Google Insights is the tool for you. It also offers an array of methods like sorting search volume by region to determine the change in trends over time in different areas.
3. Mint
The only tool on the list that has a one-time payment, Mint Analytics comes with no recurring costs and an excellent layout and simple and user-friendly charts that give you all the information you need.
Although it charges a fee of $30 per site, it definitely is a cut above other tools, even if those have a lower monthly fee, because your annual expenditure with those tools will still add up to $30 or maybe more.
4. Google Alerts
Being a Google tool, you can expect it to deliver and deliver well. It efficiently monitors social media and packs a punch with its analytics package. Keeping track of any literature you’ve shared online or keeping a tab on your competition becomes really easy.
Set it up to track specific keywords, like your blog name, or personal details and receive e-mail alerts every time someone searches using those keywords. You can even have your very own social media watchdog which notifies you if unwanted content is placed on any platform.
5. Stealth Keyword Digger
Much like most other keyword analyzers, the Stealth Keyword Digger focuses on trending keywords. But it stands apart in that it targets the most profitable keywords. This is super-helpful if you’re focusing on a niche market.
6. SEO Quake
Similar in its working to other affiliate tools, it aids affiliates in keeping a tab on the Alexa ranking of their websites. Moreover, it offers data on back links and gets your webpage displayed higher in Google searches. A highly-effective browser plug-in for affiliate marketing, it operates on Firefox and Google Chrome.
7. Spyfu
It helps in optimizing affiliate programs to suit the needs of the target audience, which is essential in affiliate marketing. It also tracks your competitor activity and the keywords they’ve purchased on Google AdWords. It is one of the most highly-trusted tools used by marketers.
8. KISSmetrics
It provides an amazing way to better understand your visitors. It is one of those analytical tools designed specifically for commerce sites, although it can be used on blogs as well. Especially, blogs with products on offer.
9. Google Optimizer
If you want to optimize your blog and shape it into a model blog in the eyes of Google, this is the tool for you. It can be used to customize layouts, and enable template designs and SEO content. Use this tool wisely and you can maximize your chances of appearing in related Google searches.
10. Clicky
This is the tool that most affiliate marketers can use instead of Google Analytics. The main difference is that Clicky provides real-time information unlike Google Analytics, which gives you the info from the previous day. This is crucial if the volume of visitors to your blog or site from an external source suddenly spikes.
To conclude
Keep your strategy simple but effective and don’t forget the basics. Understanding your visitors and your target audience is essential to your business, and these tools can definitely help you get there, if you use them wisely.

Tuesday 17 February 2015

HOW TO BUILD A THRIVING EMAIL LIST USING FACEBOOK

When you’re planning to build a new blog or an online business, creating a sizeable subscriber base should be one of the first things on your mind. With people on your mailing list, you can work on building relationships and converting subscribers into buyers. Some marketers believe that email lists are not as important as they were a few years ago because of Facebook.
But the stats suggest otherwise.
  • In the last year, 66% of all US consumers below 15 years of age made a purchase because of an email.
  • 91% of consumers check their email at least once a day.
  • 64% of decision makers read their emails via mobile.
  • Over 70% of mobile purchasing decisions are influenced by email.
This clearly suggests that email marketing is not only alive, but more relevant than ever before. Facebook, on the other hand, is the world’s largest social network. For many users around the world, it is more important than emails.
Every month there are
  • 4 billion visitors on Facebook
  • 700 million visitors on Facebook groups
  • more than 700 billion minutes spent on Facebook globally
Every day there are
  • more than 890 million people on Facebook
  • 1+ billion searches on Facebook
  • More than 3 billion video views on Facebook
  • More than 7 billion post likes on Facebook
These are mind boggling stats.
But what if we combine the exposure of Facebook with the power of email marketing? It’ll be any marketers dream.

