Stephan Miller

09 Jun, 2008

Testing the 0-60 of a New Blog

Posted by: Stephan Miller In: Blogging| Journal

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I have been trying to start another blog lately. At least, that’s what I am telling myself.
It’s a clean slate right now and that’s a good place to start. I have started many sites but it is hard to make the first move. Is that the right amount of categories? Did I cover everything? Will I have to bolt something on down the road to make sure the site’s complete?
You see, I don’t want new blogs to turn into the mess of categories and tags that this one turned into. It’s fine for this blog. I cover everything here and I’m not too worried about it being perfect. But I know how restructuring a blog after it already has content can go. I did it once. I do not want to try it again.
I have also been trying to build a smart system to interlink blogs. Profit-ware was going to be the first test case. But I think now, I will begin the blog to get the traffic going. The system I am building needs to plug in seamlessly anyway, whether or not the blog has content.
The new blog is going to be about Ebay. A lot of the links pointing to the domain fit. I used to make money on Ebay. I wrote shareware for Ebay sellers once. I still sell products for my day job there. I have even spotted a few niches lately that would not require all the shipping and tracking. This, for those Ebay sellers who just had the bottom drop out of an income stream when Ebay banned downloadable products.
What I saw could make a person about $200 for about an hour’s worth of work. Easy work. So that has me excited to get started. And I’m sure I’ll find other niches there. I always do.
I stopped doing anything on Ebay for a while because it was eventually just easier to be an affiliate marketer. Downloads on Ebay sell for pennies. Shipping products out takes too much time and energy compared to writing a blog post or article and making commission from an affiliate sale.
But I guess now it is my mission to pull some less time intensive niches out of Ebay and write some posts. That will keep me on task and coming back. Plus who knows, I can use the extra cash also, from my test cases. I might even need to test reselling liquidated products, because we need some new electronics. One thing I learned from my Ebay Powerseller past was never to pay retail for anything.
I have some Private Label Rights articles on Ebay also. Now I think I will be just leaving them in queue for the days that I do not want to post my own content. I will use then to flesh out the boring parts. Finding a way to make money = fun. Telling someone step by step how to sign up = boring.
So now it is time to head down that road and see where it goes. There is no time like the present. It will be a case study. Now the domain gets about 5 visitors a day and has a Pagerank of 4. I want to see how fast, with my limited time, I can hit the 200 visitor a day range .The plan is still a little vague, but I can deal with that. Nothing is every perfect. And there is no better way to test it than in the wild.

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4 Responses to "Testing the 0-60 of a New Blog"

1 | Phil (1 comments.)

June 9th, 2008 at 7:07 pm

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That’ll be an interesting case study. I’ve never done the ebay thing. Always figured it just ended up being an hourly wage sorta thing but $200 an hour would be a nice hourly wage. Still not for me though. Just not interesting I guess.

The blogging thing is though. I’ve just started a bit. I do have the right domains for it and will have a very attentive audience. Been running into people recently several of which have said “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written online” So I guess I’ll have a good start at it when I get it going.

I’ve always been the ecommerce sort. Lots of SEO but that’s getting old and I’m excited to try out blogging.

It’ll be interesting to see the progress.

Phil

2 | budi (1 comments.)

June 10th, 2008 at 3:33 am

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interested article , on last year i have try todo internet marketing i bought some product (software and ebook) but i got sad because mostly internet marketer (expert) just try to trapped someone with their ads, till now i m not believed making money from internet

budi’s last blog post..ERP only SAP …? Who said !?

3 | Richard McDuff (1 comments.)

June 10th, 2008 at 3:53 am

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We sold on Ebay for 7 years, and it just got too expensive to sell there. We now use an free e-commerce site. It is a lot less work. We just put the product up, and work on other stuff. We can sell our product for less, and therefore generate some good sales. We spend more time on SEO and social networking, but I believe this is good, because it will help when it comes to me selling websites in the future. Well, I miss Ebay, I do not miss all of the work involved, I can now concentrate on other ventures - like affiliate marketing, website design and marketing, etc.

4 | Stephan Miller

June 10th, 2008 at 6:41 am

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Those are basically the reasons I went to affiliate marketing. It does become just like any normal job eventually unless you get big, I guess, and can hire employees, which I never really want to do except on a freelance basis.

The expense is pretty high too, along with competition constantly driving down prices.

Digital downloads used to be an easy way to make some money without much hassle. It could almost run unattended. But that is over now. Services may be an option now that I am going to explore. But I will be checking out everything. If I spend a little time, I can usually find a niche or two hiding in the listings every time I go to Ebay.

I see Ebay as a place mainly to cut your teeth if you are starting a home business anyway. It gets you in the right mindset. Teaches you some things. And doesn’t have a steep learning curve or high cost of entry.

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This is my blog about building sites, traffic and using those to make money from ecommerce sites, affiliate programs and blogging.

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