Experiments to make people purchase more online

Need conversion recording software

2006-04-24T05:16:00.000-07:00

I realized that traffic to sites is not consistant. Perhaps instead of concentrating on getting more we b traffic perhaps I should concentrate on improving more conversions.

To know if my conversions are improving or not appears easy. Just look at how many people bought divided by the number of unique visits. If only there was software that would record and display this just as easily as web traffic is displayed.

Perhaps there is conversion recording and analysis software - I just have not found it yet.

Adsense is back

2006-04-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

Looks like the changes I made the last time worked. I am once again earning money from adsense. Its not much but sufficient to host the websites. Also I do not have to physically do anything but just keep the regular traffic visiting.

I guess I really should put some more effort in getting the sites do better. There is whole lot I can do and know about all the things I need to do. However I just cannot create a large enough time slot to do all the activity. The flip side is I can do all this work and know that it is not sufficient to cover my labour costs. However there is the slight possibility that my efforts will pay off to bigger amounts of lucre.

Ofcourse I do not do adsense for the money at this time. My websites are a simple distraction from the day to day work. A hobby you may say that keeps me curious, interested and learning new things that will help me out when I need that next job or contract.

Where is my Adsense

2006-04-18T04:37:00.000-07:00

I am posting after a very very long time. Have been really busy.

Did not bother updating my sites because the income from them appeared
steady until this month., April 2006.

Google Adsense began to decline rapidly. When I looked it appeared google was not placing Adsense on my sites - but - when I looked again it does seem that it depends on which IP I use to browse my website.

I do think for the most part google is not serving Adsense. Perhaps I need to look at some other source of Income or get google to serve Adsense once more.

August - Back on the Saddle

2005-08-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

July was one of the lowest traffic months I have ever had. I thought that affiliate marketing had lost its charm, but I was wrong.

Success in affiliate marketing depends a lot on your product and the search engine that likes you.

The first week of August, Yahoo loved me. I had more unique traffic from yahoo than MSN. In fact I had no (zero) traffic from MSN for a month. But in the last week MSN has begun rubbing against my web sites. I made a few changes this weekend and - have shot up in MSN traffic.

Why am I excited about MSN ?

It is no secret that I am selling Apple mini ipods And in August I have averaged about five you heard right 5 unique visitors from MSN every day, and every day someone has bought something ! It just so happens the items are priced decently and every sale gives me a nice little income.

So what changes did I make to my apple mini ipods websites to make MSN like me - I am not telling :-) But, I will tell you that for my products, a SERP position at first postition on Yahoo is not as valuable as Tenth position on MSN !!

If I move up higher in the SERPs, perhaps I will get more iPod traffic from MSN and perhaps I would begin selling iPods Accessories. And I could care less about my SERP position in Yahoo, there simply is not money in that demographic for my product.

Mid July Review

2005-07-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

The traffic is the lowest I have every had. MSN and Yahoo have moved buy 24 hour shopping to the second page and my Best Buy 24 hour shopping to the bottom of first page.

Also figured out that Blogs do not have the anticipated effect of improving search ranks. But I guess some links to my sites are better than none, So I will keep doing this.

Also found out that some forums that appear to be providing signature links to search engine, do not do this. So I will only look for search engine friendly forums.

Learned a new technique to calculate CTR of the keywords. This should impact the way I select keywords for my sites. I should revise my existing keywords and drop the unprofitable ones - it would also give me a chance to see if this algorithm works.

Just need to find more time to do work on my sites. Working on other stuff elsewhere and should be busy for a few months before I can look at my sites again.

Waiting for PR update

2005-07-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

A lot of things have kept me busy and away from blogging.

My sites have low traffic and I have dropped in the SERPs, primarily due to more competition in the keywords that I have targetted. So, I made some small optimizations and lets see if they will help me regain my ranking.

Naturally the income has dropped because I am not using PPC to drive traffic. My concentration at the moment is on two domain names that I am trying to increase the PR. I understand there is a PR update around July 9th, 2005 so I hope that once the PR of these two domains kick in I can use their weight to boost my SERP position for the current domains and hopefully I will not need to use PPC at all.

More after the PR update.

Web Hosting compare and review site

2005-06-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

Web Hosting Compare is a web hosting comparision and review site that I just build. Still need to populate the web site with hosting information.

I really like the way the database search and locate is going to work. I think it will be a lot more useful that the hosting directories you find on the internet.

This is a very competitive market and I will have my work cut out for me to build links and unique content for this website. I already have some knowledge and experience in web hosting and it would have a lot of my personal experiences and also useful resource links that I frequently use.

How will this site be different from other web hosting sites ? It will be different because it will focus on software support by web hosts rather than simply price and uptime comparisions.

What is wrong with Pagerank ?

2005-05-29T21:45:00.000-07:00

Most people have already noticed that the google bar and any code that uses their API to calculate the pagerank receives an incorrect value or displays an error. Naturally the services that have come to rely on the google pagerank such as the Digitalpoint coop and Link-Vault to calculate the weight for web pages for mapping are hit hard. In a way I am happy this has happened.

I am happy that DP and LV may be forced to rely less on google pagerank for their calculations. My primary domains are not accepted into their network. It has been almost a year when I registered my first shopping website called Buy 24 hours and since that time google has kept my website in their famous 'sandbox'. Google, is aware of my websites existance but refuses to index and rank me, thereby not sending me any traffic. The sites do benefit from MSN and Yahoo which appear to have better technology to spider the web frequently unlike google who is concentrating more on making money from advertisers.

