+1 I've visited your site a few times and didn't know that.

I noticed a bunch of sites that were offering me vip services for vegas clubs and I'm starting to wonder if this could be a viable model for other areas of the country?

This is a sites layout for vegas that I really liked:

http://www.24-7vegasvip.com/index.php?page=nightclubs


Here are some other well done services:

www.clubhost.com

and www.nitetables.com

Does anyone know anything about the proffitably of these services? I'm getting that tingle in my stomach that makes me want to give this a shot. I would launch sites for cities around me and oversee everything, a concern would be wether or not I would have to take the reservations myself (Through some kind of online payment processor. I would probably have to have a ton of cash on reserve in order front for this.) or if I could simply be the middle man and point the traffic to the club's host.

The game would probably be rapid expansion.

(I'm not looking to actually become a club host myself)

thoughts?

Wasn't aware of this but sure enough I was allowed to re-establish my account. Thanks for the heads-up.

Definitely a lesson learned for me. IM is tenuous stuff when relying on affiliate income. One re-algorithm by the G or pissing contest between your merchant and your state, and *poof* it goes.

No problem man, I'm glad you were able to get back up and running. There is so much inherent correlation between IM projects that, if possible, you definitely want to have a wide variety of adsense-, ecommerce-, affiliate-, whatever else- properties.

Hi, I took a quick browse of your site, and as someone who has experience with CAD drawings etc I'd like to make a couple of comments.
I think you've made a great site for your first attempt at wordpress, nice job. For SEO purposes, I would probably find out some common searched words, things like CAD etc (what we call it here in UK, although might be different in the US?) and dot them about the site. Also, I see the sites linked into Precision Designs website and you have a Portfolio over there; I think a portfolio section in your site would look pretty good and compliment it well to see the finished articles. Kinda nitpicking but in the Custom Changes section, you mention 'redesign', 'added', 'created' and you also say 'deleted'- I think this should read 'removed' instead of deleted.
One last thing, on the right hand side you've got drop down boxes for search plans - if you could somehow change this to one box with left to right sliders (like you may find on hotel booking sites for example) instead of dropdowns I think it'd make the process a little smoother.

Nice site, my sisters just graduated and jobs are scarce around here. I might point her in the direction of your page to see what she can pick up any ideas from it

Thanks for looking at it. I will look at the changes part. I see what you mean about the verbiage. I already have the seo pretty nailed down. I picked Texas house plans and southern house plans to go after. There is really no way I can ever get "house plans" or "house floor plans" since these are dominated by sites that have been around 8+ years. I am already ranked #4 and #5 for my keywords. I am also starting to move up for some other keywords as well. I tried to get a custom search made though Elance and it was a total disaster. I eventually just went with an off the shelf generic search that is working for now. I will eventually change it but with the experience I had before with this I decided to wait. I know what you mean about jobs. In 2006 I had 5 employees and now it is just me. At least I think the bleeding has stopped in housing. Now we just need to get some growth which unfortunately I think is still going to be a while.

Not sure if this is a "help everyone" thread or not. If it's not, let me know and I'll delete this post.

I'm working on a simple app that gives users prices of certain commodites ("magic cards" - a trading card game). The goal is to make money with adwords and referral income. The site is up, although still in alpha and I'm fixing broken things daily.

I'm going to spend a week fixing things then start work on marketing. What I'm wondering is: I have the original domain (www.mtgcardpricer.com) with static. and blog. as subdomains. I also recently bought a much shorter name - mtgprice.com (and mtgpricer.com) since I want uswers to be able to use the site extremely quickly.

1. Should I move all the content to the new domain instead of just doing a redirect? Is having a short domain really important?
2. Is it worth getting a cheap logo made for the site and doing some basic branding? If so - should I use the longer or shorter name?
3. Should I make this decision now, or later?
4. I know very little about branding and brand identity - how important is having a strong brand identity at launch? Is it worth spending an extra week on?
5. I have the basic SEO stuff in there - keywords on the pages, different titles, fast-ish page load times, meta descriptions. I know I need a sitemap (which I'll add in a week) - what else should I be thinking about early? Especially, is there any stuff that's hard to change later, once the site is established?

Thanks!

i would definitely move it to mtgprice.com and 301 redirect the other site over there. whatever you do, decide sooner rather than later. this youtube video from matt cutts may be helpful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wATxftE8ooE

Thank you - that was a great link

I have one more quick question: My site is going to have information on around 20,000 different cards. Almost all the actual content is unique (prices, card text, image etc.) but it's always in the same format. Right now, I just have essentially 20,000 different pages in the form www.mtgcardpricer.com/foo/bar.html

When I move to the new domain, I need to decide if I should continue this, or instead do something like mtgprice.com/cardLookup?s=foo&n=bar

1. will each of these links in the new format count as different pages in a search engine?
2. If I want to A/B test ad placement using, say, google's website optimizer, is there an easy way to do this across 20,000 pages all with the same format?
3. The layout, much of the javascript, the css and the html are going to be static - I know I can load images from external files but is it possible to cache html chunks client-side?

thanks!

absolutely the former. use htaccess url rewriting to make it look like actual files and folders even if the reality is a query string. /foo/bar.html will look like different pages (good), ?s=foo&n=bar will not.

What you're describing is handled by an autoresponder. All the major e-mail software/providers have that - aweber, constant contact, icontact, etc...

I haven't used Aweber, but I did try http://www.ymlp.com/ which is probably more basic, but definitely a lot cheaper depending on what you're trying to do.

(I hope it's cool to ask this in this thread, I have read most of this thread today and it is clearly not about the OP anymore, but I'm not sure if this is on-topic).

