Start your own E-Commerce Store: Follow my Progress

[JasonR]

Hi Peter,

Installing Google analytics is one of the first things I did (as you can see from the first page, I believe). Thanks for the tip. I do need to make sure the conversion funnel is working and, and set up goals (newsletter sign up, check out, etc.).

 

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[theag]

Depending on what you plan on doing in regards to seo, you should quickly disconnect your site from all google tools, e.g. Webmaster tools and analytics, and use independent alternatives. There are a lot of articles on this and while there is no proof, many people suggest it can have a negative effect on your efforts.

 

[The-J]

interesting thread.
im 16 from the uk and i want to get on thefastlane asap . but i dnw ifi shud drop outa college or not and how to make income through ecommerce any tips advice would be appreciated thanks

One tip: read more on the Fastlane Forum.

 

[JasonR]

Depending on what you plan on doing in regards to seo, you should quickly disconnect your site from all google tools, e.g. Webmaster tools and analytics, and use independent alternatives. There are a lot of articles on this and while there is no proof, many people suggest it can have a negative effect on your efforts.

Can you explain this further? I've never heard this before.

 

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[theag]

Heres a good topic on it, dont have time to search for more details right now, sorry. http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...ont-use-google-analytics-webmaster-tools.html

Its not about having access to links or information like that. Its about putting all your eggs in a single, and unnecessary basket.

If you spent years building up websites that finally received top rankings, would you want to jeopardize all of those accounts by installing Analytics or activating Webmaster Tools? For some of us, that equates to $xx,xxx/mo. or more!

Some don't play by Google's ever ambiguous terms of service and we want to reduce the possibility that all of our websites could lose all of the rankings at the same time. By activating Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools you run the risk of having all of your sites removed in a single blow if you don't play by the rules.

Like I said its just theories. But as we all know, google likes to F*ck up stuff for smaller online businesses to get them to use ppc. They have no reason at all to "allow" seo techniques because they dont make any money from it. And webmaster tools + analytics gives them another layer of information to see your tactics.

Just think about it: theoretically, if you just build ONE link yourself to your site, you're already violating their terms of service or seo guidelines or whatever the document is called.

 

[theag]

Love this quote

They didn't spend billions to get urchin (analytics) just so they can show webmasters pretty pie charts for free. People look for proof and case studies but using common sense draws a clear enough picture: if I am making money from voyeuristic pornography and am somehow able to make people use transparent walls for their houses... would I use it to make more money or would I let all this cash slip away because of my motto 'don't do evil'?

 

[PatrickP]

Just one person's experience.

I put google analytics on my site on day one. 1 week after making the site it was ranked # 16,000,000 according to Alexa. 2 months later it was ranked 2,250,000 according Alexa with 1 incoming link. I have zero idea if this is good or not, or if it even relates to what you guys are talking about SEO. Or is Alexa is a reputable source for this info.

Just one sites results.

 

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[JasonR]

Heres a good topic on it, dont have time to search for more details right now, sorry. Dont Use Google Analytics Or Webmaster Tools?



Like I said its just theories. But as we all know, google likes to F*ck up stuff for smaller online businesses to get them to use ppc. They have no reason at all to "allow" seo techniques because they dont make any money from it. And webmaster tools + analytics gives them another layer of information to see your tactics.

Just think about it: theoretically, if you just build ONE link yourself to your site, you're already violating their terms of service or seo guidelines or whatever the document is called.

I think one problem is you're looking at blackhatworld! Haha. Anyways, I do see the point about the transparent walls and making more money, which may mor may not happen, but I don't think excluding analytics or webmaster tools will hurt my site. Sure, if I was using questionable SEO Tactics I probably wouldn't use them, but I don't believe that's how you built a site and brand will be successful in the long term.

So I will continue to use analytics and webmaster tools.

 

[theag]

I dont see whats wrong about bhw. Theres a lot of great whitehat knowledge there. And by googles definition ALL seo tactics are questionable and "blackhat", not just cloaking, link spam and other pure bh stuff.

 

[JasonR]

Wanted to give an update. I've been using excel and Magento's Data Flow profiles to import products. So far - it's pretty slow going, definitely a big learning curve to Magento. However, I do think other products will go quicker. I need to get a few products up in every category, and start testing the market.

