http://storecoach.com/training/core/Introduction-to-Get-a-Domain-Name

We’re not trying to become a household name. We want to become a little specialty shop. All of our traffic comes from search engine rankings for our keyword. The domain name doesn’t really matter because most visitors will come one time, make a purchase and then never come back.

Method #1 – Domain Names That Already Rank in Google

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Method-1-Domain-Names-That-Already-Rank-in-Google

Pros: Already ranked, but with the Coach’s Keyword Tool, you’re able to find keywords with low competition, so it isn’t quite as hard as it would normally be to rank a new domain.

Cons: Cost – around $200-$300
Awkward to approach website owner who’s website is not for sale

To find a domain:

Search for your keyword in Google

Look through the first 50 results

If site looks underutilized, like if it’s an adsense site, contact the owner either through their online contact form or by getting their email address from whois.

Email should look like this:

Subject: actual domain name

Hi,

Would you be interested in selling your domain name to me?

Thanks,
Dave

Method #2 – Use Coach’s Aged Domain Finder Tool

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Method-2-Use-Coachs-Aged-Domain-Finder-Tool

Pros: domains are for sale (cheap) and may already have some pagerank and have some of your keywords in it

Cons: not ranking

If domain has keyword phrase in it, then it’s ok if it doesn’t have pagerank or backlinks. If domain doesn’t have keywords, then domain should have pagerank and backlinks.

Make sure to check to see if pagerank has been faked by using their tool

Introduction to Find a Supplier for Your Store

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Introduction-to-Find-a-Supplier-for-Your-Store

The Store Coach system is based on dropshipping. You may have heard that drop shipping is a scam, but they have created 40 ecommerce sites that use drop shipping.

Introduction to Brand Names

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Introduction-to-Brand-Names

We need to find out what the top brands are within the niche or if the brand is already in the key phrase, we only want to carry that one brand.

Identifying Brand Names to Target

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Identifying-Brand-Names-to-Target

Type your keyword into Google and go to each site until you find one that lists the brands.

You can also put your keyword into the Coach’s Keyword Tool to see if any brands come up. This also tells you how many searches there are for each brand.

Go to a major shopping portal:

1. http://www.thefind.com/  – look on the right hand side for the Brands button. Sort it alphabetically and then copy the list.

2. http://www.shopping.com/

3. http://www.frogit.com/

4. http://www.bizrate.com/

Identifying the Manufacturer of a Brand Name

The ideal situation is to find a manufacturer that will dropship. They might call it direct to consumer or direct ship. The goal in getting the ecommerce store up and running is to just find one supplier (manufacturer), not all of them. After the store is making money, then you can go back and add manufacturers.

Do I Need a Business Entity?

The main reason to create a business entity is to get suppliers because they will usually want a seller’s permit. All you need is a DBA (doing business as). You look more professional and capable when you use a business name.

I came across this great website, http://electronplumber.com/ where El Plumber (as he refers to himself) ran an experiment to see which link-building service was the best, or in other words, got the best results. He picked 5 different services/ways of building backlinks and then created as close as possible 5 duplicate websites to use for the test. Over a 6 month period he built backlinks to each website using a different service for each one.

Here are the services/ways of backlinking he used for each of the 5 websites:

1. Site #1 – Non Spun Content Network Link Building Service

   BuildMyRank

2. Site #2 – Spun Content Network Link Service

   1waylinks

3. Site #3 – Forum Profile Link Service

   LinkAloha

4. Site #4 – Article Link Service

   Unique Article Wizard

5. Site #5 – Good Old Fashioned SEO Elbow Grease

   I’m going to put in around 10-12 hours a month doing blog commenting  and article marketing, about what you’d expect for spending $50-$60 on a  virtual assistant service.

http://electronplumber.com/the-great-seo-link-building-experiment-of-2011/

Next post in the experiment:
BuildMyRank First Impressions
http://electronplumber.com/buildmyrank-first-impressions-great-seo-link-building-experiment-2011/

Buildmyrank.com rejected his website at first because it was only a single page, so he beefed it up and got it accepted and then wrote 8 completely unique paragraphs to submit to BMR. Each 1 has to be at least 150 words and has to be submitted with the html formatted for your link if you want to submit a single csv file.

