 Vermont
Web Design and
Internet Marketing
From:
Jeremy Ryan
Burlington,
Vermont
Friday 4:22 pm
Hello and welcome to our website! We recently made some
changes to the web site. First, we added a company blog,
which is below this message. The blog is meant to provide
educational information on web
design and internet
marketing as well as a way for us to share our current
developments with you. We encourage your feedback and
participation by clicking the comments link after each
blog entry.
If you are new to our web site and wish to learn more
about us, click here. To view
more information about our services please click the links
to the left which list our services. Click
here to send us a comment or question.
Respectfully,
Jeremy Ryan
Advantage Creations
Our company blog...
Posts 1 to 10 of 31
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PortableChangingRoom.com Progress Update |
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It’s been almost a year since I started portablechangingroom.com. Last year, I made several posts following the progress of the site’s performance as I developed and marketed the site.
I developed the site utilizing Cart32 shopping cart, which has worked really well for our other retail websites as it has a lot of great features and is easy to work with.
Once the site was completed, we began marketing it through pay-per-click campaigns through Google and Yahoo. Once we determined the best keywords we then began optimizing the site for the top keywords so that the site would show up in search engine’s organic listings.
Upon, last check I am very pleased with the progress the site has made in only a year’s time. Below are some of our current Google rankings as of this date…
#1 for portable changing room
#1 for portable changing rooms
#1 for pop up room in a bag
#1 for portable change room
#2 for portable pop-up change room
#2 for portable dressing room
#2 for pop up dressing room
#3 for pop up changing room
#3 for portable rooms
Most of these keywords are now providing us good steady traffic and more importantly sales, that don’t require any ongoing costs.
If you would like help with your internet marketing, please contact us regarding our internet marketing services such as pay-per-click and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
5/10/2008 11:09:52 AM
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New Blog Course and Innovative Internet Marketing Idea |
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Mark Joyner, famed internet marketing guru, has released a new course on
blogging and in order to get free publicity is allowing people to get it free at
this time for simply posting the information below in their blog.
I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog. It covers: - The best blogging techniques.
- How to get traffic to your blog.
- How to turn your blog into money.
I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.
What a innovative idea! You offer something for free or a discount in exchange for free
publicity and a free incoming link which could help boost your website ranking.
I may need to give this a try. For example, with my low acid coffee website, I
could give a free bag of coffee to people posting a review. |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
12/21/2007 1:54:44 PM
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New Web Hosting Plans |
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We have now added a couple different options for our hosting. Before now, you had the following options:
- One Plan Hosting (Yearly): $99/year
- One Plan Hosting with Cart32 (Yearly): $120/year
Due to recent requests, we have decided to add the following monthly options for both types of hosting.
- One Plan Hosting (Monthly): $10/month
- One Plan Hosting with Cart32 (Monthly): $15/month
Click here for more information on our hosting plans. |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
10/3/2007 7:48:06 PM
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YouTube Marketing |
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 YouTube is an online video sharing website where users can upload their videos for all to see. We recently uploaded a couple videos for a client and that almost instantly they started getting viewers.
When we uploaded the videos we made sure that the anyone viewing the video would know that they could go to our client's website to get more information.
We also were able to embed a YouTube player with each video on the clients website so that people viewing the client's website wouldn't even need to leave the site to view the videos. The videos are streamed instead of downloaded so the viewer must either go to the client's website or YouTube's website to view the videos, which can be seen as a positive as it offers some protection from copyright infringement and it encourages more visits to the website.
The best part is that YouTube offers all of this for free as the YouTube website is ad-supported, meaning that when viewers go to the website, they will see text and some video ads along side the web pages.
It's definately worth a try and there are all kinds of possibilities, such as personal messages, product demos, interviews, customer/client referrals.
Please contact me if you would like us to help you get video on your website. |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
5/20/2007 4:51:52 PM
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Welcome to Our New Clients! |
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 Some of our newest clients include...
We have many hosting, web design and internet marketing solutions for every budget and every need.
For example, Baby Yap Yap needed reliable Cart32 Hosting for their ecommerce business, which we offer for the very affordable price of $120 (no setup fees).
Henninge and UnderandOver Weavers needed a no-hassle hosting package, which we offer for $99/year (no setup fees). |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
5/18/2007 7:45:52 PM
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Update on Google Checkout and Froogle |
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 The introduction of Google Checkout certainly helped the bottom lines for many retailers including our own retail websites with their zero fee merchant processing. The latest news is that Google is extending their no fee policy throughout 2007 and they have started giving a $10 instant rebate on all first purchases for new Google Checkout users.
You can see how we are promoting this by going to JLRyan.com. We have the promotion posted at the top of every page. How it works is a customer selects the product(s) they want, goes to checkout and then the Google Checkout button/option appears along side the regular shopping cart buttons. If the user is new to Google Checkout, they simply signup and then get the $10 off that order. This promotion, I believe has driven a lot of orders to be paid through Google Checkout. It's been a win-win situation for us and customers as the customer gets $10 and we save the merchant processing fees of 2.49 percent plus .20 transaction fees on each order.
