A few new sites to use as tools

The first that I've actually received two customers from is merchantcircle.com where you can add promotional advertising for your site. I put a 10% off coupon there and have gotten 2 customers from there so far. Well worth the cost... FREE. :-) Here is the coupon I posted. Just took 5 minutes.

Another site I found from a posting on buyitsellit.com community boards is all4webs.com. You create a web page where it's a little like a home page. You direct people to your website with this tool. Here's my page.

The final website is weebly.com. You can create a blog here, but for now I'm treating it like all4webs and just creating a front page for people to click for my real website. Here's my Weebly page.

All of these were very easy to use and just took a few minutes to set-up. Hopefully it will bring new visitors.

BISI Down For a day

This week was rough for Buy It Sell It account holders this week. Everything was lost up until the 26th for a full day and later restored. While the restoration was happening nobody had administrative access to their stores. This cause understandable fear and panic amongst store owners. BISI will lose many stores because of this outage. I myself am considering moving to zencart.com. I'm still trying to weigh the pros and cons. Everyone that has moved to zencart.org seem very happy with their stores. I'll have to search their community boards and see how many complaints there are. The cost of both are the same. However I did just sign up with propay a couple months ago for them to handle my credit card transactions and I can't use propay with Zen Cart. Luckily I wasn't impacted very much by the BISI outage, but who knows what will happen if there is a next time. In looking at the boards of BISI it appears that people are still having problems though. Check out these complaints from The Selling Lounge. Well I'm off to dinner and the park to relax and not think about this whole mess.

SEO tips

Someone on Buy it Sell it was concerned about her traffic so I gave her some suggestions. I thought it maybe helpful for others.

I'm no expert but I wanted to give you some input on your titles and stuff that might help you get more traffic. I have to admit I'm a bit bored at work and that's why I have time. :-)

I recently optimized my pages and my Google percentages went up by 2% (according to the BISI stats on our Dashboard. I was at 25% until I started tweeting a lot so that brought me down for google percentage but not down in Google search quantity. I used google adwords to find the best words for me. After I was done I went to SEOCetro.com and used the keyword analyzer to be sure page title is in sink with my keywords and description. Also you want to have the keywords you find in google adwords to be the first words in your title.

Let me give you an example.... You have this title for a product. Black and White silk/sheer hair clip. Double loop I would change to Girls Hair Clips Black & White Silk / Sheer I always put the spaces before and after the slash so the search engine sees the two words separately otherwise I think they are seen as one word. Most importantly the title I'm showing puts the Girls Hair Clips front and center. That's the keywords you're hoping people will search for. Why? Because in Google it shows people look for that phrase is 1,900 in a month AND there are 618,000 pages competing with you. Now if you change that to Hair Clip you get 301,000 searchers but you don't know if they are looking for women or girls. AND you are competing with 2.36 million other pages to get your page to the top of google AND to be clicked on by the customer. So with Girls Hair Clips you are targeting more of a niche group and they are more likely to be interested in sticking around. And take note when you go into Google that the S on the end of a word makes a huge difference. In your case, I would use the S exactly where I have them.

I know some people on Buy It Sell It think you don't have to add SEO attributes and they'll be added for you, but I think it's just added as whatever you have on your home page... that's not going to apply to all of your items. And when I see my percentage increase by 2% from optimizing I beg to differ with them that it's not necessary to add your own. I had always been adding to SEO, but I wasn't as diligent with my title.

This update brought to you by
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Buy It Sell It has an affiliate program now!!!

Exciting news! Buy it Sell It has a new affiliate program where if you recommend people to them you receive 25% revenue share on those referred accounts. So I've added a link to the left. You sign up, create your fab website and start recommending people to Buy It Sell It after you see what a great place it is to sell on.

Been a while

OK I'm motivated today! I just got a new ceramic dog dish supplier and I'm really excited because they are fantastic looking and of fantastic quality. I'm going to post a bunch tonight.

I've been getting quite a lot of visitors from Twitter to my store which makes those quick posts worthwhile.

There's quite the buzz on buyitsellit.com today. Fees went up on the paid account from $4.95 to $9.95. Not too bad... actually a bargain based on other sites out there for hosting and having the tools for you to set up a great looking site with your own domain name. I think the problem is coming in for people that currently have free stores. With the new structure they'll be limited to 10 items in their store... that's not many at all. So many say they'll close their store. It's my understanding that this is all to curb fraudulant activity. I can see that working. People that are fraudulant aren't going to waste their time with a place where they can only post 10 items... most likely AND they don't want to spend $10 on a store if they are an ameture scammer. I was thinking about opening a new store, but I'll have to wait until my first store can pay for it.

Off to add some dog dishes to the website....

