Niland’s Blog

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First rule so far will be I am allowing only one plug for what you are selling once a month. This way I don’t have to mark your comments or blog’s as spam. Those of you that follow this will be allowed to keep putting messages in the blog. I am not going to allow any pharmaceuticals on the blog, as I do not want to be involved in trafficking in anyway. I am not a pharmacy, nor a doctor. If you want to plug your items I suggest becoming a contributor to this blog. For those of you who forget, this blog is about e-commerce and what you know or are learning about e-commerce. I am hoping this will motivate some of you to become authors on this blog. I am very relaxed about this so all you need do is ask?

Thanks James

I have been going on about my experience but so far. I have got hundreds of comments, but no one has asked me to let them publish on my blog. I am looking for the real life story about trying to make a living on the internet. I will even let you promote your website as long as it has nothing about Porn, Pills, and Dating. I would like others to publish about what it takes to work the internet for profit

Well I finally found something I can sell and make some profit at. I have been busy this month selling Air Jordan Nike athletic shoes. I am selling on eBay and my website http://shop.nilandsplace.com. In each of my eBay listings I have my logo first on the page (shop.nilandsplace.com in neon blue), and it seems to be generating traffic to my website. I am reinvesting most of the money in shoes and pay/click advertizing. Now that I have found something that sell I want to find out if pay/click works. I have picked up Google and Yahoo, but not MSN. Google has made it much easier to use and Yahoo in second place, but MSN you have to work harder for your keywords. With the Google analytics I am watching to see what keywords are working. I have already eliminated shoe and shoes as they were just too broad. as I learn about the methods of  Pay/Click I will post them.

Well I signed up with Doba (http://www.doba.com/) for products to sell for one year. My subscription came to an end, so this is a review of sorts and why I did not sign up again. First off let me say that Doba never tried to cheat me, I think this is very important as far as credibility goes on the internet today.

What I was trying to do with them may have been the wrong thing. I was trying to market everything they had. This in eventuality did not work for me. They asked me by phone a couple of times if they could (for a fee) set up a website with one category (100 products) for me. I may have done better at this, and it is what I am trying now. The only question for me is “is it wise to pay someone for the privilege to sell their product”? At this time I have sourced my own product and I will try selling only that for awhile and see if I do better. I think I may have ignored the way that people shop the internet, because I only know the way I do it. When I buy something on the internet it always started with me knowing or having an idea what I wanted.

One of my other failures was I did not do any research to se if the I idea of an Internet Shopping Mall would work. Another failure on my part was I had no clue how hard it is to keep up with stock levels from the vendors I had. Too many times I failed to make a sale because they were out to stock. The product I am trying to sale now is just one category so it is much easier to keep track of. But the greatest thing of all is I have had success selling it on eBay, so I know it is sought after. Thus, my form of market research. My suggestion is before trying to open your own e-commerce website is to use a place like eBay or Amazon to find out what people are buying on line. At least if you fail there you are not heavily invested to lose allot. You can use your Logo on eBay and Amazon, so you can get name recognition for your site. Also with these two you do not have to bear the cost for accepting credit cards.

Some recommendations I can make is be honest with your shipping cost, as people are paying attention to what your total cost will be. Shipping is not a way to make money, unless you are a shipper. Free advertizing for me resulted in jamming up my email, and there may not be away to check to see if it is really working. Consider eBay is already number 20 on visits and Amazon is number 31. No matter what way you look at it, it takes time to list inventory if you are selling a “hard” product. Count how many hours you will spend listing your product line and ask yourself if this is a good use of your time? For a fee Doba offered to set up my sight. Have I had the money this may have been a better way to go? I would be interested to here from people who have done this?

Doba has files you can download inventory if you can find software to use it. One of the things they did do that I didn’t like was they stopped providing images with these files about the time I started using them. What good is a product listing without an image? They just made more work for me to get the listing done, and I feel I had paid for a certain amount service, that they felt necessary to down grade. Even with the “CVS” files there was quite a bit of work to format it in Microsoft Excel to use with my “software”! The software I was using was something I was able to download and use for free from Zen-Cart. You can obtain Zen-Cart and “Easy Populate” at these web addresses: http://www.zen-cart.com/ and “Easy Populate From osc” or “Easy Populate Free - from langer / modhole”. There is a third one now but I have not used it. Of the two that I have used, only try to list 300 items of less at a time or you will overload your web server and get an error. I also have to recommend that you order the book from Zen-Cart “e-Start Your Web Store with Zen Cart”. This will make the learning curve of the software much shorter.

I am looking forward to hearing from others their adventures with e-commerce. I am willing to give Publishing wrights to others that are willing to make a Like contribution. Contact me at blogers@nilandsplace.com, if you are interested?

