Taken directly from the Higher Balance Galaxy forums. Coincidentally the very same month that a HBI staff member joins the Amazon team they publish an eight step by step guide that even includes percentages. I've contacted CEO's at Amazon and also different departments that allowing these reviews to stay up and the negative ones to be pushed down could be construed as purposely misleading consumers. In fact you can already see the negative reviews on amazon.com are claiming that the numerous five star reviews mislead them into purchasing Eric Pepin's book.
Eric Robinson Author of bending God
A Short Guide to
Promoting Higher Balance on Amazon
So, you say you love Eric’s books, you want to help share and get them out in the world, but don’t know much about Amazon or the internet?
Well, this handy guide is here to show you how, in a few simple steps, you can help get the good word out about Higher Balance. It’s simple, takes only a few clicks, and requires the least amount of effort for the biggest reward.
The journey of a thousand minds begins with a single click
1. BOOKS, BOOKS, AND BOOKS
This is really all about the books, which is the easiest and fastest way to get knowledge into peoples lives right now. There are four books on Amazon (but this applies to all future books as well).
Right now we’re going to boost the books on Amazon. It will take less than 3 minutes. Here are the links you’ll need:
Silent Awakening: http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Awakening-Telepathy-Effective-Awareness-ebook/dp/B00HBSBJQS
Igniting the Sixth Sense: http://amazon.com/Igniting-Sixth-Sense-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B00EH0RL8I/
Meditation within Eternity: http://www.amazon.com/Meditation-within-Eternity-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00B0MPCKA
Handbook of the Navigator: http://www.amazon.com/The-Handbook-Navigator-ebook/dp/B001NEKDDG/
Bending God: http://www.amazon.com/Bending-God-A-Memoir-ebook/dp/B005E1OXEE/
2. BOOST HELPFUL REVIEWS
Right now, log into your Amazon.com account. Now go to http://amazon.com/Igniting-Sixth-Sense-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B00EH0RL8I/
Scroll down to the bottom where you see the reviews. There are two columns of reviews. The main column in the center of your screen, “Most Helpful Customer Reviews”, and on the right side, “Most Recent Customer Reviews”.
Most people scroll straight down the center to the most helpful reviews.
Notice at the top of each review is something like this, “52 of 56 people found the following review helpful”
Amazon ranks these reviews in large part based on this number. The more people find something helpful, the more Amazon pushes it to the top. The least helpful, the lower. Now scroll down to the bottom of the review. You see, “Was this review helpful to you? YES | NO”.
If you are logged into your Amazon account, click YES on Steve Pfaff’s review.
Congratulations! You just helped Igniting the Sixth Sense with a single click
3. ALL THINGS IN MODERATION – BOOSTING POSITIVE REVIEWS
Here’s what you can do next: Find a few reviews that personally speak to you, or you think someone else looking for the book would find helpful. Click YES, you found it helpful.
DO NOT click YES on every single positive review. Don’t spam the system. As much as I like 4 and 5 star reviews, I read some and they don’t speak to me. As a book reader, they sound too much like a commercial or don’t speak to what I would look for in a book.
As a general rule, don’t YES more than 10% of total reviews. 5% is perfect.
If a book has 60 reviews, I would click YES on 3 reviews. It may not sound like much, but if each person does this it really adds up. Plus, it means you don’t have to put much time into it to be really helpful.
4. UNHELPFUL REVIEWS AND CLICKING ‘NO’
Here’s the thing: Amazon is trying to create a system that is as automated as possible. They want people to police the system themselves by the power of the crowd. With a small number of results, it is easy to game Amazon. The larger, more popular something is, the harder it becomes.
Relying on people to police the system is great – if everyone is completely honest without personal agendas. Unfortunately, the system can be abused by fake profiles, or competitors looking to harm your reputation, or when the number of reviews is still relatively small… even a single person with bad intention can drag a book down while it is still gaining momentum.
For the most part, the rule of the internet regarding negativity is simple: Don’t feed the trolls.
Some people feed off negativity. Ignore them, and it goes away. Put energy and attention to them, and it makes them stronger. You give them what they want – attention.
Amazon, like most search engines, rewards any kind of engagement. It doesn’t see good or bad. Energy is energy. If you comment, click, or link to a negative review or comment – even in the hopes to dispute it – all you do is give it power.
In an interview Tim Ferris (New York Times bestselling author and all-around incredible promoter and ‘messager’) said that you should ignore any reviews of 1 or 2, because people who leave reviews like that are a) generally impossible to make happy about anything, so why try b) leave 1 or 2 rating on anything they review, so are generally impossible to make happy or c) have some other issue or agenda (they are a competitor, philosophically opposed to your content, or just don’t like your face).
