I built AnimalImages.biz out of animal posters and books from All Posters
and Amazon. The expenses were a few domains and hosting. Cost: $97

Eventually I’ll pay our writer, too. Cost: $150

Search engine optimization efforts were minimal and included directory submissions. I bought pay per click on Yahoo, where our ads got 12,632 impressions and 41 clicks averaging the 2nd position on Yahoo’s search page.  The doorm-room.net Yahoo keywords include “college dorm room checklist,” “dorm room picture,” “dorm room” and “dorm room decorating.” These had the most impressions. Cost: $73.86.

The first change I made was to get off the animal images and onto the dorm room marketing angle. I am now marketing dorm-room.net, college-dorm-room.com and dorm-room-decor.com.

July intake:
All Posters: $3.82
Amazon: $0.00

Affiliate Marketing Experiment
AnimalImage.biz is our first full-blown affiliate-driven ecommerce venture. It is powered by Amazon Associates Program and AllPosters.com Affiliates Program. Today I am adding linkshare.com animal magazines.

Animal Image Target Market: Dorm Room Decor
The site’s marketing target is the young girl going to college. Girls — much more than boys — will express their homesickness and actually try to do something about it. So our marketing strategy validates the girl’s experience and offers inspiring animal posters as a remedy.

Visitor Stats
We launched on July 8 2006. As of yesterday AnimalImage.biz had 34 search terms on Yahoo centered on the “dorm room” theme. To date (July 13) the ads have 3,244 impressions and 13 clicks. Today I updated the marketing copy on 8 ads. I believe some of them must have bee written in my sleep. I also need a lot more copy on the site itself but that is taking some time outside of my control. My web stats indicate that following # of unique visitors starting July 8: 40, 26, 34, 52, 8.

Promotion Activites
I launched the site on v7n.com forums by way of asking for feedback. I used OnlyWire and a few other tools to ping this post: Animal Image .biz (animalimage.biz) launched. I also submitted the site to some free search engine submission services, Yahoo, Google and MSN.

college-dorm-room.com, dorm-room-decor.com, dorm-room.net
The Search Engines are rewarding keyword domains so today I added and 301-forwarded some good college dorm room domains. college-dorm-room.com, dorm-room-decor.com and dorm-room.net are not meant for human consumption, they exist for the search engines.

July 12 2006 AnimalImage Revenue Results
$0.00

 

Technorati Tags
Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, ECommerce, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate Web Marketing, Search Marketing Bogart Computing
Ice Rocket Tags
Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, ECommerce, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate, Web Marketing, Search Marketing, Bogart Computing

Today we’re monetizing the blog with LinkShare affiiate links. I chose techie and game links because I assume my audience is techie and game-ie. The LinkShare program is straightforward to join. The interface is similar to commission junction, easier to read.

I placed some links on the sidebar and some are over this article. I’ll report back on AdSense vs. LinkShare success.

By the way. Like this blog? Please click a link.

 

Technorati & Ice Rocket Tags
Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, Dorm Room, ECommerce, ECommerce, Horse Posters, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate, LinkShare Affiliate, Web Marketing, Web Marketing

The task today is to decorate the WordPress blog in a theme appropriate for code readers and flexible enough for Adsense Hosting.

After Joomla I’d say WordPress has to be my favorite tool. It works. It doesn’t talk down to me. I don’t have to threaten to hurt its family to make it go.

Finding themes for WordPress is much harder than finding themes for Joomla. My blog posts are full of raw code — PHP, C#, VBScript — so the theme I choose for Bogart’s Answers has to work with dicey content. (When I first created this blog over at Blogger Google made me wait for a human to approve it. Apparently all of that raw C# looked like spam to the filter.)

This theme — Corporate Pro 1.0 by Colleen Chard — has the strength and flexibility to withstand my spamish-looking code rants. This theme is a beautiful combination of color, layout and refinement.

Corporate Press 1.0 Theme

Of the many marketing ideas I’ve learned over at John Scott’s V7n forums is the very good idea of making the AdSense the same font as the theme’s font. I have added 1 link unit and three text units to the theme’s index and sidebar using the colors I found in styles.css. The result is Google AdSense that blends right in.

Technorati & Ice Rocket Tags
Web Marketing, Web Marketing Blog Marketing, Blog Marketing, Blog Monetization, Blog Monetization,

Join us as we experiment with a brand spanking new affiliate marketing site. Today we added dog magazines, dog books and dog stories to our dog posters. The content comes from amazon.com and allposters.com affiliate programs, and our newest writer Castina Watson. Until we figure out exactly how we want to reproduce the results the site is not using a database. The pages are simple table cells that include individual files containing affiliate code.

The Yahoo ad program is setup, were waiting for editorial release. The theme is “decorate your dorm room with animal posters.”

We will be adding internal cross linking to make it easier for the visitor to stick to the site.

Technorati & Ice Rocket Tags
Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, AllPosters Affiliate, AllPosters Affiliate, Amazon Associate, Amazon Associate, Cat Posters, Cat Posters, Dog Posters, Dog Posters, Dorm Room, Dorm Room, ECommerce, ECommerce, Horse Posters, Horse Posters, LinkShare Affiliate, LinkShare Affiliate, Web Marketing, Web Marketing

We are proud to announce the launch of animalimage.biz.

