My E-Commerce Journal: Wealth or Waste?

T

TheQuestion

New member
Oct 11, 2010
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British Columbia, Canada
Hey all, I came across this forum a few weeks ago and was blown away by the quality of information available. I have had a couple of projects on the backburner for months now (since I closed my eBay account) and reading through some of the posts I got the motivation to put a solid plan together and get some work done.

My plan is to build a network of profitable E-Commerce sites that can hopefully act as a spring board into my next business venture. I am new to running my own profit generating website, however I am not new to web development (I have a basic skillset) or online business (I supported myself on ebay for 2 years)

I decided to go with E-com for two reasons. Primarily, It seems that there is simply a lot less competition than many of the niches available through affiliate marketing. Secondly sourcing products myself gives me more control over what I promote, how I promote it and who my competition is. To clarify that last point, if somebody sees my site or ad it's not as simple as duplicating the landing page and throwing up a campaign of their own, they have to do their own product research, source the items and get some other framework in place. I'm used to handling products myself and dealing with suppliers so that is not an issue.

My immediate goal is to build 1 site a week until the middle of november. At that point i'll step back and see which direction everything is taking me. I have 5 possible niches I can enter and have already selected my products for each niche. At the moment i'll focus the site around a single product, but in a few niches there is room for expansion if the site really takes off. Sourcing products is not my immediate concern since I will be promoting these sites with SEO. I will advertise the item as in stock and as soon as I get my first attempted order i'll purchase the stock. This way i'm not blowing money on sites that are destined to be a total flop.

I've already made some headroom on my first site today. I've got the layout picked from themeforest, I bought a shared hosting account from zensix and i've got my domain. I also wrote about 1000 words of content for various parts of the site and currently I am working on sourcing videos related to the product.

The next step is to figure out exactly how I want to structure my webpage so I know what content to write next. After i've got the content all written up and uploaded i'll need to focus on photoshop (designing a logo and touching up product shots). Finally I'll get the ball rolling on link building and move on to the next site.

One disadvantage is that i'm a full time student studying business administration, and i've got a 20hr a week job on top of that. So time does not come naturally to me. Fortunately I feel like I am pretty efficient so i'll be sure to get as much done while I can.

Thats it for tonight!
 


Sounds very interesting.

One thing that bothers though, with the limited amount of time that you have (barely any), how do you plan to launch, manage and promote 5 different businesses? If I were you I'd do some more research and put all my focus into the one with the most potential until you get it off the ground...

In any case, I'll be following this closely.

Best of luck!
 
I've got 12 journals bookmarked. Only two are updated.
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Well, I suppose every newbie says this says this but I fully intend to see this one though till the end.

In regards to my time schedule, I was able to handle shipping out 50 items a day at the peak of my ebay business while working two jobs 40hrs and 20 hrs a week respectively. Granted it was a small, easy product (screen protectors - low margin) but I was able to do it.

In the past i've employed friends and family to respond to emails and ship items for me if I get too busy to handle it. I don't think it will be an issue but if it comes up i've got resources to handle it.

The biggest issue for me is going to be getting the sites built and maintaining a solid link building strategy. But in doing so i'll be able to see exactly how far I can stretch myself week to week and then re-evaluate once I actually start making orders.

Regardless, i'm setting the bar for this first site low. the keyword gets 30k exact match searches in the states and over 201k monthly wordlwide searches. (exact match).

I may also employ a slightly different strategy for my next couple pages. Instead of building sales pages i'll make an informational site based around my product and convert it into a sales page once I get some traffic. We'll see what happens when the time comes.

I got back from school a little early today (writing midterms) so I set up the structure of the web site. Now I have a list of all the content I need to write or source. I'm just going to finish entering filler text into my template where I need it and linking the pages together. The other goals for the day is to prep and upload 4 videos to youtube and get some content written.

But first study time, another update comes later tonight.
 
well, got some things done I had wanted to.

Pointed the domain to my shared hosting account, set up a forwarded email account and signed up for youtube and twitter accounts. No plan for the twitter account yet.. but i've got 5 videos uploaded to the youtube with my URL on the bottom. Looks like only 1 of these videos is already hosted on youtube (much worse quality however) and the rest are original content. Really I just wanted em uploaded to take some of the load off my hosting account, but you never know I might get some traffic this way.

Has anybody tried sending mass links to youtube? Something I'll have to research for the future...

did not write as much content as I would have liked. I spent too much time getting everything perfect. Next time I think i'll just force myself to write without stopping, then go back and review after i've drafted up all of my content the first time.