BMR seems to be the most labor intensive, but his commenters feel that it’s the only one that has merit and has an added benefit of being completely white-hat.

Next post in the experiment:
LinkAloha First Impressions
http://electronplumber.com/linkaloha-first-impressions-great-link-building-service-experiment-2011/

LinkAloha uses XRumer to create links on forum profiles. It took him about 15 minutes to set up and he’ll get 500 links with no additional effort. He took the time to set up different campaigns so that he could get different keywords in each link. He used a ratio of 75% main keyword, 10% 2-word version of keyword, 10% main keyword rearranged, 5% url. So for example, if the keyword is purple donkey shoes, 75% of the links would use purple donkey shoes, 10% would use donkey shoes, 10% would use purple shoes for donkeys, and 5% would use http://purpledonkeyshoes.com

Next post in the experiment:
Great Link Building Service Experiment Update Week 2 and 3
http://electronplumber.com/great-link-building-service-experiment-update-week-23/

All sites are up with exact match keywords somewhere in the domain, but there hasn’t been enough time to really draw any conclusions. One interesting note is that the .com domain was indexed way faster than any of the others.

Rankings so far:

Google: Not 1 of the 5 are in the top 1000 results of a broad search

Yahoo/Bing: Most of the 5 are in the 10-150th position for an exact phrase search

Next post in the experiment:
The Great Link Building Service Experiement 2011 – Week 4 – Wow!
http://electronplumber.com/the-great-link-building-service-experiement-2011-week-4-wow/

BMR site (.org) is on Google page 2, 1waylinks (.net) and LinkAloha (.com) sites are on page 4.

Unique Article Wizard (.com) site is at the 159th position. Took him 3 hours to write and spin an article. This service isn’t looking so good.

Manual SEO efforts (.net) site is not in the top 500 results. He spent 3 hours writing and submitting articles to article directories, some blog commenting and submitting to Onlywire for about 30 bookmarks/social media mentions. None of the backlinks are showing up in Yahoo.

Next post in the experiment:
Why Is UniqueArticleWizard Doing So Poorly In The Link Building Service Experiment?
http://electronplumber.com/why-is-uniquearticlewizard-doing-so-poorly-in-the-link-building-service-experiment/

El Plumber believes that UAW needs to add the services of pinging the created articles, adding them to social media sites and building backlinks to them to make the service worth the price.

Next post in the experiment:
Week 5 Of The Great Link Building Service Experiement of 2011 – Page 1!
http://electronplumber.com/week-5-of-the-great-link-building-service-experiement-of-2011-page-1/

All links so far have been pointed at the homepage of each site. He will now start pointing links to secondary pages.

BMR is the clear winner with only 17 Yahoo reported backlinks and a position of 9 for the main 3 word keyword.

However, the LinkAloha site is also coming in strong with the same number of backlinks and a position of 13. This is quite remarkable considering the lack of work this service requires.

1waylinks site is only in position 36, but it’s generated the most revenue which he attributes to the long-tail keyword traffic he’s getting due to the way he spun the one article he’s using.

The UAW site dropped out of sight and the manual seo site has never been found (mostly because he’s not doing the work which is exactly what happens and why he’s looking into services to begin with).

Next post in the experiment:
Week 6/7 Update Of The Great Link Building Service Experiment Of 2011 – The Return Of Unique Article Wizard
http://electronplumber.com/week-67-update-of-the-great-link-building-service-experiment-of-2011-the-return-of-unique-article-wizard/

Just when he thought UAW was a complete waste of time, the site popped into position 33.

BMR site rose 4 positions to #5.

LinkAloha site slipped a couple to 15, but this service can’t be beat for hands-off operation.

1waylinks site is at position 40.

Manual seo site has been taken out of the running because it just isn’t worth his time to try and deal with it.