Affiliate Ecommerce Site
Animal Image is an experimental affiliate site designed to create revenue for animal-related web sites. Eventually we will integrate what we learn into animalneighborhood.com and our free New Hampshire animal welfare web sites.

Content
Next week we’ll have 25 or 30 articles on the site. Most will discuss the emotional benefits of caring for animals. The rest will discuss how to make the journey to college easier for young girls.

The marketing tie-in is:
Images of cats, dogs, puppies, horses, dolphins etc will comfort the young girl decorating her dorm room and feeling the pangs of home-sickness.

Stay tuned for more on our experiements in affiliate marketing.

Animal Image
Animal Poster
Dog Poster
Cat Poster
Dorm Room
Dorm Room Decor  

A master page must have a form tag with a runat=”server” attribute.

A PayPal donation button must be inside a form that posts to “https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr”

You can’t put that as an action on the master page’s form tag because (a) it’s ignored, and (b) if it weren’t ignored you hardly want to state that all of your pages should be posted to paypal.com.

One solution is to post the master-page-derived form to a hidden page. The hidden page does not have a master page. It submits to PayPal.

Donation Page

submit-paypal.aspx
The body tag loads the form. The user never sees this page. They are taken to form’s action location: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr

‹%@ Page Language=”C#” AutoEventWireup=”true” CodeFile=”submit-paypal.aspx.cs” Inherits=”submit_paypal” %›

‹!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”›

‹html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” ›
‹head runat=”server”›
‹title›Untitled Page‹/title›
‹/head›
‹body onLoad=”SubmitForm.submit()”›
‹form name=”SubmitForm” action=”https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr” method=”post”›

‹input type=”hidden” name=”image_url”
value=”http://bogartcomputing.com/therapuppy/images/juggopop.jpg”›

‹input type=”hidden” name=”cmd” value=”_s-xclick”›

‹input type=”hidden” name=”encrypted”
value=”—–BEGIN PKCS7—– [a very long encrypted string from paypal here]==—–END PKCS7—–
҉ۼ
‹/form›

‹/body›
‹/html›

Q. What are the PayPal real-time and sandbox payment Post and payment Get URL’s?
A. Sign up for merchant emails at the real-time and sandbox merchant interfaces. In the sandbox merchant interface, sign up for a customer email as well. Send the payment to the Post or Get links. Verify at the _cmd-notify-validate links.

Real Time
PayPal Customer and merchant interface

Post request for payment

Get (Response.Redirect) send request for payment

Post request for _cmd=notify-validate

Sandbox
PayPal customer and merchant interface

Order Processing

Get (Response.Redirect) processing

Post request for _cmd=notify-validate

Question: How much does a free online shopping cart cost?
Answer: About $5,000.

By Dave Goodwin and Caroline Bogart

Free Samples
Companies give away free samples to demonstrate the quality of their products. They expect that satisified samplers will return with open wallets. Whether the sample is cookies or software, it allows the potential customer to try the product on for fit and comfort.

And some products are just free. Companies give away free software tools to expose a targeted audience to the company’s product line. We do that with Ping Pilot, our free web host uptime monitoring tool.

A Question of Scale
There once was a guy who opened a box of cookies and discovered that they were stale, right out of the newly-opened box. He sent them to the cookie company with a note: “Dear Cookie Company, These are stale. I want my money back.” A few weeks later he received a package from the cookie company with two boxes of cookies and a letter. The letter said, “Dear Mr. Cookie Buyer, We’re so sorry about the stale cookies. Here are two boxes to make up for your loss.”

Mr. Cookie Buyer realized that he’d stumbled onto a way to double his money for free. To capitalize on this new information he went to the car dealer and bought a Jaguar. He then promptly sent it to the auto manufacturer with a note: Dear Jaguar, This car is broken. I want my money back.” A few weeks later he received a package with a letter in it. The letter said, “Dear Mr. Jaguar Buyer, What do you think we are? A cookie company?”

An online store might not be a Jaguar, but it’s certainly not a cookie.

An online store is not a simple piece of software. A good online store is not just a shopping cart and some product pictures. It’s a merchant gateway to accept credit cards, a secure server interface, fault-tolerant business web hosting, website design, flexible tax calculations, offline and realtime shipping calculations, multiple product variations, a stock monitoring system, different prices for wholesalers, a newsletter, discounts, search engine marketing and a constant eye on ROI.

Question: Can ecommerce companies really afford to give away their shopping carts?
Answer: Yes. They just can’t afford to give away the merchant gateway, the secure server interface, the fault-tolerant business web hosting, the website design, the flexible tax calculations, the offline and realtime shipping calculations, the multiple product variations, the stock monitoring system, the different prices for wholesalers, the newsletter, the discounts, the search engine marketing, the eye on ROI…

If it looks too good to be free, it’s probably not free.

To learn more about a comprehensive eCommerce marketing product that includes a search-engine-optimized online store, e-marketing tools and a focus on converting visitors into customers, please visit us at SiteXL.