Day 3, 2009 Marketing Challenge – Setting Up a Amazon Store

Just recently I came across this great video on how to set up your own Amazon store using Associate-O-Matic. You can view the video here.

Below the video are links to other tutorials you might find helpful, such as how to transfer the Amazon files to your host’s server (FTP) and the easiest way to create HTML text for your Amazon store.

I have setup a basic Amazon store FindMyKin.com using a addon domain but you can easily install a Amazon store as a sub-directory for free along with your blog site. If your hosting uses CPanel, open File Manager, and create a new folder in your public_html section and FTP the Amazon store files to this new folder.

Once you FTP the files to the new folder, you will have a new Amazon store ready to go at say www.yourblogsite.com/herbalstore.

Now that we have our Amazon store setup, next post I will look at ways to make our new Amazon store search engine friendly.

Introducing my new genealogy website TheMadGenealogist.com

Usually whenever I start a new website, I follow certain rules. One is I always include one of my targeted keywords from the list I created on Day 1 in the domain name.

But this time I am trying something new! Does having your targeted keyword in the domain name have a affect on rankings?

To be honest, of all the websites I have started, choosing a dot com domain name for a genealogy website was the longest search I have been on. Every domain name I tried was unavailable or unsuitable.

Some of the ones I tried were:

searchformyroots.com

myfamilyroots.com

whoseyourdaddy.com

So this time I decided to try a domain name which is related to the topic of the site to see if it affects different rankings.

Why not buy a dot net domain extension?

I found dot com domain names are better if you are targeting international traffic and you get more type-in visitors with a dot com. Some of my sites get around 400 to 500 visits a month in traffic just from visitors directly typing in the web address.

Another thing I look for when choosing a domain name is to make it memorable. You don’t want to be the person with the terrific website that no one can ever remember to tell their friends about because they can’t remember the domain name.

Have I made a mistake ? Only time will tell I suppose.

Choosing which keywords to target is the first thing you should look at when you decide to start a new website. Choosing which keywords to target is VERY important and should not be skipped.

Before we even start setting up the new site and creating content we need to do a little keyword research and find which keywords to target. We need to find out if the keywords we are targeting are getting enough searches for us to get traffic to our site and make money online.

Choosing the right keywords could help make your new site have a better search engine results page (SERP) listing on Google and good traffic results. Choosing the right keywords will also determine what SEO factors we need to implement, even the domain name we choose.

For this little test I will create a genealogy related website. This genealogy related website will try and make money online using Google Adsense, related affiliate banners and a Amazon genealogy store.

To do my keyword research, I use Google Adwords Keyword Tool that seems to have worked pretty well fo me so far. I enter the most generic keyword for my website. In our example, my keyword would be “genealogy”.

Let’s take a quick look at Google so we can see exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword. If we go to Google and enter “genealogy”, you’ll see there are almost 60 million websites competing for this keyword phrase!

Back to the Keyword Tool, If you scroll down, we can find some more specific keyword phrases like “genealogy records”, “my genealogy”, and “family genealogy” etc. The keywords I usually target have at least 4,500 – 6000 searches per month which is roughly 150-200 per day. AND don’t forget misspelled words. If you look at “geneolgy” there was 250,000 searches last month!

These could be possible keywords we can target to begin with. Once we have our list of 8 to 10 keywords, we need to go to Google and check out the competition. Trying “genealogy records” it shows around 2 million competing websites. Now that might be a whole lot easier to rank on the first page!

As I am also using a Amazon store, I will have to do this twice. I will need to find which keywords to target for my store which will hopefully also receive traffic from Google as well as the advertising links from the blog I will set up.

You might be able to eventually target HUGE keywords such as “genealogy“, but it’s always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and then you can focus on the larger keywords.

P.S. If you want to make money online using Google Adsense, you need to see if there is enough Adsense clicks. For this I use Google Adwords Traffic Estimator.

I don’t know about you but I get a real buzz when I start a new site. Then reality sets in. All that work involved. Am I even doing it right?

Every few days I will be posting here at BloggerRap about my adventures using some of the “so called” guaranteed ways to make money online and some of my own ideas. I will be combining 3 different methods into one website. These are, a membership site, an amazon store and a blog.

The posts will include the techniques I have used, looking at things like choosing which keywords to target, choosing a domain name, SEO and advertising.

So come along for the ride and see if I become just another failed entrepreneur?

But I have a good excuse, honest!

I am in the middle of starting a new website business and I haven’t had much time to look after BloggerRap. I promise to look after it from now on.

I am still in the process of setting this new website up but I should have a big announcement to make either tomorrow or the next day.