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Best way to set up my site and/or sites

Started by David Freed, December 11, 2010, 02:46:14 PM

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David Freed

I asked this question on what appears to be a popular SEO forum. In 6 hours 103 people looked at it, but no replies  ???, so I thought I would throw it out here. I'm pretty sure someone will at least reply here, even if just to say hi.  smiley_wavy

I am setting up a new business selling products that are unrelated other than the fact that they are all Amish made. I need to find out what is the best way to proceed in setting up a site and/or sites to get the best results (traffic and SE ranking) for the time involved in upkeep. It looks to me like the setup time would be about the same for each.

Would it be better to have separate web sites with one main site that has a brief description of each business and a navigation menu that links to the others, one big site with lots of pages covering all the products, set up one domain with sub-domains for the separate products, or is there a better option that I don't even know about?


I have read a little about sub-domains, and I think that is what I should do, but I'm not sure.

jamesamd

All that is gold does not glitter,not all those that wander are lost.....

isawlogs


  Yes Jeff would be the man to talk to , send Wildflower a message  ;)
A man does not always grow wise as he grows old , but he always grows old as he grows wise .

   Marcel

beenthere

Hi!     :)

And agree, Jeff is the guru (albeit there are others on the Forum with similar talent too).

Or...try two or three different combinations.
south central Wisconsin
It may be that my sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others

Busy Beaver Lumber

David

We are somewhat in the same boat as you are. We own businesses that are in most ways not related to one another. Here are the catagories of businesses we own:

1. Embroidery and Sign Shop, also doing vinyl graphics
2. Own and operate 40+ vending machines
3. Sell Coins and Wood Craft Supplies on Ebay
4. Own Sawmill and Firewood bundling operation
5. A hand full of smaller efforts like stock market investing and buying and selling machinery

For us, the best way to go was with seperate websites and seperate marketing channels, but with some overlap where it made sense and with hyperlinks from one website to another.

For the embroidery and Sign Shop, we have a seperate ecommerce website, but we also list many of the items from that website in our ebay store.

The vending machine operation did not need a website since most machines were placed through face to face contact with store owners and service facilities

The ebay store is used mostly to sell coins and wood working supplies and ebay limits your ability to link to external websites if a customer could make a purchase directly from that exteranl site and circumvent their lofty fees.

For the Sawmill and Firewood bundling operation, a seperate website has definately been the way to go for us and has brought in a lot of business.

Personally I think a focused website for each activity is the way to go. If you select you web hosting service wisely, you usually get multiple domain names for the same monthly rate. For example, we get 3 websites for $8.99 a month. Can't get much cheaper than that.

Who wants to spend their time sorting through hundreds of items they don't want to find two or three they are intersted in? Take this forum for example. We all come her because we have a specific interest in the sawmill industry or one of the closely related main topics and it is easy to narrow down and find information we are looking for thanks to the way Jeff has it set up. Don't think you would enjoy it as much if you had to weed through page after page of unrelated topics on things like sewing or scrapbooking if it was a multi-functional site.

My two cents for what it is worth
Woodmizer LT-10 10hp
Epilog Mini 18 Laser Engraver with rotary axis
Digital Wood Carver CNC Machine
6 x 10 dump trailer
Grizzly 15in Spiral Cut Surface Planer
Grizzly 6in Spiral Cut Joiner
Twister Firewood Bundler
Jet 10-20 Drum Sander
Jet Bandsaw



Save a tree...eat a beaver!

David Freed

This is what I was thinking about using to link everything together. It's actually just barely started, but you should be able to get the general idea. By changing a couple words I could use this page as 1 big site, 1 site with sub-domains, or separate sites. I thought this would be pretty easy to navigate.

http://www.amishleatherandwood.com/

David Freed

Busy Beaver Lumber,

Thanks for the details on your setup. Everything helps because I have a lot of learning to do.

cpstrutt

Buyers on the internet are notoriously short on attention span.  If I go to your sight and am looking for energy efficient products, I am thrown off by the other stuff.  Same goes for if I am looking for leather goods.  I think you need a site that will take you directly to the thing that your customer is looking for.  My suggestion would be separate sites with links to the others. 

David Freed

Thanks for the suggestions. I am going to try to incorporate a few different suggestions (here and another forum) to make it easier for someone to find what they want. It may be a month or more before I get it done. We have been busy at work, but I think we will finally get a breather for a month or two.

Jeff

Here is my rather negative few of trying to have a small business and doing e commerce. 

My advice if you think building a website is going to take off and make you money? Forget about it. I think websites are a great tool to help real world customers do business with you, and a great way for new customers to learn about what you do, but I think using it as the means to create new customers simply because you are on the web is setting yourself up for disappointment.  Buy a lottery ticket instead. Unless you have means to advertise it widely and offer something very unique and specialized that nobody else has or does that everybody wants or needs, you are simply a note in a bottle floating on an ocean with another million bottles.

