After spending a few hours mending my car last night, I finally got around to loading my new PHP-based eBook store to The Cafetorium. It's not complete yet, and still needs a lot of configuring. As a result, a lot of the content is replaced by error messages.
Howver, if you go there, you'll get the idea of what it looks like.
I plan to do a lot of customisation of the appearance once everything is up and running. I've already updated the logo graphic. The rest of the site will have its colour scheme adjusted to blend with the logo.
I must say that I am impressed by what I got for my measly $7. I'll be even more impressed once it's up and running.
The administration control panel is just excellent. There's help on every page, and it's designed to let you administer your site without ever having to worry about HTML, PHP, JavaScript etc.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Online shop rethink
Late last night I was offered a turnkey online eBook store, stocked with 200 eBooks.
It's fully automated with PayPal, and obviously uses some scripting such as PHP, because it has some automated features.
I suspect that it's database-driven because adding new products is simply a case of entering the details into an online control panel.
This is something that I had planned to do with my own store eventually, as I learned more about PHP scripting. Now it appears that it's been done for me, so I figured that it was easier to buy in the technology than to spend time writing it myself. As the price was very low, it has to be worth it.
It's a huge download (about 350Mb), so I left it downloading and went to bed. In the morning when I checked the download, it had stopped due to an error. I resumed the download and went to work. So I won't get to see it until tonight.
It was very cheap at $7, so I'm not expecting too much of it, but from its description, it sounds as if it's worth buying just so that I can see how it works.
Plus, the 200 eBooks might be useful - although I suspect they will be the same ones that everyone is selling or giving away in bundles because they've been around for a while.
In the meantime, I'm still working on The Cafetorium. Yesterday I developed a PHP script that allows me to create just one single download page that will work for all of my eBooks, instead of writing one per product. That's going to save a lot of work and will be much less prone to error.
Maybe I'll see if I can do the same for my sales pages - and my catalogue pages. There's a lot of them to write, and until my eStore Builder program is fully operational, I'll have to do those by hand.
Actually, the major chore is creating the PayPal Buy Now buttons. PayPal's web interface for creating buttons is tedious to use and you can't save your data.
I'm not keen on programs like Paylock Generator because they are easily cracked. I cracked it by hand in about an hour, and have since written an unencryptor program which will reveal all the details of a Paylocked PayPal button.
I really need to write a program that will generate real encrypted PayPal buttons. It's possible, but not easy, so it might take a while.
It's fully automated with PayPal, and obviously uses some scripting such as PHP, because it has some automated features.
I suspect that it's database-driven because adding new products is simply a case of entering the details into an online control panel.
This is something that I had planned to do with my own store eventually, as I learned more about PHP scripting. Now it appears that it's been done for me, so I figured that it was easier to buy in the technology than to spend time writing it myself. As the price was very low, it has to be worth it.
It's a huge download (about 350Mb), so I left it downloading and went to bed. In the morning when I checked the download, it had stopped due to an error. I resumed the download and went to work. So I won't get to see it until tonight.
It was very cheap at $7, so I'm not expecting too much of it, but from its description, it sounds as if it's worth buying just so that I can see how it works.
Plus, the 200 eBooks might be useful - although I suspect they will be the same ones that everyone is selling or giving away in bundles because they've been around for a while.
In the meantime, I'm still working on The Cafetorium. Yesterday I developed a PHP script that allows me to create just one single download page that will work for all of my eBooks, instead of writing one per product. That's going to save a lot of work and will be much less prone to error.
Maybe I'll see if I can do the same for my sales pages - and my catalogue pages. There's a lot of them to write, and until my eStore Builder program is fully operational, I'll have to do those by hand.
Actually, the major chore is creating the PayPal Buy Now buttons. PayPal's web interface for creating buttons is tedious to use and you can't save your data.
I'm not keen on programs like Paylock Generator because they are easily cracked. I cracked it by hand in about an hour, and have since written an unencryptor program which will reveal all the details of a Paylocked PayPal button.
I really need to write a program that will generate real encrypted PayPal buttons. It's possible, but not easy, so it might take a while.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Cafetorium goes online
My Cafetorium eBook shop has now been built. The shelves are empty at the moment as I review my stock for quality.
A vast improvement on my previous version is that the stock is being categorised to make it a lot easier to find particular eBooks.
Every day I'll be taking a few eBooks to work and I'll read and review them during my lunch break. Then in the evening, the ones that pass the review will be added to the site.
This is going to be a long process, but I think it will be worth it. There are so many eBooks out there today which are either total rubbish, or duplicates of other eBooks. This duplication happens because people sell the PLR (Private Label Rights), allowing the buyers to rename them, change the content and put their names to them. Many people do nothing but change the title and author, meaning that you can end up with several identical books under different titles.
By reviewing all my stock, I hope to eliminate all duplicates. If I can, I'll also try to make a note of duplicates so that my customers don't end up buying something they already own.
On the Alexa front, I downloaded and installed the Alexa Toolbar again and everything seems to be working again. It seems that the ranking system doesn't always work if you don't have the latest version installed.
