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.

Search Engine Rankings, May 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 - #21 (#21)
personalized children's books - #79 (#96)
personalized childrens books - #42 (#46)
personalized story books - #15 (#13) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #8 (#9) TOP TEN!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #11 (#11) TOP TWENTY
personalized children's books - #60 (#50)
personalized childrens books - #38 (#82)
personalized story books - #18 (#18) TOP TWENTY
personalized book - #14 (#13) TOP TWENTY


The Good: Improvement in three of five keywords on Google. Improvement in one keyword on Yahoo. A top twenty and a top ten ranking on Google, and three top twenty rankings on Yahoo.

The Bad: Decreases in 1 keyword on Google and two keywords on Yahoo.

The Ugly: Still have terrible rankings from both search engines for "personalized children's books" and "personalized childrens books". These are oft searched terms that I need to do better on. There was some improvement here on Google and a mixed result on Yahoo.

Search Engine Rankings, April 2007

I'll make this a monthly update - good for me to look at this monthly anyway and see which way I am moving. The first number is the current ranking, the second in parenthesis is from last month:

For Google:
personalized books - #21 (#36)
personalized children's books - #96 (#114)
personalized childrens books - #46 (#57)
personalized story books - #13 (#16) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #9 (#10) TOP TEN!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #11 (#9) DROPPED OUT OF THE TOP TEN
personalized children's books - #50 (#50)
personalized childrens books - (#82) #64
personalized story books - #18 (#10) DROPPED OUT OF THE TOP TEN
personalized book - #13 (#10) DROPPED OUT OF THE TOP TEN


The Good: Improvement in all five keywords on Google. A top twenty and a top ten ranking on Google, and three top twenty rankings on Yahoo.

The Bad: Decreases in 4 of 5 keywords on Yahoo, including dropping out of the top ten for 3 keywords. The only ranking that didn't drop was for "personalized children's books" which stayed at a lousy #50 position.

The Ugly: Still have terrible rankings from both search engines for "personalized children's books" and "personalized childrens books". These are oft searched terms that I need to do better on.

As stated last month, for the web site to be truly successful, I need to crack the top ten on Google for personalized books. We are getting closer - #21 this time.

A 200 dollar book!

So one of the used books I sell on Amazon sold for 200 bucks - pretty good since I paid less than a dollar for it. What book is worth 200 dollars you ask? This book was something call Madrigal's magic key to French, which if you follow the link you will discover that the cheapest copy offered now on Amazon goes for about $440 dollars. So my buyer got a pretty good deal. (My copy was not in the best shape - but I probably still undersold it.) Now if I could just sell a 100 more 200 dollar books, I'd be doing pretty well...

And I still need to get that feedback rating up so that I too can overcharge for books.

Tooting my daughter's horn post

We just found out a couple days ago that our older daughter was a River of Words Environmental Poetry finalist. Out of tens of thousands of entries her poem was selected as one of about fifty finalists. Pretty cool. The best part is her poem will be published in the 2007 anthology, River of Words: The Natural World as Viewed by Young People. She gets a copy of the book and they'll also donate copies in her name to her school library and the public library. I must admit I'm just a little jealous that she will be published before me (actually I expect both of my very talented daughters to be published before me...)

Anyway we will go to the Library of Congress in May for the awards ceremony. Now if I can just figure out how to get the personalized book website url into the press release that we send to the local paper about it, I can start exploiting my children's successes already...

Taxes and Stomach Virus Blues Post

So I have been working on the taxes (with the help of TurboTax Home and Business) most of the day while my older daughter whiles the day away in her room with a stomach virus (last night was hell - I did have to take a break or two to sanitize the bathroom...)

Good news - looks like we get a sizable refund from the feds this year (I guess there is some advantage to operating a money-loosing business.)

Other notes:
- my Amazon Context links have started to show up.
- No word from the good doctor on the result of the 'ol brain mri.