If you think you are going to create a website and make a bunch of money just because you did, forget about it. Odds are you are several years behind the front runners in what ever market you are in and your website will be simply be one of several thousand of its type already sitting there struggling.  A web business is like any other business. You have to work at it every waking moment. If you are not actively doing something to promote it, you better be thinking about things you can do to promote it. Only a very few get lucky.

Use your website instead of yellow pages. Make sure customers can find you locally. Use the website to make yourself convenient and available 24/7. Use it for customer service, just don't think you are going to create some huge rush from people finding you on google, because its not going to happen unless you have something else to point them to your online business.

Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

Magicman

I described my Grandson's very successful internet business in the Business and Management board.

https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php/topic,47722.0.html

His success is not due to his website.  No one finds him through the site.  His customers Google the product, and that leads them to potentially hundreds of vendors selling the same product.  They then weave their way to the seller with the best price or no shipping/handling cost, etc.

His business is very demanding because the instant the customer hits the Paypal button, he is obligated to ship the item immediately.

When I was asking him about the site, he emphasized to me that it was not the site, but the product.  He said that he had no idea how that many folks find him.
Knothole Sawmill, LLC     '98 Wood-Mizer LT40SuperHydraulic   WM Million BF Club Member   WM Pro Sawyer Network

It's Weird being the Same Age as Old People

Never allow your "need" to make money to exceed your "desire" to provide quality service.....The Magicman

Cedarman

Our business is sucessful because of our website.  We are in a niche industry of eastern red cedar.  Although there are many mills producing red cedar and quite a few have websites, ours is different in that we offer a wide range of cedar products not just lumber.  We also advertise a few other places.
We offer a unique species, no others.
We offer a wide variety of products that no other mills provide.
We have a good shipping rate.
We will ship just one board or a truck load.
We get a lot of referrals too.
We have been at it 25 years.
As Jeff says, it will take continual effort in several areas over an extended time to make a good business.   And there is no guarantee that even that will pay off.
I am in the pink when sawing cedar.

Busy Beaver Lumber

David

I have to agree 100% with what Jeff said about websites not being a get rich quick route, but will add the folowing thoughts.

We have an ecommerce website for 7 years, www.wholesaleadvertisingspecialites.com and it does generate about $2000 a year in direct sales where people order directly on line. But if you look at the time it took us to set it up, we would be working for $5 a hour. That is not to say that it is a waste of time. Basically, we use it as an on-line catalog that people can browse and get an idea of what we offer. The large majority of people then call us and place custom orders by phone which generates about another $15,000 a year in sales. I think we would generate about the same level of sales even if it was not an ecommerce site and simply showed the products and services we sell, but oh well it is all set up and working, so not going to change it now, but looking back and if I had it all to do again, I would not have taken the huge amount of time to create an ecommerce site.


In contrast, We have the second website www.busybeaverlumber.com  This website went live in February or 2010 and generated over $30,000 in income for us this year, and a contract spanning the next three years for another $75,000 in bundled firewood. It is not an ecommerce website, but rather just a listing of the producrs and service we offer. Funny thing is it took less than 10 hours to put it together and get it on line, whereas the ecommerce one above took hundreds of hours. Obviously a much better use of time.
Woodmizer LT-10 10hp
Epilog Mini 18 Laser Engraver with rotary axis
Digital Wood Carver CNC Machine
6 x 10 dump trailer
Grizzly 15in Spiral Cut Surface Planer
Grizzly 6in Spiral Cut Joiner
Twister Firewood Bundler
Jet 10-20 Drum Sander
Jet Bandsaw



Save a tree...eat a beaver!

David Freed

Quote from: Jeff on December 24, 2010, 05:14:09 PM
Here is my rather negative few of trying to have a small business and doing e commerce. 

My advice if you think building a website is going to take off and make you money? Forget about it. I think websites are a great tool to help real world customers do business with you, and a great way for new customers to learn about what you do, but I think using it as the means to create new customers simply because you are on the web is setting yourself up for disappointment.  Buy a lottery ticket instead. Unless you have means to advertise it widely and offer something very unique and specialized that nobody else has or does that everybody wants or needs, you are simply a note in a bottle floating on an ocean with another million bottles.

If you think you are going to create a website and make a bunch of money just because you did, forget about it. Odds are you are several years behind the front runners in what ever market you are in and your website will be simply be one of several thousand of its type already sitting there struggling.  A web business is like any other business. You have to work at it every waking moment. If you are not actively doing something to promote it, you better be thinking about things you can do to promote it. Only a very few get lucky.

