For the last few months I have been getting heavily involved in ecommerce. I have taken one site from an average of $15k a month turnover to $23k this month. No money spent on adverts, although we did spend about $200 on links. I am going to do a short report on that as it really was what I considered to be obvious stuff.

However todays post is to cover two ecommerce platforms that I have been looking at and try to explain why I have picked the one I have.

The two platforms are

You can click either image above to go to their site. No affiliate links as I am not an affiliate of either.

• These opinions are mine and mine alone, no one at the companies knows I am doing it (not sure they would care)
• I have been using big commerce for a couple of months, I spent 1 day with magento (i will explain why)
• I will not compare these to any kind of WordPress butchery which people use, well not here anyway

I started to look at magento for a project for one reason, cost. I have less than 100 items to sell and Big commerce costs $25 a month for that amount of skus, magento is $15 a month (they do have a way to get it for free!). If both platforms are pretty much the same then why not save $10 a month, I believe in getting a business to be Raman profitable really fast if I can (the expression just means it makes enough to feed me Raman noodles) and then build from there.

Price
I think that it is a mistake to base every desicison for your business on price. This is why people use wordpress for ecommerce sites, they think it is cheap and that is good enough. In my opinion that is a mistake and it can cost you a lot of time and stress. Magento is cheaper than big commerce and offers more storage and bandwidth.
100 items
Big Commerce = $25 per month – 200mb storage and 2 gig bandwidth
Magento            =  $15 per month – 200mb storage and 4 gig bandwidth

500 products
Big Commerce = $40 per month -300 meg storage and  3 gig bandwidth
Magento             =$25 per month -500 meg storage and 8 gig bandwidth

1k Products
Big Commerce = $80 per month – 500 meg storage and 5 gig bandwidth
Magento             =$65 per month – 800 meg storage and 16 gig bandwidth
Templates
Big commerce = 100 templates – some of them are very plain , some are aimed at specific markets
Magento             = 11 templates    -Generally nice but not a lot of variety to my opinion

You can buy magento templates from various places http://themeforest.net/category/ecommerce/magento , but they cost, $70+ seems to be average. This kind of goes against my idea of being profitable quickly. I don’t want to pay $70 for a theme, yes I may do so later when I have an idea that my store is really going to be profitable (with the best will in the world there may well

Extras
I think this was the killer for me, to be able to sell on Facebook with magento I had to get an extension  - http://go.magento.com/extensions/ - that one was free but in Bigcommerce it is all built in.

Advanced Reports – I love my data and to be honest I think it is more important with an ecommerce store than any other store. Big commerce has all I need built in. With Magento I found out that I would have to buy an extension-$129 – hang on if I amoratize that over the 1st year that is $10 a month. Which is the amount I am saving by going with Magento over big commerce.

Big commerce Apps - http://apps.bigcommerce.com/ - they do have a marketplace for apps that offer extra functionality but so far I have never wanted something I have not found in the core. I do like the look of the abandoned cart plugin, but at $20 a month it does not meet my plans. One thing you could do once you have some traffic to your site is take them up on the 30 day trial and see how many new sales it brings. If the new sales are more than enough to cover the $20 a month, then it makes sense to buy.

Support
Both systems offer great support options. I have not had to use the phone support for them but their online support is good. They also have extensive videos and articles showing you how to do things.

Training
Both companies have great follow up training systems. It makes sense as they  want you to stay using their system. Magento have some superb books you can download and print out to walk you through the system. I have looked at opencart (which is free) and the only books they have available have to be purchased for around $30 so the free (and very detailed) books are a great thing.

Is it Just Personal Taste
It may well be, if you are just starting out and the $10 a month matters to you, you can work without the advanced reporting and you are happy to work with their templates  that Magento will be the ideal system for you. Out of the two I will choose Big Commerce.

My next test is going to be with opencart, is free the cheapest option for ecommerce software?

If you have questions or thoughts, or have been using some totally different ecommerce system with success let me know. I would love to see other options.

Ok calm down, I know I sound like some crazy radical.

Everyone knows that using Fiverr is the answer to all online problems, there have been at least a couple of wso reports talking about the best fiverr gigs and every forum I visit is full of how great the site is. But hear me out and let me say upfront that my feeling on the site can be applied to many other tools. It is how you are using Fiverr that worries me not the place itself.

Fiver is a superb idea, people make money by offering services in just about every niche possible.  The site  is a tool in your toolkit.

• You want some facebook likes, go to fiverr
• You want some tweets, go to fiverr
• You want some articles spun (really badly normally) ..well you get the picture

It's Only $5 Right

I feel I owe this post to all the people who have been asking where I am , and if you weren’t wondering about me don’t worry I am not hurt but I will share it with you anyway. For anyone that doesn’t know I am originally from the UK and moved to the states in December 2004 to marry the lovely and long suffering Kathy. Since I moved here I have worked online, doing my funky thing and generally it has been great.

