Is Ezinearticles anal retentive? or maybe OCD?

Or could it be that they're really thorough? Who knows, I haven't come to a conclusion on that. What I do know is that they kicked back one of my articles saying it was "too" keyword optimized. Apparently they have a ratio to determine how many times a keyword should appear per 100 words. Blah blah blah. To me it's bullshit, but I've got to edit my article to get it in their directory. The article sounded right to me. It's not like my particular keyword was used every other friggin word. But whatever, I'll edit it today and get it resubmitted.

In other news I've got another niche I'm going after and I'm not telling. I'm buying a domain today and will begin construction on it. To speed the process I may do some PPC as well as soggy's SEO program which works like a charm. It takes some time to see results but you will see results with patience. Now here's another question with my new store, should I do a regular bans with a custom template or will I go with a wordpress niche store? As it stands I'm leaning towards a wordpress store powered by the bans script. Why? Wordpress has 50 million themes, it has built in SEO features, Google likes it and finds it quickly and there are tons of SEO plugins to work with it. We'll see, I have a couple days to make a decision.

Let the Backlinking Begin!

Since I've gone through the process of optimizing my store for the search engines, it's now time to start building backlinks. Soggy hooked me up with a guy on the BANS forum who has a social bookmarking service. So far my pages have be reindexed as well as the front page of the store. Good news. Also, organic clicks are beginning to come in as well. I expect to keep rising in the SERPS as the backlinks increase. I realize that I'm in a tough niche and have been considering doing some ppc to increase targeted traffic. That's just a thought. Lately I've been reading up on SEO and PPC. I bought Perry Marshalls Ultimate Guide to Adwords and I'm hoping it gets here today. The prospect of getting targeted traffic to the store for just a few cents a click is tempting. However I do see alot of other competition in my niche doing the same thing. These are important lessons that I can't begin to put a price on. My biggest wish was that I identified a less competitive niche to go after. Fortunately I've got a few in mind and will run these past Soggy. He's turning out to be a great mentor. Check him out at Soggy's Blog
I thought that being in IT would give me an advantage in Internet marketing but it doesn't. The thought process is different, but once you learn the process, it's pretty straightforward. The hard part is making sure you're doing the right thing and getting good advice. There's alot of shitty advice in the BANS forums, one reason why I haven't been there in awhile. Like my mom says, you can't eat from everyone's kitchen. Words to live by..........

More work on the Niche Store

The work continues on my BANS. Alot's been accomplished over the past week, yet there's still more. Last week, I rebuilt the outer shell of the store, changed the template, optimized each page for my keywords and set the store pages up to reflect the content in the link. Meaning, when you go to the batteries page you get - yep you guessed it Batteries. Now my mission is to write a short paragraph or 2 for each store page keyword optimized describing what can be found on that page and giving some background information. This is tedious work, but once it's done it's done.
This past week I haven't done much work on the store as I haven't gotten much rest due to job duties and after work obligations. So after getting home at 10 pm after having been gone since 7:30, I basically don't feel like doing shit. And I haven't. I'm making up for that today. Once this is done, the next task will be submitting to the directories. Now truth be told, I'm not hand submitting these, I'm going with a company to do it for me. It's too tedious and not worth my time. I'm a big believer in outsourcing low $$$ projects in your business to others so you won't get bogged down in the details. so I'll probably go with submitedge. I've used them before and they're pretty good. After that's done it'll be good to get some backlinks, and next up for that will be articles for backlinks. Well, I have about 7 more store pages to do a writeup for so it's back to that work. Enjoy your Sunday.

Links are SEO'd - hopefully

This SEO stuff is taking longer than I expected. It's also more work too, but the rewards will pay off. It's already paying off in lessons learned. I've had more than a few aha moments while doing this. In the short term, I'm seeing more visitors in the pays 3 days than the site's seen in any 3 month period, and I'm talking all of my BANS, all 4 of them. I'm tempted to log into epn (eBay partner network) to see how many clicks and bids this store's gotten. But I'm going to hold off and keep working on making this into a high traffic site. I've emailed soggy for him to check it out and see if I've overlooked anything.

Lessons Learned: a well thought out keyword strategy can speed SEO along drastically. Link Descriptions are VERY important as are link names. This improves your score in the eyes of the ever so present search engines. Having a mentor, the right mentor/coach even in an informal capacity is a necessity to anyone serious about business. In my opinion you can't afford not to have one.

More SEO, of the link rewriting variety.

Tonight I'll be doing more keyword research and optimizing my site. I'll also be rewriting the descriptions. I expect this to take awhile. However it is encouraging to see the number of visitors increase. Although I have to take into account some of those visits are me and Soggy checking things out. Once it's more together I'll post the link to it. It's not quite ready for public consumption yet so hold your horses.

Soggy's got some slick templates at his blog too. I meant to post the link friday but forgot, here it is Soggy's Templates

Remember fellow BANS and future BANS owners. Change that default template ASAP!

More SEO Action

Today I got up early around 6 or sound and got cranking online. Mainly just to familiarize my self a little more with the BANS interface and code. I'm glad to say I'm beginning to find things alot easier, which means the next SEO project with BANS will go much quicker. But, I will say this, I might stumble and fuck up in the beginning but when I learn something I get it downpat, cold and move swiftly into the next skillset. I learned to fix copiers on 1 week of training so once I get this I will blast my income into the stratosphere, but first things first- crawl, walk, run, Win Gold Medals. (Thats' not mine, it's a quote from Sherman Ragland)

In any event, Soggy gave me a list of things to do today and while it took me awhile longer than I wanted, I got them all knocked out. I'll post about them in a few because I'm still synthesizing what I did, and how it can help me. Once I've made sense out of if I'll write it down more coherently. Why? Because this is my template for future projects and I dont wanna write some shit that makes sense now, but none 3 weeks from now. Kinda like those notes you take at seminars.

One thing is apparent, I'm getting an SEO book and printing SEO posts from forums to read on my long commute to work. This is a very important topic to anyone who wants to make a business online. Kinda like marketing is to the offline entrepreneur. Any businessman who doesn't learn marketing is well, a dumbass. SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) are my next topics of study or shall I say mastery. Later for all that creating products shit. That will come later. Too many business models gets a man unfocused, and with me, since I have a short ass attention span, it's very easy for me to get distracted and try something else. That might be why I've only made $30 the whole 8 months I've had BANS. Hmmmmmmmm something to think about. Well this is my Phenomenon year and I'm taking focused actions (whether I understand it or not) and implementing quickly. I gotta go do laundry.
See ya in a few.

BANS facelift

Today I gave my one of my niche stores (aka BANS) a much needed facelift. I thought it was doing well but after reading what a pro said about it, it was pretty shitty. I didn't put much effort into it and after looking at it and thinking it over, it showed. Plus it was getting like NO traffic. Only the google bots were nice enough to stop through. I'm not sensitive, so I said f*ck it, this has got to change NOW. Fortunately Soggy was cool enough to give me a template to use and I uploaded it. (He's got some pretty slick templates over at
check 'em out sometime - like umm now. Well not now, finish reading the post) I also changed my adsense block to match the site. Personally I think it looks 10,000 times better. Keep in mind it's a work in progress, but it's coming along. By this time next week I think it'll look alot better than now.

Sooooooooo what did I learn through today's exercise? BANS defaults are USELESS. CHANGE THEM ASAP! And when thinking about it, it's like a new pc. I've NEVER accepted fresh out of the box installs without tweaking them and making them my own. This should be no different.