Live Case Study - Follow me to $50 per day in 50 days

[russell]

Over the weekend, I was able to do a little work to continue forward, but not as much as I intended due to nice weather , and an assortment of social engagements, and outdoor projects.

So I ended up up with a table of keywords for all of the product I will be promoting.

Since I have a decent amount of keywords, I will be starting with just promoting a few of them, and roll out a few more each week. This will keep the site from being spread too thin as far as promotion goes.

I alse received my first article back from my writer. THis will be the first page on the site to be active, and will give google an idea about the site, and will give the search engines a little at a time, instead of everything at once.

Over the weekend I found a couple affiliate programs I can promote as well as Amazon. They dont pay as well, but the other programs offer tracking cookies, which amazon doesnt offer.

I also listed the commissions of the products on my spreadsheet. I will need to sell 3-6 items per day to reach my $50 per day goal.

I did some searching around for a domain name, and was able to find a pretty decent domain for the site. I wont list the domain name here yet, but probably will a little later on. I use namecheap for my domain registration because they have competitive pricing, and are simple to use and manipulate my domains. And the don't put you through upsell hell like some other registrars do.

I installed wordpress on a hostgator account that I already have, and used fantastico to do the install, so that took about 20 seconds.

I will probably be using the arclite theme on wordpress. This theme is pretty lightweight, offers a limited theme customization area, and I can modify the code without having to worry about to many complications.

There are nice pay themes out there, but I find that while the more advanced ones have so many options to them, that doing some manual work under the hood turns into an ugly mess.

I installed the theme, some plugins, and created a couple pages like the about me page, and the contact me page. I did thes cause they were easy, and I think google will like the fact that I have them when they initiall crawl the site.

For tonight I will do some minor customization to the theme. I wont get too far into this yet, because people arent waiting to come to the site yet. Phase 1 will be for google, then for the people. I want google to know about the site very soon, so I can start doing some link building.

I will be ordering some more articles today or tomorrow for the product pages, and also start working on product images, and sketching out my site layout.

[russell]

I have ordered the first 2 articles from my writer for posting on ezine, and other article directories.

I have also started doing some tweaking on the website to get ready to put up my product pages.

I also did a sketch of what each product page will look like. I used myweddingfavors.com for a reference, since this site makes a ton of money, and has been thoroughly split tested many times.

Next I need to start working on the page template. Since it will contain at elast one table I may make the page in something like Dreamweaver or NVU, then put it into my wordpress page.

I also need to change the default header, and will probably hire someone to do this on Digital Point.

At this point I really just want to get to promoting the site, but this stuff needs to be done before the masses start arriving.

[KathleenGageSpeaker]

I'm watching with great interest!

[russell]

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement everyone!

Yesterday I worked on creating images for my product pages. Since i dont use photoshop that often, it took me quite a while to get back into it. I got pretty close to finishing the first image right before bed, and should be able to finishe it up today.

The first one is the hardest, but after the template is in place, it should be pretty much swapping out the images with new ones.

So today I plan on finishing my first 2 product images, and also getting a good start at the product page. This will end up bing a template for the rest of the product pages, so will take a little more time for me in the beginning, but if I do it right, it will be supre simple to add another product page later, which I will be doing.

[sonatanna88]

Hi Russel

Could you elaborate on split testing if you dont mind

Sona

[russell]

Hi Russel

Could you elaborate on split testing if you dont mind

Sona

Sure,

Myweddingfavors.com was built by Any Jenkins of Stompernet, and they use this site as part of their proof for selling products, since the site makes like 10 Mil a year.

During some seminar they did (think it was Mass Control) they talked about some of the split testing that they had done on the website, and what kind of changes it resulted in.

Split testing is a way of testing different things on a website to see what works better. There are many aspects of a website to test, but the testing requires real traffic, so its hard to do on a smaller website with less traffic.

To do a split test we would want to make just one change to a page on the website, then send traffic to that one instead of the old one, and track the results.

After getting xxx visitors to the website, see if we have made more or less sales than the old revision did.

So after a split test we should be able to see if a change made any difference in our sales or whatever we wanted people to do.

[Kimmoy]

I'm watching with interest too Russell, in fact, I'm implementing along side you so this should be quite the adventure. I'm wondering why are you creating product images though? Doesn't Amazon provide images already or is this for something else?

Keep up the good work!

[russell]

I'm watching with interest too Russell, in fact, I'm implementing along side you so this should be quite the adventure. I'm wondering why are you creating product images though? Doesn't Amazon provide images already or is this for something else?

Keep up the good work!

Will be cool to see you outcome as well.

I am adding a little flash to the images, making them a little more appealing.

[jkgourmet]

Will be cool to see you outcome as well.

I am adding a little flash to the images, making them a little more appealing.

flash??? I find that Flash sites do not work properly on my itouch which would make me wonder if this is a good idea considering the increased interest in mobil sites. . .

[russell]

flash??? I find that Flash sites do not work properly on my itouch which would make me wonder if this is a good idea considering the increased interest in mobil sites. . .

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Not actual flash, but just making them flashier. Basically adding a border to them, maybe a drop shadow, and putting some text on them like "on sale" and a "click here" button to give people an action to take.