Christmas? Wait that’s 16 weeks away!

Yes I know that’s a long ways away but were going to change gears with our Weekend Projects. Wouldn’t you have a better Christmas if you had an extra $500 to spend? Were going to go through the steps to create an online business that you can follow along with. Like our previous projects this will be a step by step process so you can recreate it yourself.

The goal of our project is to make $500 profit over the next 16 weeks from online sales. So how do we do that?

Step 1 – Determine Product
Before we do anything we need to find something to sell. The easiest way to sell a product is to find companies that drop ship. Finding these businesses is not easy. There are a lot of sites that will sell you a monthly subscription at $49.95 and a few that will sell you a one time subscription at $300+ to access a list of drop shipping companies. After searching for awhile I found one that fit my own needs that lists Canadian Drop Shipping companies. I also liked how the price was only $10 a year which is a low investment.

Now that I have a list of products which one should I choose?

• Pick only 1 product to sell so you can be a niche.
• Choose something you are passionate about.
• Choose something that you can markup.
• Choose something that has a well defined target market.

What did you pick?
I found a local retailer that I have a good relationship with that will allow me to do drop shipping through him. He does not normally do it but because we are friends he is willing to give me a good deal. The product I am picking is the Creative Vado which I am passionate about because I think it is a great product. I am also picking my target market to be Canadian parents between the age of 25 and 35.

Next steps?
Next week we will go over getting a site online and choosing a merchant provider.

If you are interested in participating post a comment on what product you are choosing and we will contact you for updates as we go through to see how your doing. This will also allow me to customize the examples to help you with what your selling.

Last week we worked on split testing to increase sales conversions. This week we will talk about a new email header that is slowly being adopted by software vendors and ISP to make it easier for people to unsubscribe from a mailing list. This weekend project is good for those that have developed their own script to send out a newsletter.

A general email header looks something like this…

From: josh@domain.ca
Subject: Test Email
Date: August 23, 2008 3:13:02 PM PDT
To: jasmine@domain.ca

The new header field looks like this…

List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:unsubscribe@domain.ca>, http://domain.ca/unsubscribe/?email=jasmin@domain.ca

This new header field allows for both an email and link to unsubscribe.

If you were using this in a test php email your script would look like this…

<?php
$to      = ‘nobody@example.com’;
$subject = ‘the subject’;
$message = ‘hello’;
$headers = ‘From: webmaster@example.com’ . “\r\n” .
    ‘Reply-To: webmaster@example.com’ . “\r\n” .
    ‘List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:unsubscribe@example.com>’;

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
?>

If you have written your own mailer script using I suggest you begin investigating this project now.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

Last week we worked on optimizing our HTML to increase the speed of downloads. This week we will be discussing techniques to do split testing. If you are doing advertising or a new site design then doing split testing can increase your conversions by finding the best solution for your own site visitors.

These are a few of the methods you can use to do split testing…

JavaScript Split Testing

<script type=”text/javascript”>
    var randomnumber = Math.random();
    if (randomnumber < .5){
        //version 1 of your code goes here
    } else {
        //version 2 of your code goes here
    }
</script>

PHP Split Testing

<?php $randomnumber = rand( 1, 100 ); ?>
<?php if( $randomnumber > 50 ){ ?>
<!– version 1 of your code goes here –>
<?php } else { ?>
<!– version 2 of your code goes here –>
<?php } ?>

You can also do split testing with ads on your WordPress blog using a plugin.

If you plan on doing a new site design or want to improve your conversion of your ads then some simple split testing will help you create the best choice for your site and visitors.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

Last week we worked on creating content for the future of mixed search results. This week we want to look at how best to optimize your site. You might have high speed intenet but not all your site visitors will. If you would like to know how long it would take for someone with a slow connection to view your site you can run a Web Page Speed Report.

To get started go to the Web Page Speed Report and Enter your URL to diagnose your page. Click the submit query button.

It will push out a report where you can view the various time it would take to load your site at different speeds. Next down you will see that it shows a list of all the files it had to download with the size of each one. Your goal should be to get your site down to 10 to 25 seconds load for 56K. If your number one is an image you can use a free tool like Paint.NET to optimize the image.

The last part of the report makes suggestions. You should make those changes to your site to optimize it.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

Last week we worked on making it easier for our site visitors to bookmark our site on various social networking sites. This week we will ensure that we list our site on 24 of the social sites that do provide a link back to your site. Wondering why? Matt Cutts has been interpreted as saying that backlinks from social sites is a good way to increase the authority of your own site. So this means that you should go to each of these sites and submit your site or create an account at each.

Here is a list of 24 sites you should visit (thanks to Search Engine People), setup an account and submit your site…

Digg
LinkedIn
Flickr
Technorati
MyBlogLog
Propeller
Kirtsy
Current
PostonFire
BloggingZoom
CoRank
Bumpzee
LinkaGoGo
Bibsonomy
Mister-Wong
MyLinkVault
ClipClip
9Rules
AssociatedContent
Blogoria
NowPublic
MemeStreams
Mixx
Edopter

Know of any I missed? Leave it in the comments.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

Last week we covered how to redirect traffic based on their country. This week we will cover adding an ‘Add This’ button to our site to grow social bookmarking traffic. If you are not making it easy for people to bookmark your site on the various social bookmarking sites then you are missing a large amount of potential traffic.

To create the ‘Add This’ button  you need to create an account. Then once your account is created you can select the type of button you wish to use. There are various styles and options for the type of sites you might have to choose a button. Once you select everything the way you want it click on Get Your Free Button and it will output code like this…

<!– AddThis Button BEGIN –>
<script type=”text/javascript”>addthis_pub  = ‘bluefur’;</script>
<a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php” onmouseover=”return addthis_open(this, ”, ‘[URL]‘, ‘[TITLE]‘)” onmouseout=”addthis_close()” onclick=”return addthis_sendto()”><img src=”http://s9.addthis.com/button1-addthis.gif” width=”125″ height=”16″ border=”0″ alt=”" /></a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://s7.addthis.com/js/152/addthis_widget.js”></script>
<!– AddThis Button END –>

Paste that code in to your site where you want the social bookmarking button to be. Save that file and upload it by FTP to your account. I suggest for maximum exposure that the button be visible near the top of your page and not cluttered by other buttons if possible.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.