I’m really emphasizing this because many Higher Balance people are very passionate – which is cool. This passion often leads to seeing something negative and then pouring all this energy into trying to dispute it or argue in such a way to change the persons mind – which is bad. Because you can’t. All you do is waste your time and give more juice to the negativity.
The internet is a terrible medium for having in-depth discussions in general. Discussions that involve opposing-viewpoints is even worse.
The rule-of-thumb then is to feed the positive, ignore the negative.
5. WHEN YOU MUST DISPUTE NEGATIVE REVIEWS
There are rare cases when you need to dispute negative comments. This is when comments go beyond what could be considered someone’s opinion about a book. Everyone should be entitled to their opinion, whether it agrees or disagrees with yours. Their opinion is theirs – don’t take it personal.
Sometimes, a comment is made by someone with an agenda, who is purposely trying to harm a book and turn people away. A little research (if you want to bother) shows this pretty quickly.
Here’s an example:
Still logged into your Amazon account, let’s revisit:
http://www.amazon.com/Igniting-Sixth-Sense-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B00EH0RL8I/
Scroll down to reviews and currently, there is a recent negative review that has climbed to the top of the list.
The first thing to look at is the number of people who found the review helpful. 105! That’s quite a high number for a review made on August 31, when today is September 16th.
Scroll back to Steve Pfaff’s review, which has been at the top since the release of the book on August 12th. It has 56 votes total, versus 118 on this review. That’s double in less time.
Quickly scrolling through the list to see the total number of votes on the top reviews you see: 31, 30, 34, 22. When I look at other 1 star reviews I see totals of: 3, 2, 4.
In other words this review has an abnormally high rank above any review on the whole book – WAY above any other negative review. Right away this sends up a red flag that someone is putting a lot of energy into it and is gaming the system.
Those numbers don’t happen naturally, there is a campaign directed to get traffic to it.
Ignore the irony that someone is gaming a negative review, while the review is complaining that other reviews of the book must be fake and the author (Eric) must be gaming and cheating the system. Remember, don’t take this personal. Success breeds animosity and as Eric’s best selling book to date, it is only natural that it brings out an ugly side in competitors or organizations that might feel threatened of this. For every action an equal and opposite reaction.
Reading the review, you can tell this person spent a lot of time researching Eric Pepin, because the review is mostly an attack on Eric and trying to tear down his character than discussing the book. Someone who simply read the book and didn’t like it, even a 1, isn’t going to spend the time to do this without an agenda.
Following the Tim Ferris rule that most people who do 1 or 2 star reviews will always rate that, we can check their profile.
We find they rate “Words of Jesus Daily” a 5 star and say they use the app twice a day. Right away their strong reaction to a popular metaphysical book makes sense and we can see the picture forming already. Christianity, sadly, has its fair share of extremists and a church would have the draw to collectively campaign to game a book via a message forum or church email.
He also gives a Sylvia Browne book a 1 star. Feng Shui book – 1 star. A diet book – 5 star. So any book of any metaphysical philosophy is getting a 1 star by this person. Pattern. Agenda.
All of this would be fine, and should be ignored, except for the fact that they are gaming their review to rise to the top. This means anyone coming to the book see’s their review first.
6. HOW TO PUSH DOWN NEGATIVE REVIEWS
Here is what you do:
Scroll to the bottom of the review. We see the same question, “was it helpful? YES | NO”.
Before you hit NO, check out to the left where it says 12 comments.
On any review, you are able to comment and reply to the review. This guy is making a lot of negative claims, and some people have disputed those. Here’s the problem – that only feeds this to rank higher on Amazon. This comment is getting engagement, that draws people to Amazon, which Amazon wants so it gives it more juice.
If you are considering making a comment, check to see if the point you want to make has already been made. If so, walk away. Don’t feed the troll. You can’t win an argument on the internet. All you do is give the negative people power. I would say after 4 comments, everything that could be said, has been said. And checking the comments, the first person to respond made great, practical, down-to-earth points. That’s the best you can hope for. If that’s done – move on.
Go back to the review and click NO.
Next, Amazon will have a message appear.
They will thank you for your feedback and give the option to tell them if the review is inappropriate.
Now, normally if you just disagree with a 1 star or they went on some weird rant that wasn’t helpful – just click NO and move on.
However, if it really is abusing the system and is way off topic, go ahead and report abuse. In this case, we are going to click “please let us know”. Go ahead and click NO, and then “please let us know” if you haven’t already.