Does anyone have an opinion on how many campaigns in AdWords are actually losing money? I have had chances to run AdWords ads a few times in the past (promotional offers from Google giving me $75 of ads, also ran some a few years ago for my main site, etc), and they have not only been -EV but WAY WAY -EV.

Now, the products I was advertising were quite badly suited for AdWords (low-priced, nichey), I wasn't shocked that the ads performed horribly, but I am very close to launching a new site and I'm trying to figure out the best way to get the word out.

My site is a high-quality web service (somewhat in the vein of the products 37signals.com put out), with membership plans that run from $5/mth to $100/mth, although I think the avg subscriber will be on the $10/mth plan, the $100/mth plan should only really apply to a very small amount of users (it is there because competitors have it, and as a general pricing strategy).

For my main keywords, Google is telling me it'll cost $1.25 to $3/click, which seems very high. I feel like even with an awesome conversion ratio this will be -EV, but maybe I am just being cheap. Anyone have thoughts on this? (It's obv. be easy if I knew conversion rates and avg. lifetime of a customer, but I can only guess at these, having not launched).

I ran some AdWords stuff for my niche business, and it seemed OK. I would never spend real money on it (just coupons from Wired magazine and such), though - my feelings are more or less the same as yours.

You need to understand how adwords works. In particular, you need to get your quality score as high as possible. Google charges more to direct people to irrelevant, slow, crappy sites than it does to extremely relevant (keywords on page match the ad keywords and users click the links a lot), fast-to-load, high quality sites. Increase your quality score and bid on low competition keywords and you can probably get it down to 10c a click or so.

This.

When I started out I was paying $1.10 - $1.25 per click for my keywords and now I am paying around $.30 -.35 per click for an average position of 2.8. It sucks but that is the way it is set up.

Yeah, I understand the way that Adwords works with the quality rating and everything, I didn't realize the price would drop THAT much, that's good news. The 10 cents/click seems insane, I'd love to see some cases of that and see what they did.

Or you mean with low competition keywords I guess - the problem with that in my case is that all the low competition keywords are going to be a lot less irrelevant to my product, so people who see those ads are going to click a lot less, no? I mean unless I find a goldmine of keywords that my competitors haven't bothered to advertise on, seems unlikely. One of the times I was using Adwords before, I selected a large group of keywords that were "related" but not very great, and my clickthrough on them was atrocious, hardly worth it for 1-2 bad quality clicks a day that will never convert.

quality score is 90%-95% under your control (and thus the easiest thing to change)

keyword selection is largely a function of the market, unless you tack on some extra keywords to your main words and go for lower volumes. (i.e. tack on "simple" or "new" or "fast" or whatever and just live with the cheap clicks but low volumes)

conversion ratio is mostly up to you as well - are you A/B testing your landing pages? Ideally, you want a unique landing page for every single ad, although unless you use specific tools, that gets onerous quickly.

Do any of you guys have a good place for WP templates for E-commerce? I have come up with an idea I think I can make a few bucks on during my SEO initiation. I will probably have 3-6 items to sell. I found this site that is pretty simple but wasn't sure what else was out there.

http://themeforest.net/item/envirash..._preview/73265

Thanks again to everyone for their help with my other site. I really appreciate it!

WooThemes / WooCommerce are pretty nice.

There has been some talk in this thread about PR releases. I decided to give it a go with my site and thought I might make a post today (part way through the process) and then again next week after the release has been released.

I decided to this site: http://www.pressreleasesender.com/

based on a recommendation I had gotten via PM from someone who had used him before. I paid 795 which means they will write the release for me (could have saved 300 by writing it myself but I'd never written one before and didn't really feel like learning about it).

Before signing up, I had several email exchanges with Dan Janal (guy who runs the site) and I was pretty surprised with how responsive he was. I was typically getting responses to questions within 5 minutes (maybe I just got lucky that he wasn't that busy).

When I agreed to sign up, we scheduled a time for the interview (a few days off) and I went to his site and paid for the service. He called me as scheduled within 1 minute of our agreed upon appointment. He asked a few questions to get me talking and was taking notes along the way. He also pauses along the way to throw out ideas along the way - semi-related businesses that had branched out to generate revenue by using their sites content in books; ideas for possible future press releases - things like that which were interesting and I appreciated his willingness to share his ideas.

The interview lasted about 30 minutes. He asked if he could have 2 days to write the release up because he likes to take his time and stew on it. As promised, he got me the first draft of the release 2 days later. I went over it and thought it was pretty good. To be honest, It just felt a little bit awkward to see myself quoted in his article - but he's the expert.

Release is going out next week (either Tuesday or Wednesday as he says those are the 'best' days of the week in his opinion). I think they guarantee something like 40 sites minimum will post the release and he says he'll send out a report that details that. My site has only been getting 40-60 visits per day - so I should be able to track the impact very easily.

Beyond that (quick reminder - site is a community based tool for modifying habits) - the release has a strong pitch as a New Years Resolution tool - so I'm hoping I can get some mentions in a few of the (hundreds) of articles that will be written in December detailing the "Best new tools to help you" - blog posts and articles that will be written - so I'm hoping for a sort of steady traffic through the next 2 months.

I will post results

Regarding new client acquisition:

Have you any of you tried physical mail marketing and had any success with it? Which company did you use? How did you scrap addresses?

Loss Tee: great write-up, and definitely keep us posted. I haven't used any of these services but I have been thinking about trying them out for one project.

I've used PRWeb. The referral traffic wasn't that great. Similar to our social media campaigns (low time on site, high bounce rate, etc). Our ROI is much higher with social media campaigns and content partnerships.

I was reading a blog by an SEO guru and noticed that he uses text, rather than icons, for the links to share his posts in social. I see that 2p2 is also doing this now. Just curious if this is an SEO thing or if there's some other reason for it and/or if it matters at all.