Brain MRI Blues Post

I don't expect to get any work done today - I have to head up to the hospital to have my head examined-fun fun. At least I didn't have to call in sick to anyone. Of course some of the benefits of this job are lousy - no sick pay for example... Not that it pays much of anything at this point anyway!

Amazon Context Links

I am an Amazon Associate, which means that have an account with Amazon that allows me to put links from my webpages and blogs to Amazon and get paid a commision (very small commision - about 4%) is someone buy the product I am linking to. Ussually I use it on my children's books blog to link to products I am reviewing or quoting from or otherwise mentioning in some fashion. For example I have a list of the Newberry Award Winners from 1986 to the present as a blog post and link to each of the books on Amazon. I have a notice of the new Harry Potter book that you can preorder from Amazon and thus have a link to it.

Amazon has come out with a new product for us associates to try out - context links. The way it is supposed to work is that I embed some html code in my blogpost, and Amazon will automatically add links from the text of the blog to something relevant that you can buy on Amazon. Consider this post a test. Except for the link to the MadLuck Books Blog above, the rest of the links in this post were created automatically by Amazon. (If there are any???)


Edit - so far no links apparent let me go back to the drawing board...
Edit2 - I've added the script to the template as well (which should add links to the whole page maybe? - might be a problem with this "new blogger") Also may take time for links to show up so I will be patient...

Legitimate link requests

When I first started my personalized children's books web site madluckbooks.com, I read a lot of SEO (SEO = search engine optimization or some such) "how to" sites and books which recommended that the best way to get noticed by the search engines was to go out and get as many reciprocal links as possible. The more the merrier was the view point and it didn't matter where you got them from. One site or book suggested that you do a search on Google and yahoo to find out what sites were linking to your competitors than contact them and get them to link to your site. So I followed the instructions and contacted as many sites as I could and asked them to exchange links with me. After a while I had twenty or thirty links on my "links" page, and about 5 or 10 links back to me. The problem with requesting reciprocal links (or link exchanges) is that you have to link to the site first and hope that they follow up with a link back to you. It is time consuming, making the requests and putting the links up and making sure they link back to you and taking the links down if they don't.

Then I started reading elsewhere that reciprocal links weren't so great, especially if the sites you were linking to were considered link farms (IE sites that spasmodically link to everyone and anyone) or if they were unrelated to your site (like a link from a mattress company to my personalized book website.) Better than these links would be a one way link from a site or blog that linked to you because they like your content, or they were reviewing your product on their site.

So I more or less put my link exchange program on hold and stopped sending out the "link to me please" emails. Over the last year I have received a few requests to exchange links, usually from spam sites that I wouldn't be caught dead linking to. But I did recently get my first "legitimate" link exchange request from a site that sold a related product (educational children's toys), and had a decent PageRank from their links page. So after hesitating for a week or so, I added the link to mytoysmart.com. I'll keep an eye on them to make sure they keep my link up. One down side from them - they have over a hundred out bound links from their link page which make a link from them not as valuable...

Search Engine Rankings March 2007

It has been a while since I last looked at my search engine rankings, the last time I detailed them here was September 8, 2006. So here are the new and improved March of 2007 rankings for Personalized Books by MadLuck Books (the first number is the current ranking, the number in parenthesis is the 9/8/06 ranking, did not check ranking for "personalized book" in 2006):

For Google:
personalized books - #36 (#69)
personalized children's books - #114 (#119)
personalized childrens books - #57 (#75)
personalized story books - #16 (#17) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #10 TOP TEN!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #9 (#26) TOP TEN RANKING IN PRIMARY KEY WORD!
personalized children's books - #50 (#47)
personalized childrens books - #64 (#44)
personalized story books - #10 (#29) TOP TEN!
personalized book - #10 TOP TEN


The Good: Improvement in 2 out of 4 keywords on Google, and Yahoo. A top twenty and a top ten ranking on Google, and three top ten rankings on Yahoo including a top ten ranking for the primary key word of "personalized books".

The Bad: Decreases in ranking for personalized children's books, and personalized childrens books, both "often searched" key words. Also, I have hit the top ten on Yahoo for personalized books before - it lasted less than a week before I was bumped back down to 12 or 13 and I expect this time to be just as short lived (but maybe that is just the pessimist in me).

For the web site to be truly successful, I need to crack the top ten on Google for personalized books. We are getting there (a drop from 69 to 36) but still have a ways to go.

Listing books

So I have made my way through about half of the 2000 book I bought from the Russian EBay seller a few weeks ago and have been able to list about 280 of them. My estimate is that I'll get about 500 altogether listed. Not so good you say? Well considering that I have been able to list them at an average price of around $12.00 each, the 500 books should eventually bring me in about $6000.00 dollars- a pretty good profit on the $300 dollars or so I spent on them. It is time consuming though (three and a half hours today to list 30 books for example.) Plus, what do I do with the 1500 or so books I can't sell??? Right now they are stacked up in various piles all over the basement.

Other book selling news - I did get Steve Weber's book and have already put some of his suggestions to use - full review coming soon. And some idiot decided to give me fair review as a seller because they didn't read the Amazon description that gave the publication date of the book and would not remove the review even after I gave him a full refund. So sales have been slow despite the many new books listed. Oh well...