I think I got a wake up call, and the niche I'm in might be more saturated then I thought. We'll see. I've had some personal issues in my life come up to make for a really shitty week, so I'm going to take tonight to recoup and hit it hard this weekend.

The biggest hurdle will the marketing, and adding real value via content. If anyone needs help with importing products (using excel, Magento's data flow, etc.) let me know. I'd love to help you out.

And I really do hope this thread has provided value for people. Update coming soon. Also, I will probably reveal the niche and website to the INSIDERS to get some feedback.

Good night!

 

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[Zen Focus]

Dear Jason,

You'd better believe your thread is providing value to a lot of people.

I am one of them who is constantly hoping to hear for your updates.

Currently I'm beginning on an Ecommerce store as well, and had outsourced website design/development to freelancers on oDesk. I chose OpenCart as my platform, because it seems much easier to maintain on my own. Secretly though I hope to be able to run on Magento but am afraid that as a one man team I can't run it independently.

As you said right now I'm also facing the hurdle of marketing the Ecommerce store. I've made sure to give it a theme, an attraction hook or reason for people to see my store as the go-to place even though I couldn't reduce pricing down from the standard drop ship value. However, somewhere at the back of my brain says the most important part is yet to come as contents and SEO take their place to star the show.

I'm hoping that with pure hard work in writing/offering as much quality contents there'll be results eventually.

I haven't been able to learn how to import products as data feeds to my Ecommerce store yet on OpenCart. Will have to learn that as well. Had established contact with several manufacturers and created several accounts enough to pack my store with lots of products. If I was asked on whether I know inside and out how I would go about listing the products (e.g. ship internationally or only within US, pricing shipping, putting up notices on which products can be shipped Internationally or which can't) with their necessary key purchase information I'd say I'm completely clueless for now.

But I guess to qualify ourselves as Fastlaners, we'll have to keep pushing on anyway regardless of whether we 100% understand how to do something as we continue to learn, strategize and act on our plans on the same path.

One thing I've learned from a book I've read recently about Ecommerce in terms of perception, is that we have to really think of it almost as a brick-and-mortar business. In local retailers they are able to reach to the local community of customers. Online, or as an Ecommerce, we are appealing to the world/whole of US customers at the least. Naturally, this means we must, must work a lot harder and imagine it as a brick-and-mortar retail store instead of a venture that promises a dream future fast.

The book says that we can consider giving a timeframe of 3-6 months of hard work to begin seeing results, and 1 year minimum before we expect any solid kinds of success. Keeping that in mind helps me work on it with more patience and commitment - hope this may help others on the same path as well to keep pushing on and don't quit too early.

 

[susanyang]

Very exciting to hear about your update, Jason! You bet you are helping a lot of us newbies. Hope your personal issues got sorted out soon!
I might PM you about importing products later on.

 

[ewH]

Hi Jason, thanks for posting about your progress. Can you explain a little more on the process you went through to find and select your suppliers?

 

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[JasonR]

Ewh,

I started emailing manufacturers of the products I wanted to sell. They put me in touch with local reps, and the local reps put me in touch with the two big distributors in my niche. I actually used Biophase's email script, but it didn't end up working that well for me. I still had to wait until I got a business license, resale cert, etc. before the suppliers would send me pricing information.

I would suggest getting a general business license before seeking suppliers. You can just get a general business license with a generic name, thus allowing you to explore any niche/market. And then contact manufacturers as some manufacturers will drop ship ,but if not, they can point you in the right direction.

Hope that helps you!

 

[ewH]

Thanks Jason, I am looking forward to hearing more about your road to success. Best of luck!

 

[Eskil]

The biggest hurdle will the marketing, and adding real value via content.

What is your short-term and long-term strategy for marketing? Mainly SEO and social/viral traffic? Or do you want to get into paid traffic as well? If you need some tips on marketing it with ppc, feel free to hit me up.

As far as content, there are many good ways to outsource that type of work for fairly cheap. Depends on your budget I guess, but I would start out with a product blog interlinked with your ecommerce site, or add content sections integrated with it (how to's, tutorials, tips, "did you know...", type of content). Whatever suits your niche I guess.

