Savant7 » marketing

ezstream player games

Richard — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:06:38 +0000

streamer for 7/29

windows player:

same page over at jockjive

Buzzboosting Some Cali Pottery Items

Richard — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:55:17 +0000

I haven’t played with feedburner in a while, but a recent visit tells me I haven’t missed much. Place hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years or so.
Made a little buzzbooster for some rare California Pottery items that show up on my California Pottery Index site. Thought I’d embed it here…

Shelby County Website a Go

Richard — Mon, 24 May 2010 05:47:25 +0000

Rich Allen is a radio announcer friend of mine. For years I’ve been telling Rich that he needs to transition out the dying radio industry and into something more future oriented. Something like the internets! Woot!
So I finally got him to take the plunge into new technology and we’ve built a cool little community portal for his east Texas town of Center, Texas and the surrounding Shelby County.
Called Shelby Wired it’s just now coming online and here’s a short little video in support of it’s debut.

Links to Items For Sale Pages

Richard — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:54:08 +0000

I keep losing the links to these various topic pages, so I guess I’ll just list them here so I can find them.

Art Nouveau Mucha Gift Ideas
Classic Car Gifts
Cool Mouse Pads
Cool Trombone Shirts
Gift Ideas For Girlfriend
Historical and Personality Watches
Historical Tractor Watches
Metal Business Card Cases
Metal Cigarette Cases
Thank You Gift Ideas

New Direction For Teeblr

Richard — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:35:44 +0000

I’m pulling the plug on Teeblr. This is a website I built about nine months ago as a showcase for my t-shirts. In that time it has generated some page views but very little in the way of actual sales of shirts. Plus the Pliggs CMS has turned out to be a real spamfest of a platform and I’m tired of screwing with that aspect of the site.
So the old teeblr is gone, replaced by a wordpress blog for experimenting with some eBay affiliate projects. The posts will run the gamut from unlocked iphones for sale to all about the Margaritaville blender to an informational piece on where to buy gold coins.
I probably should set a tighter target and probably will as I develop the site. We’ll just have to see.

PDF’s, Google Rank, and Backlinks

Richard — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 19:29:46 +0000

I created some simple informational pdf files the other day for my California Pottery Index site. These were simple one-sheet bio’s and profiles of the different Californian potters of the 1940s, 50, and 60s. Each profile contains a link back to the corresponding page at CPI.
The PDF’s were then uploaded to document hosting sites scribd.com, docuter.com and docstoc.com. To scribd (which is the YouTube of docs) I uploaded pages individually, while the other two I uploaded the sheets compiled into an e-book.
Almost immediately, a couple of hours, the individual pages hosted on scribd were indexed into Google. The majority of pages were ranking in the top-10. for example, the profile on “William Manker Pottery” ranks number 2 on Google for the search for “William Manker Pottery.” This is obviously not the most competitive keyword combination out there, but number two is nothing to sneeze at, and the quickness of the indexing is a definite plus.
The object of the exercise though is the backlink creation. Quality anchor-text backlinks from a site Google respects. Woot!
I haven’t been able to notice the same sort of fast indexing on the docuster and docstoc uploads. Perhaps that’s because I was lazy and didn’t upload the pages individually. Always remember, small bites make a great meal.
PDF files are pretty easy to compile (I use Open Office) and it doesn’t take much of an excuse to make one. Here’s one I just uploaded to scribd that will link to my Big Bear Cabins For Rent site. Just a simple map of the Big Bear Lake area.

Big Bear Lake Map Big Bear Lake Map pickletoon Map of the general vicinity of Big Bear Lake, California, including Big Bear City, Fawnskin, Fox Farm, Sugarloaf, Bear Mountain, Moonridge, Snow Summit and The Village.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Illustrations & Maps map california

Some Interesting eBay Store Numbers

Richard — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:46:24 +0000

Why are these good things happening to me? That’s what I was thinking yesterday (2/28/09) as I had a real good day selling items from my eBay store. My 7-day auctions were doing their usual, but the store items were rocking. The store had been slow all month, but I’d just written it off to the catastrophically bad economy I’ve been hearing about on the news. Now I had five store sales in one day. So what’s up?