Once thing I have noticed while working for myself is that it is quite a lonely life, I don’t have friends, I don’t mix with anyone and that is actually starting to get to me. I did try a couple of networking meetings but all the geek guys just get scared you are after their clients or they spend the time telling you how good they are at asp/php/biteme or whatever the latest thing is.

I also found that I am not really a person, well the banks don’t seem to think I am anyway. I have a green card (citizenship in 2012 and we shall be having a party when it is done, look out for your invite in the post) but as a non citizen and an internet marketer it is like I have 3 heads!

This personal stuff has been building up and it is all becoming a tad annoying, I am sure it will all improve next year when I get my citizenship, have to do an exam and be able to prove I can speak English, my daughter tells me..Daddy you need to speak American not English now you are in America…., But in the meantime it is causing me problems.

So that is the background to the big thing.. I got a job…

Forcey Family Photo

Yes after 7 years of working at home in my shorts I now get to work in an office in jeans.. I am working for a local internet company that has a few businesses on the go, they have programmers and designers but no one knows (or cares) anything about content or seo and that is where I come in. I share an office with one design guy who is very cool and most importantly doesn’t seem to mind my music and my talking to the computer.

It is strange working for someone else, very strange getting a pay check every 2 weeks, (and even with more money coming in I seem to never have any) it is nice to see that my knowledge and experience is useful and I really do like the people I work with. The first couple of months were hectic which is why this blog has been so quiet but I am used to it now and am

SEO
It is funny how differently you look on link building when it is your job and a whole company is relying on you to grow their online exposure and not to get them deindexed or slapped. It is great to be paid to watch white board Friday and to read SEO Blogs and posts by people who do not recommend that you throw a few thousand profile links at a site and see how it goes. I spend my time looking at the larger picture as I only have 3 sites to worry about, I also have access to people to make videos (live action and aniomoto), do infographics and any other graphics stuff I need done.

My online life
I am still here and am still working on my own stuff, I have new products coming up, I am still updating products and have some thoughts to share about Facebook/twitter/links and quality vs quantity and why passion may be the winner in the future.  I see so much when i spend time going through data that it would be a shame not to be able to share it all.

So I am going to be posting here and on Facebook again, I am going to finish up the manual for some software I have been using for a while and I also have an info product or 3 kicking around in my brain so i shall try and get all that out to you by the end of this year.

Yahh there is a new version of wordpress out, and it looks nice and all my plugins work with it so all is good in the world..

I spent a couple of hours updating most of my sites (will do more later in the week was my thought).. Next morning I wake up log in to a site and ..what..what do you mean we now need to update to 3.2

I am not sure of the exact number but it feels like I have updated WordPress 3 times (at least) in the last month..I love the program and I understand why they need to do updates, and of course it only takes a few seconds to do it.. well if you have one site..

Say it takes 5 mins a site (open it up, log in..wait find the log in info, then log in, then do the updates, then log out and move to the next one). What if you have 10 sites, that is close enough to an hour you just spent.. even if it is only once a month that is not good is it?

Say you have 20 sites and they do two updates in a month..so you just wasted 4 hours.. and lets be honest running the updates is boring!

I was so pleased to see a different way of dealing with it. Dave Toomey has had a desktop tool made to deal with the (what seems like constant) updating that WordPress needs. Nice and simple to use and you can choose to just update wordpress or have it update your plugins as well.

Buy WpMass Updater

Is it perfect, well the only thing I can think of is that when you have some plugins which need something weird doing every time you update you would still have to log into your site. For me just saving the time it takes to update the sites I have makes it worth it for me. This is one of those tools that doesn’t seem to do exciting things, it won’t drive traffic or make you sell a load more products.

It gives you THE TIME to do all the exciting stuff instead of updating WordPress.

p.s I love WordPress and it is vital to keep it updated, if you only have a couple of sites then keep doing it by hand. If you have more than a few sites then you really do owe it to your brain to automate the process

One of my long term customers emailed me to tell me how much he still loved my article helper pro product. It is nice to hear that people use my products and this is one that I use all the time as well. In fact I use two of my programs together, the LSI Content Creator to write my initial content and then Article Helper Pro to make more high quality content. Discounts buy buttons are available on both these below the video.

I thought I would do a video about how I use both of them together and offer a discount on each of them. Make sure you use the buttons below the videos to get the discounts. I am putting these out as a wso so will be removing the discount buttons when I do that, so buy now

The discount buttons are below the video (and they work)

**Sorry to anyone who tried to purchase the LSI Content Creator yesterday, somehow my digiresults button has gone haywire so I have put a new one together so you can still get the discount.