Regarding Froogle, Google has decided that they will discontinue accepting the Froogle feeds. They will now only accept Google Base feeds which are a little different in format, but still feed product listings to Froogle I believe. Listings will also be listed on Google Base as well. We are currently reworking our feeds to work with the new system. Google is allowing until the end of February before they will now longer accept old Froogle feeds. I imagine that there will be a lot of merchants that will let the feeds expire and so this should give a boost in traffic to merchants who react quickly to the change. |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
1/27/2007 8:55:43 PM
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Ready for Cyber Monday? |
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Cyber Monday is the Monday following Black Friday, which is the day after Thanksgiving. It's become the annual kickoff for the online holiday shopping season. It's said to be one of the busiest shopping days of the year for online retailers. Many online retailers offer promotions to mark the occasion, which in affect causes the heavy buying to begin.
Although Cyber Monday officially marks holiday shopping season, e-commerce websites report that the busiest shopping days are actually between December 5-15th, which is two weeks after "Cyber Monday"
So, you still have time to get your holiday promotions and marketing strategies figured out.
Two Ways to Boost Sales Fast This Holiday...
The following are a couple things you to do very quickly to get your products and promotions in front of holiday shoppers.
- Email marketing - Sending notices of what you have to offer and any specials to your in house email list. You may email a special discount coupon to all past customers to encourage them to shop with you. We have offered a 10% off coupon code which can be used with the Cart32 shopping cart that we use.
- Pay-per-click advertising - Using Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing, you can get ads for your products and offers next to search results on every search engine in minutes for so much a click. I usually aim for .20/click or less terms, but I'm willing to pay double, or more in some instances, during the holidays as the chances of a visitor buying are much higher. If you currently use pay-per-click advertising, then make sure your bids are up higher than usual to catch more easy sales and if you don't... try it!
These two marketing strategies can be implemented very quickly... in time to boost holiday sales.
Please email me if you would like us to help you with your email marketing or pay-per-click campaigns. |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
11/21/2006 5:17:19 PM
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Cart32 Hosting - $120/Year |
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As I said in the previous post, we have upgraded the Cart32 shopping cart to Cart32 v6.3. One of the major new features we are using right away is the Google Checkout addon. The addon allows Google Checkout to work within the Cart32 shopping cart along with accepting Paypal, credit cards (through your own merchant account) and of course checks/money orders.
I had posted previously that a drawback to using Google Checkout is that it didn't integrate well with websites or shopping carts. While it still is not easy to integrate into websites, Cart32 has taken the time to create an addon that helps you easily integrate Google Checkout into the Cart32 shopping cart.
To get merchants to accept Google Checkout, Google is now waiving all fees for processing transactions for the holidays, which is great! After the holidays, Google will be reverting back to the old fee structure, but still allowing you to process $10 of Google Checkout sales for free for every $1 you spend on Google AdWords, which is still a great deal.
We now offer two tiers of web hosting. Website hosting with Cart32 support and without. Cart32 hosting is only $120/year and hosting without Cart32 is still only $99/year. The Google Checkout addon is an extra $24.95 (one-time fee). |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
11/15/2006 8:02:42 PM
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Long time, no blog... |
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I know it's been quite a while since I last posted. Things have been very busy here the last couple months.
As many of you may now, we have been moving many of your websites to better system as well as upgrading the cart32 shopping cart software.
This move an upgrade took far more time than expected. We spent many hours over the last couple months working on this in addition to my usual workload, but it should be worth it with the increased reliability and features the new system and version of cart32 will provide.
Now that the upgrade is complete and most of you are moved to the new system, I should be able to post more regularly from now on. :)
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
11/15/2006 7:46:35 PM
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Pop Up Room Successfull on Ebay |
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 PortableChangingRoom.com is now approaching 2000 hits since we started it in June and sales have been continuing to be steady since. We are quite happy with the progress this new site has made so far.
Ebay "buy it now" auctions have been very successful in the last month. We have completed several auctions so far with each auction doing better than the last. We've made several tweaks to the auctions as we go. We started out with a basic text and image auction using an Ebay template for the layout. This auction was profitable but we didn't sell every unit we listed. After formating the auction page to look more like the website, portablechangingroom.com, with links to the pages at the bottom for more information on policies, testimonials and faqs, we have been able to sell every unit we list, which is 10 units per auction. View our Pop Up Room Auction to see what I mean.
I also imagine that buying is increasing due to increased positive feedback regarding past auctions for the Pop Up Room. Also, I almost forgot to mention that because every auction includes images that load from portablechangingroom.com, as well as links to pages on the site, traffic and search ranking is improved... this is another side benefit to using Ebay along with your own website.
Google Checkout has also been quite positive, particular when it first launched and when we added it to the page. However, sales using Google Checkout have pulled back in the last couple weeks. This could be a signal that Google Checkout was interesting to people when the media hype was out, but people may now be loosing interest. Or, it could be that this time of the year is usually slow for online retail as it's summer and many people are now taking their vacations and generally spending more time outside rather than shopping online. However, it's interesting the our Ebay auctions continue to thrive. Time will tell.
Once the website attains a Google Pagerank of 3 or more, we will proceed with aquiring more link partners for keyword terms and phrases so that we can get more ranking on search engines for more terms. As of this writing we have the 3rd position on Gogole for the phrase "portable changing room". |
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Posted
by: Jeremy Ryan
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Date/Time:
8/5/2006 11:52:49 AM
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