Why You Should Route Facebook Users To Your Email List

Although Facebook offers you extraordinary exposure and reach, relying on it for your long term business strategy is risky. No matter how many Facebook page likes you have, they’re still not your property and can be taken away from you by just one algorithm change. Facebook is also tightening the screw on page owners, and does not give you the same free exposure that it once offered.
Email subscribers, on the other hand, are your real online assets. You have complete control over your email lists and can use them for creating long term strategies. So instead of relying completely on Facebook, the intelligent approach is to use Facebook for building your email lists
Here’s how you can do it.

IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE

When you’re building an email list, it’s not just the number of subscribers that matters. The quality and relevance of your subscribers is equally important. Your objective for list building is to convert subscribers into buyers. So you need people who are seriously interested in what you have to offer.
For this, you need to create the right buyer personas. Buyer persona is a sample profile of your ideal buyer, or someone who is genuinely interested in your offer.
For example, if you’re selling a weight loss product, your ideal buyer could be a 35 to 40 year old man, living in a major US city, earning at least $100,000 per year, and genuinely concerned about his increasing weight.
Until recently, buyer personas were used primarily by content marketers. But innovative social media companies like 99DollarSocial and Buffer have used them intelligently in creating more targeted social campaigns.

CREATE THE RIGHT FREEBIE

Marketers use different kinds of incentives to lure people to their email lists. In most cases, it’s a freebie like an eBook, a free course or a discount coupon. But to attract the right subscribers, you need to create a freebie that is in line with your paid offer.
This is important because you don’t want to attract subscribers who’re just looking for freebies. You want to attract people who’re prepared to pay you for your services in the long run.
For example, if you offer SEO and digital marketing services, your freebie can be a free website SEO audit or an SEO checklist.
Just make sure your freebie has some immediate value for your target users so that they subscriber to your list immediately.
For example, this is the freebie that Neil Patel offer on his blog QuickSprout.
Core Services
You can see that it’s directly complementing the core services that Neil offers (SEO consultancy, traffic generation, conversion optimization etc.)

CREATE A LANDING PAGE AND AUTO-RESPONDER SERIES

Once your freebie is ready, you need to create a clutter free and high conversion landing page. Conversion optimization is a broad subject and a lot can be written about it. But in summary, all the components of your landing page, including copy, images and your freebie, should point in only one direction – your opt-in form.
Here’s a great example from Noah Kagan’s blog.
Email
You also need to have an intelligent auto-responder sequence set up for your new subscribers. Just like your freebie, it needs to be aligned with your paid product/services.
I typically use a five email auto-responder sequence in which the first three emails deliver direct value in the form of actionable advice and resources. The last two emails are about my paid offer which my subscribers can get at a discounted rate.
There are several auto-responder and email marketing tools on the web, but I prefer GetResponsefor my managing my campaigns (Neil Patel recommended it to me). Apart from email marketing, you can use it to create your landing pages as well.
Creating the landing page and auto-responder is important because you need to give immediate value to your subscribers so that they start trusting you and refer more people to your list.

CREATE A FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGN

Once you’ve completed the ground work, you can now turn to Facebook advertisements to send you highly targeted visitors. While creating your ad, you need to keep your buyer persona in mind.
Facebook ads have a very precise targeting system. You can use it to zoom in to your target audience and attract the most relevant visitors to your landing page.
While creating your ad, keep the following points in mind.
  • Use at least 4 to 5 high quality images for your ad.
  • Test different headlines and content for your ad.
  • Make sure your ad copy has a clear call to action.
  • Start with a small budget for each ad and do test runs to find out the combination.
  • Be as precise as possible in your audience criteria.
Once you start your ad campaign, monitor the results closely. If your Facebook ads are getting a lot of clicks and sending traffic to your landing, but the visitor to subscriber conversion rate is low then try making changes to your landing page content and structure. In my experience, Facebook ads have the highest CTR among all other paid advertisement tools.

Wrapping it Up

As I said at the start, Facebook has millions of active members from all across the globe. By using the strength and exposure of this platform, you can attract highly relevant subscribers to your mailing list and convert them into an online asset. However, in order to benefit from Facebook ads, you need to build a solid foundation with your freebie, landing page and auto-responder sequence. If you get it right, you can build a thriving email list in just a few days.