Use your website instead of yellow pages. Make sure customers can find you locally. Use the website to make yourself convenient and available 24/7. Use it for customer service, just don't think you are going to create some huge rush from people finding you on google, because its not going to happen unless you have something else to point them to your online business.

I wasn't expecting a rush of customers, but I also didn't realize how much work I was getting into. I have been reading a lot in the spare moments I have had in the last couple of weeks, and have been slowly finding out much of what you say in your post. What is so frustrating is that for everything one person says concerning any part of making a website (keywords, seo, etc) with their reasons for saying it, you can find someone else saying the exact opposite with their reasons. It is taking a lot of time to sort through everything to get the (hopefully) right answers just to have a remote chance of working. I am thinking about ways to bring customers to my site besides just relying on Google as you mentioned.

If I knew when I started this what I know now, I don't know if I would have started. I have a lot of time invested now, so even though I now know that the sites that did succeed aren't even a drop in a barrel, let alone a bucket, I am not going to give up yet.

Thanks for the reply. Hope you're feeling better.



Magicman
Glad to here your grandson's site is doing well.



Cedarman and Busy Beaver Lumber,
Examples like yours are what keeps me from just giving up

crtreedude

We built our business using the Internet, mainly by mistake. I kid you not. I really had no plan to sell trees as an investment (which we did for nearly 8 years) but I am glad we did. It worked very well for us.

Since I didn't ever care if we sold trees, I built a website but it wasn't about selling trees, but about reforesting and living in Costa Rica. It still is. Because of the stories and information, we were getting nearly 400 visitors a day (it helps if you wife is an editor!). If all we did was put up a simple website offering trees for sell, we would have had nearly zero for sells, but we sold more than 100 thousand trees this way and built up a sizeable business.

Our website is more than 100 pages with lots of high quality content. I continued to review it up to about a year ago to see where traffic was going, and changing things around to funnel into the area where they could see what we were offering.

I enjoy writing, my wife enjoys editing. If you are going to make a web based business you probably need to learn to enjoy building, and maintaining, websites.

Another thing, and I can't stress this enough. We have Shameless commercial links with Jeff on the Forestry Forum. It is by far the best money I have ever spent to improve positioning of links. Honestly, bang for the buck, nothing has come even close to this. Forestry Forum has a huge draw based on page counts and similar content, we ride those coattails in searches.

We also have things that set up off as different, but this is what closes sales, getting the sales is about getting your name out there, it is a numbers game, more contacts, more sales.

So, how did I end up here anyway?

Cedarman

Maybe just a quirk in my nature, but it irritates me to no end that when I want to contact a company , I usually want to do it by phone to ask questions, get a feel for price, know where they are located etc  AND they make it difficult to find their contact info.  Therefore I wanted my website to have contact info on every appropriate page so that they could e-mail or phone immediately while they were inthe notion.
If I am buying lumber I want to know are they within driving distance or will it be shipped.  I figure other people will want to know also.
I am in the pink when sawing cedar.

David Freed

Quote from: Cedarman on December 25, 2010, 10:08:34 AM
Maybe just a quirk in my nature, but it irritates me to no end that when I want to contact a company , I usually want to do it by phone to ask questions, get a feel for price, know where they are located etc  AND they make it difficult to find their contact info.  Therefore I wanted my website to have contact info on every appropriate page so that they could e-mail or phone immediately while they were inthe notion.
If I am buying lumber I want to know are they within driving distance or will it be shipped.  I figure other people will want to know also.

I have run into that myself. It makes you wonder what they are thinking when they advertise something and then make it hard for customers to reach them.


Quote from: crtreedude on December 25, 2010, 09:51:14 AM
.....Another thing, and I can't stress this enough. We have Shameless commercial links with Jeff on the Forestry Forum. It is by far the best money I have ever spent to improve positioning of links. Honestly, bang for the buck, nothing has come even close to this. Forestry Forum has a huge draw based on page counts and similar content, we ride those coattails in searches.

That is something I have been very seriously thinking about doing when I am ready. Still have a lot of work to do first.

Jeff

I guess I should not be so negative, and simplify what I am trying to say.  The web is huge. The adage "build it, and they will come", simply does not apply, and people are still led to believe it does.

Some things that people don't realize.

Search engines do not give near the importance to new domain names as they do names that have been in existence for multiple years.  Why?  Because if a domain name has been maintained for multiple years, obviously there is probably something behind it.

