Thanks for the Info Purdue I was wondering if we were going to lose Ebay or if you were going to be able to fix it..
From what everyone is saying, including Al, it will just be a small code change. Chad, nice blog! Go Braves!!
I noticed you have your stores as subdomains, So IF I use my own domain I can include several subdomains in that domain for no extra cost ?
Thanks just a project blog for something I enjoy.. Figured I could make a few bucks from Adsense and Kontera on it..
I have them on the same domain but you still have to pay for each individual store, they are seperate. I just had the domain already and did not want to start a new one as this was a project but since I am starting to make money with these 2 I will probably buy domains for the next ones I buy..
Ok Guys need a little help. I have some money I wanted to put back into my stores that I made from other programs I am in. Probaly around $50 bucks. Should I buy links with most of it? Buy another store and just keep building links myself? Buy something else to help my existing sites? Any opinions are appreciated..
I feel that you can get the links yourself with little effort, so I would not spend the money on links... IMHO, you want to spend the money on things you can't do yourself... So - If you don't have articles and can't really write well, buy PLR articles (although I've promised those for free - coming soon). If you don't really know how to get links, you can buy them (but again, I think it's better to do this yourself). You could buy blog reviews of your site... I can hook you up with that if you need. Let me know. These back-links are best because the blogs are typically related to your niche... You could advertise PPC directly... Not a big fan of this personally, much prefer organic traffic. You could bring up new stores Cheers Al
If you do consider PPC, I would find a $50 voucher so you will have $100 to work with. Also, I would target specific items in your store (Callaway X460 Drivers) as opposed to the general keywords of "Golf Clubs" or "Cell Phones."
Thanks for the info, I like the idea of building links through article marketing and have used ezine articles in the past, but I just get bored with writing and never consistently write enough so it doesnt have a huge affect on my sites. I know if I just did 1 a day it would create good traffic, I just cant make myself do it.. I just hate to buy articles because I never know if they are orginal and Ezine only takes original articles.
There are a million article directory sites that don't require original compositions. I know, I know. Someone will scream duplicate content! So, don't put unoriginal stuff on your site. But for building relevant back-links, I see no problem with duplicate content. If you read Matt Cutts, you'll see that sites with overlapping content does not get removed from the index. It's in there. Thus, you'll get a back-link, and a relevant one too. Now, it will not likely show up in the SERP as Google WILL pick the site with the best PR if the content is the same. But if you're looking for links to boost up your own SERP, I think this works...
I've been using JetSpinner / JetSubmitter for articles recently. JetSpinner allows you to "spin" your articles, so by creating a few variations on paragraphs, title, sentences, words you can create many unique articles out of 1 main article. After that I use the linked service of JetSubmitter to submit them. It automatically submits your "spun" article set to 400+ articles sites. This part of the system is far from perfect, but still I got 95 accepted out of that 400+. The reason that it doesn't work perfectly is that a lot of people put up articles sites and then don't maintain them. So JetSubmitter uses the shotgun approach to submit - i.e. submit to lots and lots of sites and see what happens. So as an example I wrote 1 article. I spun it into 50 variations. So then I had 50 articles on the same topic. Then had them submitted to 400+ sites and got 95 in. After that I re-wrote the article into another high quality unique copy by hand, adding some new content and generally making it as good as possible and submitted it to Ezine Articles. So now I will have (best case) 95 backlinks that probably deliver no traffic) and 1 more back link from a high quality site that generates traffic. Anyway that is my approach. As a summary for my site. Site was created about 2-3 weeks ago. The last 4 days traffic jumped from 5-6 to 20-40 unique visitors a day. Once at my site, people don't stay long - they either bounce or click through so click through has been very high. As far as income goes, I've had 1 Amazon sale, 1 eBay sale, and 1 AdSense click. I've had 21 clicks to other CJ merchants - which may or may not end up as sales. Assuming traffic continues to build this site looks quite promising.
Thanks for the details on your experience. Keep us up to date. This is interesting. And I think others will find your description of your methods educational.. I know most don't follow-through on what they read, but it goes to show you that if you just stick-to-it, the income does come...
I think alot of the stuff you read works as far as building links and doing articles and such, its just being consistent and keeping fresh content for the search engines to find.
Your comment about providing fresh content is important I think. I have another site that is datafeed driven. It has a unique template and I have presented the way overused data in a unique way as well. It is quite well indexed and although it enjoyed reasonable success at one time, it hasn't lasted. It still brings in a few search engine hits from time to time but I can't remember the last time it made any actual money. Give Google a big freshly mashed site to eat up and it will work for a while, but there needs to be more than re-hashed data for it to last. Maybe I just don't know how to work the system right (and IncomeStores seems like a much better solution than mine) but unique content seems to need to be in the right balance... I guess (probably making no sense due to lack of coffee and sleep)
Good posts guys... It is a constant balance... And yes, you need to keep moving your Store forward at all times. Link building. Articles. Keyword research and placement. More link building. Yes.. If you write your own stuff, it will be better than cutting and pasting PLR stuff in there. I'm not saying it's bad to have PLR in there. It's okay to help round out a site. But well all know that Google sees duplicate content and shows only the strongest site in the SERP when it decides the content is too much of an overlap. In my view, PLR material is good for building back-links that you want to be relevant. But not as great for pages you are actually trying to rank in the SERP... Unique and original will always be better there...
Yeah I would like to have some articles to submit to directories in order to build backlinks, are the PLR articles available yet?
Yes. I posted in the Forum.IncomeStores.com on this, should have posted here. A small disaster. Backups are solid. No data loss. Very sorry for the inconvenience. We will be fully recovered shortly. 11:13 pm UPDATE: The problem is actually not IncomeStores itself. It's another application using the same database server. A table got to 80,000,000 (yes million) rows. That by itself was not the problem. It was the delete statement that was run on it (should have been a truncate instead) - which caused the logs to all overflow... Long story short, I'm putting our estimated recovery time at 2:00am Eastern (to be conservative). Again, very sorry for the inconvenience. A maintenance job has been built to prevent this type of thing from happening again in the future.