The power of keywords.
Buried in the search options is a very unassuming little field labeled "title search." That's what this article is about.
The number one question we get from new users "Hey, what's the best search? How do I set the search options to find the most profitable books?"
If there was such thing as a "Right search" everyone would do it, and it would be obsolete overnight, right? (Especially if I published it here.)
Be glad there's no such thing as a "right search." It's what ensures there's enough to go around because everybody's setting the search options their own individual ways.
When people ask me this question, "what's the best search?" I actually have an answer for them. Here it is, drumroll...
"Do broad searches combined with niche title keywords."
A broad search is anything that brings up tons and tons and tons of results, too many to sort through.
A title keyword is a word that narrows that broad searches to a profitable category of books. And I'll explain what I mean by that in a second because some categories are more profitable than others. So that's basically, how you combine a broad search and then you narrow that broad search and refine it down by using a title keyword.
All genres of books are profitable to one extent or the other.
But with online book arbitrage, most of the money is in what we call "scholarly non-fiction."
That doesn't always mean textbooks, that means books that function as textbooks that we can price as textbooks but maybe don't always look like textbooks.
So good title keyword to narrow the search is one that narrows it to just one niche of scholarly non-fiction book.
And there's actually I've actually done other community calls about this particular subject, so I'm not gonna go deep in exactly how to find scholarly non-fiction. But my advice is that a good title keyword is one that will narrow the searches...wait I'm trying to read my own writing here.
So in the book "Online Book Arbitrage" a lot of you have read I just as an example use the word immunology right? That narrows it down to start a very niche subject of scholarly non-fiction okay. Scholarly non-fiction is non-fiction that does not appeal to the masses if that's not clear. So immunology is not light reading that your mom would do however she might read a book on you know, the biography of Ronald Reagan or something or at least my mom would.
Number One, most people are doing broad searches with no keywords. Meaning that most people are to one extent or another going over the same results as other members.
True, there is enough variety in the search results without using title keywords that it's not like everybody is combing over each other's crumbs.
There's so many different ways to set searches, sales rank and minimum, maximum price, etc.
People aren't tweaking the searches that much, so you get a huge advantage when you use keywords.
Number Two is that your options to sort a broad search outside of keywords are finite.
Your search options aren't exactly small, but there's only approximately 12 of them.
So you only have 12 different ways to search.
Whereas there are countless number of keywords.
When you are not using keywords, every search option is for an attribute that applies to every book. Minimum price, maximum price, sales rank etc, these things apply to every book. Every book has a price, every book has a sales rank.
However, with title keywords, those keywords do not apply to every book.
Meaning: keywords are a fantastic way to cut through all of the results and get right down into hidden veins of gold within Amazon.
Number Three is there are so many title keywords and so few Zen Arbitrage users. So it is exceedingly unlikely that any two users are using the same keywords.
Let's say you do a super broad result that literally brings up hundreds of thousands of results. You could go through all those 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 results.
Or you could throw a keyword in there like "immunology" It's exceedingly unlikely that any two users are going to use the same keyword.
Tip: avoid keywords that are themselves too broad. In other words, you can do a broad search, but if you use a broad keyword, you're still likely to get too many results to sort through. An example is "biology," which is just going to bring up 300,000 books more more.
Lastly, no "scholarly non-fiction" keyword is better than any other.
(With the exception of very broad words I just mentioned).
There is no keyword that is more profitable than another. It's just about using keyword to cut through the same old results, and seeing books no one else is looking at.
Resource: Download a 1,000 keyword list (spreadsheet)
- Peter Valley