Also a few months ago this year (march 2005), I registered another 24 hour Best Buy Shopping web site and I have resigned myself to the fact that the website will not be ranked by google anytime soon and perhaps I will see some traffic in a couple of years.

I worked on both

Best Buy 24 hour Shopping sites

this weekend . The problem at hand was that although my subdomains receive traffic, my primary domains do not and are not accepted by google and because of this both DP and LV refuse to accept my sites into their network. This is the sole reason why I worked on my websites this weekend, to make them useable and get them accepted by LV and/or DP.

Hopefully Best Buy 24 shopping will get spidered and given a pagerank in the very near future and I will be accepted into the folds of LV and DP to do some ranking magic.

It's a good idea to buy up any domains that you may think you will be working with in the future. That way you will not have to wait too long for organic traffic to visit your sites.

Playstation 3 traffic

2005-05-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

Playstation 3 traffic has really peaked on my online shopping store I was expecting it to not get any traffic for a while. My older sites are on the online shopping best buy and are not doing any better.

Much of the traffic increase is due to Sony Playstation 3 I am consistantly getting over 400 uniques daily. Some days have close to 600 uniques. The saddest part is that the Playstation is not available in the USA yet and I have no sales at all. There is certainly a market, I just hope I will be the one selling the items and making some money in the transactions.

I do hope I will move up the rankings. I am ranked No.7 on Yahoo for Sony Playstation and I am getting 400-600 uniques a day, I am sure my traffic will increase exponentially if I try to push up my ranking. Hopefully I will be selling playstation 3 when I am ranked at the top.

Summary of weekend

2005-05-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

All I did was SEO of my AWS sites. Added RSS and changed the link structure.

Still looking for a good free domain expiry tool After paying dnforum did not want to spend any more money on tools to do this. dnforum is not as useful as I expected it would be even my requests for a DMOZ domain went unheard several times. Found a handful of people selling the same websites over and over again. I may end up making my own tool expired domain qualification tool, but first I need a reliable source of expired domains. I did not expect it to be so difficult to find expired and deleted domains given that about 5 Million domains expire every single day. Yet the list of deleted domains is not usually free.

AWS really sucks because they do not put the price on their products, instead they have a message saying "too low to display". If your looking for digital cameras almost every single camera has this label. Makes it really difficult to sell anything. I have not found any better affiliates except for Adsense. I guess I need to concentrate on monitizing with adsense. I guess I need to do more research on Adsense and come up with a bigger stategy with unique content and more traffic.

Joined Link-Vault

2005-05-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

Joined Link-Vaul t. Trying to get them to accept my Digital Camera Shopping site

SUN-TZU : THE ART OF WAR

2005-04-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

Excellent website with discussion thread when you click the ?

ART OF WAR

Quoting my self from a forum post

2005-04-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

After reading a forum post by an affiliate manager explaining the virtues of their affiliate program in 4000 words

I just had to post.

"If there is too much to read, there is a lot to hide"

Come on, the internet, affiliate programs are ripping hard workging affiliates left and right and the policies are simply a bunch of hogwash. The only way to judge a good affiliate program is good word of mouth from many other people who are not trying to sell the same affiliate program.

Brand Name sunglasses

2005-04-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

I learnt about brand name products such as Gucci and Oakley. After researching the phrases realized there is little competition for many areas and I thought I found a niche area. But I was in for a surprise.

After a lot of work trying to get the products to show up on my shopping cart i have to admit I am quite unsuccessful. I do not know what it is about the Amazon XML api, but they do not display the final products when you need them. You can go to their categories but not link to the actual products. I had to pare down my shopping cart and finally provide three pages almost static code to display the categories to directly take the browser to the Gucci and Oakley shopping areas. I do have a place holder for this research to refine in the future. Here are the links to Gucci Sunglasses and Oakley SunGlasses Gucci sunglasses Oakley sunglasses these two I would ike a separate site website but for now they are going to have to be together I also think the Nike Sunglasses and the Chanel Sunglasses have some potential Nike sunglasses Chanel sunglasses however most higly ranked will probably be the Police sunglasses Police Sunglasses and Calvin Klein Sunglasses Armani sunglasses Spy sunglasses Calvin klein sunglasses Armani sunglasses the Spy Sunglasses are something I know very little about. I guess I should search about them but I do not have that much of an inclination yet.

Interest in Adsense because it pays

2005-03-28T20:00:00.000-08:00

I added Adsense to a couple of my websites. And the last week I noticed I am making as much from them as my Amazon shop. This has surprised me for two reasons.

The traffic on my content website is about a third of the amazon site
Conversions are instant. For Amazon sites I have to wait 4-6 months before I make a dime.

There are several other big advantages with adsense over Amazon sites.

No dependency on affiliates like amazon.
No upkeep and followup of items not sold anymore but in the shop
No stale websites. Long after ipods are no longer in vogue my links and website selling the ipods will still be there. not so with content sites. Information can always remain useful for several generations .

All you need for Adsense is content and traffic. Think about this, if you spend 1/5 of whatever you make on adsense and put it towards getting traffic from Adwords then you will already get 'some' traffic if your a new site. Add to it some content like this blog that I am writing and your done.

Naturally Adsense and similar content sites is what I plan to develop. I have some ideas on how to go about this. Plan to think it through this week and come up with a concrete plan I can follow for the whole year.

