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Apr 8, 2009 
These past few days I have been asking you to participate in an “experiment” involving Amazon reviews. I asked you to:
Please click on this link ( http://budurl.com/54cp ) and it should bring you right to one of my reviews of one of Kevin’s books at Amazon with my review title “Classic Salesmanship…” Just click “Yes” on “Was this review Helpful to you?” below the review and you are done…
Thanks for helping out! First, a couple of things about this experiment…
- I used a budurl for the link to the site I asked you to visit. You can set up a free account at www.budurl.com (or pay a few bux for an account with more features- I have the free account right now) and this will allow you to “see” exactly how many people have clicked on that url… So, I know exactly how much traffic was generated on that budurl links.
- budurl’s are cloaked so you can’t see where they go to. And they allow you to use shorter links in your messages… people click easier on shorter links…
- Amazon rates its reviewers in part based on how “helpful” their reviews are to the Amazon client base. The more “This is Helpful” clicks you have the higher your review ranking.
- Since I want to increase my reviewer rank, I want more Helpful votes, but Amazon has a little note that they are taking steps to detect campaigns to get Helpful clicks.
- I wanted to determine if the steps they are taking could detect putting up a link to a particular review, and asking people to Click to give me “Helpful” votes.
Here are the results…
Over two days, I used my blog and several twitter tweets to send people to my Amazon review asking for them to click on Yes this is Helpful.
I got 44 total clicks on the budurl that goes to that review. 16 of them came from twitter, and 28 came from this blog… Of the 16 that came from twitter, 0nly 5 of them were actual people, the other 11 were various bots and webcrawlers that scour the Internet for links to follow…
Of the 28 from this blog, 3 of them were mine, so that leaves 25 clicks from other people. Total 30 real people clicked on the budurl link and went to the review.
Assuming that my instructions were clear and that link actually took people to where I think it did, that means 30 people were right there ready to click on the “This is Helpful” button… I got 7 Helpful votes. So I think that either my instructions didn’t work as I intended or Amazon was able to somehow detect the “campaign” and eliminate some of the votes that I was trying to manufacture…
I might try another way to accomplish this in a future post. I would be interested in any comments from those who participated in this “experiment”.
Rob
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• Apr 8, 2009 @12:21 pm
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