I fired up the eBay store traffic numbers from Omniture that are part of my basic store account. I do this religiously, twice a year like Easter and Christmas. I’m not all that good at crunching traffic numbers, but it doesn’t take long to see a problem. Check out the traffic to my eBay store homepage in January.

eBay Store Homepage Views Jan 09

Holy Heck, it just disappeared in early January. Around the 10th homepage traffic decreased from an average of 75-100 views a day to Zero. Not one or two. Zero. Low numbers I can deal with, but Zero is a total non-starter. I can’t work harder and improve on zero. Zero visits to my store homepage continued for the rest of the month, and then into February:

eBay Store Homepage Views Feb 09

Zero. Zero. Zero. Until the last couple days of the month when it suddenly picked back up. Well, this explains my recent good fortune! Here’s one other graph of the store traffic, a little longer term for comparison. Nov 08 through Feb 09:

eBay Store Homepage Views November '08 through February '09

How can this be explained? I don’t know, but suggestions from twitter buds @aswas and @colderICE led me to investigate whether I had opted-in to the new eBay Stores. I remembered looking at the new eBay Stores but couldn’t remember if I’d actually opted-in. Turns out I had. I don’t remember when and I don’t know if it has anything to do with the traffic decrease. But apparently other eBay sellers have reported traffic problems after opting-in. After discovering that I had opted-in I have now opted-out. Will be watching to see if the traffic numbers climb, although perhaps, judging from the last couple days, maybe the problem is behind me.
A couple other graphs, just to show another aspect of the traffic problem. Here’s Store Searches from January ‘09:

Searches of eBay Store, Jan '09

What you see is 10 or 15 store searches a day decreasing to zero, again in early January. Since store items don’t show up in regular eBay searches, store searches are very important in getting any store sales. The zeros continued through February, until, you guessed it, the end of the month:

Ebay Store Searches February '09

It’s easy to see why I sold five store items on the 28th.

So, is there some sort of catastrophic problem with the new eBay Stores? Beats me, I’ll let the experts figure that out. I’m just presenting my little bit of evidence. I’ve opted out of the new stores and will watch to see if traffic numbers return to some semblance of normal. But they were headed back up anyway, so who’s to say what is the smart thing to do right now.
The true lesson for me is to not assume facts which aren’t in evidence. All February I was assuming that the slow store sales were due to some worldwide catastrophic depression, when in fact it was a much more specific problem, something that’s probably a lot easier to fix than the collapse of western civilization.

New Return Page for CafePress Shoppers

Richard — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:12:43 +0000

I’ve made a new “Return Page” for my CafePress shoppers.

Here’s how that works. When a person concludes a shopping session on CafePress, when they’ve paid their money and are through with the checkout, they are sent to a return page. By default they return to the CafePress store from which they made their purchase. But it is possible for the shopowner to designate a different return page.

Here’s my new return page for Cafepress shoppers.

Basically a video thank you for the business and a call to follow me on Twitter. As it is now CafePress buyers are lost to me after the transaction. Maybe I can get a few to follow and can maintain some sort of online relationship.

Mr Wizard, Science Dude of the Sixties

Richard — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:55:54 +0000

Back in the sixties, nobody did science like Mr Wizard. Science was actually enjoyable when Don Herbert was leading the demonstration. Interesting to look at those old episodes of Mr Wizard now. I still find them quite enjoyable even though the subject matter has nothing to do with the cutting edge science of the 21st century. Perhaps everybody could use better education in the basic foundations of science, I know I can.

Check out the new Mr Wizard T-Shirt that I have for sale at my RetroRanger shop.

New Savant7 Wordpress Blog

Richard — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:13:08 +0000

So, it’s up and running. My new Wordpress blog for Savant7.

Savant7 is an account I’ve had for some time. It’s been a good storage unit. Hosted some pics. Some experimental pages have been hiding here. Basically jsut a big bucket of stuff. But with some new projects comes the need for a new blog, so welcome to the world Savant7.

Jeez I wish I weren’t so Alzheimerish. Any time I have to get into the nuts and bolts of Wordpress I have to start all over from square one. It’s like I’ve never seen a Wordpress blog before. This blog, for example, has taken me close to 5 hours to get up and running. But that does include making the cool header.

This is Savant7. Thank you for reading.