Sony PSP Games Store

2005-03-23T22:30:00.000-08:00

I believe there is a decent possibility that the Sony PSP may become the requested console of the year. And on this line I think there will be some demand for Sony PSP Games because what good is a game hardware if you cannot play games on it.

It is my hope that people will Buy Sony PSP from my website and play thir
Sony PSP Games on the consoles bought at my shop. There are already a fair number of PSP Games already available and from what I have been reading the PSP Games have been specially made to take full advantage of the small screen.

Sony PSP Games

I have heard a number of downsides, that the Sony Playstation PSP although portable cannot accept inputs from television and video or cannot play sounds loud enough to be heard if your in a loud bus or subway but I think it does what it was made for really well and that is what counts

So this is hoping that the Sony PSP Store succeeds in picking up traffic before the christmas season begins !

Gift Baskets for all occasions

2005-03-22T22:30:00.000-08:00

Not done yet but I want to keep this as a place holder for many gift basket shops coming online. I made a Sample Gift Basket shop and I later realized that I need to add links for Gift Cards as well so one can have an outlet if they do not succeed in finding something they like online.

This time I am concentrating on three primary key phrases. Christmas Gift Baskets for Christmast time at Christmas Gift Baskets and all occasions demand Gift Baskets but on those extra special days when you do not work there are the Holiday Gift Baskets . I plan to expand the range of offerings so I finally have Gift Baskets for all occasions .

More Electronics web sites

2005-03-21T23:00:00.000-08:00

Just could not help setting up another set of Electronics website in the hope that my main websites have increased traffic. You have see all these products before. They relate to buy Mini iPod Now and Best iPod Shuffle PP3 Player and even Affordable Mini Mac Computer . In future I hope that
Buy Sony PlayStation 3 Game will improve in ranks and the best Powerbook Battery website will be ready by the time the latest powerbook is available for sale. This is just a small collection of great electronics websites that I hope will help me.

Apple Powerbook Battery website

2005-03-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

Doing an Mac Mini website has to be followed by another. Apple products are such a competive market that it took me a long time to find a niche market. Yes, this time its Apple Powerbook Battery . You need Powerbook Batteries if you want your notebook to be mobile don't you. Naturally your thinking, "There is no way you can get sufficient traffic to justtify the website". And I have to admit your correct in your gut feeling. The way I have justified the existance of the website is focus on other keywords that may get me into the Apple laptop ballgame.

The other small traffic phrases are, Apple Laptop Battery Apple Powerbook g3 Apple g3 Laptop Battery Powerbook g3 battery Powerbook g4 battery Powerbook g5 battery and just for fun Make Money Online is another phrase I want to capitalize on in the near future.

Hopefully collectively they will lead to sufficient traffic to my website that it will be worthwhile maintaining the Powerbook Battery website. If you look carefully you will see there are three models of the Apple Powerbook the Apple g3, g4 and g5. The Apple Powerbook g3 no longer exists except for batteries and I am hoping that clients who what to keep their trusty Apple g3 still running will be buying the Apple g3 laptop battery. The g4 is Apple PowerBooks current model. Hopefully I will move up the ranks and someone will buy an Apple g4 from me. However this is stretching the dreams a little. You see the g4 has been around for sometime so it is probably by the time my website hits mainstream I will be selling batteries for the Apple Powerbook g4 and if I have my wish then I will be zooming up the ranks and someone will eventually buy the Powerbook g5 from me. Apple Powerbook g5 has been announced I believe but in circulation at this time. Apple Computers has created a marketing issue again, much like the Mini Mac this time the name Apple Powerbook G4 and Apple PowerMac G4 both share the g4 tag , and the PowerMac is a desktop whereas the Powerbook is a Notebook or Laptop depending where you live. This makes it difficult to optimize by brand. I just hope I have done the right things by selecting Apple Powerbook Battery.

Mac Mini Website

2005-03-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

Created a New website for the Mini Mac , yes you heard right. The Mini Mac ! If you already know it's a cool device you probably know it is officially marketed as the Mac Mini not the way I have called it : The Mini Mac. Why did I call it the other way around ?

Because I fall into the demographic of people that refer to it as the

Apple Mac Mini

Granted, It does not sound as great with the "Apple" in front of "Mac Mini" but should we really care about that. What I am hoping for, is similar minded people like myself who call it the min mac will mosey over to my Mini Mac website and buy tonnes of Mac Mini products and the related mac mini accessories. Of course this is only a wish but we will just have to wait and see if mini mac is a strong attractor for online wallets. I heard somewhere that Amazon does not give a large percentage for online computers and parts and I am sure large purchases are probably not very popular on the internet... but think about it... It cost less than US$ 500 !!

But like I said, i hope my mini mac web site will be popular and I will be watching the statistics to see what happens.

More iPod websites to compete with

2005-03-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's better to cast a broader net to catch more fish. This is what I have decided to do. I know for sure that the iPod theme is a profitable nitch and I know that there are a lot of players but I do want to improve my chances to get a bigger portion of the iPod pie. What I have done is setup a few more iPod websites. Hopefully these websites will be able to cash in on the keywords that I am currently missing. Below is a brief description of the sites.
Buy Apple iPod is a favorite search for many just wanting to buy a first time Ipod. This site is similar to the Buy iPod site. The difficulty here is we really do not know what the surfer is looking for. We do not know if they want to buy or not so that is why I am using the phrase "buy" in the anchor tag. The other three websites focus on more specific clients. I'am particularly proud of Buy iPod Accessories because it is targeted to people who already own an apple iPod or two. However I know that there are people who want to spif up their existing iPods and are an even smaller group of people. For this group of friends I created the websites Buy iPod Mini and Buy iPod Shuffle . Mini iPods and iPod Shuffles are very different from the first generic iPod. Finding accessories for the Mini iPod and Shuffle are a lot more difficult because the dimensions are different so I hope these websites will help people who want to buy ipod products for specific iPods.

