Creative Compulsion

Lately, I’ve been working on the SEO for my websites one by one. I recently took a free online search engine optimization class taught by Cricket Walker. The class is great, with easy to understand information and each lesson gives you another aspect of SEO to work on. I highly recommend it!

So, needless to say, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject. Last night, I came across a site called SEO Book. Wow! What a resource.

The first thing that caught my eye was the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Totally cool. I’m currently paying for a keyword service, and while it’s good, I find it a little overwhelming to work with. The SEO Book tool is much more basic, but gives a host of information.

With this great tool, you just pop in your keywords, and it will come back with predicted daily search counts from Google, Yahoo and Live. It also gives you keyword variations based on your original search.

Once you’ve studied the keyword counts, you can go on to explore Google Trends, Google Traffic Estimator, Keyword tool and more, right from the same page. At any time, you can click on one of the keyword variations and the process starts again. I love it!

Other great tools found on SEO Book are the Rank Checker and SEO extensions for Firefox. Try them, I guarantee you’ll love these nifty little time savers!

Beyond the tools, SEO Book also offers a blog, a forum, free training videos and paid SEO training as well. I didn’t even scratch the surface of this site yesterday, I know how I’ll be spending my Saturday morning!

Enjoy

… a custom Zen cart template, that is

A couple of months ago, I was looking for a designer to give my eBay store a complete overhaul. I was lucky enough to find Ellie at LillyStar Designs. I didn’t really have much of an idea for what I wanted, except a cartoon dog picture I had fallen in love with.

She is just amazing! Ellie did such a great job of redesigning my eBay store and listing templates, I asked her to design a matching Zen Cart template for my main website. Again… absolutely brilliant! Ellie did all of the graphic design and I did all of the coding for the site.

Since then, we’ve emailed back and forth a few times and decided to collaborate on Zen Carts going forward. Ellie will design and create the graphic elements for Zen, and I will provide the coding to turn it into a custom Zen Cart template. I will be putting together a portfolio page for potential customers to view sites we’ve worked on together.

For more information on getting your own custom Zen Cart template, visit Ellie’s eBay store: LillyStar Designs. Her price list is here. Templates begin at $470.00, which is very reasonable for a one of a kind design.

In the meantime, here are screenshots of her work on my eBay store and our Zen Cart work. Click on the thumbnails for a larger image.

	KT Pet Supply on eBay Design and Coding by LillyStar Designs
	KT Pet Supply Graphic Design by LillyStar Designs Custom Zen Cart template by Creative Compulsion
	babeSKIN Graphic Design by LillyStar Designs Custom Zen Cart template by Creative Compulsion

I found this really cool site today courtesy of Blogs By Women (and thanks Nicole, for pointing me there!).

This site does exactly what the name says - it makes chicklets! You know, those cool little rectangular graphics you see on lots of blogs. The Chicklet Maker lets you choose background colors, font colors and family and even offers three sizes: Standard (80 x 15), Yahoo Size (91 x 17) and Google Size (104 x 17). Very cool and useful tool!

Visit the Chicklet Maker

I haven’t posted much because I’ve been working on getting a new site going. It’s finally live!!

I’ve had great luck with the items I currently have, mostly collectibles and some home decor items. What I’ve found is that they tend to be quite seasonal in nature. For the last few months I’ve been toying with the idea of adding in a completely different line that would be more stable and consistent, more of a commodity-type. I’ve experimented with body jewelry and while I’ve sold almost all of the inventory I purchased, the mark-ups are (obviously) so thin you really have to sell a lot to make it worth the time. In the past several months, I began introducing pet supplies to my eBay store, Cutting Edge Gifts. I began selling things from store inventory immediately without even running auctions so, after lots of thought and more research, have decided to make that a permanent part of my offerings.

Visit my new “labor of love” at KT Pet Supply. Named after my beloved Golden Retriever, Katie, my childhood best friend

I have been hosting with Clook.us for about a year now and quite honestly love them! I’ve never seen customer support like they have - 2-5 minute response time and always helpful. Recently, though, I made the (difficult) decision to switch hosts. It’s purely a bandwidth thing. On one of my eBay ids I sell digital products, mainly templates that are in huge zip files. The sales on that id are picking up a lot this month (a good thing) but my bandwidth limit on my host is 10 gig and I’ve already used 25 gig this month (not such a good thing). Soooo, I started shopping. Needed more space and a host that would let me have multiple domains as I have 4 now and a 5th to be added soon with a 6th following hopefully not too far behind. (I know, I’m becoming a domain whore).

After looking over lots of packages and browsing several different forums, I decided to go with Go Daddy. It seemed pretty logical - my domains are registered there and my SSL certificates were purchased there. I heard that CS isn’t the greatest, but I typically don’t need help outside of installing certificates and other basic things. I did read on one forum (from several people) that uptime was good and speed was ok. So, I switched one domain. Just to see. I went with their Deluxe plan which gives you 100GB of storage and 1000GB of bandwidth - more than enough for what I need. Everything went smooth and even though I’m used to CPanel, I found my way around the hosting interface easily.

Everything went so well I decided to transfer a second domain/site over. This one has an SSL certificate. Everything went smooth - site looks fine. Only thing left to do - transfer the SSL certificate. Now, I had emailed support prior to signing up for hosting to ask what the transfer process entailed. They told me once my hosting was set up, I could automatically transfer the certificate by just clicking the Transfer button under my certificate options. Even I could handle this right? Uh, not so much.

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Just came across a post on the PS boards - Firefox has a new addon for eBay!!

Most people are getting really sick of the shipping gouging going on over at the Bay. It might look like a good deal for $0.99 but with $20.00 shipping is it really the best price?

For me when I’m shopping, I want the bottom line. Who REALLY has the lowest price? This nifty lil tool for Firefox figures it out for you by inserting 2 additional columns when you search eBay: Total price (for auction) and Total BIN price. You can sort low to high in either column. What a time saver!!

Get the ShortShip eBay addon here!