Shameless Commerce Division (thanks Click and Clack)

Where am I blues Post

It has been a while since I last posted here - I am even behind my Search Engine Rankings posting, and I have barely posted to the madluckbooks.blogspot blog as well. No excuses - just too busy to waste my time doing it. That would be great if I was too busy because business was booming, but actually it is because I have moved up to three days a week at my part-time day job. Extra expences on the home front and the business income is just not enough. I am working on it - or at least on expanding the used-book business on amazon.com. My goal is to be eventually selling at least a hundred books a month, and bringing in over $1500.00 a month - not too ambitious really. So if I am going to sell a hundred books a month I have to be able to list at least a hundred new books a month. So that is the monthly goal I have set myself - find at least a hundred books or 1500.00 worth of books to list a month. I am up to over a thousand books listed and still getting more. Just made another big purchase of 500 to 600 books off of EBay. Unfortunately the seller has suddenly disapeared now that I have paid for the books - three emails and a phone call and still have not heard back from him. I paid via PayPal so I should have some protection if he doesn't surface...

Search Engine Rankings, September 2007

Here are the current search engine rankings for the MadLuck Books Personalized Books web site. As usual The first number is the current ranking, the second in parenthesis is from August:

For Google:
personalized books - #15 (#32) TOP TWENTY!
personalized children's books - #26 (#93)
personalized childrens books - #33 (#50)
personalized story books - #16 (#11) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #11 (#13) TOP TWENTY!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #30 (#19)
personalized children's books - #56 (#47)
personalized childrens books - #41 (#39)
personalized story books - #20 (#24) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #30 (#24)

The Good: Improvement in four of five keywords on Google, including a big improvement in "personalized children's books". Three top twenty rankings on Google, and one top twenty rankings on Yahoo. Most importantly a top twenty for the critical keyword "personalized books" on Google.

The Bad: Decreases in 1 of 5 keywords on Google and continued slippage of 4 keywords on Yahoo. While "personalized story books" moved up to a top twenty ranking on Yahoo, "personalized books" fell out of the top twenty.

The Ugly: No top ten keywords on either search engine

The improvement on Google is fairly recent (within a week) and I have already seen a >50% hit rate increase on the web site. The question is how long will these rankings last, if they somehow last through the Christmas buying season, that would be nice...

Search Engine Rankings, August 2007

So I skipped July, and haven't posted anything at all since June - never claimed to be a prolific blogger, and hey, it's summer and that means that I get to take a break. Anyway let's look what our Search Engine Rankings look like today. As usual The first number is the current ranking, the second in parenthesis is from June:

For Google:
personalized books - #32 (#29)
personalized children's books - #93 (#100)
personalized childrens books - #50 (#53)
personalized story books - #11 (#15) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #13 (#13) TOP TWENTY!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #19 (#8) TOP TWENTY!
personalized children's books - #47 (#32)
personalized childrens books - #39 (#50)
personalized story books - #24 (#10)
personalized book - #24 (#10)

The Good: Slight improvement in three of five keywords on Google. Two top twenty rankings on Google, and one top twenty rankings on Yahoo.

The Bad: Decreases in 1 of 5 keywords on Google and 4 keywords on Yahoo.

The Ugly: Went from three top ten keywords on Yahoo to one lousy top twenty keyword. Not surprizing as I expected my top ten rankings to be temporary, I just thought that when they dropped they would stay at least top twenty...

Oh well disapointing all around. Which is why my business focus has been on the used book end anyway...

Estate Sales on Craig's List

So I recently went on my first (used) book buying trip to an "Estate Sale". I put estate sale in parenthesis because I am not sure that it wasn't really a glorified yard sale. But it was successful from a book buying perspective, as I bought about 15 books, most for a quarter each and was able to list all but one or two of them on Amazon. The average price I listed them was somewhat over $10.00 which means a pretty good potential for profit. Here is an example of one of the more valuable books.

The reason I had not been to an estate sale before was because I was unable to find them - there never seemed to be any listed in my local paper - plenty of yard sales which rarely have any valuable books. Finally I just punched "Estate Sales Virginia" into Google, and along with half a dozen links to companies that run estate sales, there was a link to Craig's List DC garage and moving sale listings. After clicking on the Northern Virginia tab I was able to find sales near me and sure enough one of them was listed as an estate sale. There are at least two more estate sales this weekend that claim to have old books which I just might have to check out.

Search Engine Rankings, June 2007

Time for the monthly update. As usual The first number is the current ranking, the second in parenthesis is from last month:

For Google:
personalized books - #29 (#21)
personalized children's books - #100 (#79)
personalized childrens books - #53 (#42)
personalized story books - #15 (#15) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #13 (#8) TOP TWENTY!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #8 (#11) TOP TEN!
personalized children's books - #32 (#60)
personalized childrens books - #50 (#38)
personalized story books - #10 (#18) TOP TEN!
personalized book - #10 (#14) TOP TEN!


The Good: Improvement in four of five keywords on Yahoo. Two top twenty rankings on Google, and three top ten rankings on Yahoo, including on personalized books.

The Bad: Decreases in 4 of 5 keywords on Google and one keyword on Yahoo.

The Ugly: While the improvement on Yahoo is great, I am much more concerned with the decreases on Google - the positive trend I had been seeing now has reversed itself.

Odds and Ends Post

Here is a hodgepodge of things going on here at the Home Biz Blues house hold:

• Amazon - Finally got all (or as many as were in decent shape) of the Lot of Books listed on Amazon Marketplace. My current inventory of Used and collectible books now comes to about 750 books. With so many books I had to devise a way to keep track of them, so I labeled my book shelves and made an access database to keep track of where each listed book was located (which book case, shelf, and general location on shelf.) Much easier than looking through hundreds of books randomly placed on shelves. Doing pretty good - selling about 15 to 30 books a month. Now my number one need is to go out and find more books to sell.

• Other Amazon news - my positive rating number has finally gone back up to 90%, which should help sales. My goal is to maintain a 95% and above positive rating, so still a ways to go (Only 10 more good ratings should do it).

• Personalized books - As ever this time a year, the personalized book business is slow. This was not helped when Google decided to make madluckbooks.com disapear from the search results for such keywords as "personalized books" and "personalized story books". This has happened before, but that time it only lasted for a few days. This time it lasted for well over a week and I was starting to panic. Interestingly, yahoo improved my rankings for those same words at about the same time. All of a sudden I was getting hits from Yahoo that I had never gotten before, and nobody was coming from Google. Eventually Google decided to stop being mean and madluckbooks.com began showing up on their searches again (though maybe not ranked as hight as I had been). I'll do the monthly update on search engine rankings soon to see where everything balanced out.

• Schools out for summer after this week so I will have to return to my basement hole to work to keep out of the kids way.