Two of my other sites have picked up a little traffic.

Best Digital Camcorder

Digital Camcorders: If you do not know which one is for you. Just buy the most popular one.
Best Digital Camcorder
I thought camcorders would not be popular but I suppose they still are. I am expecting the traffic for Digital Cameras to be much more than Camcorders.

Canon Digital Camera

Canon has been in the Camera business for as long as I can remember. Finally have some traffic to the Canon Digital Camera siteCanon Digital Camera
I'am hoping the traffic will increase. Currently it is only from MSN but hopefully the other search engines will notice and rank them high.

The ipods do seem to have the potential of the maximum targeted traffic is what I am thinking but I could be wrong.

XBox Games and MP3 Players need traffic

2005-03-16T20:00:00.000-08:00

I expected a lot more traffic to my websites due to the blog. But alas I was wrong. However two more of my sites have picked up traffic, the digital camera and portable dvd web sites and I made the first sale. However the following websites are getting zero traffic at this time.

XBox website

I thought there would be a lot of traffic for the xBox and accessories related to it. Perhaps I was wrong or I just have a bad selection of key phrases. Well time will tell why this is the case. I need some inspiration and a handful of tweaking tips to get myself into the SERPs. XBox games is a phrase I thought would have a lot of popularity but amazingly not a single bit at this time. Perhaps my competition has all potential buyers.

XBox

XBox games

Where to buy xbox

xbox console

xbox skins

xbox accessories

MP3 Player Website

MP3 Players I thought would be a good device to sell. I am already having some success with iPods and I thought I would translate that success to the mp3 players but that certainly has not been the case. The only people hitting the mp3 players are ones that are trying really hard to go three hundred or so pages into the search engines.

MP3 Players

Portable mp3 Players

mp3 Players

mp3 players

Buy XBox

I also realized my page popularity in google is next to nothing. I compared my main domain on a keyword popularity tool and I had one link only, as perhaps it should be but noticed my competition had a lot more. At this point I do not know if having a broad array of phrases is good or a targeted phrase to high traffic such as what I am trying is better. I do realize that to target a phrase is probably a better solution for me because my products are short term compared to knowledge based sites that may stick around for a few years.

I certainly hope XBox Games and MP3 Players pickup traffic as I look at other solutions to improve conversions and organic search optimization.

Getting Traffic for MP3 Players is hard work

2005-03-12T17:00:00.000-08:00

My site was down and I lost a lot of rank in the Serps. But it looks like it's picking up again. I have not checked to see where I rank but it looks like it takes MSN a good week to recover and the traffic has picked up. But I do not know this is the buying crowd but just the browsing crowd.

Also try to help a friend out with an electronics drop shipping web site hopefully that will bring some traffic to his site. Hoping the USA economy will improve and people will buy more mp3 players as gifts during the year if not christmas... that was last years gift. I am hoping the players are not very sturdy so that they break and I will be a steady supply of sales over a length of time. Pretty sneaky if I may say so. When someone wants to avoid making the same mistake again they will probably not buy same brand of MP3 Player that broke for them. Intead this time they would perform a search using a brand name.

Searching by brand can become quite crazy. For example I really like the creative MP3 players and I think they give the best return on investment. Just my opinion. They are also easiest to connect to IBM compatible PCs with no extra software required and no particular music format that they are bound to. Now if I were to buy such and MP3 player what phrase would I want to search for ? Given each device can be called at least four names Would I search for Nomad Zen Xtra or Zen Xtra or even Creative Nomad by now someone is bound to leap up and say, hey !, some of them are the same devices as the Nomad Jukebox !", and that is exactly my point. There is a nugget and oppurtunity there. However knowing which phrase is searched for and finding out what they competition has optimized for will help us locate those individuals who will buy from us. I personally refer to the devices as Zen Xtra or Zen Xta, the latter is a spelling mistake and as much a mista at Xtra with a missing 'e' . After looking at some statistics it looks like I am the only one spelling it wrong. I see a lot of people referring to the Creative Nomad or simply the JukeBox ... a single word that can be difficult to optimize for and should only be used in the correct contextand. So I leave you with this though... MP3 Players are difficult to optimize for !

Some traffic but not much

2005-03-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

I have dropped in ranking on MSN (the only bot that visits my sites). I used to receive 60 uniques a day when I was number one for Accessories for iPods but now I am receiving around 40 uniques and I am ranked position three. It's important to rank high in the SERPs for words that have a high traffic and also a high payback. There are many such phrases but I have selected Buy an ipod mini as one such phrase. It does not convert well but and I am working on it by redesigning the shopping cart.

Personally I find my own shopping cart difficult to use. I have redesigned it and have deployed it at a few sites like the Sony Digital Camcorder website but I still think it is still far from complete. The very last step where you transfer to Amazon is probably the most confusing and difficult to digest. I am rethinking who I want this transfer to occur and plan to provide additional information so that when someone transfers to Amazon they will not be shocked more on that at a later time. I plan to deploy the new carts on another website and push them up using the coop. Not sure if it will work but it is probably worth the effort.