Search engine placement lies heavily on "popularity"  How many other sites link to your site? What is the popularity of the sites that do link to your site? Outgoing links mean nothing. Incoming links to you mean everything and the size of the sites linking to you is very important.  The Forestry Forum is deemed a popular site by google. It took years and thousands of hours of work to get to that point. Lots of that time was spent sitting on different educational boards, and networking with people in the industry. The Forestry Forum was recognized by real people first who saw what it had to offer. It had links placed to it by sites like the Michigan DNR and other high traffic sites. This all led to advanced popularity with search engines. Now search engines index the site constantly. Anything I put on our front page will end up in google usually within a couple 3 hours.

A new site with static content with no popularity may take months to get re-indexed.

Do you have content?  Content is king. Seems like every time I build a site for someone, I have to struggle to get them to give me textual content for the website.  They want it to be pretty and have pictures. Pretty with pictures and not textual content is next to worthless.  Its like having a brick and mortar store with pictures of the items you may offer on the shelves.

In this internet age you HAVE to be unique. Either your product, your service, your price, or your location.  Location is the easiest way to get some traffic. People are looking for things conveniently located to them when it comes to things like rustic furniture or lumber or especially services say like a Forester would offer.  You have to stress those things that separate you from the hordes.

I have lots of opinions, but you know what they say about those. But I also have 13 years of experience with websites of all genres and in internet years, that's quite a bit.

I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the failure rate is extremely high, as it is in starting a real life business if you don't dedicate everything you have to its success.
Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

crtreedude

Very good points Jeff.

So, what you are saying is that advertising is hard work...  ;) and it actually requires getting to know what you are doing to do it well.

I read a 400 page book on SEO, twice, before I did our website. You can get some pointers from a forum like this, especially from someone like Jeff who is a pro, but really, if you are serious, read a book. There is a lot of misinformation out there, get a current book.
So, how did I end up here anyway?

Jeff

Current is important. The things that worked a couple years ago may not be as relevant today. Some of the "tricks" offered in even older publications might even get your site black listed from search engines. Forever.   Don't use tricks.
Just call me the midget doctor.
Forestry Forum Founder and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.

Commercial circle sawmill sawyer in a past life for 25yrs.
Ezekiel 22:30

WH_Conley

To the subject of hosting. Do a Google and Yahoo search for "Oak Tomato Stakes", see what the number one, non paid listing is, and where it is hosted. ;D
Bill

Cedarman

When I designed my website, I tried to look at it from the point of view of potential customers.  What is important to them?  I asked myself what is important to me. I don't want fluff, music, moving pictures etc.  I want it to load fast.  Some people still have dial up.  Pictures are important, but I put them on a separate page with thumbnails.

Our sawdust sales are a direct result of a vice president of a huge multinational corp asking one of their people to find someone to sell them sawdust.  When the call came asking if we would sell sawdust, I was caught off guard. But we ended up having a long term relationship and also selling a new product that is extremely profitable.  This opportunity is pure serendipity.  BUT, without a good website, it would never have knocked at my door.  They knocked at quite a few other doors, but no one answered them thank goodness.

We keep an extensive list of products we sell with pricing.  I think it is good, but it is an arguable thing as to whether locking in prices is good.  Of course we can vary the price taking into account specifications that change the final product.

My philosophy was to make it easy for the potential customer to see if what we were selling might meet their needs.  As has been said, they will make a decision very quickly to stay or move on.

We are updating it in the next week or so.  We haven't made changes for quite some time.

I thank Jeff for having a place for us to advertise.  I am sure it helps keep us up in the rankings.
I am in the pink when sawing cedar.

David Freed

I really appreciate all the info from everyone. I have found 2 or 3 different sites listing se no-nos that can get you in trouble. I also am going to try to emphasize the unique qualities I have to offer. Since I am new to seo and I have been reading so much conflicting info lately, my brain was just about to get information overload from trying to decide what to believe. I realize that even here, there can be differences of opinion, but this is a place that I know I can trust everyone and, especially on this subject, everyone is pretty much in agreement. Again I really appreciate all the help.


WH_Conley,

I am going to show some of my ignorance here. How do you see where it is hosted?

P.S.
I found this just this morning - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60/ . Haven't played with it much yet, but it looks like a handy tool. I installed it to check things on my site as I build it.

WH_Conley

Well, that was my mistake. I thought it was on the bottom of the page. Hosted right here at the Forestry Forum. Within a day or two of being published it was in the top search engine hits. Been there ever since.
Bill

David Freed

Your tomato stake example brings me back to my original question ( or a variation of it). I have been getting numerous conflicting answers to this in all of the reading I've done and trying to figure out how to set it up has me bogged down.

If I have 1 site with a separate page/pages for each of my products with keywords on those pages specific to the product on the page, will a search engine take the potential customer straight to that page even though my homepage talks about all of my products?

It looks to me like that is what is happening when searching for oak tomato stakes. If that is the case, that decides for me how I am setting the whole thing up and will give me a renewed enthusiasm to keep going.

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