Well, you've gotton some good advice here. But I cannot agree with not working on your site constantly. We work on it every day, it's a full time job. My site
www.larrylupole.com/catalog started out as a site to market my husband's music cd, Classic Fantasy. So it was a music site. He was injured at a job, and could not play out anymore. So what to do?
I learned on eBay. But now our site this month, already has over 51,000 targeted traffic hits. Last month we had over 307,000. As our traffic increased so did our sales. It shows a steady growth. Now our site is valuable real estate.
We have not paid for any marketing as of yet. But have plans for some things in the future. "Getting on the front page of Google is a pipe dream."? No, not really. My site has been on the front page of Google & Yahoo almost from the start for 4 years, in the top ten under many different keywords.
Most of our products come up in the search in the cluster at the top. It is now in top of Google, Yahoo, MSN & Froogle. We use data feeds, cron uploads, etc. Don't forget Froogle & Google Base. They are essential for targeted traffic!
Keyword spamming is a critical problem with most sites. They go overboard. We keep it very simple. Keyword weight is very important. Don't over weight your keywords in your text, but don't under weight it either.
I also have a ebay store, but have been moving my products out of it this week. I get way more traffic to my site than my ebay store gets. I did get sales on ebay, but now it takes too much time from my site. So I am moving most of my stuff there and will just use that store for marketing.
I love this type of business. But it is a lot of work and at first I wasn't sure we could survive without the outside jobs. But now I know we will. We have many repeat shoppers and we check our stats daily. I have a blog, but some days I just don't have the time to get to it. And now my garden will be taking some of that valuable time.
Another thing is that we allow others to list their products on our site for free and we just get a percentage of their sales. This allows us to increase our targeted traffic based on more products.
Good Luck with it. If you have any questions pm me. I love to see us homesteaders being successful on the net!
katlupe