My idea for writing a robot to visit all the pages of my sites has now been realised.
I've used it for a few days now. It's too soon to determine whether visiting all of the pages of a site has any bearing on the Alexa Rank, but for the two sites that have the most pages, the initial results look promising, with increases of around 350,000 compared with other sites for which I'm visiting just one page, which have increased by about 100,000. One set of results doesn't provide much evidence though.
We shall see over the next few weeks.
The number of pages on the Cafetorium site will increase steadily over the next few weeks, so if my theory is correct, its rise should be phenomenal. That site also has a Google Rank, so it will become a valuable site for all my other sites to be linked to.
A vast improvement on my previous version is that the stock is being categorised to make it a lot easier to find particular eBooks.
Every day I'll be taking a few eBooks to work and I'll read and review them during my lunch break. Then in the evening, the ones that pass the review will be added to the site.
This is going to be a long process, but I think it will be worth it. There are so many eBooks out there today which are either total rubbish, or duplicates of other eBooks. This duplication happens because people sell the PLR (Private Label Rights), allowing the buyers to rename them, change the content and put their names to them. Many people do nothing but change the title and author, meaning that you can end up with several identical books under different titles.
By reviewing all my stock, I hope to eliminate all duplicates. If I can, I'll also try to make a note of duplicates so that my customers don't end up buying something they already own.
On the Alexa front, I downloaded and installed the Alexa Toolbar again and everything seems to be working again. It seems that the ranking system doesn't always work if you don't have the latest version installed.
My idea for writing a robot to visit all the pages of my sites has now been realised.
I've used it for a few days now. It's too soon to determine whether visiting all of the pages of a site has any bearing on the Alexa Rank, but for the two sites that have the most pages, the initial results look promising, with increases of around 350,000 compared with other sites for which I'm visiting just one page, which have increased by about 100,000. One set of results doesn't provide much evidence though.
We shall see over the next few weeks.
The number of pages on the Cafetorium site will increase steadily over the next few weeks, so if my theory is correct, its rise should be phenomenal. That site also has a Google Rank, so it will become a valuable site for all my other sites to be linked to.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
A new site on its way
I have decided to resurrect my plans to create an eBook store. I put it on hold before because I thought that too many people were doing the same thing and my site would just get lost.
However, I've read recently that people are still making reasonable money from selling eBooks, so I thought I'd give it a try.
I have collected a fairly huge stock of eBooks over the past year, but I have to say that quite a few of them are utter rubbish. So, I have removed all of my entire stock, and I'll be reading through each of them before putting them back on sale.
There are numerous rip-off artists about who try to sell you rubbish like that, and have no scruples. They don't even read them themselves - they just buy the resale rights and churn it out.
Personally, I can't bring myself to do that. I plan to provide a decent service, selling quality products.
I also figured that if I add a new product or two every day, the search engines will view my site as an active, changing site. And if I write up reviews of the eBooks that I sell, there will be a lot of changing content for the search engines to get their teeth into.
This can only do my search engine ranks a lot of good.
The domain that I am using for my ebook store has been around for about 6 years now (simply used for a personal website), and Google seems to prefer long-lived sites. This is reflected by the fact that it has a Google Page Rank of 2/10. Not brilliant, but better than nothing.
The site now has an Alexa rank of 1,891,986. Again, not fantastic, but not a bad position for a startup site.
The site is called The Cafetorium (like this blog), and is at The Cafetorium.
There's nothing to buy there yet, but the stock levels will pick up over the next few days.
However, I've read recently that people are still making reasonable money from selling eBooks, so I thought I'd give it a try.
I have collected a fairly huge stock of eBooks over the past year, but I have to say that quite a few of them are utter rubbish. So, I have removed all of my entire stock, and I'll be reading through each of them before putting them back on sale.
There are numerous rip-off artists about who try to sell you rubbish like that, and have no scruples. They don't even read them themselves - they just buy the resale rights and churn it out.
Personally, I can't bring myself to do that. I plan to provide a decent service, selling quality products.
I also figured that if I add a new product or two every day, the search engines will view my site as an active, changing site. And if I write up reviews of the eBooks that I sell, there will be a lot of changing content for the search engines to get their teeth into.
This can only do my search engine ranks a lot of good.
The domain that I am using for my ebook store has been around for about 6 years now (simply used for a personal website), and Google seems to prefer long-lived sites. This is reflected by the fact that it has a Google Page Rank of 2/10. Not brilliant, but better than nothing.
The site now has an Alexa rank of 1,891,986. Again, not fantastic, but not a bad position for a startup site.
The site is called The Cafetorium (like this blog), and is at The Cafetorium.
There's nothing to buy there yet, but the stock levels will pick up over the next few days.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
A new Alexa experiment
Having experienced bizarre and inconsistent results regarding Alexa rank of my sites, I decided to read up on how Alexa computes rank.
It's not only based on unique user visits to a site, but on the number of page views, as well. That puts a whole new slant on things.
What if I was to visit all of the pages on all of my sites every day? Would this affect the Alexa rank? Let's give it a try.
As all of my sites have a Google sitemap file listing all the pages on the site, it should be easy to write a script that takes my browser to all of those pages.