LSI Content Creator

Article Helper Pro

Make sure you sign up for the updates once you purchase so you can get the updates when I release them.

Paul

p.s I am finally moving onto Facebook

p.p.s no idea why the buttons are so huge..

Just over a week ago I did a video showing how I am trying to ensure that I build links to every page on my sites. Video Link

The next day my mate Mark Thompson contacted me laughing, what was so funny? He was working on a tool which went one step further than my video. Great minds think alike and all that.

Smart Virtual Assistants does so much more than I showed in the video. I have been using it for about a week now and I love it. It will collect all the urls for your pages/posts and tell you how many links there are to that post/page. You can color code the data, so if you want to get 25 links to each post then any that do not have that number of links will be shown in red. If a post url is in red you know you need to add more links, it is as simple as that.

It is natural for people to build links to home pages rather than internal pages, it is easier and it is a mistake. Building links to all your internal pages is vital, Google ranks posts not sites so you should be building links to all of your posts. While SVA will not build the actual links for you it will show you which posts need more links and help you keep track of them as you build them.

The best thing is that I know that Mark has plans to keep on adding modules to it. The next module is going to be an income checker I believe. Modules will be added every 4-6 weeks and I am sure the price will go up with each module

At the moment he is doing it as a one off payment and it is cheap as chips. Use my link below and you get it for $17 until Monday 11th April. After that it is going to be at least $27 and I think he will go with $37.

Watch the video and I would strongly suggest that you get it sooner rather than later.

Buy SVA For $17 Today

Oh and I forgot to say it is delivered straight after purchase and it is produced in Adobe Air so it will work on mac or pc.

I have given a copy to my assistant (my wife Kathy) and she is working through my sites finding pages that have no links and she is going to be adding them into our social adr , postrunner or bmr accounts. Obviously it is a lot of work and can be expensive to do articles or even bmr posts for each page on a large site so some of them will only get social bookmarking done.

My personal belief is that doing something is better than doing nothing. Don’t moan that you can’t afford all the articles to do each page, think what you can do. Can you tweet them, can you put them into your social bookmarking accounts. Do something for each page and it will all add up to big movements.

Using Smart Virtual Assistants was actually a bit scary for me, the software is easy enough to use but I never really realized how badly some of my sites were linked. Some pages with loads of links while others have none. Now I can keep track of that and work towards fixing the imbalance.

I really do recommend that you get this program before it goes up in price on Monday.

Download SVA Today

Well for everyone who has been following along with my posts about Build My Rank here is the final review. I will say that the test showed up one thing while another test showed something different. Rather than doing the longest post in the history of the world I decided to do a video. So you can listen to my sweet warbling rather than reading my rants and raves!

Make sure you scroll down past the video as I am going to talk about some stuff and of course I want to hear your thoughts

Build My Rank – Join to get 10 free links .
This is an Aff link – So yes if you join I get something

Ok thanks for watching the video. Ready for a bit of a rant (it fits in with this review honest).

Bare Minimum Bob
Back in the day when I worked for the insurance arm of a bank we had around 25 staff . We had one guy who would always look for the easy way out. He would not start a minute early, or work one minute over. He would work harder at finding ways to not do any work than any one else I knew.

What did he get out of this, well he did get to go home on time every night and think that he was screwing the man. What he did not get was the chance to do any of the sweet overtime (double time, plus day off, and no work to do), he didn’t get a end of year discretionary performance bonus and he didn’t get considered seriously for promotion.

He put little in, always looking for the quick fix and in the end he got a lot less out of it.

Are You Running Your Online Business Like Bob?
If all you are doing is looking for the next way to create 1k links with no real work then you are Bob. If your website is not worth you taking the time (or paying someone else) to create links of value then you shouldn’t be in the niche.

I am not saying that mass creation of links is no good, I love ezal , but it should not be the only thing you use. There is no one tool to rule them all, you need link diversity.

I know people are using things like article marketing robot to send out thousands of articles. Would it not be better to take some time and find the 20 (or whatever the number is) article directories that have PR and just submit to them?

You get 20 links from sites that get spidered all the time, you can easily add those 20 to your imautomator account and give them some extra love. You can work at giving those 20 some power which they pass onto your sites. You can even link build to your author profile so that everything you post to that profile will get some love.

Think Benefit Not Ease
If it was easy everyone would do it, I have been making money online for years and it is not easy. It is hard work (but easier than sitting in a office for 10 hours a day for someone else). The harder stuff often brings better results. But people do not want to do the hard work.

BMR is Not For Bobs
People moan that BMR needs to much work, they need unique content for each post and you only get one link from that. “Why bother when I can get a million links from this badly spun article slammed all over the place.”

I love that, I always agree with people and tell them they are right and they should not bother. That is one less person that I have to compete with.  I am too tired to fight with people who always end up throwing info from some sales page at me. If you can not see the value in building links on sites that have PR and that will get indexed by the company (so less work for you) there is nothing I can say that will help.