 

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[DEMARAY07]

Jason,

I love the thread, but I was wondering if you ever solved your problem with putting together your main "widgets"? In my niche there are many technical issues similar to that. However, product reps and distributors are an amazing recourse for me. Most reps that I have encountered are willing to come and meet with me and walk me through the process putting together a new products, how the product works and troubleshooting (this can come in handy for selling product that will fix the main "widgets" issue. This adds benefit to you because if you know when the product will begin to have issues, you know when you can start a marketing campaign--via email or otherwise--promoting products that can fix "widget" issues)


Good luck! Keep posting!

 

[JasonR]

No - I haven't figured that part out yet. However, I'm currently re-evaluating the niche...I'm not convinced I can add real value to this (I discovered more competitors when I started loading product). I may consider making the niche even tighter (IE selling "widgets" geared towards kids instead of everybody).

It's hard to help you out when I'm not sure what you're selling. But, if you can solve the technical issues (i.e. adding value), you very may well have a good opportunity and a competitive advantage.

 

[JasonR]

If I transferred much of this information, and wrote articles weekly / biweekly, would you guys be interested in following a blog dedicated to e-commerce, e-commerce business ventures, and so forth?

 

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[Bruce]

If I transferred much of this information, and wrote articles weekly / biweekly, would you guys be interested in following a blog dedicated to e-commerce, e-commerce business ventures, and so forth?

I would later on when you make a lot of sales and have huge success, it'd be nice to read up on how you did it and your hugest mistakes etc. But for now I think a progress thread is good enough.

Also after reading this thread I'm pretty excited to start my own eCommerce website. I've just contacted a few suppliers and hopefully I can get there response tomorrow morning and set-up my store (hopefully Magneto).

 

[MMatt]

How much does it cost to run magneto? I just did a little demo with it and it seems they have the greatest amount of successful users and I can now see what you mean by most customizable. Although I lack the knowledge to utilize all of its features; maybe it would be a good idea to start with them from the get-go.

 

[JasonR]

Magento community edition is free, and Nexcess Magento hosting starts at $25.00 (Magento Hosting – Nexcess).

Once your site starts getting traffic you'll need to monitor performance, and upgrade hosting accordingly. The company I work for runs their current site (x-cart) on a dedicated, managed host for under $400 and we get 80-100k visitors monthly. You should be able to get a dedicated server from Nexcess for under $400 (I'd have to double check) when you have the traffic that requires a dedicated server.

 

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[Burko]

Awesome thread Jason.

It is great to see the process you are going through. You have made very good progress with your site and I wish you luck (The kind you are making yourself).

Keep up the great work.

 

[stranger]

Setting up my Site Structure (SEO)

Most of you probably know that the structure of your site and SEO friendly URLs factor into search engine rankings. Here's how I'll be setting up my site and why.

My root url, as discussed, will be "www.mystore.com"

All CMS/content pages will be "www.mystore.com/content-page.html"
All product pages will be "www.mystore.com/product-page.html"
All category pages will be "www.mystore.com/category/"
All brand pages will be "www.mystore.com/brand/"

Pretty simple! The reason I have set the product pages up WITHOUT the category URL is simple, yet important. So what happens when you move a product page that resides in "www.mystore.com/category/product.html"? You now have to 301 redirect the old page, and, honestly, the extra keyword or two in the product URL isn't going to significantly impact your rankings. Also, what happens when you have a product in multiple categories when you have the category in your product URL page? Which category do you use? That's why I recommend not using product page URLs like "www.mystore.com/category/product.html."

The only thing I'm considering is possibly using ".html" instead of "/" for my category and brand pages (to keep things consistent). However, Google doesn't care if you're using a "/" ".html" ".asp" ".php" at the end of your URLs.

Also, I will make sure to block specific pages (the cart page, check out pages, login pages, etc.) from the search engine indexes by blocking them in the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is very important, so learn to edit and modify this file as needed (it's very easy). I can post a couple links to articles on the subject.

I hope all of this makes sense. If not, you haven't read and don't understand the Beginners guide to SEO that I posted.

Hi Jason,
Hope your store runs ok.
Probably, you know the answer on my question. Google has indexed some pages of my store that shouldn't be to index. And one of these pages got pr 2 even. So, how to delete and block them from indexing? Hope you or someone else will answer me. I can pm your the links which i'm saying about. I don't want to put they here because they will be found by spiders/bots again.

 

[Burko]

Hi Jason,
Have you managed to get a dev environment up and going yet? I have just discovered Amazon Web Services where you can set up the server of your choice in the cloud for free for the first year. You have the ability to snapshot your site prior to any upgrades for quick restoration. You are given full root access to the server and full control of the configuration.