A pop-up window appears like this:
You have two choices, simply report the review by clicking, “Report as inappropriate”, or enter a reason why and then submit it.
For this review, we go to Amazon’s own rules and terms and conditions. They say that information which is offtopic, so unrelated to the product or service, is commenting or reviewing the seller rather than the product, or is promoting offsite url’s – is against their policy.
In this case the person is going on a rant unrelated to the book (offtopic), attacking the authors character (commenting on seller rather than product) and is pushing people to url’s off Amazon.com (offsite url).
So I type in: Offtopic information, personal attack on author, inappropriate content – offsite url
hit submit and I’m done.
All the other 1 star reviews I leave as-is. Why? Because anyone of same or similar personalities may feel the same, which means they shouldn’t read the book in the first place. We want the negative reviews to weed out the wrong people, just as we want positive reviews to attract the right people.
If I were going to do anything I would find 1 to 2 more that I feel were off-topic or totally unrealistic and I would click “NO” they were not helpful – but I wouldn’t flag them for abuse.
The main point is – NEVER flag all 1 or 2 star reviews NO. NEVER flag all reviews as abusive unless they really are. If you only promote 5% of positive reviews, only downvote 2.5% of negative reviews. The ones you REALLY disagree with.
If everyone likes a book – something is seriously wrong. Nothing in life is so clean-cut. Every single book on the planet should have people who hate it. Even books about puppies eating ice cream. This is a natural balance. Don’t try to control it.
7. TAKING MORE TIME – COMMENTS
Most of what we just went through involves simple clicking. YES a review was helpful, or NO it wasn’t.
If you want to take more time LEAVE A REVIEW!
Write a review of the kind you would find useful for yourself. Don’t ‘hype’. Be realistic, make it personal, keep it real.
Short or long doesn’t matter to Amazon. What you rate it and that you left a review is enough. If you are Amazon verified as owning the book adds more weight. If you don’t own it – doesn’t do much.
Also notice you can comment on other reviews. Writing a comment on a positive review gives it more weight than if you simply click YES. It doesn’t need to be long. If you found something really helpful in a review – write a quick comment telling them that.
Quick rule of thumb is that if it takes more time to do something – generally means Amazon gives it more weight.
8. DO IT FOR ALL THE BOOKS
Now rinse and repeat for all the other books. Take 5% of total reviews and click YES on positive ones. Comment if you have time. Downvote half that of really negative reviews (or leave them alone).
That’s it! A really simple, easy way to help promote Higher Balance on Amazon, contribute to getting the books out there, and using Amazons system to moderate people abusing the system.
Eric Robinson Author of bending God
A Short Guide to
Promoting Higher Balance on Amazon
So, you say you love Eric’s books, you want to help share and get them out in the world, but don’t know much about Amazon or the internet?
Well, this handy guide is here to show you how, in a few simple steps, you can help get the good word out about Higher Balance. It’s simple, takes only a few clicks, and requires the least amount of effort for the biggest reward.
The journey of a thousand minds begins with a single click
1. BOOKS, BOOKS, AND BOOKS
This is really all about the books, which is the easiest and fastest way to get knowledge into peoples lives right now. There are four books on Amazon (but this applies to all future books as well).
Right now we’re going to boost the books on Amazon. It will take less than 3 minutes. Here are the links you’ll need:
Silent Awakening: http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Awakening-Telepathy-Effective-Awareness-ebook/dp/B00HBSBJQS
Igniting the Sixth Sense: http://amazon.com/Igniting-Sixth-Sense-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B00EH0RL8I/
Meditation within Eternity: http://www.amazon.com/Meditation-within-Eternity-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B00B0MPCKA
Handbook of the Navigator: http://www.amazon.com/The-Handbook-Navigator-ebook/dp/B001NEKDDG/
Bending God: http://www.amazon.com/Bending-God-A-Memoir-ebook/dp/B005E1OXEE/
2. BOOST HELPFUL REVIEWS
Right now, log into your Amazon.com account. Now go to http://amazon.com/Igniting-Sixth-Sense-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B00EH0RL8I/
Scroll down to the bottom where you see the reviews. There are two columns of reviews. The main column in the center of your screen, “Most Helpful Customer Reviews”, and on the right side, “Most Recent Customer Reviews”.
Most people scroll straight down the center to the most helpful reviews.
Notice at the top of each review is something like this, “52 of 56 people found the following review helpful”
Amazon ranks these reviews in large part based on this number. The more people find something helpful, the more Amazon pushes it to the top. The least helpful, the lower. Now scroll down to the bottom of the review. You see, “Was this review helpful to you? YES | NO”.