Summary

Do I recommend Build My Rank – Yes
But not to be used on its own on new sites and not unless you are ready to work the system.
Do some articles through ezal and other places. Get the sites indexed and some rankings then use Build My Rank to push it up the ranks.

I am seeing great results doing that. But do not expect to be a bare Minimum Bob and get anywhere

Paul

p.s Outsource…More on that another time

** The person who I worked with was not actually called Bob, the only Bob I worked with was a great worker.

I assume you have been following along with this review but if you need to catch up then please do read

Build My Rank Review Part One

Build My Rank Review Part Two

This last week has been interesting, I did 2 sets of 50 posts to bmr for someone and promoted 2 specific pages on their site for 2 very specific phrases. One has gone from #7 to #2 and the other has gone from #16 to #9.

Not all the links are live and indexed yet but that is a good result so far, now writing 50 posts will drive you nuts (well it did my wife anyway) but you need to stop thinking about the product. You are not writing an article, you are doing a blog post. So say my link is for cats, I will write all about how allergic to them I am. I write just as I would if I was writing for my own blog.

Experiment results so far
While the site I did 50 for on each keyword has seen movement, the one that I actually set up for this test has not seen any positive movement for its keywords. I only did 24 for each, maybe it just wasn’t enough to get the movement.

My thought is still that Build my rank works great on established sites with some other links but not on brand new sites where you are using it as the only method of link building.

We shall see what the results are in another week or two as they may just be taking their time to move me on up.

I got this note from a Beta tester today

Thanks for staying with this project and pressing on in spite of the programmers.

He is testing a new version of a tool that has been the only product I ever worked on that drove me to tears. Now this week you are going to see lots of talk about how easy it is to produce software, make a million and smile all the way to the bank. I am going to tell you that it isn’t always like that.

I love product creation, I have done well with it for years and I have tools that are still selling after four years. But it is not all sweetness and light, this next product has been through three programmers. I will not go through the whole sob story but let me just say that I think it may have been easier to let it just go and move on.

So why did I stick with it?

Well it wasn’t for the money, it was because of the users. The people who bought the first version (which had a issue we didn’t spot till we had sold some and programmer 1 decided to stop answering emails) all loved it but knowing it wasn’t perfect I could not carry on selling it. It would actually have been cheaper to give them all their money back but I just couldn’t face giving up on a program that all the users loved.

Those first 30 buyers kept me working on this. Finally on programmer number 3 I had someone who could do it.

I hate to think how many hours I have spent on this project and the sales page and videos are not all done yet. But just seeing that message from the beta tester has made me get stuck into work today and finish the manual. Videos and sales page next, I am hoping to do some early bird sales next week.

So if you are working on a project that is taking longer than you hoped, maybe it is driving you nuts. Take a break by all means, but if you (or just as importantly other people) believe in it then do not quit.

Ok I am off to do some more cleaning, my mum is arriving from the UK tonight and as fast as we clean the house my daughter is getting toys back out so she can show nanny when she gets here.

Oh and yes I will be doing a special on the software when it is ready, so keep an eye out.

Since reading part one of my review on linking tools I am sure you have been chomping at the bit for more info about Build My Rank.

Ok let’s start with the data that I have collected and then go from there

• 47 posts
• 5 keywords (although 1 of those words only got used once)
• 45 are indexed
• PR1 = 8
• PR2 = 24
• PR3= 11
• PR4= 4

The keyword/post split isn’t very even.

• Keyword 1 = 3 posts
• Keyword 2 = 8 posts
• Keyword 3 = 24 posts
• Keyword 4 = 11 posts
• Keyword 5 = 1 post

I suppose I could also break down the  posts to pr and I may do that for the next report.

The links were all done in January with the earliest ones being done on the 8th and the last one done on the 23rd. So these links are not hugely old.

So Far

• Keyword 1 is ranking at 61
• keyword 2 is ranking at 96

This is not exactly shining a sparkling light on the system is it..lol
However I think it does need some more time and more work from me before I can give my final thoughts.

Carry On
I want to carry on this test but to try and make this test a bit more organized and fair I am going to narrow the test down to 3 keywords, keyword 2, 3 and 4 and do more links for them over the next week. I will get keyword 2 and 4 to a position where they have 24 links each and then move forward from there.

Thing to note
I have been using BMR on some more established sites along site EZAL and Postrunner and have seen a nice move up the rankings for them. The other sites are in much harder niches but the sites are older and have had some substantial amounts of article marketing done for them.

My feeling is that the BMR links have been enough to push them up the ranks, but it isn’t working too well for ranking as a stand alone item. We may see a move soon and I will keep on plugging away and keep sharing.