Doing keyword research is vital to getting traffic to any website, not just niche store sites.  Today I received an email from Michelle stating that she is having a webinar on nothing but keyword research tomorrow, June 24, 2008.  I’m going to sign up for this and wanted to pass the information along in case you want to, too.

If you are interested go to http://www.michellemacphearson.com/onemistake/.  The webinar will be free and I’ve sure it will be full of solid information.  Also, she will record the webinar and make it available for those who’ve signed up to listen to later.  Michelle will probably post it as a link so you can hear it, as this is what she’s done in the past.

Rochelle

A few months ago I wrote about How to Add a ‘Contact Us’ Form to Your Site, a mod created by BANS forum member, mistermickster. If you follow those instructions you will end up with a ‘Contact Us’ link in your Site Navigation’s sidebar menu.

After I posted these instructions many people said they prefered to add their ‘Contact Us’ link to the footer of their sites. Both Holly and mistermickster shared how to achieve this. But some people where confused so I am clarifying with detailed instructions here on how to do this.

As I said above, all emails are sent to the address you entered in your site’s Admin Security tab. If you are like me you have entered the same email address for every site you have. You won’t want emails from various sites sent to one email because you’ll have no idea what site the emails are coming from or referring to.

There are several ways to deal with this. The solution I have chosen is a simple one that will allow you to add unique email address for every niche store you have and let you check them all in a single place. No, I don’t mean your inbox, such as Outlook or Outlook Express. This is even easier than that.

What I suggest requires creating multiple accounts with Google’s gmail. For those who may be worried, you are allowed to have multiple gmail accounts as long as your purpose for the accounts doesn’t violate Google’s TOS. Using your email accounts for ‘Contact Us’ purposes only is an acceptable use of multiple accounts.

I realize not everyone will want to use Google’s gmail. If you don’t want to do this then I’m afraid I’m leaving it up to you to figure out how to deal with the email address aspect of creating ‘Contact Us’ forms. I apologize but I simply don’t have the time to write instructions for every method available for doing this.

Now that you have created a primary email account and unique variations of this account for each niche store you need to periodically check your primary account for messages. When you log in you will see all your emails in one centralized place. But you won’t know which niche store your emails have come from just by looking at your inbox:

To figure out which store your email came from you need to click on an email to open it. Once you have done this you need to click the ‘show details‘ link:

Now you can see what email address the message was sent to, and this tells you what store the email is coming from and referring to:

That’s it. You now have a ‘Contact Us’ link that you can add to your site’s footer, a unique email address set up for each of your niche stores, and an easy way to read any messages you receive. Go ahead and click it to send yourself an email to verify that it works. Pretty nifty, eh?

Rochelle

Have you ever wanted to change the wording that displays when no auction results are available? Me, too.

The default wording is, “No products matching your query have been found in our store. Please bookmark this page and come back soon to see if we have what you want.” I don’t like this wording because there is no way to bookmark searches, and this wording will also display when searches have no results. I feel like I’m misleading visitors by encouraging them to bookmark searches.

Rochelle

Yesterday I wrote about why I no longer use subdomains to create Build A Niche Store (BANS) sites. Today I will explain how to move a niche store from a subdomain to its own domain.

Before I go into how to do this I want to say that I have chosen to do this using two different hosting companies. In another post I will explain why you may want to have multiple hosting companies. Until then, I’ll just say that the niche store I moved was on a subdomain hosted with HostGator and I moved it to a URL hosted with WebHostingPad.

I am going to assume that you know how to purchase a new URL and that you already have a second hosting company (if you don’t I recommend either HostGator or WebHostingPad).

Check your new URL. Your niche store should look exactly the same as the niche store located at the subdomain.

If you don’t have a second hosting company you can still move your subdomain to a new URL but the database aspect of this will make doing this on the same hosting company as your subdomain a bit challenging. I haven’t done this but I think it would be a matter of backing up the database, deleting the current database, creating a new database with the same name/username as the deleted database, then associating the new database with the new URL. After it has been associated you will need to restore the database. The main problem I see with this method is that you risk having downtime on your subdomain before the niche store at the new URL is ready for viewing.

Ok, the easy part is now done. Next comes the really fun part of transferring a site. You get to create redirects for every single page on your site! You can do this by following the instructions found at How to Redirect Deleted or Renamed URLs to New Pages with a 301 Redirect.  When you follow these instructions you will create the 301 redirects on the .htaccess for the store located at the subdomain, NOT the new URL.

06/21/2008 edit: Mick and Sanjay have saved the day/week/month/year by sharing how to easily modify the .htaccess file to redirect an entire site to its new location by adding one bit of code.  By adding these two lines of code you will be able to redirect your entire site.  This means any link from your old site will send visitors to that exact page within your new site.  In other words, you won’t have to create a redirect for every page.

I couldn’t get the code Mick shared to work but found a slight modification that did work for me.  I will include both versions here in the event that one doesn’t work for you but the other does.

First, open your old site’s .htaccess file (this is from the site you are moving away from, NOT your new site) and save a copy of this file.  

Place either of the following codes directly UNDER RewriteEngine On:

Mick’s Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.info [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.com/1 [L,R=301]

My Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.info/$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.com/1 [L,R=301]

Change www.mydomain.info to your OLD site’s URL.  Change http://www.mydomain.com/1 to your NEW site’s URL.

Save changes and click a link on your old site to see if you are taken to your new site.  If one of these codes doesn’t work then try the other.

06/21/2008 Edit #2:   After writing the above I found that the code I added worked but not consistently.  I searched and found an even easier code that you can add to your .htaccess.  If neither of the above works for you then try this code:

redirect 301 / http://www.you.com/

Change www.mydomain.com to your NEW site’s URL.

I strongly recommend you check that any of the above methods works by going to a search engine, such as Google, and entering site:mydomain.com (use your URL, both with and without www) and clicking any link to see where you are taken.  If you go to the original location, NOT the new location, then try one of the other two codes.  

Creating 301 redirects might not be fun, but it is necessary. If your niche store has backlinks pointing to it or your site was indexed in search engines then the pages that are indexed will take people to the subdomain location. You want to send people to your store’s new location, not the old one. The 301 redirect will make sure people end up at the right place.

Also, if you added any mods to your site while it was located at the subdomain, such as the How to Add ‘Bookmark This Site’ Code To Your Site, then you will need to update the links to your new URL.  You might want to go through the header and footer for your template to make sure you get all the links. Did you add any links to your footer, perhaps for your sitemap or privacy policy?  If so, update them.

Lastly, if you added your site to Google’s WebMaster Tools then you may will want to update your site information there, including your store’s sitemap location.

Well, that’s it. Phew! I’m off to create a huge list of redirects for my transferred site. I should be done in a week or two

Rochelle