Selling books on Google Base: It's better than Froogle, Adwords, Amazon or eBay

Google Base went live just a day ago, and it appears the new platform is providing serious traffic for small sellers of products on the Internet.

Earlier today, I listed my recently self-published book, The Home-Based Bookstore, on Google Base, which has already resulted in about 20 page views at my Web site in the past two hours. So my brand-new listing on Google Base already is outperforming all my other Internet-based marketing efforts, which include:

-- A listing on Froogle, which has resulted in no page views in nearly two weeks.

-- A Google Adwords campaign costing over $400 in the past week, which has resulted in about 200 page views and no apparent sales.

-- A listing on Amazon Marketplace, which has resulted in a half-dozen sales in one week (but no costs except for a 15-percent commission after the sale); and,

-- A few dozen hits over the past week from organic seach-engine hits from Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Recently I uploaded my book's PDF to Google Print, which should result in a lot more free traffic, whenever the Google gods get around to making my listing live and I begin seeing hits on the full text of my book. (I uploaded the PDF two weeks ago, but it's not even in the "processing" stage yet.)

Make no mistake, I don't believe that Google Base should be used for spamming people with irrelevant content. However, the potential beauty of Base is that people searching for classified-type ads can find relevant products they'll be interested in. For example, people who are viewing my Google Base listing are searching for "books for sale", "selling books", selling on the Internet", etc. I believe that many of them will be glad to see a clearly relevant product listing.

The main question is, how will Google integrate its Base results into its regular organic search results for users at Google.com? Certainly at this point less than one percent of Internet users are even aware of Google Base. For Base listings that are highly relevant to general search queries, it seems to me that everyone will win by including these Base listings in regular organic results.

So, kudos to Google for continuing to push the envelope on introducing new services that lots of people can use. Let's just hope they don't get the same degree of monopoly power with Internet traffic that Microsoft achieved with desktop software.