Next post in the experiment:
Week 8/9 Update – Great Link Building Service Experiment – The Ignoring
http://electronplumber.com/week-89-update-great-link-building-service-experiment-the-ignoring/

He says he didn’t build any new links to any of the sites this month (April, 2011) and pretty much all of them stayed in their same positions. However, later on he includes a list of BMR submissions and it shows that there were 16 posts in March and 8 more in April.

In the comments he says he tried the 3waylinks service and it was a waste of time.

Next post in the experiment:
Week 10-12 Great Link Building Service Experiment 2011 – The Ignoring Ends!
http://electronplumber.com/week-10-12-great-link-building-service-experiment-2011-the-ignoring-ends/

Again he says he didn’t build any new links to any of the sites this month (May, 2011) and pretty much all of them stayed in their same positions. However, later on he includes a list of BMR submissions and it shows that there were 10 posts on 5/29/2011 targeting his main keyword and 20 posts on 6/1/2011 targeting two sub-keywords.

Next post in the experiment:
My Site Was Sandboxed And How I Climbed Out Of It
http://electronplumber.com/my-site-was-sandboxed-and-how-i-climbed-out-of-it/

His BuildMyRank site dropped out of the rankings in week 13. The site wasn’t de-indexed, just penalized which he could tell by doing a site:domain search in Google. He determined that the penalty was caused by the unnatural anchor text that he had used in his latest BMR 30 article submissions. Before these 30, his anchor text was (this is using examples rather than his actual anchor text):

• 22 best seo experiment
• 2 google search experiment
• 2 seo link building
• 2 here
• 2 bestseoexperiment.com
• 2 http://bestseoexperiment.com

after he submitted 30 new articles to BMR, it was:

• 40 best seo experiment
• 10 google search experiment
• 10 seo link building
• 2 here
• 2 bestseoexperiment.com
• 2 http://bestseoexperiment.com

which equates to a link profile of:

• Over 65% of  links going to main keyword
• Only 6% for site name
• Less than 10% not keyword stuffed
• In two days, the number of links to the site had doubled

So he submitted another 10 articles to BMR to make his links look like this:

• 40 best seo experiment
• 10 google search experiment
• 10 seo link building
• 2 seo experiment
• 1 experiments with seo
• 2 here
• 1 this site
• 1 can be found here
• 4 bestseoexperiment.com
• 3 http://bestseoexperiment.com

So after submitting these articles to BMR, his link profile looked like this:

• Under 55% for main keyword
• Over 10% for site name
• Expanded keyword stuffed diversity
• Over 5% of junk anchor text

In only 2 days, his site was back to the original rankings.

Next post in the experiment:
Great Link Building Service Experiement of 2011 – Update Weeks 13-20
http://electronplumber.com/great-link-building-service-experiement-of-2011-update-weeks-13-18/

No new link building and rankings are holding steady except for the 1waylinks site that was sandboxed. He did the same thing to the LinkAloha site that was sandboxed in week 13 (after waiting a month or so) as he did for the BMR site (changing the anchor text profile) and in 2 days his rankings were back.

Next post in the experiment:
The Great Link Building Experiment of 2011 – Final Results
http://electronplumber.com/the-great-link-building-experiment-of-2011-final-results/

• The Build My Rank Site:  #1
• The Unique Article Wizard Site: #5
• The 1WayLinks Site: #8
• The Link Aloha Site: #71

My Conclusion
Since BMR had the best results, I am going to focus my link-building using BMR posts. It is the cleanest network of blogs because it does not allow spun content or even duplicate content of any kind. It all has to be completely unique. Which is good from a quality stand-point, not so good from a cost stand-point of having to produce the content. But if you take into consideration that a site can generate hundreds of dollars per month, it is a ridiculously small amount to pay.