The link structure of the site is finished for now, at least i've got the HTML files labeled how I want them but nothing is linked yet.
 
Good luck in your journal. My advice is try to give as much information as possible for others to read and learn without shooting yourself on the foot because they steal your stuff.
 
Good luck with your project, you should probably plan out your site structure with keywords, that way you know what to write and target.
 
Good luck in your journal. My advice is try to give as much information as possible for others to read and learn without shooting yourself on the foot because they steal your stuff.
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Thanks for the heads up, not speaking from experience I hope!

I spent 3 hours today in photoshop doing logos and editing product shots to fit with the theme of the site. I don't have tons of photoshop experience and i'm a perfectionist so although I learned a lot I certainly didn't have the output I had hoped for.

Also read through the cashvertising book summary thread.. gave me some great ideas for some of my content which is going to need some modification. But it will have to wait until tomorrow.
 
Thanks for the suggestion, Library had it out but i've got it on reserve now.

anyway, I haven't forgotten about this thread! Just working a few shifts at the 9-5, studying for exams and hustling on the page.

I got really into writing testimonials this weekend. It's hard to go into too much detail without giving away my niche, but I came up with a very unique approach to testimonials on my page. Regardless I now have an additional 10 pages of content for the site with at least 250 words each which i'll start uploading daily once I get the main bit up.

I also have a fairly small database of products so a regular shopping cart system doesn't really work for me. I learned a bit of code and wrote up a very basic but very effective shopping cart script that works excellent for my site. I've got it integrated with paypal right now (which was pretty easy so should be good enough for now)

I know paypal has a lot of bad rep, but i'm not dropshipping and I think it should be good enough while I get my feet wet. I've got a verified business account thats had a good amount of cashflow through it and never a single dispute so I doubt i'll run into problems.

Still got to crunch through the photoshop bit.. i've been avoiding it. But anyway back to work!
 
hey, i like this, I am doing e-com atm and its great. Its great when u know ur building ur own brand etc. I have a journal on bhw thats been going for about a yr now if u want it tell me.

I want to know though, u want to build a list of e-com sites which is great because im also along that path but I want to know how are you gonna get traffic to it? Do you have skills in SEO adwords etc?

Theres not point in 10 sites and zero traffic, if you get what i mean. But apart from that I guess ill bookmark this to see how u go. =D goodluck and if u need sometimes just pm me
 
TheQuestion said:
Hey all, I came across this forum a few weeks ago and was blown away by the quality of information available. I have had a couple of projects on the backburner for months now (since I closed my eBay account) and reading through some of the posts I got the motivation to put a solid plan together and get some work done.

My plan is to build a network of profitable E-Commerce sites that can hopefully act as a spring board into my next business venture. I am new to running my own profit generating website, however I am not new to web development (I have a basic skillset) or online business (I supported myself on ebay for 2 years)

I decided to go with E-com for two reasons. Primarily, It seems that there is simply a lot less competition than many of the niches available through affiliate marketing. Secondly sourcing products myself gives me more control over what I promote, how I promote it and who my competition is. To clarify that last point, if somebody sees my site or ad it's not as simple as duplicating the landing page and throwing up a campaign of their own, they have to do their own product research, source the items and get some other framework in place. I'm used to handling products myself and dealing with suppliers so that is not an issue.

My immediate goal is to build 1 site a week until the middle of november. At that point i'll step back and see which direction everything is taking me. I have 5 possible niches I can enter and have already selected my products for each niche. At the moment i'll focus the site around a single product, but in a few niches there is room for expansion if the site really takes off. Sourcing products is not my immediate concern since I will be promoting these sites with SEO. I will advertise the item as in stock and as soon as I get my first attempted order i'll purchase the stock. This way i'm not blowing money on sites that are destined to be a total flop.

I've already made some headroom on my first site today. I've got the layout picked from themeforest, I bought a shared hosting account from zensix and i've got my domain. I also wrote about 1000 words of content for various parts of the site and currently I am working on sourcing videos related to the product.

The next step is to figure out exactly how I want to structure my webpage so I know what content to write next. After i've got the content all written up and uploaded i'll need to focus on photoshop (designing a logo and touching up product shots). Finally I'll get the ball rolling on link building and move on to the next site.

One disadvantage is that i'm a full time student studying business administration, and i've got a 20hr a week job on top of that. So time does not come naturally to me. Fortunately I feel like I am pretty efficient so i'll be sure to get as much done while I can.

Thats it for tonight!
Click to expand...


Where do you go to school?
 
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