Sincerely, James Niland

I have not been active on this blog for over a month. Let just say I had an accident and was away for a long time. I think it is piss when someone hangs on to the bad things that happen in life. lets face it everyone hits a hard spot now and then. It you really need to here all about whats wrong just email me at stuffithereok@hotmail.com and I will maybe give you an ear full :-).

I used to do some programing in Visual Basic and some database programing in MS Access and Visual basic for applications (AKA VBA). When I was at Dakota State University, Madison I wrote an extensive database for the Smith-Zimmerman Museum (I need really who would fake a name like that). Google it and you will find it is the first listing. I dropped out after 2 years because I really have a love hate relationship with computers.

I also wrote a very good Chat program in Visual Basic mostly because Microsoft had and OCX (or API) you could wirte code for, having your own chat program. It all gave way to the IM like ICQ and others.

I am currently looking for programming for a AU 200 USB phone I have. I got this phone as part of a VoIP service I had.

Bye For now Jim

Well I had to shut down my pay/click on the tree search engines I was using, Yahoo, Google, and Live. I was not getting the return on investment I had hoped for . Maybe I just didn’t have enough budget to get the clicks and customers I was hoping for. It seems to get the good clicks you had better be willing to start at $3 per click. Maybe I could have done better with keywords? Maybe if you could go to a company have them set up your campaign maybe you could do better, but could I pay for this on a small budget? The only hope I have is with 40on1, I believe they are the reason my page rank has gone from 8 million from number 1 to 474,516 Page rank according to Alexa. Alexa has a neat plug in for Firefox. Maybe if I get to be on the fist page maybe I would make enough money to keep  me there.

James Niland

http://shop.nilandsplace.com

When I originally set up Nilands Place Shopping Mall I knew I needed to take credit cards. In my dealings with PayPal I learned I could set up a merchant account were they would take a percentage of the sale (1.9% to 2.9%). later I was told that was too much and I needed to go with someone like authorize.net to do credit cards. I didn’t end up with them as we kept going back and forth about what I could and could not have at http://shop.nilandsplace.com. I ended going with a company that cost a little less than authorize.net. Anyway being a beginner and not knowing how to market my site I got less than a few customers. In the mean while it kept getting billed by SecurePay.com, and getting no income. Months later PayPal’s percentage didn’t sound so bad as I did not pay any monthly fees with them. So I call to see if I could cancel my account with SecurePay.com, only to learn I was under a three year contract with them and would have to pay $300 to get out of it. I don’t remember when I signed on with them this ever being mentioned. They did cut my fee back a little so thanks for that. The morel to the story is: I was being greedy about not wanting to give PayPal their cut, but in retrospect I would have spent allot less money.

here is the link for PayPal https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside

Sincerely James

I just listen to an interview with Jeff Johnson the I think everyone should listen to. It mostly has to do with social networking marketing. I have to say I was impressed, most free things I get off the internet are junk trying to sell me something, but not this interview. I downloaded it from the Underground Training Lab

I am going to put it on my website http://nilandsplace.com for free as I got it. or you can just go to there site. It has a lot to offer http://www.undergroundtraininglab.com/index.php

Please do yourself a favor and give it a listen

I got a very distressing email from one of my drop shippers today!
“Your application may have been denied for a number of reasons, including
but not limited to:

- Missing information from signup form
- Your website, address or traffic source is outside of the US or Canada
- Web site under construction, or no website available
- Incentive or freebie website
- Adult or confrontational content on your website
- Your site is irrelevant to Doba’s products & services
- The quality of your site doesn’t lend to supporting the Doba brand.

Thank you for your application.

Doba Affiliate Manager”

Not only is it none specific, I wonder how it is I am good enough to sell their product but can’t suggest then as a source. They are not the only drop shipper out there, so maybe when it come time (soon) to renew with them I will have second thoughts

1. Sell an inexpensive product to sell an expensive
product. If people like your inexpensive product,
they’ll be persuaded to buy your expensive one.

2. Allow your visitors to decided how much they
want to pay for your product. I only recommend it
for products that don’t sell or ones that hardly sell.

3. Create an extra revenue stream with your web
site’s articles or content. Publish the first paragraph
of each article and charge people to read the rest.

4. E-mail targeted e-zines and ask them to do a
joint venture with you. Ask them to run your ad and
in exchange they get a percentage of the profits.

5. Find a tiny niche for your new free e-zine. There
are thousands of free e-zines; your e-zine needs to
be extra specialized to attract new subscribers.

6. Test your ads by using autoresponders. You can
have people e-mail your autoresponders to get more
information and you just check your traffic reports.

7. Create credibility and trust with your visitors by
telling them something they already know. They’ll
know for sure you’re not lying to them.

8. Make residual income from your customers by
selling back end products. If you don’t have any,
you could sign up to related affiliate programs.

9. Use a redirect page to boost your sales. People
think the long affiliate URLs look unprofessional in
e-mail so you could redirect them to a web link.

10. Create an extra income from your web site by
charging for consulting. The consulting should be
related to your web site’s theme.