Friday 13 February 2015

How to Rank Your Products on Amazon – The Ultimate Guide


If you want success on Amazon, you need to understand how Amazon’s Search Algorithm works – right?
Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised…
Most sellers have no idea how Amazon ranks and delivers search results; let alone how (easily) exploitable it can be!
How to Rank Your Products on Amazon
Are you ready for a shocking fact?
THREE TIMES as many buyers search for products to buy on Amazon, rather than Google.
Think about it…
Where do you go when you need to know if a product is worth buying?
What about when you want the best deal on anything from a book to a refrigerator?
Amazon…
Yet, you probably don’t pay attention to it’s search engine – much less consider it as a marketing channel worth optimizing for. Even most ‘Amazon Marketers’ are still spending their days trying to optimize their Amazon Listings for Google…
But, what if you knew how to rank in Amazon instead?
You’d have THREE TIMES more ready-to-buy customers than you’d EVER get in Google – and you’d do it in a fraction of the time!
You’re about to read The Ultimate Guide to Ranking Your Products on Amazon…
But before we get into the meat of the matter, here are some basics you should know…

Introducing A9: Amazon’s Product Search Algorithm

A9 is the name of Amazon’s product search algorithm. Since this is a guide about ranking products in Amazon, it makes sense to start at the source. So, this is A9’s official statement for how they calculate search results.
Our work starts long before a customer types a query.  We’ve been analyzing data, observing past traffic patterns, and indexing the text describing every product in our catalog before the customer has even decided to search.
Amazon
As we can see here, much of the work is done before the customer even touches the keyboard. Once the customer actually hits “Enter” to perform a search, the A9 algorithm delivers results through a two-step process:
Once we determine which items are good matches to the customer’s query, our ranking algorithms score them to present the most relevant results to the user.
Amazon
It’s a pretty simple process at its core:
  1. First, they pull the relevant results from their massive “catalog” of product listings.
  2. Then, they sort those results into an order that is “most relevant” to the user.
Now, some of you SEOs out there might be thinking, “Wait a second… Isn’t relevancy Google’s turf? I thought Amazon only cared about conversions! What’s all this focus on relevance doing here?”
The answer is simple: Relevance doesn’t mean the same thing to Amazon that it does to Google. Read this statement from A9 carefully to see if you can catch the difference:
One of A9’s tenets is that relevance is in the eye of the customer and we strive to get the best results for our users. […] We continuously evaluate [our algorithms] using human judgments, programmatic analysis, key business metrics and performance metrics.
Amazon
See that?
  • Google says, “What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”
  • Amazon says, “What products is the searcher most likely to buy?”
The difference between those two questions is the difference between how Amazon measures relevancy compared to Google.
On the whole, ranking in Amazon is more straightforward than Google because you’re essentially cutting the work in half. This is because there’s no such thing as off-page SEO for Amazon; they only use internal factors to determine how a product ranks. Backlinks, social media, domain authority… These are all things you don’t need to worry about on Amazon.
That being said, there are a few simple rules you must always remember about Amazon. These 3 rules are critically important to making the most of this guide, so make sure you read them twice:
  1. Amazon’s top goal in everything they do is always maximize Revenue Per Customer (RPC)
  2. Amazon tracks every action that a customer takes on Amazon, right down to where their mouse hovers on the page
  3. The A9 algorithm exists to connect the data tracked in #2 to the goal stated in #1
So far, so good?

