By Cole Lakes – Director of Operations, GeoRiot
GeoRiot builds links that work “across countries, devices, and stores.” The company also recently acquired BookLinker.net, which creates a universal link for a book “that works for all Amazon stores.”
If you’re an indie author, chances are you’re taking advantage of Amazon’s international online store to promote and sell your books. One thing many authors don’t realize is, if you want your books to be international bestsellers, you need to be able to promote them to international readers. Let me break it down.
When you’re marketing your books in stores like Amazon, you’re actually marketing a book to a series of region specific storefronts. For example, readers in the United Kingdom want to purchase your books in amazon.co.uk, US readers will want to use amazon.com, Germans go to amazon.de, etc. What this means is, if you’re using a single, country-specific link for your books, anyone outside of that country is unlikely to go through with the purchase, and may actually be mad at you for giving them a poor user experience when they go to buy your book. You’re probably wondering “Why” aren’t you? Good question. Let’s dig into it.
Let’s pretend that you walk into a physical store to buy a book you want, and all you have is a couple of US Dollars, no credit card, and only speak English. If that store’s signs were all in Japanese, the salesperson only spoke Japanese, and the prices were in Japanese Yen, what’s the probability of you going through with that purchase? Pretty low, right?
This is the same experience for your international users when you send them to purchase items outside their country’s storefront, which means you’re potentially losing out on any sales – including the additional affiliate money you could have made from anything else they purchased in the same session if you’re signed up for the Amazon Associates Program. Not good.
Now that I have you sufficiently worried, let’s talk about how to prevent those unhappy readers and failed purchases. What these platforms do is automatically determine the country your readers are from, then direct them to their local storefront and add your affiliate ID so that you can earn that cash we previously talked about. The good ones even give you additional benefits like creating “vanity links” such as http://mybook.to/MyBookRocks, which not only looks much better than the long Amazon links, but also gives the reader insight into exactly what it is they’re purchasing. Depending on the platform, there’s also some really solid reporting like showing you which links are leading to sales. For example – you can create a link for Facebook and a link for Twitter, then compare to see which one has more clicks, and where those clicks are coming from.
So there you have it. Signing up for the affiliate programs for Amazon is definitely a no-brainer. Using globalized links to make sure all of your readers are getting the best experience possible when purchasing your books should be as well. Of course, if you have any questions at all about how this process works, let us know. We are always here to help.
Cole Lakes is the director of Operations for GeoRiot, the world’s leading link management platform. GeoRiot specializes in ensuring the best user experience and highest conversion rates possible on the world’s largest online marketplaces.