If you are logged into your Amazon account, click YES on Steve Pfaff’s review.
Congratulations! You just helped Igniting the Sixth Sense with a single click
3. ALL THINGS IN MODERATION – BOOSTING POSITIVE REVIEWS
Here’s what you can do next: Find a few reviews that personally speak to you, or you think someone else looking for the book would find helpful. Click YES, you found it helpful.
DO NOT click YES on every single positive review. Don’t spam the system. As much as I like 4 and 5 star reviews, I read some and they don’t speak to me. As a book reader, they sound too much like a commercial or don’t speak to what I would look for in a book.
As a general rule, don’t YES more than 10% of total reviews. 5% is perfect.
If a book has 60 reviews, I would click YES on 3 reviews. It may not sound like much, but if each person does this it really adds up. Plus, it means you don’t have to put much time into it to be really helpful.
4. UNHELPFUL REVIEWS AND CLICKING ‘NO’
Here’s the thing: Amazon is trying to create a system that is as automated as possible. They want people to police the system themselves by the power of the crowd. With a small number of results, it is easy to game Amazon. The larger, more popular something is, the harder it becomes.
Relying on people to police the system is great – if everyone is completely honest without personal agendas. Unfortunately, the system can be abused by fake profiles, or competitors looking to harm your reputation, or when the number of reviews is still relatively small… even a single person with bad intention can drag a book down while it is still gaining momentum.
For the most part, the rule of the internet regarding negativity is simple: Don’t feed the trolls.
Some people feed off negativity. Ignore them, and it goes away. Put energy and attention to them, and it makes them stronger. You give them what they want – attention.
Amazon, like most search engines, rewards any kind of engagement. It doesn’t see good or bad. Energy is energy. If you comment, click, or link to a negative review or comment – even in the hopes to dispute it – all you do is give it power.
In an interview Tim Ferris (New York Times bestselling author and all-around incredible promoter and ‘messager’) said that you should ignore any reviews of 1 or 2, because people who leave reviews like that are a) generally impossible to make happy about anything, so why try b) leave 1 or 2 rating on anything they review, so are generally impossible to make happy or c) have some other issue or agenda (they are a competitor, philosophically opposed to your content, or just don’t like your face).
I’m really emphasizing this because many Higher Balance people are very passionate – which is cool. This passion often leads to seeing something negative and then pouring all this energy into trying to dispute it or argue in such a way to change the persons mind – which is bad. Because you can’t. All you do is waste your time and give more juice to the negativity.
The internet is a terrible medium for having in-depth discussions in general. Discussions that involve opposing-viewpoints is even worse.
The rule-of-thumb then is to feed the positive, ignore the negative.
5. WHEN YOU MUST DISPUTE NEGATIVE REVIEWS
There are rare cases when you need to dispute negative comments. This is when comments go beyond what could be considered someone’s opinion about a book. Everyone should be entitled to their opinion, whether it agrees or disagrees with yours. Their opinion is theirs – don’t take it personal.
Sometimes, a comment is made by someone with an agenda, who is purposely trying to harm a book and turn people away. A little research (if you want to bother) shows this pretty quickly.
Here’s an example:
Still logged into your Amazon account, let’s revisit:
http://www.amazon.com/Igniting-Sixth-Sense-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B00EH0RL8I/
Scroll down to reviews and currently, there is a recent negative review that has climbed to the top of the list.
The first thing to look at is the number of people who found the review helpful. 105! That’s quite a high number for a review made on August 31, when today is September 16th.
Scroll back to Steve Pfaff’s review, which has been at the top since the release of the book on August 12th. It has 56 votes total, versus 118 on this review. That’s double in less time.
Quickly scrolling through the list to see the total number of votes on the top reviews you see: 31, 30, 34, 22. When I look at other 1 star reviews I see totals of: 3, 2, 4.
In other words this review has an abnormally high rank above any review on the whole book – WAY above any other negative review. Right away this sends up a red flag that someone is putting a lot of energy into it and is gaming the system.
Those numbers don’t happen naturally, there is a campaign directed to get traffic to it.
Ignore the irony that someone is gaming a negative review, while the review is complaining that other reviews of the book must be fake and the author (Eric) must be gaming and cheating the system. Remember, don’t take this personal. Success breeds animosity and as Eric’s best selling book to date, it is only natural that it brings out an ugly side in competitors or organizations that might feel threatened of this. For every action an equal and opposite reaction.
Reading the review, you can tell this person spent a lot of time researching Eric Pepin, because the review is mostly an attack on Eric and trying to tear down his character than discussing the book. Someone who simply read the book and didn’t like it, even a 1, isn’t going to spend the time to do this without an agenda.