Core Pillars of the A9 Algorithm

From A9’s website and from the information that Amazon makes available to us through their Seller Central (login required), we can group Amazon’s ranking factors into three equally important categories:
Conversion Rate* – These are factors that Amazon has found have a statistically relevant effect on conversion rates. Examples of conversion rate factors include customer reviews, quality of images and pricing.
Relevancy – Remember the first step in the A9 algorithm? They gather the results, and then they decide how to list them. Relevancy factors tell A9 when to consider your product page for a given search term. Relevancy factors include your title and product description.
Customer Satisfaction & Retention – How do you make the most money from a single customer? Make them so happy that they keep coming back. Amazon knows that the secret to max RPC lies in customer retention. It’s a lot harder to get someone to spend $100 once than $10 ten times. Customer Retention factors include seller feedback and Order Defect Rate.
*Note that Amazon uses both predicted and real conversion rates for product rankings. For example, if your product is priced higher than other similar products, Amazon will predict a lower conversion rate for your listing and use that rate until real data corrects it.
Okay! We’re finally ready to start talking about how to rank product listings in Amazon. What you’ll find below are 25 Amazon ranking factors that either Amazon themselves or independent marketers have confirmed the A9 algorithm to use.

Top 25 Amazon Ranking Factors

Amazon isn’t like Google where they go to great lengths to hide the factors that they use in their algorithm. Inside Amazon’s Seller Central, they’ll blatantly tell you several of their top ranking factors. You can also visit the official Amazon Seller Support Blogfor some great insights. And here’s the UK Seller Support Blog if you’re interested.

Conversion Rate Factors

Sales Rank

After just a couple searches on Amazon, it should be pretty obvious that number of sales compared to other similar products – otherwise known as Sales Rank – is one of the most important rankings factors.
Even now Amazon is testing a new feature in their search results where they automatically append a #1 Best-Seller banner (see below) to the best-selling product in category-specific searches, like this one for “Strollers”:
Amazon Best Seller Banner
It’s simple really…
More sales mean higher rankings – and higher rankings mean more sales!
It sounds like a vicious cycle, but luckily there are still many ways for new sellers to compete.

Customer Reviews

It probably doesn’t need to be said that the number and positive-ness of your customer reviews is one of the most important ranking factors in Amazon’s A9 algorithm.
This example product search for the keyword “vacuum” illustrates some interesting points about how Amazon weights review volume vs. review quality:
Amazon Reviews
Let’s dissect this search results page:
  1. The BISSEL vacuum (green) has the most reviews AND the highest review rating. It’s also the best-seller in its category, so it ranks at the top.
  2. The second-ranked Dirt Devil (red) has more customer reviews, but a lower review rating. It’s also a best-seller, so it ranks second.
  3. The third-ranked Shark Navigator (blue) has less customer reviews, but a higher rating than #2, and it’s also a best-seller, so it ranks #3.
  4. The Hoover WindTunnel at #4 has substantially more customer reviews than any of the top three listings, but it’s not as highly rated as #1 and #3, and it’s not a best-seller, so it ranks #4.

Answered Questions

This is one of those metrics that Amazon doesn’t specifically state they track. But, it’s data they have access to and Q&A’s are listed close to the top of the product page, which typically means it’s important for conversions.
Furthermore, there products like this (me-approved) Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush, which ranks #1 for the keyword “electric toothbrush” over other equally rated best-sellers because it has almost twice as many customer Q&As than any other listing in the category:
Amazon Questions Answers

Image Size & Quality

Amazon continues to tighten their image size and quality policies for product listings. Right now, some categories won’t even display results that don’t have at least one image that is 1000×1000 pixels or larger. These are called “suppressed listings”.
The 1000×1000 pixel image size allows Amazon to offer customers their Hover-to-Zoom feature, shown below, which they’ve found has a dramatic effect on conversion rates.
Amazon Image Zoom
Awful artistry aside, you can see that as my cursor hovers over the image, Amazon automatically displays a zoomed-in version in the product information pane.
Notice that image quantity is not what’s important here. This Tippmann paintball gun is the #1 product for the keyword “paintball guns”, but it only has one image. Since the image is big enough and informative enough to give the customer all the info they need, that’s all it takes to make Amazon happy.
That means it’s better to have one large, high quality image than to have multiple normal-sized images. Not to say that multiple images won’t convert better than one image, just that the benefits quickly taper off after the first.

