“Web 2.0 Retail Platform” - Shopify Review

Shopify helps you open “a shop in minutes”, to be “in business for life”… and many supporters are hoping that they become the Web 2.0 retail platform.  The company is based in Ottawa, and they launched the site a lot later than they originally planned… surprise… but the splash has been huge.  Basically, they take a 3.75% commission on each sale and in turn host your ecommerce shop, which is ultra easy to setup.

ShowMoney Video on Internet Directories

Hey… you’ve probably been over to ShoeMoney’s Blog by now, so hey, check out a video of the ex-fat guy.  Naw… was he really fat?!  Once again he’s got us wondering, and talking about him.  Genius.

Highlights of The 30 Day Challenge

…the above graphic is a screenshot of the first 10 of over 100 video/audio sessions that were ripped and posted on the 30 Day Challenge over… welll… 30 days in July. The challenge is to make a whopping $1 in your first month of internet marketing. Not a very ambitious goal, but the content is a rare free offering, that is great for beginningers! I don’t quite get how these guys make money or justify this expenditure of their time… but hey, it’s a ton of content, and content is much of what is all about these days. Perhaps this is a “link baiting” trick where they build a ton of traffic and interest in 1 month, with a secret plan on how to monetize it.
yTo help my own commitment to memory, I’ve loosely summarized what I learned from this content.
The 30 Day Challenge

BONUS: I’ve attached a PDF on How To Write a Sales Letter compliments of The 30 Day Challenge.

Example: Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Vintage Guitar
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Use the Keyword Selector (also found now under TOOLS on YolkSmoke)
Use this to find keywords with results in the 30,000 - 70,000 range.

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Use the Yahoo Resource Center
Use the “View Bids Tool” to confirm that your niche has paying ads in the range of .30 - 1.25 or so. (or more!?)
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Amazon Test (local Barnes & Noble is better)
The “Guitar” keyword has 8000 books… which is too big to be a real niche, so go for a smaller niche, blues guitar, acoustic guitar…

BE SILENT: “Outrageous profits bring ruineous competition”… so talking about your site in a marketing forum is stupid. First Rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club, is don’t talk about Fight Club. Don’t be a proud sausage maker! Your profits will dwindle immediately. So we can’t talk about our obscure niches.
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Google Ads Test
(a) On google.com, click “preferences”, and change to “100″ results, to see lots more results at once.
(b) Type Guitar, and find this ad confirms this niche is profitable… people are making money in it:
http://jamorama.by-right.com/?gclid=CMOkhobes4YCFTMcGAod3U72Pg

[I’m tired of editing these notes… so from here on, it might only make sense to me. Go check out the 30 Day Challenge Video/Audio content!

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Google Trends
Guitar shows spikes around Xmas, but steady trend on both search & news for 2004 and 2005.
Lacrosse has an obvious seasonal cycle in search, but news is steady UNTIL turn of 2006… a huge story “2 Duke Lacrosse Players are arrested”. POINT BEING, Google Trends helps you break out NEWS from search results, so you don’t mistake a positive search trend from one that has bad press.

Looking below, you’ll see that the top regions for searching “guitar” is Phillipines & New Zealand. Should you be focusing your marketing on Phillipines/New Zealand? NO. The averages are means, and the population of Phillipines or New Zealand is small, but proportionally they have a lot of guitarists.

Upper right, change region to US, our target market.

Upper right, change time to MAY 2006… and you will see a pulsing wave… which is the weekend! Your target market for Guitars is searching on weekends for guitars! VERY HELPFUL for your marketing campaign (Promos/Auto-responder information, etc..)! And some keywords are more common during the weekdays!

COMPARE “Fender Guitar, Gibson Guitar”

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Blogger - Create a Blog
Be sure to set site feed to SHORT, so people are forced to visit your site for the full article, if another is publishing your feed.
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Blog & Ping - Use Pingoat.com
Click “general” tag at the top to select all.
Don’t select other languages, but DO select “special services”.

MUST DO 2 to 3 times PER DAY, and PING everytime!!!!!!
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Get Flock Browser, since it has a news reader built in.
(paid advertisement? I think so.)
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Google News - Vintage Guitar
Click on RSS Feed icon (orange icon) and in Flock drag it into his Vintage Guitar News favorites folder.

Click the blog button in Flock
Copies part of this article into your blog.
Then you humanize it, by adding your own editorial content about the article.
TAG the post since it helps search engines pick it up, and FLOCK lets you do this.
SAVE TO WEB SNIPPETS, right click any image or TEXT, and you can bring this into blog post later!
DRAG AND DROP web browser link into your post, makes it a clickable link.

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Coin Collecting
Coffee Shop Secrets

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FLY CATCHER
Aweber.com Autoresponder - is the backbone of MANY successful online businesses, as it lures people along a path of investing their time with little nuggets of information to arrive at the HOOK, buy something!

+Bang out 7 days of auto-responders right away… the more that have offers, the more money you will make.
+Search “Vintage Guitar filetype:PDF”

1st EMAIL - Be friendly, reference their first name, and:
+ send them a YouTube video on the topic of your site.
+ A reader (Bob in Denmark) sent me this video and I’d thought you’d like it (makes it seem like a big fan base)

Let me know if you like it.

Talk soon,
NORTH

PS: If you have any buddies who play guitar, feel free to send them to my site and I’ll puit them on the list too.

Here’s my site in case you lost the link:
http://www..yolksmoke.com

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http://www.underachieverlife.com/portal/Forum/tabid/62/view/topics/forumid/1/Default.aspx

SES San Jose Pimps

What a fly panel of SEO pimps. They were literally pimped out, with bling shades, leopard suits, canes, and ummmm… confetti?!
http://searchviews.com/archives/2006/03/ses_pimp_my_sit.php

In true pimp style, I’ve got about 37MB of PPT presentations and such from SES, for those that couldn’t make it.  If you seriously have the will to digest this information, throw me a comment on here suckas.

Top Search Keywords

You know you want to know what the world is searching for at any given point in time!

I’ll get straight to the point on this one. I’ve tracked down one great tool for this, and two that are just alright.

Read ‘em and weep. Wait.. that didn’t make any sense. OH.. you know what I mean. Ummm… no you don’t… just get out of here!

http://buzz.yahoo.com/

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

http://www.cwire.org/current-top-15-internet-searches/

10 Places to Buy a Profitable Web Site

So you think you can dance?!  Well, building an online business can take a TON of work. If you know how to sniff out the good deals from the bad, it may be better to buy an existing online business. Here are 10 places you can explore.

Sitepoint’s Sell Your Site Marketplace
Digitalpoint’s Buy, Sell, Trade Sites Section
Namepros Developed Sites for Sale
Geek Village Website for Sale
DN Forum Developed Websites
Ebay Internet Businesses and Websites
Webmaster Talk Websites for Sale
Search Engine Forums I Want to Sell My Website
BizBuySell Internet Businesses
Webhostingtalk Other Offers and Requests