Today you can see a pair of glowing eyes.

If you’re a code nerd, you can go look at the .css file.  If you do you’ll see several lines are commented out.  If you piece those images back together, you get a picture of … something.  No clue what that is supposed to be.

I have a strange feeling that the image from the css has nothing to do with whatever they plan on announcing…  most likely it’s a Blizzard joke.

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There are 9 of us in our office.  7 of us would prefer to have the lights off.  2 people want them on and blindingly bright.  So in true democratic fashion, the lights stay on all day as the majority are forced to capitulate to the loudly voiced demands of the minority.

Apparently in a Democracy all you have to do is yell and complain louder than anyone else and you get your way.  And that is how minority rules.

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Our company had a PPC training today, which interestingly, all the SEO guys attended  (I think we are all secretly jealous cause they get instant traffic).  It was really really good.  I picked up a lot of things I didn’t know about PPC.   I have been running PPC ads on a personal project for a while now, but today showed me that I really didn’t know what I was doing.

Later Jared, one of the PPC managers, sat down with me and went though my account.  He was very polite and didn’t openly mock me, to much.  It pretty much came down to: you should delete that campaign and start over.  I was really resistant to that, until he showed me the report that tells you which keywords people are searching when they clicked on your ad.  I was shocked.   I have a ring related website and I was getting searches for rings for piercings in places you don’t want to talk about in civilized conversation.  I didn’t even know you could pierce some of these places…  *shudder*.  Anyway, it basically came down to, 2/3rds of my money was going straight out the window on keywords that had nothing to do with what I was trying to promote.  Part of that was a mysterious “Unknown” section that Google wouldn’t even tell us about that amounted to about 500 clicks.  I guess you doesn’t realize how much you don’t know until someone shows you.

So taking Jared’s advice, I promptly chucked my old campaign and started over.  We’ll see how it goes now.

Below are some of the great PPC related things I picked up today.  Enjoy.

Exact Match Keywords - [keyword keyword]

Your ad only shows up when that exact phrase is typed in.  No more, no less.

• Exact phrase only
• In that exact order

Examples: [red tennis shoes]

Your ad shows up if the search is: ‘red tennis shoes’.

But not for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’ or ‘tennis shoes red’ or anything else.

Phrase Match - “keyword keyword”

This seems to be the one that gets used most commonly.  Also use in conjunction with negative keywords.

• Plural and singular keywords are separate and distinct keywords.
• Keyword order specific

Examples: “red tennis shoes”

Ad shows up for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes buy now’

Ad won’t show up for: ‘tennis shoes red’ (out of order), ‘red tennis shoe’ (singular)

Broad Match - keyword keyword

Your ad shows up for the entered keyword, as well as pretty much anything Google deems slightly related.

If you use this, good luck.  This is what I was using, without knowing what it would actually do to my campaign.

• Not order specific
• Not plural or singular specific
• Not order specific

Examples: red tennis shoes

Ad shows up for: ‘buy red tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes buy now’, ‘bobs red tennis shoes’, ‘tennis shoes’, ‘red shoes’, ’shoes’, ‘red’, ’socks’ (cause they are feet related too), ‘Nike’ (cause it’s a type of shoe) etc.  The list is huge.

Ad won’t show up for: ‘Grandma’s knitting’.  Pretty much something completely unrelated.  Cause if it can find a link, it will try to put your ad there.

So yeah, it was a good day.  I learned I had been loosing money for a long time.  But on the bright side, I got to learn about the problem before launching any major projects! 

Oh, and on a side note, it snowed this morning here in Utah.  It’s frigg’in May 1st and its still snowing!  Damn this global warming!  It’s going to freeze us all to death!

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I like that.   Now I need to get my code to show up like that. 

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Note: The election part of this rant has been removed because I am so tired of hearing about politics and feel that the other half of the message has a very important point to make.

Starting quote:

What do these stories all have in common?

• A woman who says she lost more $1 million gambling in Atlantic City sues some casinos for $20 million, claiming they should’ve stopped her compulsive gambling.
• People who bought houses they couldn’t afford with loans they didn’t understand want their lenders to change the terms.
• Congress authorizes a war and then tries everything it can think of to get out of it.
• Our country gets addicted to oil and then blames OPEC when it doesn’t like the price.

These stories prove how personal responsibility has all but vanished in America, and our government is leading the way.

Remember the kid from that interminable 1980s commercial whose father caught him using drugs? The father incredulously asked, “Who taught you how to do this stuff?” and the kid responded, “You, alright? I learned it by watching you.”

Well, we are that kid and our government is that drug-using father who doesn’t think that anyone notices his bad habits.

Our government is leading us by example, and I don’t mean that in a good way. For years, it has spent us into oblivion, mortgaging our future for programs we can’t afford, and Americans have happily followed suit, running up credit card bills and home equity loans for things they never should’ve bought.