Price

Remember earlier when we talked about how Amazon’s A9 product search algorithm uses both predicted and real conversion rates to determine which products to show in their search results?
One of the biggest factors Amazon uses to determine predicted conversion rate is pricing – they know that customers tend to seek the best deals. More importantly, Amazon uses pricing as a major factor in picking which product to show in the buy box, which is the part of the page containing the Add to Cart button (we’ll talk more about that later).
Amazon Listing Price
Notice here that the top-ranking product for the search term “juicer” has less customer reviews, lower customer reviews and lower Sales Rank than every other listing in the top 4. It still shows #1 because it’s got decent ratings and is pricedwaaaaay below the category average.
Note that customer reviews are still vital here. And pricing isn’t the only reason that the Black & Decker Juicer ranks #1…

Parent-Child Products

Many sellers create multiple listings for variations of the same product. This is suboptimal. It’s much better to use Amazon’s built-in parent-child product functionality to direct all customers to a single product page.
This has several benefits:
  • It maximizes your customer reviews, since Amazon will combine your similar products into a single primary product page
  • It makes the most sense from a UX standpoint; keeping customers on the same page makes it more likely they’ll buy your product
  • Amazon has shown a preference for ranking products with multiple options in their listing
Let’s look at that top-ranking Black & Decker Juicer again:
Amazon Parent Child Products
If you scroll back up the page, you’ll see that this juicer is the only one in the top 4 results to utilize parent-child product connections. When you enable the parent-child relationship, it shows as an extra option in Amazon’s search results…
This not only increases click-through rates, we can see here that it also helps you rank above the competition!

Time on Page & Bounce Rate

Remember, Amazon can measure every way a customer interacts with their website, so it’s easy for them to track detailed time on page and bounce rate stats.
Here’s exactly what these similar-but-different metrics mean on Amazon:
Time on Page: Amazon believes that the amount of time a customer spends on your listing page is a good measure of how interested they are in your product. A customer who reads your full product description, looks through reviews and investigates the Q&A’s is much more likely to buy than the one that spends a couple seconds skimming the features.
Bounce Rate: A “bounce” is when a customer performs a search, visits your page, and then either goes back to the search results or clicks on a Related Product offer. Keep in mind that Amazon has a much more exact measurement of bounce rate than Google, again, because all user activity happens within their platform.

Product Listing Completeness

Finally, the last conversion metric to optimize for is listing completeness. The individual sections of the product listing mostly have to do with relevancy, as you’ll learn below, but the actual completeness of the listing has an effect on conversion rate.
As a general rule, the more complete you make your listing, the better. Do your best to fill in every single field in the listing setup page to maximize your chances of appearing at the top of product search results.

Relevancy Factors

Title

Optimizing your product title for Amazon is an excellent example of the way that optimizing for Amazon differs from optimizing for Google.
In Google, you want a concise, engaging title with your keyword close to the beginning.
In Amazon, all you care about is keywords. You want to cram as many keywords into about 80 characters as you possibly can.
In fact, you can actually go beyond 80 characters if you want, and it’s better to have too many keywords than too few. I’ve seen top-listed products with titles that make no sense and have over 200 characters, like this top-rated “Nexus charger”:
Amazon Product Listing Title Keywords

It should be noted that Amazon is starting to crack down and standardize Product Titles – keep an eye out for this moving forward…

Features / Bullet Points

The other big reason that particular Nexus charger ranks so highly is because it has lots of keyword rich, informative features. Features, which are displayed as bullet points right below the pricing and product options, are an absolute must.
Just like with images, Features are so important that Amazon no longer allows products without bullet points to be featured in the buy box, and not having them is a serious road-block to good Amazon rankings.
Another good example of proper Feature usage is this Asus computer monitor, which ranks #1 for “computer screen”:
Amazon Product Listing Features
Notice how the bullet-points are both extremely detailed and include a ton of keywords? At the same time, they’re easily readable, which means they won’t confuse customers and risk hurting conversions.