There are many free prebuilt server configs to get you started quickly, not sure if there are any with magento.

You could easily upload a copy of your site and database and be up and running with a full dev environment in less than a day.

Keep up the great work.

 

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[theag]

Hi Jason,
Hope your store runs ok.
Probably, you know the answer on my question. Google has indexed some pages of my store that shouldn't be to index. And one of these pages got pr 2 even. So, how to delete and block them from indexing? Hope you or someone else will answer me. I can pm your the links which i'm saying about. I don't want to put they here because they will be found by spiders/bots again.

Add a no-index metatag and exclude them via .htaccess.

 

[JasonR]

Add a no-index metatag and exclude them via .htaccess.

This. However, since the pages are still indexed, I would make sure to block them in your robots.txt. For extreme measures, you can use Google webmaster tools to remove those pages from the index.

However, keep in mind some pages will still get indexed in Google/Bing. Google's bots are VERY good, but pages can slip by even though they are blocked by robots, noindex meta tags, etc. For example, some of our search pages are indexed, even though they are excluded by the robots.txt files, and some of them rank as well. It's not perfect.

You could also change the URLs of the pages, block those, and 301 redirect the existing, indexed pages to the related content you do want indexed.

 

[JasonR]

Hi Jason,
Have you managed to get a dev environment up and going yet? I have just discovered Amazon Web Services where you can set up the server of your choice in the cloud for free for the first year. You have the ability to snapshot your site prior to any upgrades for quick restoration. You are given full root access to the server and full control of the configuration.

There are many free prebuilt server configs to get you started quickly, not sure if there are any with magento.

You could easily upload a copy of your site and database and be up and running with a full dev environment in less than a day.

Keep up the great work.

Thanks. I hear Amazon cloud services/hosting is great. However, finding a good managed host is invaluable, especially when run complex applications like Magento. I have probably sent 30+ questions to my host, and they have helped me out with almost everyone and are quick to respond, even at 2 AM. That's value.

 

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[masterpuff]

That's a great thread that provides a lot of value, Jason.

I've built my first e-commerce store using Magento 3 years ago. I didn't knew much about SEO and nothing about Magento. I've lost a lot of nights googling for a lot of issues and trying to figure how to get the things done. Now my store ranks #1 for a lot of important keywords and top 5 for almost all of my keywords in my niche. All this without a good semantic SEO in my theme (I don't have category titles in h1 and the product name on the product page in h1). It is more important to launch your store and improve on the go instead of loosing one month optimizing some damn headers.

I want to share a MUST READ article ( I think the Best Magento SEO article you can find )

http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/

It helped me rank from the beginning in my niche and all the traffic I have for this website is organic (never paid a cent for PPC or other form of paid advertising). Follow Yoast, he is an authority in the SEO game.

I also highly recommend you the Fooman Speedster module (it will speed up your store combining css and javascript) test on a clone of your store before to be sure you will not get javascript errors - usually if you have custom javascript in your site.

Install Yoast Meta Robots - it works great on 1.6.1 even if it says it's compatible with 1.4. With this extension you can add for example noindex, nofollow tag for CMS pages you don't want to be indexed in Google (Privacy Policy, Terms of use, Contact Info, etc).

Install Canonical URL extension by Yoast (same like Meta Robots, works great on 1.6.1 even it says compatible with 1.4). The extension is better than the Magento's default canonical features.

If you want some extra speed install the OnePica ImageCDN extension to load all the images from a CDN system (Parallelize downloads across hostnames). I use MaxCDN which is cheap and works well. You can use Amazon S3, Coral CDN, Mosso/Rackspace Cloud Files and a lot of other providers.

Manually add rel=nofollow in your template phtml files for your layered navigation and your login, checkout, wishlist and all the links you don't want to be indexed. This can be a bit tricky, it took me some time to find where all this links were located in the template files.

This are just some things you can do to improve your onpage SEO and page loading time. All the extensions I've wrote about are FREE and I use them on all of my 3 Magento websites.

If you have any questions please fell free to PM me. I will be happy to help you if I can.

Good luck with your journey to wealth!

 

[Brandon1981]

Awesome thread Jason! Just read the whole thing today, and will be following. Interested to hear of your progress. Good luck man!