El Plumber posted an update to his rankings after the Google Panda 2.5 update and the BMR site is still in the #1 position! He says he ended up with about 90 links on BMR. This is very good evidence that Google likes BMR backlinks, so based on this experiment, a formula for the number and type of backlinks using BMR is:

8 posts in first week of site creation

8 posts the 2nd week

8 posts the 3rd week

8 posts the 5th week

30 posts the 13th week

10 posts the 15th week

10 posts the 30th week

10 posts the 40th week

with this link profile for anchor text:

• Under 55% for main keyword
• Over 10% for site name
• Expanded keyword stuffed diversity
• Over 5% of junk anchor text

As an example, if I was targetting purple donkey shoes and was going to post 100 links, I would use this anchor text:

50 links: purple donkey shoes

15 links: purpledonkeyshoes.com, http://purpledonkeyshoes.com, http://www.purpledonkeyshoes.com

28 links: shoes that donkeys wear, donkey shoes in colors, purple and pink donkey shoes, purple shoes for donkeys, etc.

7 links: visit here, visit this site, click here, check out this site, take a look, etc.

Some from each type would be posted each time a BMR submission was run.

Chapter 1 – Finding a Winning Micro-Niche

3 Main Factors for determining whether to go after a niche or not:

http://storecoach.com/training/core/The-Big-3-Factors

Your niche has to pass these 3 factors to be considered. If it fails even 1, move onto the next possibility.

1. Seasonality – long seasonality is ok, like summer stuff (pools, camping, etc), but not 1 week or 1 month seasonality like Halloween costumes.

2. Local Availability – if there’s a good, wide selection locally then it’s not a good niche. The local stores like Walmart can have some products, but a lot of choices at local stores means you should skip this niche.

3. Average Order Profit – average order size should be $80-$100. Ideally we want profit to be  $50-$150 per order which means the order size needs to be $200+
Imagine having 3 or 4 stores that are each making $3-$5k/month each.

Smaller Factors to Consider

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Smaller-Factors-to-Consider

1. Catalog size – smaller is actually better. It takes a lot more work to maintain a store with hundreds of products. Look for 1-150 products. Shy away from a technical type of product that will take a lot of hand-holding with your customers.

2. Intent to buy – is the visitor looking to buy something or just looking for info?

2. Shipping – how hard is it to ship?

3. Fragility – how likely is it to break during shipping?

4. Touchy/Feely product – is it something that a customer will most likely want to see or touch in person so they might be disappointed when they receive it?

5. Target Audience – stay away from teenager products

6. Legal issues – stay away from grey area products that may be illegal in some states

They don’t look at the percent they make compared to the cost of the product. They only look at how much they can make per sale and target $100-$150 profit per order processed.

Make a List of Your Interests

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Make-a-List-of-Your-Interests

Brainstorm ideas and use their Keyword Tool to determine good niches to go after. Sit down for 15 minutes and write down your interests, hobbies, sports. Just make a list of 10-12 topics, don’t worry about the market aspects of it at this stage.

Keyword Phrases

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Daily-Search-Volume-for-Keyword-Phrases

We build our stores around a specific keyword phrase that gets a lot of searches and doesn’t have a lot of competition. Use the Store Coach Keyword Tool (which is also provided free) to determine how many searches keywords get each day.

http://storecoach.com/keyword-tool/search

Keyphrases that have a bold green number of searches are good candidates as long as they meet all the other criteria for a good niche.

Market Opportunity Score

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Market-Opportunity-Score

The MOS tells you how strong the online competition is. The higher the score, the easier it’ll be to rank for your keyword (niche). The MOS is based on how hard it will be to outrank the current top 10 Google results. The MOS takes into account several factors and very quickly gives you the information that used to take them hours to come up with.

Chapter 2 – Finding a Supplier(s) for your Store

Introduction to Find a Supplier for Your Store

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Introduction-to-Find-a-Supplier-for-Your-Store

The Store Coach system is based on dropshipping. You may have heard that drop shipping is a scam, but they have created 40 ecommerce sites that use drop shipping.

Introduction to Brand Names

http://storecoach.com/training/core/Introduction-to-Brand-Names

We need to find out what the top brands are within the niche or if the brand is already in the key phrase, we only want to carry that one brand.