Product Description

Your product description is basically where you expand on your Features. It’s also the part of the page you have the most control over. If there’s anywhereto really put a lot of effort into engagement, it’s in the product description.
That being said, keep in mind that unlike with Google there is no benefit to having a keyword appear multiple times on the product page; if it’s anywhere in your product listing at least once, you will be relevant to rank for it.
If you want to see a truly appetizing product description, check out the one for thisDeLhongi Espresso Maker – the #1 ranked listing for the term “espresso maker”.
Amazon Perfect Product Listing
There’s nothing advanced about this product listing – they just covered all the bases. It’s thorough, inviting, easy to skim, includes plenty of images, captions, and they even included extra tech. specs that aren’t listed in the normal Specifications section (which we’ll talk more about below).

Brand & Manufacturer Part #

Remember earlier when we looked at the top results for the keyword “Juicer”? You can refresh your memory below:
Amazon Juicer Listings
Something that every single one of the top listings do right in that category is list the brand and manufacturer number first in the product title. In fact, if you do the search yourself it’s not until the 15th result that Amazon shows us a product listing withoutthe brand and manufacturer number included in the title.
You always, always, always want to include a brand in your title because it enables your product for search filters AND allows you to capture customers searching for a specific brand. And if you’re in a niche where customers are using the manufacturer number to search for products, you definitely want to include that keyword in your title.

Specifications

These are different than Features – this is the part of the page where you actually list the technical and physical details of your product. This includes size, shipping weight, color, publication date (if you’re doing books), tech. specs and more. You can seethis top-ranked product for the “home theater system” search term using their product specifications to the max:
Amazon Product Specifications

Category & Sub-Category

You probably didn’t realize this, but once a customer has entered into a category – every other search they perform on Amazon will, by default, be limited to that category.
Take a look at the example below:
Amazon Search Category
You can see here that a simple search for “dog food” actually takes us three categories deep into Amazon’s product catalog, indicated by the red lines in the image above. The blue box shows that we’ll stay in the Dog Food category until we either return to the home page or manually tell Amazon to show us All Departments.
When setting up your product listing, make sure you put your product in the most relevant, narrow category possible.

Search terms

In addition to categories, you can also specify search terms that you want associated with your product.
Even though Amazon lists five different 50-character search term fields, you’re better off thinking about it as one big 250 character text box in which you can enter every possible search term you can think of for your product.
This is somewhat complicated to explain, and I can’t do a better job than Nathan Grimm has already done over at Moz (it’s about 1/3 of the way through this article), so just head over there if you want to learn more about this specific factor.

Source Keyword

This is one of the biggest hidden ways that Amazon determines a listing’s relevance to a given product search. This is also yet another example of how Amazon tracks every single minutia of a customer’s activity on their website.  Take a look at this URL that links to a listing for a Black & Decker electric drill, and see if you can tell me what search term I used to find it:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-LDX172C-7-2-Volt-Lithium-Ion/dp/B005LTNLDI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416351135&sr=8-1&keywords=electric+drill
You can see the source keyword right at the end of the URL – &keywords=electric+drill – that tells Amazon that the source keyword was “electric drill”.
Therefore, if I were to buy this drill, Amazon would know that this listing is highly relevant for the term “electric drill”. The next time a customer searches for that term, this listing would be more likely to show at the top.
Here’s a neat little Amazon ranking hack you can do to take advantage of this factor:
  1. Construct a URL for your product listing using the [&keyword=your+keyword] query (append the code inside the brackets to your product URL).
  2. Use a link shortening service like bit.ly to create a shareable link to that URL.
  3. Drive traffic to the shortened link.
Now anytime you make a sale from one of these shortened keyword links, you’re basically tricking Amazon into thinking that these visitors performed a product search for your target keyword.