There are so many things that one can do and should do to increase and improve traffic that it becomes a big chore trying to do everything for the big payoff at the end. Knowing there is likely a big payoff at the end is also a good thing. So I will continue peddling a few more websites and hope the search engines blow wind into my sails so I can reach my destination.

Web sites are back up

2005-03-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

It's great to have my web sites back up. It's also great to have clients say they were Ok with their sites being down and did see the issue was out of my hands from the evidence I presented. I still feel bad on the loss of revenue for everyone and also the fact that I have not backup plan for these kind of issues where the problem is outside the datacenter my server is hosted.

My SERPs in google went down rapidly. Three key phrases brought me traffic from my No1 position in google. Once google sensed my sites were offline I have lingered around position No.8. My sites have be online for about 12 hours and google has moved me to position No.5 so I need to see if I can regain my position No.1 once again.

MSN has been more accomodating. They kept me at my position. They have not indexed or placed any new pages from the sub-domains except for the very first one. This makes me think that MSN only likes domains they see the very first time and then forget about them. The neat thing about MSN is they spider more frequently than google and yahoo and show their updates on existing pages very quickly but have not added any new pages .

On yahoo I have yet to show up anywhere in the top ten of the SERPs.

One interesting phenomena one of my new web sites is showing up in Froogle of all places. I'am ranking high for the phrase Cannon Digital Cameras . I wrote about this interesting phrase before. Cannon is the mis-spelling of the real manufacturer Canon Digital Cameras and I hope to milk this nitch keyword. Froogle has already sent me four visitors now if only other search engines do the same I would be happy. I certainly do not mind ranking high for Cannon Digital cameras or any digital cameras or camcorders. Thanks froogle where did you pick me up. I even put a line in my robots.txt so images are indexed by google to save bandwidth. Apparently that line does not apply to froogle. I don't mind as long as anyone sends me targetted traffic... even if its for a misspelling like Cannon digital cameras !

Sites are down and very busy

2005-03-04T06:59:00.000-08:00

Before I knew it... this week is over ...
Started out the week on Saturday trying to catchup at the office and finish up on the extra serial port communication projects. Went through three machines before i could get a decent machine to work with. Now it's friday and I have production and QA using the software and hardware I setup for them. I need to build another backup machine but that should not be a challenge. Another problem did crop up however.

Websites are down !
The plesk server has been extremely stable over the last two years. Not a single problem till wednesday March 2nd., when my amazon sites and my main website be came unavailable. On initial investigation I can see the traceroute ending at adnc.net which is not where this server is housed. But my datacenter informs me that this is a server issue and they will not be able to get parts till Saturday night. That is more than two days of downtime ! This will certainly affect the business expriment.

What are the affects ?
Well to begin with, fewer hosting clients. In a way thats Ok because I think I will make more lucre providing other services with less effort. But I do want to keep some clients so the servers can pay for themselves and be self sufficient. So this is not something that affects me directly but there are other issues.

Losing Money. Both my clients and I will be reeling from the loss of income directly due to the servers not being online. Last time I gave all my clients the money back this time I just have a handful of paying clients that will probably stick with me for advice and information and depend on me to make sure their website is up through the best possible means available to me... and that is exactly what I have been investigating... if there is a way for me to improve my uptime.
On the long run there are bigger issues.

The bigger issue that affects me directly is loss of income from Amazon because people visiting me will not be able to browse and buy the items. My sites may have been down during the period there are not may buyers in the week but that remains to be seen. I only average one sell a day so it may not be too bad - if I miss the sell then I probably will not meet the percentage upgrade I will get if I do not sell 50 items in march. But this is a small itch compared to my next issue.

A bigger issue is that my sites being down may result in a drop in ranking naturally this is my biggest fear because moving up in rankings is the most difficult thing to do and being penalized for the site being down may have very long lasting effects. So I need to come up with a backup plan.

Backup Plan
I always needed a backup plan. Cannot depend on one stream of income 'Amazon' and I need to diversity but on a more immediate note I need to put sites on other physical servers.

Before I select another server I need to find a new domain name and I have some in mind. This weekend if I have time I will try to setup a handful more of my Amazon sites on my cPanel servers. I am hoping cPanel will be much easier to work with since I can use putty and copy files enmass instead of using FTP like I do with plesk. Also configuring databases should be a breeze since they can all use the same passwords unlike Plesk which forces you to create a separate user for each database. In a way I am looking forward to working with cPanel. Naturally the work involved to maintain separate sites will double the maintainance time required but I think this may more than double my income if I do it right. I do hope to make as much as Dan Grossman at least as some point. But I suspect he has a great lead ahead of me and also has a secret weapon called targetedvisitors, maybe not that secret because he sells the service.

New Apple ipods and lower priced versions

2005-02-27T04:39:00.000-08:00

Apple announced this week they have an ipod 6 gb version of their lightweight flash device and also the ipod 30 gb . With this announcement there has also been a reduction of prices on their flash based ipods, the classic ipods and their mini ipod line.The new 6gb ipod are a direct replacement for their mini ipod line and the ipod 4gb is expected to be phased out.

Sony Playstation 3 expected

2005-02-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

After setting up many small amazon websites and not getting even one hit from any search engines. I have realized it takes a long time before the search engines build up their indexes and rank aw web page where it is visible to surfers.

I have setup websites for digital camcorders, digital cameras, mini ipods, mp3 players and even wholesale electronics drop shippers and non of these have received one iota of traffic at this time. Normally one would get frustrated but I realized that this endeavor is going to take time and for that very reason I have decided to focus on a product emerging in the near future like the Sony Playstation 3 . Naturally no one in their their sane mind is going to do a search for a playstation 3 before the device is available.

