My micro-ecommerce journal

lemon

lemon

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Jul 19, 2009
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Hey Guys, so my goal here is to start several small volume dropship sites over the next 60 days to generate some supplementary income. In addition, I just got an hourly position with a local business to develop their existing e-commerce platform which is providing me with capital to pay my day to day expenses while offering me the opportunity to experiment with different SEO techniques and sales page optimization.


For my own sites, I am going for very niche products and selecting keywords with a high buying power. I’ve noticed that the company I am working for has a #1 ranking for keywords with under 300 searches a month (exact) and they are consistently making decent money off of this. This is a strategy I hope to replicate.



My first product gives me about $125 profit per sale and 1000 local, exact searches per month. This may actually be larger as I am looking at US only traffic however this product could be sold to most of Europe and Canada. Reasonably I can expect 10 sales a month, and due to the buying power of this keyword (it is a very specific term) I may be able to sell up to 30.


My next product is for a very small niche market. There is only 450 searches per month however I know exactly what this market is looking for and I am able to get a suitable product drop shipped. I would make over $500 per sale and a few sales monthly seems to be attainable. I have seen these products sold on forums used and they are often sold within hours of the listing being published.


The last site is much more of a standard e-commece site. I am selling a common household product, and my main keyword has over 40k exact searches every month. I am viewing this as a long term project. If dropshipping I’ll be making about $50 per sale however I will be able to increase this once I am purchasing wholesale and shipping myself. I will need a good amount of capital.


The first two sites will all be started within the next 4 weeks. I plan to start the sites off as purely informational, and I’ll put 4-5 thousand words of content up over the first week. During that time I’ll figure out my SEO strategy and get them ranked. Once I’m seeing some traffic coming in I’ll ensure that the first page acts as a sales page for the product I am informing my readers about. The last site won’t be started until I have enough capital to really push the site. It will need a lot of SEO and I will have to upload literally hundreds of products.



This week I need to get some seed capital. I have two small web development jobs for local businesses and I hope to have them complete this week so that I can get started.

I will keep you posted as things progress. Looking forward to any feedback you might have.
 


just wanted to give you all an update on how this is progressing. Yesterday I finished 1 of the two sites for the local businesses. The second one i'm going to have to wait a few days as I don't have everything I need from the store owner to get started.

For the e-commerce site of which I am a paid employee, I started going a lot of keyword research around their niche. In the coming month we are going to rebuild their site on a magento platform and really put effort into making sure the site is structured well for SEO purposes. I suppose it will also be important to 301 all the URLS they are currently ranking (which btw have awful structure) to the new URLS. But for now all I am focusing is getting a list of tiered keywords to build the site around.

I want to have 3 or for large keywords of at least 20k+ exact searches, and each of those will have keywords below it relating to categories of items or even specific items. Of course I might have to sacrifice consistency here as for some products the brand and model are the most popular search term (eg: cherry coke) and for other products its the description (flavored cola).

I also started on my first e-commerce site. I got as far as registering the domain, and while I was waiting for the DNS to propogate I started doing a custom HTML template (which is about 90% done just need to figure out how to structure my nav) and wrote a 1000 word article that i'll use when I launch tonight.

I picked a couple cheap seo services from BST with my own cash and pointed them at the site I work for towards a couple low volume keywords. I"ll use the results to help me figure out the best strategy for my own sites, although age is a factor as this site is 7 years old and mine is not yet online.

I think I will start with a couple social bookmarks to get indexed and focus on getting lots of content up before I do any thing crazy.
 
I now have the designs (both custom HTML) for my first two sites and 500 words of content. I want to get more content written before I upload them so that is the goal for today. Currently reading case studies and trying to figure out a way to rank my EMDs.
 
it's been a while since i've updated this. My main focus has been on the established e-commerce site that I am working with. I did a huge SEO project and went through all 500+ products and did keyword research for each of them and compiled a huge list of what I thought would be the most profitable keywords. Then I went through the top 100 and looked at the serps to see what our competition was like (in terms of page quality rather then SEO quality) and picked 20 terms i'd like to rank for.

I used this data to redo the entire navigation system of the website so that it was focused around those keywords. also made some cosmetic changes to the page which increase average pages viewed and time on site. Finished it all off with a SGW blast so we will see how that works, the site is very well established with about 2000 natural links and 7 year old domain.

For my first "micro" e-commerce site I have a custom design and about 4000 words of content but the site is not indexed yet. It's only been up for a week or so but the keyword is really easy and low volume so I just wanna see where it lands before I throw any links at it.
 
70 posts or 2,000 posts - a well-kept log is exactly that.

I'm in.

I have some questions for my own curiosity and to help you bounce some ideas around in here.

1. Any concerns as to company/site credibility in selling products over $100 (I've heard this loosely referred to as "the $100 rule")?

2. Is your wholesaler aware that you're dropshipping? Mainly, is there any reputational-risk of your brand integrity if the wholesaler mails the product with their own branding/promotions? Or does this not apply for whatever reason?

3. Why Magento? What other platforms do you have experience with? Are you using Magento across the board?

4. What BST services have you purchased? Any conclusive reviews to push our way?

5. What does your inner-page link structure look like?


Looking forward to your results!
 
1) I had to test a few suppliers to find the right product, but i've found a good supplier. The product was inspected by a professional and he confirmed that it was up to snuff.

2) They are OK with me drop shipping and we've negotiated shipping rates and all that. I'm going to be using UPS, although its cuts into my profit margin a fair bit I know that at least i'll be able to get the products delivered quickly.

3) I should probably clarify, my main project (as a paid employee) is the only one using magento. Currently I am both fixing their old site to make it usable, and developing the new site which is going to be launched in august. They are currently using a custom e-commerce site built by some firm in india and it sucks. Magento there is a lot of extensions and plug ins that give them the functionality they need without having a programmer on staff, and it feels pretty powerful. Setting it up is taking quite a while and this has been taking most of my time. I've uploaded almost 700 products into the database. Soon i'm going to have to figure out how to create a little script that exports inventory reports from the POS system and uploads it to magento, but this is going to need some research.

3+4) I'm buying some BST services for my first small site today. I have over 5000 words of content on there, including videos, images and links to authority pages. I was hoping that i'd show up in a search term for my main kw (which is only like 800 exact searches) but no go, so i'm buying some links today. I'm going to start with a couple high PR homepage links. Don't want to risk Social Bookmarks or blog comments quite yet.

5) well I have one main KW, and 5 other keywords. At the top of the site there is 5 navigation links, each of them lead to a separate page targetting primarily one of the tertiary keywords but also includes the main keyword. Each inner page has 1-3 links to other inner pages, but only when its relevant.
 
1. Why would anyone hire you for SEO when it's clear you have no clue WTF you are doing ?

2. Why would you ever think that because you have 5000 words, videos, images, and outbound links to authority sites Google would index you ?? let alone start to rank you!

If you build it they will come... doesn't work so well w/out any links.

You have so much to learn, I'd suggest slowing down on the shit links to your EMPLOYERS site until you learn what you are doing. If I was your employer and saw this thread basically saying you are testing, and learning SEO with their business I'd be fucking pissed at you.
 
haha hiring people who don't know the first thing about SEO is like the #1 game in town for local businesses.
 
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