I signed up with Twitter a few days ago to use that as a source of advertising. I've gotten a few hits from there so far. It's easy enough to use so I figure I'll use it for a bit to see if it helps. Follow me!!!

It was pointed out to me the other day by someone on Buy It Sell It that I didn't have the information on my blog page for people to follow me on here. I'm thinking that made it difficult to gain followers so I've added that.

I've been using sitemeter to follow my stats for my store because for ME it's more user friendly than Google stats. I'm sure google contains more information so I'll have to explore that more too. Well, I realized the other day that I didn't have the sitemeter code on ALL of my pages so I was only getting reads if someone came in through my home page. I've fixed that and now I see many more people visiting. I can see that they're coming in through google so I'm very excited about that. I also clicked on one of my items and noticed that when it appears in Google Base it shows my name rather than my store name. I'd MUCH rather it show my store name of course so I've made the adjustment that I think will correct that I just have to watch for it to change. I'm expecting it to take a day or so to take affect but I might have to do some investigating to figure out why it hasn't shown up as DogDishStore yet.

I've been posting more in a dog forum to try and get customers. It's pretty nice. I've been adding input regularly on there.

I've gotten a few places to link to me and I'm thrilled about that. I have to work on getting more of that going. It's kind of tedious but VERY necessary to rank high with google.

I hadn't realized how much I've done until I wrote it all down. I think I need to give myself a pat on the back. :-)

Update

Lately I've been busy adding items to my store and of late, I am going back to all of my listings to edit them for duplicate content. There are so many listings that hardly differ from the next but to keep my items from being banned from Google I need to be sure they are on duplicate. I've gone to jpeterman.com for inspiration. I can't believe how descriptive and poetic their product descriptions are. If you ever need motivation to write better content, check out jpeterman.com.

I see I have two followers to my blog now. YAY! Welcome! Feel free to send your friends. :-)

What has changed via Buy It Sell It of late:
* They have come out with a new template as of yesterday and everyone is buzzing about it. I love it myself. It's really making me want to come out with a cat dish store, but I should really do more with the dog store before I focus on two sites at once. At least that's my current thought. There are still so many items to post in the dog store and so many things to better about the store. Although I know there are always things I can make better about the store so that part won't keep me from moving onto creating a new store.
*Statistics on our stores has also been added to Buy It Sell It so that will be helpful. Google Analytics is great, but it seems that stats from Buy It Sell It will include more visits than Google includes. I always feel like I'm shorted by Google in looking at my page views in Buy It Sell It so hopefully this will help me analyze what I can/should change about the store.
* I was able to add more featured items to my home page so now it's at 9. You really can fumble through html and get buy with a Buy It Sell It store. You may have questions now and then if you want to get a little fancier, but there is always someone there to help. I know people have been scared away from custom templates on there because they think they need to know html, but if you look at it often enough you can figure out how to make minor adjustments to do something that an unpaid user wouldn't be able to do.

This past week I got 2 sales in 1 day that I'm very excited about. What's even more exciting is that it looks like they found me through Google. VERY key to being successful on the internet is ranking high with Google. Hopefully there are many more sales to come. I'll keep ya posted!

So I've decided to take the plunge and purchase the E-Book for the SEO class I'm taking. People report better results with it, and I figure the book is probably more organized than my notes.

I've been continuing to post new products in my Dog Dish Store. I have to admit that I'm getting a bit discouraged. On my to-do list currently is to get people to add my site to their site, and the response for this is VERY low. Kind of frustrating really. But it's one of those not so fun tasks of setting up this successful site. It's a job I don't want to do but really HAS to be done to get my name out there in Google. The more links the more likely Google is to crawl my site and the more likely I will move up in their rankings.

I think one reason why I've been discouraged is that the SEO class is coming to an end and while I feel like I've learned a lot I'm not at the top yet. And maybe unrealistic, but I think I expected to have more hits by now. It's only about 20 hits per day. That's nothing. I would love at LEAST 100. And for more to be coming from Google. I only get about 9 per day from google. The others come from buyitsellit community boards or Selling Lounge. All great people, but I guess I'd rather people get there without me putting the website right in their face.

I should also point out that I have found another fabulous online community full of sellers helping sellers called Selling Lounge. I only wish there were more posts on there, but once people start coming from buyitsellit.com and plumdrop.com hopefully it will pick up.

My First Sale

YAY ME!!! I have my first sale... well my first two sales! The first was a slipper dog bed. That was last Thursday. THEN a sale today for 8... that's right... EIGHT ceramic dog dishes. I'm so excited!!! I've been adding items daily and trying to get people to link to me on their sites. I'm also continuing with Cricket's class with anticipation for each new lesson.