So what phrase will people use to search for the playstation 3 ?

Nobody can be sure of all the valuable phrases, but you can make an intelligent guess that people will want to purchase the same products they currently use for the playstation 2 and want to upgrade to the playstation 3.
Then again I am not familiar with the device and more than likely I am going to be waaay off in guessing which products are going to be popular.

So I have got wordtracker to help me and hopefully the collection of search phrases will allow me to make a more intelligent guess than simply relying on my hunches and media press releases.

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	24Hrs	Competing..
1	playstation 3	92.306	21104	4015	4825015
2	playstation 3 console	24.555	174	33	1233
3	sony playstation 3	21.740	2942	560	398136
4	ps 3 console	19.402	450	86	10437
5	playstation 3 system	17.834	303	58	5148
6	playstation	8.591	2153	410	539541
7	playstation 3 consoles	3.285	40	8	487

Unfortunately it looks like most searches for the playstation focus on the game cheats rather than the hardware gear. After removing searches for playstation cheats and playstation mod chips and playstaton emulators I am only left with the above seven phrases.

To complete my playstation 3 shop I am just going to guess there will be a few people looking for the following playstation phrases as well.

playstation 3 cables
playstation 3 memory
playstation 3 protectors

Who knows just a handful of browsers may eventually seek these phrases and I may rank high these playstation 3 search phrases if others are not going to compete for them.

playstation 3 accessories
playstation 3 controllers
playstation 3 games

I have no data to backup that these are the phrases that will be popular. These are only the phrases I can think of to locate playstation 3 hardware and I have never handled a playstation so do not go by my knowledge on this issue. Whatever the case I finally do hope to convert surfers to buy playstation 3 form my shops.

buy xbox

2005-02-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

The statistics on the buy xbox phrase are very interesting.

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	24Hrs	Competition...
1	xbox consoles & accessories	13702.521	811	154	48
2	xbox skins	95.335	562	107	3313
3	where to buy an xbox	25.786	19	4	14
4	xbox console	25.578	924	176	33379
5	xbox	25.352	10923	2078	4706219
6	where to buy xbox	17.053	18	3	19
7	xbox games	12.493	2279	434	415735
8	buy xbox console	5.565	16	3	46
9	where can i buy an xbox	5.452	13	2	31
10	buy xbox	2.204	121	23	6643
11	xbox live	1.976	854	162	369113
12	buy xbox games	1.421	50	10	1759
13	xbox buy	0.376	17	3	769
14	buy an xbox	0.120	29	6	6985
15	buy a xbox	0.076	23	4	6979

I found Mozilla Firefox slowing down immensely over the past few days and I am writing this in IE and it appears faster. No idea why but I would like to use the multiple tabs in firefox. Now on to the buy xbox phrases from wordtracker.

The very top phrase xbox consoles & accessories naturally has a high KEI word phrase. I cannot understand why so many people would want to search for both. My guess it that this is an automated query with no human performing the search.

Another interesting phenomena is the number of people searching with phrases similar to "where to buy xbox". Google suggest probably has this covered and will probably streamline the number of searches that are similar to an even smaller set. From the KEI you will notice none of the - where to buy xbox phrases have a high KEI and are therefore not worth optimizing for. I guess the competition has that covered and the reason for the lower KEI.

That only leaves xbox consoles that my site can probably rank high for. Among xbox accessories I did not find xbox skins but I did find similar items. Hopefully that is what xbox gamers are looking for when they want to buy an xbox from my store.

On an ending note I would certainly to rank better on items on the xbox store than the mp3 player store.

Digital Camcorder Store

2005-02-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Another store. Not just camcorders but Digital Camcorders. Most camcorders these days are digital although I have seen tape camcorders for sale.

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	24Hrs	Competing...
1	digital camcorder reviews	445.286	605	115	822
2	best digital camcorder	158.730	200	38	252
3	digital camcorder comparison	122.008	121	23	120
4	digital camcorder rating	97.200	54	10	30
5	comparing digital camcorders	39.062	25	5	16
6	jvc camcorder digital	31.080	59	11	112
7	compare digital camcorders	30.179	65	12	140
8	digital camcorder batteries	21.607	55	10	140
9	digital camcorder review	21.357	182	35	1551
10	best digital camcorders	13.228	47	9	167
11	cannon digital camcorders	13.081	22	4	37

As expected more people are looking for reviews and comparisions. However some brands do stand out. Particularly JVC digital camcorder and Cannon Digital Camcorder. Notice the incorrect spelling of Cannon . Perhaps there is much more tarffic for the correctly spelling phrase and does not showup on wordtrackers sort order.

I was hoping for better traffic and chance to rank higher for Sony Digital Camcorder because they do show a good standing in best selling digital camcorder as well as best selling digital camcorder accessories

If one were to do digital camcorder reviews and comparisions. It would have to be either a feature comparision and a subjective evaluation. I am just hoping purchasers try out the digital camcorders in a brick and mortar store or borrow one from a friend and then buy it online. Particularly from one of my shops.

MP3 Players

2005-02-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

MP3 players another phrase that is going to be tough to rank high.

A lot of competition in the MP3 player market
surfers have a lot of confusion as to what mp3 player related search phrase to search for
Manufacturers have mp3 player related branding to differentiate each other

Bottom line - A lot of mp3 player related searches !

It seem that if I can even rank high for a couple of MP3 player related phrased it would be worth it. The traffic seems relatively high no matter what mp3 player phrase you search for.