Following the Tim Ferris rule that most people who do 1 or 2 star reviews will always rate that, we can check their profile.
We find they rate “Words of Jesus Daily” a 5 star and say they use the app twice a day. Right away their strong reaction to a popular metaphysical book makes sense and we can see the picture forming already. Christianity, sadly, has its fair share of extremists and a church would have the draw to collectively campaign to game a book via a message forum or church email.
He also gives a Sylvia Browne book a 1 star. Feng Shui book – 1 star. A diet book – 5 star. So any book of any metaphysical philosophy is getting a 1 star by this person. Pattern. Agenda.
All of this would be fine, and should be ignored, except for the fact that they are gaming their review to rise to the top. This means anyone coming to the book see’s their review first.
6. HOW TO PUSH DOWN NEGATIVE REVIEWS
Here is what you do:
Scroll to the bottom of the review. We see the same question, “was it helpful? YES | NO”.
Before you hit NO, check out to the left where it says 12 comments.
On any review, you are able to comment and reply to the review. This guy is making a lot of negative claims, and some people have disputed those. Here’s the problem – that only feeds this to rank higher on Amazon. This comment is getting engagement, that draws people to Amazon, which Amazon wants so it gives it more juice.
If you are considering making a comment, check to see if the point you want to make has already been made. If so, walk away. Don’t feed the troll. You can’t win an argument on the internet. All you do is give the negative people power. I would say after 4 comments, everything that could be said, has been said. And checking the comments, the first person to respond made great, practical, down-to-earth points. That’s the best you can hope for. If that’s done – move on.
Go back to the review and click NO.
Next, Amazon will have a message appear.
They will thank you for your feedback and give the option to tell them if the review is inappropriate.
Now, normally if you just disagree with a 1 star or they went on some weird rant that wasn’t helpful – just click NO and move on.
However, if it really is abusing the system and is way off topic, go ahead and report abuse. In this case, we are going to click “please let us know”. Go ahead and click NO, and then “please let us know” if you haven’t already.
A pop-up window appears like this:
You have two choices, simply report the review by clicking, “Report as inappropriate”, or enter a reason why and then submit it.
For this review, we go to Amazon’s own rules and terms and conditions. They say that information which is offtopic, so unrelated to the product or service, is commenting or reviewing the seller rather than the product, or is promoting offsite url’s – is against their policy.
In this case the person is going on a rant unrelated to the book (offtopic), attacking the authors character (commenting on seller rather than product) and is pushing people to url’s off Amazon.com (offsite url).
So I type in: Offtopic information, personal attack on author, inappropriate content – offsite url
hit submit and I’m done.
All the other 1 star reviews I leave as-is. Why? Because anyone of same or similar personalities may feel the same, which means they shouldn’t read the book in the first place. We want the negative reviews to weed out the wrong people, just as we want positive reviews to attract the right people.
If I were going to do anything I would find 1 to 2 more that I feel were off-topic or totally unrealistic and I would click “NO” they were not helpful – but I wouldn’t flag them for abuse.
The main point is – NEVER flag all 1 or 2 star reviews NO. NEVER flag all reviews as abusive unless they really are. If you only promote 5% of positive reviews, only downvote 2.5% of negative reviews. The ones you REALLY disagree with.
If everyone likes a book – something is seriously wrong. Nothing in life is so clean-cut. Every single book on the planet should have people who hate it. Even books about puppies eating ice cream. This is a natural balance. Don’t try to control it.
7. TAKING MORE TIME – COMMENTS
Most of what we just went through involves simple clicking. YES a review was helpful, or NO it wasn’t.
If you want to take more time LEAVE A REVIEW!
Write a review of the kind you would find useful for yourself. Don’t ‘hype’. Be realistic, make it personal, keep it real.
Short or long doesn’t matter to Amazon. What you rate it and that you left a review is enough. If you are Amazon verified as owning the book adds more weight. If you don’t own it – doesn’t do much.
Also notice you can comment on other reviews. Writing a comment on a positive review gives it more weight than if you simply click YES. It doesn’t need to be long. If you found something really helpful in a review – write a quick comment telling them that.
Quick rule of thumb is that if it takes more time to do something – generally means Amazon gives it more weight.
8. DO IT FOR ALL THE BOOKS
Now rinse and repeat for all the other books. Take 5% of total reviews and click YES on positive ones. Comment if you have time. Downvote half that of really negative reviews (or leave them alone).
That’s it! A really simple, easy way to help promote Higher Balance on Amazon, contribute to getting the books out there, and using Amazons system to moderate people abusing the system.
