Writtenstyle's Legit Ecommerce Business Journal

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writtenstyle

newbie taking action
Nov 3, 2008
666
11
0
I thought I would start a journal for my quest in creating a legit ecommerce business. As for a little background, I have been an eccomerce marketing manager for a large manufacturer for the past couple of year. During this time, I have had a chance to create some great processes and profitably integrate new marketing plans in to the the business.

My only setback to creating my own ecommerce empire was the lack of suppliers. Well, that has recently changed and it is time for me to put some of my knowledge to use in building a legit business.

I have Newbie Taking Action in my profile, but I am only newbie in some areas. For instance, I have never done SEO according to SEO on this forum. I have never bought scrapebox services, had link wheels created, or used any automated backlink building tool. My linkbuilding experiences have all been blogger outreach, viral content, and other completely white hat methods.

Of course, I am working for a large company and I do not want to be responsible for any kind of penalty. I will say that white hat link building has been great, as we are #1 or #2 for most every phrase in our niche. We are even #1 for a couple of one word queries that get 100K searches a month. That is really a vanity ranking, since it doesnt convert.

I got started last week and here is what I have done so far:

I have selected 4 niches. I will refer to them Niche 1, 2, 3 or 4 throughout this journal.

I have got my Federal Tax ID number

I have applied for my Tax Certificate

I should have those by the end of the week.
 


Niche 1

This niche is the least profitable niche. My profit looks to be around 20%. The thing I like the best about this niche is, the SERP IQ score for the main keyword is 54. So, it is the least competitive overall niche of the four I selected.

I bought a 12 year old brandable domain and had it transferred to me on 3/08. I installed presta shopping cart and updated the homepage with content about the niche. I also added one product so I could send signals to search engines as to what this site is about, and to remove general lanquage from the standard template.

I installed WMT and GA. Today, all pages are indexed! I rank on the 2nd page for my brand name.

I still do not have a contract with the supplier, yet. But, that should be squared away by the end of this week.

Niche 2

The most competitive niche. Really, I just want a site in this niche so I can brag. This is more of a vanity thing than a money maker. I just really want this site.

I have the contract with this supplier, already. The problem is getting a programmer to upload the products via CSV for me. I have no program skills at all.

I bought a brand new brandable domain for this one.

I also need to buy a template. Will probably use presta for this one too. Since I have to buy modules. I figure, I can buy them for one site and use them for all four sites.

Niche 3

Waiting on business paperwork. This one I am most excited about. This one looks to be the most promising of all of them.

Niche 4

Waiting on business paperwork.

Since these sites have no backlinks, I want to jumpstart my SEO by using some of the services in BST. I just do not know how to come up with a plan. One time, I bought an Xrumer package, but nothing happened. Like I said, I have never done anything automated.

That is the thing I am most excited about learning. Since I am not using EMDs, I am going to have to build my sites as brands, which is part of my legit business strategy.
 
Im liking this aged domain for niche 1.

I got the domain for $20. From what I can tell, it has never even been hosted, much less used in any way. When I bought it, it had 0 backlinks according to Majestic's historical index. It had no captures on Wayback machine. It had 0 pages indexed.

In three days after transfer, it was fully indexed with no links built, only installation of GA and WMT.

Might consider aged domains for my remaining three niches, as well.
 
Sub'd! Will you just be doing SEO for marketing or are you going to use other tactics?

I have an ecom store myself in a high comp niche. For link building I prefer in content links and stay away from big blasts of 500 +. It was working good until I guess got slapped. For my 4 kws but a month later have jumped back and have same or better for the kws.

So now I will slow do on my links and go for more high pr pages. Quality vs quantity.
 
Im gonna build them on solid SEO foundations from an architecture standpoint first. Then, work on a solid backlink portfolio. But, I might get some Web 2.0s and social bookmarks to jumpstart things.

I plan on using paid sources as well. But to keep this real, I am only going to use funds gained from internet marketing to build these sites and provide the marketing budget.

So first is to get my business paperwork and forms all finalized. Then, get my suppliers all in order. Then, build out the sites. Then work on marketing.
 
Finally, got all the licenses and paperwork squared away. So, I am officially a business! Havent done much cause I couldnt approach any suppliers.

I still have the suppliers I found in my initial research and I am going to fax them the paperwork tomorrow. So, hopefully next week I will have some things lined up.

The only site I started is ranking really well. It is that 12 year old domain is holding its own. I have no products and just placeholder text about the niche on the site and it is still ranked on page one for its brand name, with good rankings for several phrases in the sparse content.
 
Ok. After an entire day of back and forth faxes and phone calls, I am now setup with 3 out of my four suppliers. This is good, cause I am going to dismiss my vanity niche and focus on making some money.

So at this point, I have to figure out haw to get a programmer to import a product feed for me and make it update everyday so my real time stock levels stay correct.

Im also still trying to make up my mind on shopping carts. I am leaning heavily on prestashop, but I need to see if I can noindex/nofollow all prosucts, then go in and manually make them index follow.

The reason I do the above is, I want the products on my site so people have products to purchase once they get there, but I do not want all that duplicate content indexed. I will make the products indexable as I rewrite every description one by one. I might also do a video description or something for each product, but how do you do that without having the actual product in hand to demo?

Things needed now:

Templates
Programmer
2 Domain names
Tons of niche research

The good thing about build on presta is, once I have the addons, I can use them for my other sites.
 
Good idea to drop the vanity site! How many products will each site have?

Have you looked at Volusion? See a lot of people using that cart. Seems to function well and looks good to!
 
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