Unfortunately, we’re also learning something else from our government: how to avoid taking responsibility for our actions.

From Eliot Spitzer’s alleged hooker craze to the revelation that Arnold Schwarzenegger commutes to work in a large private jet even as he preaches the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, there’s never been a shortage of “do what I say, not what I do” hypocrites in politics.

…

If you want to talk about disenfranchised voters, then let’s talk about why just 17 percent of Americans have a positive view of Congress. Let’s talk about why we still have wide open borders despite most Americans wanting them sealed. Let’s talk about why we keep selling out our sovereignty and our security by borrowing billions of dollars from-less-than friendly countries, such as China.

Americans aren’t disenfranchised because our leaders won’t count votes in a couple of states. They’re disenfranchised because our leaders aren’t doing their jobs. They’re disenfranchised because after working hard to support their families and to raise kids who understand the difference between right and wrong, their leaders do exactly the opposite.

Source: CNN - Glenn Beck: Too bad, Michigan and Florida

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History

When MexicanVanilla.com launched in 2004, it started as a simple site powered by OSCommerce, an open source ecommerce solution. While OSCommerce worked fine, it was extremely hard to customize and not very friendly for the end user. It did however do its job.

The initial marketing focused on PPC advertising with Google and Yahoo. At them time I didn’t know much about SEO, but I still tried to build up inbound links and do various other promotion online.

Overtime we became a recognized authority site by the search engines and started ranking better. As that happened we diminished our PPC spend and let our organic traffic carry us forward.

Rankings and SEO Efforts

Initially there was some link building done. Some of the best links we got were from trading reciprocal links with recipe and cooking related websites. We also did some pages on 3rd party sites that were setup with a friend who was a search engine marketer. All of these techniques were of course considered OK at the time. Now however the search engines frown upon those.

In hind sight, our link building efforts were rather poor. It should have been an aggressive thing across the life of the project. We also never took the time to get the site listed in any directories. We did however try to get listed in DMOZ, to no effect. Damn corrupt, lazy editors. MexicanVanilla.com was number one in its industry, and could never get listed.

The OSCommerce version of the website had a very hard time ranking. It was never able to rank well in Google. Yahoo and MSN however picked up on the site very nicely. As soon as it was ranked high in Yahoo, Yahoo based PPC was stopped.

When the CSS version of the site was launched in February 2007, it had an immediate impact on rankings. It immediately jumped to number 6 on Google, and after a couple weeks number 3 and finally number 1.

With the release of the new site, a revamped and SEO optimized dessert recipe section was added. The recipes were grouped into sections such as Brownies, Cookies, etc. with a list of recipes under each section. Each section was optimized for their terms, such as “Cookie Recipes”. Each recipe was optimized for its phrase “Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe”, “Vanilla Pudding Recipe” etc. Optimizing this section was an excellent thing. Our Google analytics logs show that the site was getting hundreds long tail keyword hits for recipes on the site.

At the time of releasing the site back to the owner, MexicanVanilla.com is ranked #1 on MSN, #2 on Yahoo and #2 on Google for the term “Mexican Vanilla”.

Traffic Statistics

Overture estimates (2007) that there are ~750 searches per month for the term “Mexican vanilla”. While ranking #1 or #2 across all the search engines, MexicanVanilla.com received 1,300 unique visitors per month. The peak season of November and December brought 2,000-2,500 unique visitors per month.

The Business Model and Operations

The Product:

Reseller of a product, plain and simple. The supplier was a local company. So I would pick up the product locally.

Shipping:

Ah… I love this part.

All shipping was handled by the local UPS store. When I would pick up stock, I would drop it off with Robert at the UPS Store. Robert and crew received an email copy of all orders. They would then package and ship the order. When they had the tracking number they emailed that to the client for me.

Package shipped. Customer has tracking number, which, makes you look very professional. Order has been handled. On a side note: if you don’t get the customer a tracking number, they will email you non-stop about the status of their order. Get them a tracking number so they don’t harass you!

Ya have to love that. Hands off order fulfillment. Perfect for an internet business. All 100% without my help. Let the pros do what they are good at so you can do the same. I am a developer, so I could focus on building and coding. The UPS Store are shipping pros, and they did a great job with order fulfillment.

Support:

I handled all the support issues. I hated it. So many questions. No one seemed to ever read the FAQ on the site. Most responses are copy paste from the FAQ. Other questions where answered as quickly as possible. But I have to admit, I hate handling support. It is a distraction from what I consider important (aka: coding) work.

But to run this type of business, handling support quickly and efficiently IS CRITICAL. Customers are always impressed when online businesses reply quickly. It makes you look more professional. In hind sight, I should have setup an instant auto reply to all inquiries. Something professional sounding, telling them that we would reply shortly and to reference the FAQ for common questions.