Customer Satisfaction & Retention Factors

Negative Seller Feedback

Why do I list negative seller feedback specifically, as opposed to just seller feedback in general?
Interestingly, Amazon actually claims not to track positive seller feedback; at least, not for the sake of their product search algorithm.
Instead they track negative seller feedback rates, or frequency. It doesn’t matter how bad the feedback is – all negative feedback is the same, and it all counts against you equally in terms of search result rankings.
To be clear – as a third-party seller attempting to win the buy box (shown below) you want your seller feedback as high as possible. However, negative feedback rate is the only metric with a known effect on product search results.
Amazon Buy Box Feedback Ratio

Order Processing Speed

Amazon knows that one of the best ways to make customers happy is with fast and accurate shipping. Therefore, a vendor or seller who has shown consistent and efficient order processing is more likely to rank higher than a vendor who’s had complaints of inaccurate or slow shipping.

In-Stock Rate

Customers hate it when they want a product but can’t have it. One of the most common ways this problem occurs is when an item is out of stock, or when a seller doesn’t keep proper track of their inventory.
Whether you’re a first-party vendor or a third-party seller, keeping up your inventory is vital to maintain top rankings, both in A9’s product search results and in your product’s buy box.
Two of the big customer satisfaction metrics are Percentage of Orders Refundedand Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation. In both cases, Amazon has found that vendors/sellers with low in-stock rates tend have higher refunds and cancellations, which of course is bad for customer retention.

Perfect Order Percentage (POP)

POP is a measurement of how many orders go perfectly smoothly from the time that a customer clicks “Add to Cart” to the product arriving at their home.
If you have a high Perfect Order Percentage, that means you have a high in-stock rate, accurate product listings and prompt shipping. That’s exactly what Amazon wants for each and every one of their customers, so they’ll naturally rank high-POP sellers above lower-POP ones.

Order Defect Rate (ODR)

ODR is basically the opposite metric of POP.
Every time a customer makes a claim with an order, that’s considered an order defect. Here are some of the most ways an order can defect:
  • Negative buyer feedback
  • A-to-Z Guarantee claim
  • Any kind of shipment problem
  • Credit card chargeback
Each of those examples by itself would count towards your Order Defect Rate, which is the number of order defects compared to the total number of orders fulfilled over a given period of time. Amazon says that all sellers should aim for an ODR under 1%.
Important! Buyer-removed negative feedback does not count towards your ODR. So, it really pays to address each and every one of your customers’ issues.

Exit Rate

How often does a customer view your listing and then exit Amazon.com? That’s your exit rate.
If your page has an above average exit rate, Amazon takes that as a sign that you have a low-quality listing. Usually a high exit rate is because your product has a low in-stock rate, or because your listing isn’t fully complete.

Packaging Options

This is a metric that I didn’t used to think Amazon measured, but recently I’ve been seeing stuff like this in product search results:
Amazon Listing Packaging Options
Clearly packaging options are something that Amazon has found their customers care about. But, even if it weren’t, it’s a great way to separate your listing from other similar products (and rank higher through an increased conversion rate).
An easy way to do this – seen in the example above – is to use Fulfillment by Amazon to offer Frustration Free Packaging. This is where Amazon uses less packaging and fully recyclable materials without sacrificing product protection. You can read more about it here.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

This post is getting dangerously close to 4,000 words, so I know that a lot of you probably won’t read it all.
That’s okay – I’ll forgive you with time :)
Key takeaways from The Ultimate Guide to Ranking Products on Amazon:
  • Maximum RPC (Revenue Per Customer) is Amazon’s top goal.
  • Amazon’s A9 algorithm uses conversion rate, relevance and customer satisfaction to rank products.
  • Fill out as much of your product listing page as possible, using as many keywords as possible.
  • Use FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) to automate customer satisfaction.
  • Find ways to encourage customer reviews, and do everything you can to keep your customers happy.
  • Above all: More sales = higher rankings = more sales
There you have it! You now know exactly what metrics Amazon is looking at to rank listings in their industry-leading product search engine. All that’s left is for you to go out there and capitalize on your superior knowledge!