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	24Hrs	Competing..
1	compare mp3 players	194.883	208	40	222
2	how do mp3 players work	181.112	217	41	260
3	mp3 portable players	176.097	383	73	833
4	mp3 player reviews	135.209	836	159	5169
5	mp3 players reviews	72.841	121	23	201
6	mp3 players	70.728	8825	1679	1101128
7	top 10 mp3 players	67.123	70	13	73
8	cheap mp3 players	51.118	400	76	3130
9	free mp3 players	45.488	374	71	3075
10	rio mp3 players	39.236	316	60	2545
11	mp3 player review	34.263	594	113	10298
12	rio mp3 player	31.926	512	97	8211
13	sony mp3 players	29.717	210	40	1484
14	discount mp3 players	23.681	103	20	448
15	best mp3 players	14.824	191	36	2461
16	creative mp3 players	10.736	76	14	538
17	mp3 player	10.473	3986	758	1517013
18	iriver mp3 players	7.010	86	16	1055
19	portable mp3 players	3.995	317	60	25156
20	free mp3 player	2.882	237	45	19492

I have no idea what will show up on the search engines for mp3 player related searches. Just for good measure I added a lot more phrases and will observe what is picked up and take it from there. My intention is to par the list and improve conversion once I know where I am ranked and what I am ranked for. Personally I do not think there is any need for the extra categories I am not ranking high.

Here is to hope that a lot of these phrases will stick.

Does not appear that this blog is helping list my sites any. But I will continue and see if it makes much difference for another month or so.

Digital Cameras

2005-02-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

I made an amazon store for Digital Cameras . There are a lot of digital camera stores out there and this is no different. Well it is different but then it's another digital camera store with low prices and large selection of digital cameras.

A digital camera store should be very difficult to rank because it is very popular endeavour for many store merchants.

But the search phrases have a good KEI. Unfortunately all the searches are going to go to the top ranking sites. In summary a digital camera site has a very good payoff but very difficult to rank high.

Are we going to be luck ? Lets give it a try with these phrases

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	24Hrs	Competing..
1	digital cameras ratings	4713.446	1199	228	305
2	digital camera reviews	2074.176	8646	1645	36040
3	digital camera comparison	543.710	1407	268	3641
4	compare digital cameras	504.070	1570	299	4890
5	konica digital cameras	469.263	605	115	780
6	cannon digital cameras	381.306	494	94	640
7	best digital camera	309.994	1797	342	10417
8	digital camera review	257.068	2100	400	17155
9	kodak digital cameras	240.616	1542	293	9882
10	canon digital cameras	207.909	1935	368	18009
11	casio digital cameras	203.629	811	154	3230
12	fuji digital cameras	192.405	1282	244	8542
13	sony digital cameras	179.066	1733	330	16772
14	fujifilm digital cameras	162.015	671	128	2779
15	nikon digital cameras	151.451	1259	240	10466
16	best digital cameras	150.226	1121	213	8365
17	minolta digital cameras	146.019	850	162	4948
18	olympus digital cameras	116.427	1225	233	12889
19	digital cameras	110.960	16199	3082	2364878
20	canon digital camera	99.142	1416	269	20224
21	sony digital camera	84.432	1467	279	25489
22	digital camera	29.124	8593	1635	2535377

Some very interesting information can be deduced about searches related to digital cameras.

Notice half the number of people looking for digital cameras are also looking for digital camera reviews. So putting up digital camera reviews at some point would be a great idea.

Another curious point is the search for Canon digital cameras which is the correct spelling for the manufacturer which is canonas opposed to Cannon digital cameras with two 'n'. The number of searches for the misspelling Cannon digital cameras is greater than the correct spelling. Could the eye or brain be playing tricks on us. I too thought the correct spelling was Cannon until I verified it. I guess I just assumed the Japanese manufacturer named their company after a big gun but I guess their name has some history and some other origin.

Google does a great job in trying to correct you with the response:
Did you mean: Canon digital cameras

Another interesting phrase that jumps into view is fuji digital cameras verses fujifilm digital cameras. In this case FujiFilm Digital cameras exist but Fuji Digital cameras do not exist. Again we do not know exactly what the person was searching for but we provide them with the closest match.

Note the only variations are the brand names so really the only traffic you can optimize for are people who want to compare, review digital cameras at one end of the spectrum and at the other end we have targetted traffic looking for specific brand names and phrases such as
Konica digital cameras , kodak digital cameras casio and minolta digital camaras ... you get the idea.

Which one ? Portable dvd players or mobile dvd players ?

2005-02-18T04:29:00.000-08:00

I am in the market for a portable dvd player and was trying to research more about them. I thought while I'am studing up on these devices why not post my finding on a website.

First I would like to know the difference between a conventional dvd player and the portable or mobile dvd player. My uneducated guess is that the portable dvd players have.

portable powersupply - a way to connect up to a car or rechargeable batteries
Immune to shocks and should work upside down
Water proof, scratch and dent resistant

These are just some of the things I would expect but I'am sure there are more features that differentiate a portable dvd player from the non portable variety.

I also discovered there are mobile dvd players and I need to find out what makes them special and different from the portable dvd players. I can image myself looking for car dvd players but this player need not be portable because it can be stuck to the car dashboard or overhead. But found a unit that can be removed from it's holder and moved around. I wonder if this is the portable dvd that is also a mobile dvd player.

After researching the best selling portable dvd players some brands appear to stand out.

