Run a search on nearly anything (especially related to books) and Amazon is likely to be in the top three results. How did they do that? They’re SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts. It all has to do with links.

First of all, people naturally link to Amazon. If you write an article about a book or other product, you naturally link to a place where you can buy it. There are tons of book review sites that link to an Amazon page for every book they review.

Second of all, you have an interesting little scheme service known as Amazon Associates. How does it work? In short, Amazon pays you to link to them. You read that correctly.

Suppose you review a book or other product on your blog. You link to the Amazon page so your readers can buy the book. In that link, you include an ID code that represents you. Whenever someone clicks through the link over to Amazon, the mega-shopping-giant starts logging what the visitor is doing. If they buy anything in the next 24 hours, you get a 2.5-8% commission. The big bloggers do this a lot, and make a considerable amount of money.

How does this help Amazon? Number one, you’re convincing people to buy stuff from them. Number two, that’s another link pointing to their domain. Once you realize that there’s a huge amount of people in the Amazon Associates program, it’ll hit you. Each one of those affiliates may have hundreds of referral links scattered throughout their sites. Multiply that by the thousands (if not millions) of Amazon Associates members, and…that’s a lot of links.

Don’t get me wrong, Amazon Associates is a great service. I’m just pointing out how much it’s benefiting Amazon. If they can do something like that, so can you. All you need is a valuable resource, and means of convincing people to link to you (I doubt you can afford to pay linkers, so I suggest coming up with something else).