Today I decided to add text to the website indicating when I last added products ... a tip from someone on buyitsellit.com. It lets everyone know it's an active site. I think I'll be changing that date everyday because I've been adding products non-stop for I don't know how long. I want to make sure I give variety and I want to become a one stop shop for people. I know when I buy from someone on the internet I'm thinking "do I need anything else they offer? Maybe I can save on shipping."

Time to get off the computer for tonight. I've decided of late to take some "me" time before bed and relax in front of the tv. I love working on the business but I need time away from the computer every now and then.

It's been almost a week since my last post so I thought I'd better post. I've been very busy with tools for my journey. My goal this week was to get more products into my store on buyitsellit.com but in the process I learned so much. I've read about niche stores before and that it's good to have one, but I guess I didn't take it seriously. Now I'm sitting up and listening. I decided to start a new store with exclusively dog dishes on buyitsellit. It's called Dog Dish Store. I'm excited about it! I have about 23 listings on there right now. I'm working on getting many more. I'm getting a fare amount of viewings as well.

I visit the community boards on buy it sell it daily and I'm so jealous of these people ... in an admiring way though. It's almost comical to see so many people talk about how well there stores are doing or even how average their stores are doing when I've had a store on the site for a year with NO sales. To the site's credit I haven't done much to promote my items on there. It's not a huge site like Ebay so you have to bring people to your store. Google, word of mouth, ways like that.

I have also joined a Sight Engine Optimization free online class. It's to start within the next day and I'm so exciting. You join Yahoo groups to get the classes. There is a $20 book to follow along with the class, but you don't have to get it. People have been found to be more successful WITH it. I haven't bought it yet, but I think I will. It's an online book so you don't have to wait for shipping. You can get the book mailed to you as far as I understand. Click here for the SEO training class. Make sure you sign up for the class AND the Yahoo groups or you won't get into the class. ALSO you have to sign up for the Website Marketing Training Class at the same time as the SEO Training Class. What do you have to lose? ... It's FREE. :-) I can't wait to get the first lesson and put some of it to great use. Someone on buyitsellit that used the program just had a $300 day the other day. Can you believe it? That was enough for me to sign up!

In case you're wondering where I'm getting the dog dishes from, they are from the dropshipper that I belong to with my website DNAETC.com. They really give you so much to work with if you want to take it to another site to sell in addition to selling on your own site. Click on DropShipDirect to the left to check it out.

Getting late. Better get to bed. We go to see Santa in the morning. Then to a friend's Christmas Party. Then Santa again on Sunday. VERY full weekend!!!

YAY!

I got the bulk upload to work on Buy It Sell It with the help of the people in the community message boards. I'll have to add 'quick AND helpful responses in the message boards' to my list of "LIKES." They have people on the message boards called bisi gurus that are experts in there and respond quickly so if you have any questions you don't have to wait for the company or someone that MAYBE knows what they are talking about to answer back. You get a response from a knowledgeable person relatively quickly. I'm so excited! Now I can add items relatively quickly. I'll work on getting more products in there tomorrow night. Right now I'll just bask in the glory of success. :-) Check out the site and let me know what you think.

I haven't been very productive this week... not as productive as I'd like anyway.

My family and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving Holiday. We went to my in-laws' home and it was a lot of fun: good food and lots of memories were shared. Now the Christmas season hustle and bustle begin.

LINKS
As for the business, I have discovered that linking to others' websites increase the visibility of your own. So I'm trying to find like-sites that don't compete with me, and having them link to me while I link to me. The bigger and better the site the better for me is how I see it. I have a couple of sites to the lower left that I have started with. I'll have to search for additional sites. Once I get a number of them I'll just add a Link category so people can click on that and see a number of other great sites that I like.

Buy It Sell It
I've had an account with Buy It Sell It for sometime now. I've had active products on there, but haven't sold anything so I haven't really paid much attention to the site.

LIKES:

1. Set up a free store.
   
2. The store is nice an professional looking.
3. Easy to set up listings.
4. You can use unlimited time frames for listings.
5. Can set up Google keywords for your listings so I think the products are more likely to show up on Google.
6. There is a bulk upload. This is done via tab delimited files you set up. At this point I haven't been able to get this to work for me, but others have and there is a community I'm working with to get my data corrected.
7. Everything is buy it now so you don't have to wait for an auction to end.
8. You can promote your other site(s) in your listing or in your storefront.
9. Products are fed to Google Base where people can see all of your auctions/listings on different auction sites.
10. You can use your own domain name with it, or just use your name in the following format: dnaetc.mybisi.com
    

DISLIKES

1. Not much traffic to the site so you may want to work to drive traffic to your buy it sell it store. I see there are a lot of listings on there so hopefully it's getting bigger.
2. You'll need to market your store. It's just like having a stand alone store so most people won't find you until you market the right way. I haven't spent anytime doing that yet so I do have no sales but I see on the discussion boards that people do have consistent sales using the buy it sell it site/tool.