Amazon author blogs

Hard to believe, but the first anniversary of the publication of Make Easy Money with Google is fast approaching (June 17). This time last year I was (very) busy putting the final touches on the book, madly writing the last few chapters and updating screenshots whenever Google decided to muck with the AdSense console. (Again, my plea to Google: please bring back the old console.) The first entry in this blog, The Make Easy Money with Google blog is up!, was posted on May 30, less than 3 weeks before the book's official release.

Since then, I've written the equivalent of another book about AdSense in this blog! You can understand my reluctance, then, at participating in the AmazonConnect program, which lets books authors like myself create Amazon-managed blogs for promoting their books. For authors without a blog, it's a great idea. For authors with a blog, it's just more work!

Still, I'm not one to pass up a chance to publicize my book, so this morning I created my own AmazonConnect blog for Make Easy Money with Google, which you can now see on the book's Amazon detail page. The best thing about the blog is that it appears before any reader reviews — giving me the chance to set reader expectations a bit better than the publisher's editorial copy does — and that I can direct potential readers to this blog. Amazon's normally pretty stingy about letting visitors off its site — remember our recent discussion about the single-page AdSense site and making exit points profitable? — and the fact that these blogs let you link to external sites at all (albeit via a redirection through a new browser window) is amazing to me.

I really doubt I'll be posting much more to that blog. Hey, I just passed the 100 subscriber mark for this blog on Bloglines (use this link to add your own subscription). That doesn't sound like much, but it's not the only way people read this blog and I've been quite happy to see the numbers grow over time. (Too bad I lost my Technorati ranking due to the address change, but that should fix itself in a few more months.)

Remember, you need to be in it for the long haul to make good money from AdSense. Writing good content — whether it's maintaining a near-daily blog like this or writing new articles for your site — takes time, and your traffic will build slowly over time if your work at it. I talked about this early on in Have you read “26 Steps to 15K a Day” yet? and the advice in Brett Tabke's wonderful posting still applies today. It should be required reading for all AdSense publishers! Print it out and re-read it every week.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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