Many I'am not familiar with many of them but may dominate this market. You have to pardon my ignorance by now you have probably figured out I do not come accross much dvd players or use the one I have frequently.

From the MSN search engine the following brands are searched often.
In the order of searches from high to low I describe the porable dvd players below.

polaroid portable dvd player

mintek portable dvd player

apex portable dvd player

initial portable dvd player

The models that are searched for frequently do not match the sales of the portable dvd players from Amazon at this time.
The top selling portable dvd players from highest to lowest are the brands

polaroid portable dvd player

initial portable dvd player

audiovox portable dvd player

I was guessing a brand like Apex would be a best selling in the portable dvd or mobile dvd player market but that is certainly not the case. Perhaps christmas time things will change with low price offerings and advertisements changing the landscape of the best selling portable dvd players

I'am going to go ahead and research actual models now and write about this information at a later date.

Keyword selection and wordtracker

2005-02-16T07:52:00.000-08:00

Wordtracker is certainly a useful and interesting tool. When the buy ipod website was developed I consulted wordtracker and the overture keyword suggest tool. I paid close attention to the keyword index (KEI) and was hoping that I would rank high on one or more of the keywords, that has not happed as expected.

These are the ipod related phrases that dug out from wordtracker.

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	24Hrs	Competing
1	ipod	101.902	17237	3279	2915688
2	ipod accessories	43.562	1589	302	57962
3	ipod cases	23.525	520	99	11494
4	mini ipod	20.503	1091	208	58053
5	ipod speakers	20.280	290	55	4147
6	ipod case	19.269	473	90	11611
7	apple ipod	18.338	2833	539	437661
8	ipod mini	16.761	2322	442	321681

Naturally ranking high for many of the above phrases are not profitable for my web site. So I only selected a few. Also just putting those keywords on my website are not sufficient to give me a high ranking, I would need to build several ipod related links and hope that I build more ipod accessories and ipod mini links to my site than other competing ipod stores. This is perhaps the most difficult step in website optimization.

Rather than getting a reciprocal link to my ipod store I have heard getting a handful of high quality links ( links with high page rank ) pointing to my ipod store would benefit it immensely
These cost money unless I can build high quality sites myself and point these links to my ipod store, but just any website would not do. I would get the most benefit if another Ipod store pointed to my ipod shop. The theme should be similar so a mini ipod would be a good complement to my existing shop.

Wholesale Electronics Store that Drop ships

2005-02-10T05:25:00.000-08:00

Wholesale Electronics

I am trying to help out a friend who wants to rank a wholesale electronics shop designed for drop shippers that would like to get in touch with one or more dropshipper to sell electronics at wholesale prices. There are several hundred products on the site. Some large section of products are digital cameras , MP3 Players and digital Video Camcorders and Printers.
All these products are sold at below wholesale electronics prices.

One of the most popular drop shipped products is the Tekxon camera which appears to be a great performance camera at a good price.

The shop is built using osCommerce Loaded from SnappyServer with STS (simple templating engine) doing the templating of a bought template. Additional contributions include drop shipping modules and several search engine optimization contributions.

Drop Shippers

Drop shippers appear to have a difficult time finding good software that will calculate the shipping rates between the shipper and the receiver. Frequently the client is an affiliate who buys and pays for the product and gets it shipped elsewhere.

Whole Sale electronics appears to be one of the most frequently dropshipped items.

Amazon affiliate sites

2005-01-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

The easiest way I figured was to become an amazon affiliate.

I decided the best way was to try a couple of different php programs and see which one works best for me. The program should be easy to use and need little or no maintainance.

Got someone to build my first affiliate site. It's geared towards selling iPods.

Do you know what an iPod is ?

I think iPods are great devices. But that is where my facination for the device ends.

What has surprised me most is that most people know, "what an iPod is". When I first heard the word I thought "Intelligent seed" ? Which is not a bad concept but too broad to evoke any sort of emotion. What am I getting at ?

I'am pointing to the marketing push to get the meaning of the word out. The iPods are MP3 players and not more and not less. When I talk to my peers they view iPods as a device class of their own.

Is an iPod a device class ?
Yes, iPods are in a device class of their own. Even companies like HP instead of creating a brand name for their own MP3 player prefered to call their MP3 player the "HP iPod" - an endorsement for the word iPod. People are now searching for iPods on search engines and I have appropiately named my website an iPod Store. I hope this site will rank high for iPods and ipod accesories before you go on to point out that I made a spelled ipod accesories incorrectly and I should have written ipod accessories I should point out that I did it on purpose primarily because there are many like me that make this kind of mistake when searching for ipods. Just because I want to cater to current iPod market I going to push ipod shuffle accessories there are not that many ipod shuffle items at this moment but I sincerely hope that this will increase in the near future. Mini ipods is also another product I hope will become popular And I hope people will for these ipods a mini ipods and have place two mini ipod links to these devices. Do not know how it will hold up alongside the iPod Shuffle with is a smaller sleeker mp3-player but with limited capacity to store songs. If you want to store a large number of songs and also want a small size you want to buy ipod mini . Hope this quick summary helps someone and gets my site spidered by search engines.

Purpose of this blog

2005-01-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

The primary reason is to get my sites spidered quickly and to see if this blogs can help me get websites I have worked with rank higher in search engines.

Another reason I want this blog is to record my activities and my results while I do this experiment. Naturally I do not expect my blog to be the sole driver of search engine rankings there will be other inpage and offpage SEO items that will affect the ranks of my pages.