Guarantee:

We offered a 100% satisfaction guarantee. That is one of those reassuring things that buyers like to see. And it does affect sales. In the 3+ years running the site, we got 2 returns. Yep, just 2. And one of the orders that was returned, wasn’t ours. Huh? A customer bought from 2 sources to try different types of vanilla. He returned the one he didn’t like. He didn’t like the competitors, but returned it to us on accident. LOL. Just one of those things…

The other customer return was a miraculous rejection. Interestingly, he became unsatisfied with his order several hours BEFORE it was delivered (according to the UPS delivery time). He was nice enough to open the product before sending it back though… jerk. “I really didn’t like the vanilla…” I see… glad you tried it (the vanilla was at the same level as an unopened bottle). Jerk.

You do run into occasional problems, but they are few and far between. Must customers are very reasonable and just want to get their order in a timely manner.

Shipping Problems:

We did occasionally loose a package. It does and will happen. When you ship regularly and continually it will eventually happen to you. Shipping insurance is for this. It pays for you to ship the product to the customer again. Very nice.

Broken Merchandise:

The UPS store always did an excellent job packing our product for us. Even though we were shipping heavy glass bottles, we never had an order broken while being shipped.

Newsletter:

As a fun experiment, we started a newsletter. Dana, a friend of ours, wrote it. And she did a great job! People loved to get her newsletter. It would discuss recipes and cooking and all those things that guys just don’t understand. Since most of our buyers were women, this added a much more personal touch to our business.

We got up to about 180 newsletter subscribers. We tried to provide them with the best content we could and didn’t spam them with ads and things like that. However, the occasional offer in the newsletter did have an impact on sales.

My Thoughts

The Good

This was a total learning experience for me. Getting a site to the top of the search engines is a very satisfying feeling.

I never really expected this project to make much money. It just wasn’t feasible with shipping costs and the product margins. I learned that you really need to be careful with what you choose to sell online. Low margin, high shipping cost items combine for poor profits. That was fine for learning, but going forward, all projects MUST make money.

The Bad

I learned something important. I HATE doing customer support. There is nothing to ruin your day then responding to customers. I just can’t do it. I am to emotionally attached to the projects I do. I know, its dumb. But true in my case. So, I need to be separated from problems. Other people need to manage them. Period.

My main reason for getting out of this business is very simple. The niche is to small. The site has a 2% conversion rate (pretty good), but while ranking high across all the major search engines, the site only draws 1,300 unique visitors or so a month. That works out to 26 sales a month. Given that profit off most sales is ~ $7, that works out to an amazing $182! Blah. Bottom line, not worth the effort.

And: Never build a project on a domain you don’t own. This is a no brainer. If you don’t own it, you can’t sell it when you are done. That just stinks. Good lesson. Lesson learned.

Conclusions

I’ve been really grateful for what I have learned from running this site. It was a great learning experience. I got to practice search engine optimization, learn about business systems and ecommerce. All good things. Now its time to move on to bigger and better things.

So what did I learn while running MexicanVanilla.com?

• Start with PPC, but SEO and natural search rankings are the way to go!
• If the niche is too small, you won’t make much money, even if you are number 1. Bummer. AKA: Don’t dream to small.
• When it is possible, outsource!!! There are quality people out there who can do a better job than you can. This frees up your time to focus on building the business, not running it.
• Customers like interaction. Lots of it. Send them multiple notifications.
  • We got your order.
  • Your order has been processed and will ship shortly.
  • Your order has shipped, here is your tracking number so you can watch its progress.
  • Follow up 2-3 weeks later:
    • Did you get your order?
    • How was our service?
    • What can we do better to serve you?

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Primary Display Resolution

Out of 87,4450 Users

Resolution | #Users | %

800 x 600 | 13,848 | 1.58 %

1024 x 768 | 275,816 | 31.54 %

1280 x 960 | 351,374 | 40.18 %

1600 x 1200 | 16,094 | 1.84 %

1680 x 1050 | 77,349 | 8.85 %

1920 x 1200 | 19,795 | 2.26 %

Ahhh! 70% of the user base is running at 1024 x 768 & 1280 x 960 resolution. I would still consider those “low” resolutions. Only around 10% of the users are running what I would consider “high” resolution monitors.

Also interesting to note, are the operating systems that people are running.

Windows Version

Windows XP | 727,772 | 83.23 %

Windows Vista | 112,279 | 12.84 %

As you can see, Windows Vista is the gamer’s operating system of choice.

Physical CPUs

1 cpu 540,791 61.84

2 cpus 305,658 34.95 %

4 cpus 27,922 3.19 %

It is nice to see, that multi-core cpus are spreading quite nicely too.

I believe you can see the results of the Valve Hardware Survey without needing to take it.

Oh yeah, Happy New Year!

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