I should be able to make it linger on those pages for good measure to make it look as if it's a human reader and not a robot.
The experiment will be all the more interesting because some of my sites have considerably more pages than others. In theory, the ones with more pages should gain a higher Alexa rank more quickly than those with fewer pages.
I'll keep you posted...
It's not only based on unique user visits to a site, but on the number of page views, as well. That puts a whole new slant on things.
What if I was to visit all of the pages on all of my sites every day? Would this affect the Alexa rank? Let's give it a try.
As all of my sites have a Google sitemap file listing all the pages on the site, it should be easy to write a script that takes my browser to all of those pages.
I should be able to make it linger on those pages for good measure to make it look as if it's a human reader and not a robot.
The experiment will be all the more interesting because some of my sites have considerably more pages than others. In theory, the ones with more pages should gain a higher Alexa rank more quickly than those with fewer pages.
I'll keep you posted...
Short-lived
Well my faith in Alexa was very short-lived.
Today I checked the ranks of my sites as usual, and all except one had reverted back to the same rank as two days ago.
I then revisited the one which hadn't changed, and then that reverted back to the old rank also.
What's more, the numbers I get from the Alexa Toolbar never seem to bear any relation to the numbers I get on the Alexa.com site, where my sites appear to have a considerably higher rank.
Maybe I'll just dismiss Alexa as being a waste of time and concentrate on Google.
Today I checked the ranks of my sites as usual, and all except one had reverted back to the same rank as two days ago.
I then revisited the one which hadn't changed, and then that reverted back to the old rank also.
What's more, the numbers I get from the Alexa Toolbar never seem to bear any relation to the numbers I get on the Alexa.com site, where my sites appear to have a considerably higher rank.
Maybe I'll just dismiss Alexa as being a waste of time and concentrate on Google.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Faith restored (for now)
Anyone reading this blog will know that I am an avid watcher of Alexa ranking, and I discovered that simply by visiting my own sites while running the Alexa Toolbar, I was able to increase their rank.
As the sites rose through the ranks, progress became slower, so that graphs of the rank would have a distinct tailing-off shape.
Over the last few weeks, the ranks have not been updated as regularly as before, and movement has been very slow, moving just a few thousand positions in the space of a month (average of about 400 per day compared with moves of 600,000 per day in the beginning).
I was beginning to lose interest in the ranks of my sites, assuming that they had reached their peak until other Alexa Toolbar users started to view them.
Until today.
Suddenly, there has been a huge jump on all of my sites, averaging about 75,000 per day since the last update. One site, which until today was listed as "No data" (which means a rank of greater than 10 million) came in at an incredible 4,218,030 - a jump of over 5.75 million places.
Two of my sites now have a rank of less than 2 million (the highest being 1,892,795).
My target still remains sub-200,000, so there's still a way to go, but it's now all looking possible.
So my interest in Alexa ranking has increased again.
(until it starts to drag its heels again)
As the sites rose through the ranks, progress became slower, so that graphs of the rank would have a distinct tailing-off shape.
Over the last few weeks, the ranks have not been updated as regularly as before, and movement has been very slow, moving just a few thousand positions in the space of a month (average of about 400 per day compared with moves of 600,000 per day in the beginning).
I was beginning to lose interest in the ranks of my sites, assuming that they had reached their peak until other Alexa Toolbar users started to view them.
Until today.
Suddenly, there has been a huge jump on all of my sites, averaging about 75,000 per day since the last update. One site, which until today was listed as "No data" (which means a rank of greater than 10 million) came in at an incredible 4,218,030 - a jump of over 5.75 million places.
Two of my sites now have a rank of less than 2 million (the highest being 1,892,795).
My target still remains sub-200,000, so there's still a way to go, but it's now all looking possible.
So my interest in Alexa ranking has increased again.
(until it starts to drag its heels again)
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Still here
It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted on here. I would like to say that it's because I've been away on vacation, but it's not true. It's more due to the pressure of work than anything else.
Hopefully, one day, I'll be making enough money to give up the day job and that won't happen any more.
Unfortunately, development work on my software products has also taken a hit, and there's been little or no progress there.
I'm still getting a few people joining my mailing list as a result of the Ebook and Software Blowout giveaway event.
I sent my subscribers details of a course that will give step-by-step instructions on getting started as an Internet Marketer. It begins in September, and carries a $10,000 prize for the best-performing student. Well worth signing up for.
I don't have the details to hand (I'm not in my home office just now), but I'll post it here tomorrow, or later tonight.
Hopefully, one day, I'll be making enough money to give up the day job and that won't happen any more.
Unfortunately, development work on my software products has also taken a hit, and there's been little or no progress there.
I'm still getting a few people joining my mailing list as a result of the Ebook and Software Blowout giveaway event.
I sent my subscribers details of a course that will give step-by-step instructions on getting started as an Internet Marketer. It begins in September, and carries a $10,000 prize for the best-performing student. Well worth signing up for.
I don't have the details to hand (I'm not in my home office just now), but I'll post it here tomorrow, or later tonight.
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