Electrosmart Blog For Digital Publishers And Internet Marketers

I want to add a plug for an amazing free online tool for those wanting to keep track of sales on Amazon. Called Amazon Sales Rank Express, it offers a very quick way to not only check your current sales rank [which also provides an indication of how many books you have sold that day], but also:

• Sales by different formats – print, audio, kindle
• Top pairings – other books brought together with your book
• Sales Page data – current discount, reveiws, used books for sale [incl price]

My personal thanks to Aaron Shepard for developing this widget and making it available to authors and publishers.

Check it out for yourself here - it is amazingly fast and retains your data from previous checks. No more waiting for sluggish the Amazon Sales Page to load and you can check on multiple books in a flash.

Beginning in April 2008, the time your page takes to load the HTML, will impact your landing page quality score.

The good news is - it is NOT affected by the time it takes to load your images.
The bad news is – all of your landing pages on a single domain using the same keyword in an ad group will be affected by one poor landing page time. So in essence, it is your keywords that link to the load time, not the landing pages. Further, if you have multiple ad groups with landing pages on the same domain, the keywords in all these ad groups will receive the same load time grades. If your ad group uses landing pages across different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time.

The total time is taken from the time the visitor clicks your adwords ad, until the HTML has finished loading. Once your load time grade becomes visible, your Quality Score will be impacted.

Now the obvious question most of you will be asking right about now is – what impact does the speed of my sites host server have on my quality score? Well, Google have that covered – load time is evaluated relative to the average in your server’s geographic region.

You can check out a keyword loadtime here.

You will get one of the following responses:

“This page loads slowly” – your quality score will be reduced
“No problems found” – your quality score will be unaffected
“No problems found – AND – Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region” – you will probably find your quality score improves.

To improve the load speed of your page, Google suggests:

1. Use fewer and faster redirects – set refresh to 0 seconds
2. Don’t use interstitial pages – where user has to wait before being redirected
3. Find a faster host server
4. If your page is large – compress the size of your page.

I’m using the Easter Break to do my own online update bonanza, you know – all those fiddly little tasks you keep putting to one side. So the next few blogs will provide some guidelines on how you too can clean up your act, and make more money online.

There has been an ongoing debate for the past couple of years on ‘The Landing Page’. Since the Google Slap of 2006 saw many Internet Marketers ‘lose their way’ with Google, and the introduction of the Landing Page Quality Score, publishers have been seeking out the formula to the perfect landing page – as seen by Google.

Some internet marketers now suggest that landing pages are no longer an effective way of marketing on AdWords. It seems that today, Google is more interested in the function of your landing page, rather than its form. If Google perceives that the sole reason for your landing page is to funnel users to another site, then you get penalised – regardless of how many paragraphs, links or other pages you have on the minisite. Landing pages must be part of a full web site with lots of original content.

Minimal Requirements

At the very least, your landing page must contain:

1. Sitemap - accessible from all pages on your site.
2. Privacy Policy – make sure it includes the recent DoubleClick DART cookie requirements.
3. Terms and Conditions - make sure you include your local regulatory requirements.
4. Contact Us - with full physical postal address and telephone number.
5. About Us - the purpose of the website is and who is operating it

If you only have a minisite around a single product, add other content, such as:

• Background Information
• Product Reviews
• Special Offers
• FAQ’s
• Blog

etc

For more information check out Googles Landing Page Guidelines

I was just listening to an interesting interview with NZ author Bob Jones on the death of the daily newspaper, and it seems the weekly magazine.

Now, most of us recognize that electronic media is putting immense pressure on printed media through loss of circulation, which in turns decreases advertising rates and so the death spiral begins. But according to Bob, one of the other key drivers is the high cost of delivering the weighty printed matter. I can certainly attest to that, having shipped books around the world. Printed material is very dense, in that it has a high weight per cubic meter. This makes shipping more expensive that most other items of the same volume.

Many daily newspapers are now going weekly, and some even giving away print altogether and relying on online advertising to make a profit. The other advantage with online advertising is that it is easier for advertisers to precisely target their market. Whilst newspapers offered some form of segmentation, it is at a much higher level than possible with online media which can be targeted at individual level.

The final nail in the coffin is that most people today do not have time to read a daily newspaper, which is why the weekend papers have both significantly higher distribution and circulation.

The signs are there – the end is near.