When Everyday Is Saturday, You Still Need A Saturday

Good Saturday morning! My wife informed me that this morning was indeed Saturday as sometimes I need reminders as I lose track of what day it is. I am very blessed that what I do for a living is not time specific. Everyday is indeed Saturday for me even though I do put in on average 12-14 hours a day. I do not consider it work. I can not wait to get to the computer in the morning just as soon as I get that first cup of coffee in my hand. All this said, I still have to force myself to get away from it. A typical Saturday for me begins like any other day with coffee and a trip through the BANS forum and then my RSS reader and then about an hour going through and answering over night emails. We usually head off to run errands, go to the bank and then lunch and ice cream. You have to understand, I hate leaving the house unless I am going somewhere that has a casino attached, but i indulge my wife anyway. When I get home, it is back on the computer for an hour or so and then I take an hour or so nap. Yes, i do take one nap a week and look forward to it. when I awake it is back to the computer until bed time. that is enough free time for me, but it does break things up once a week.

In closing, what I am trying to emphasize is as much as you want to work and make money, you still need to get away from it at least once a week. It will recharge you and give you some since of balance. If I did not do this the little that I do, I would end up like Howard Hughes and lock myself up inside a hotel room, complete with long hair and beard.

Now get gone and go enjoy your Saturday! :)

Hunting & Attacking Hot Items With Bids

Hopefully you are visiting eBay at least once a week to see what is going on with your niches. Items can get hot really quick with no notice what so ever. I search eBay in my niches to show only items that have bids. I go broad and narrow. I look for any visible trends I can spot. Mostly it will be by a model number, sub item or brand name that gets hot and it usually is a longer tail phrase in the listing title as well. The more of this you do, the better you will get. If people are bidding on them, then there is a want for it, whatever it is.

If you use Wordpress, you can target that brand, model or sub item in a post or page and SEO up the post title and a good 100 or so words of content. Using the PHPBay plugin, you can zero right on in on that target product and show 3-5 items in that post as well. You will have a much better chance to rank and compete in a hurry if you target more SPECIFIC items within your niche, even if it is just a few. Give it a try on a few post and see how you do and always be on the look out for the low hanging fruits like this.

MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder Wordpress Plugin

I have been playing with this optin subscription form plugin for a while and find it very useful as I have started to dabble in email marketing on a few of my sites. With this plugin you can now create optin forms to match your blog’s look and feel in just 4 easy steps. You can use your optin form code, which you get from your auto responder/mailing list provide such as aweber, which I use. If you have been thinking about doing direct email marketing through subscriber list, then this is a must have plugin.

Making The Unnatural Appear More Natural

Link directories, social bookmarking sites, blog commenting and article directories are not new by any means. While Google seems to on the surface seems to be devaluing some of them, they all still have a place in backlink building. The two most common abuses would be to flood them too quickly and not changing up the anchor text used in the links. Both of these practices are just unnatural. If 100 people were to voluntarily link to your site from their own site, they all would probably use different anchor text in the link back to your site. Now tons of backlinks to one page COULD all show up in a matter of days, especially if it was a viral blog post or article, but flooding the social bookmark sites using the same username is just too easy to spot.

When using anchor text for any of these processes of backlinking, make sure to rotate through a set of three or four different sets of anchor text. Your page you are backlinking too should easily be targeted around three or four variations of keyword phrases. If I were to backlink this site, I would choose: Build A Niche Store Blog - BANS Blog - Niche Building Blog or even Niche Store Blog. See how simple that is? The more you can make the unnatural backlinking building process appear more natural, the better chance you have to not raise red flags and also rank for more than more keyword or phrase. Always ask yourself if it seems natural in what you doing in the link building process.

Nice Simple & Clean with a Ton Of Backlinks

One of the refrigerators in one of my rental units needs a replacement rack bar in it, so I decided to locate it and order it online. I order almost everything I can online so as to avoid leaving the house. Anyways I typed in Kenmore parts in Google and the first result was http://www.easyapplianceparts.com/Kenmore-Parts.htm. Not an overly flashy site, but it is indeed clean, well organized, easy to navigate and on the surface seems SEO optimized just fine. I went and checked the backlinks in Yahoo site explorer and as you can imagine, it has a ton. From all different types of sites as well. As you can imagine, this site probably does very well for an e commerce site and the site is not even three and a half years old. As you can see, backlinks play a huge part in this sites ranking ability and you should spend some time chasing down it's backlinks and the strategy it has used. the layout is a simple 3 column template with no flash. Browse around the site pages and have a good look at the meta tags as well. You really can learn a ton by researching a strong hold of a site as this is. Now I am off to order that part.

EBay Changing Current Search Engine In April

Jeff King, eBay's Senior Director of Finding, has confirmed through eBay's Announcements page that the current eBay search engine on eBay will be retired in April of 2009. A new search engine that King says will be "faster and easier" will be implemeted.

"In a nutshell, it looks at a multitude of details in listings to deliver more of the results you want," said King. "It makes it easy to browse and narrow your selection, and lets you choose how you want to see the results. The new auto-complete feature will attempt to anticipate what you're typing in the search area."

King said suggestions from eBay users helped contribute to the new search feature. "The response from the community to the new finding has been great," he added. "We've incorporated a lot of these suggestions already, and in the coming months we'll be introducing more new features and enhancements to make it even faster and easier."

Recently, eBay buyers and sellers have been given an option of using the new or old search engine. As more and more registered users adopted the new technology - 90 percent, according to King - eBay is now ready to take the permanent leap to the improved model. Those who are still using the original search-engine technology will receive messages during their searches to remind them that the changeover will occur in April.

Pepperjam Ebay Text Ads Are Fantastic

Peppejam InText Ads are linked to a relevant keyword appearing in the online content which is matched to the advertiser's ad. In the case of Pepperjam InText Ads rolling over a "hot" hyperlinked keyword results in a product advertisement from eBay being shown. This lets surfers hover over a highlighted word and a small preview window shows ebay items.

There are a few ways to show ads:

White List - "White List" refers to keywords that you supply that you want converted to InText advertisements, as well as keywords from our "Auto Generate" default feature. For instance, if you have a cellular phone Web site, you may want to add keywords such as "phone," "accessory," and "Cingular" to your White List.

Black List - "Black List" refers to keywords that you definitely do not want converted to InText advertisements, while showing keywords from our "Auto Generate" default feature. For instance, you may want to add keywords like "buy," discount," and "search" to your Black List.

Auto Generate - "Auto Generate" happens automatically if you do not designate any White List or Black List keywords. Use this option if you'd like Pepperjam's system to automatically highlight keywords from our inventory of millions of e-commerce related keywords.

Exclusive White List - "Exclusive White List" refers to keywords you supply that you definitely want displayed WITHOUT keywords from our "Auto Generate" default feature.

I myself have been using the Exclusive White List feature thus far and love it and it converts great. You pick the text you want highlighted and your eBay ads are matched. This feature is in beta and should improve greatly over time. All you do is throw in the generated javascript code into the page content you want the ads on. Get to Pepperjam and check them out!!