Brain MRI Blues Post

I don't expect to get any work done today - I have to head up to the hospital to have my head examined-fun fun. At least I didn't have to call in sick to anyone. Of course some of the benefits of this job are lousy - no sick pay for example... Not that it pays much of anything at this point anyway!

Amazon Context Links

I am an Amazon Associate, which means that have an account with Amazon that allows me to put links from my webpages and blogs to Amazon and get paid a commision (very small commision - about 4%) is someone buy the product I am linking to. Ussually I use it on my children's books blog to link to products I am reviewing or quoting from or otherwise mentioning in some fashion. For example I have a list of the Newberry Award Winners from 1986 to the present as a blog post and link to each of the books on Amazon. I have a notice of the new Harry Potter book that you can preorder from Amazon and thus have a link to it.

Amazon has come out with a new product for us associates to try out - context links. The way it is supposed to work is that I embed some html code in my blogpost, and Amazon will automatically add links from the text of the blog to something relevant that you can buy on Amazon. Consider this post a test. Except for the link to the MadLuck Books Blog above, the rest of the links in this post were created automatically by Amazon. (If there are any???)


Edit - so far no links apparent let me go back to the drawing board...
Edit2 - I've added the script to the template as well (which should add links to the whole page maybe? - might be a problem with this "new blogger") Also may take time for links to show up so I will be patient...

Legitimate link requests

When I first started my personalized children's books web site madluckbooks.com, I read a lot of SEO (SEO = search engine optimization or some such) "how to" sites and books which recommended that the best way to get noticed by the search engines was to go out and get as many reciprocal links as possible. The more the merrier was the view point and it didn't matter where you got them from. One site or book suggested that you do a search on Google and yahoo to find out what sites were linking to your competitors than contact them and get them to link to your site. So I followed the instructions and contacted as many sites as I could and asked them to exchange links with me. After a while I had twenty or thirty links on my "links" page, and about 5 or 10 links back to me. The problem with requesting reciprocal links (or link exchanges) is that you have to link to the site first and hope that they follow up with a link back to you. It is time consuming, making the requests and putting the links up and making sure they link back to you and taking the links down if they don't.

Then I started reading elsewhere that reciprocal links weren't so great, especially if the sites you were linking to were considered link farms (IE sites that spasmodically link to everyone and anyone) or if they were unrelated to your site (like a link from a mattress company to my personalized book website.) Better than these links would be a one way link from a site or blog that linked to you because they like your content, or they were reviewing your product on their site.

So I more or less put my link exchange program on hold and stopped sending out the "link to me please" emails. Over the last year I have received a few requests to exchange links, usually from spam sites that I wouldn't be caught dead linking to. But I did recently get my first "legitimate" link exchange request from a site that sold a related product (educational children's toys), and had a decent PageRank from their links page. So after hesitating for a week or so, I added the link to mytoysmart.com. I'll keep an eye on them to make sure they keep my link up. One down side from them - they have over a hundred out bound links from their link page which make a link from them not as valuable...

Search Engine Rankings March 2007

It has been a while since I last looked at my search engine rankings, the last time I detailed them here was September 8, 2006. So here are the new and improved March of 2007 rankings for Personalized Books by MadLuck Books (the first number is the current ranking, the number in parenthesis is the 9/8/06 ranking, did not check ranking for "personalized book" in 2006):

For Google:
personalized books - #36 (#69)
personalized children's books - #114 (#119)
personalized childrens books - #57 (#75)
personalized story books - #16 (#17) TOP TWENTY!
personalized book - #10 TOP TEN!

For Yahoo:
personalized books - #9 (#26) TOP TEN RANKING IN PRIMARY KEY WORD!
personalized children's books - #50 (#47)
personalized childrens books - #64 (#44)
personalized story books - #10 (#29) TOP TEN!
personalized book - #10 TOP TEN


The Good: Improvement in 2 out of 4 keywords on Google, and Yahoo. A top twenty and a top ten ranking on Google, and three top ten rankings on Yahoo including a top ten ranking for the primary key word of "personalized books".

The Bad: Decreases in ranking for personalized children's books, and personalized childrens books, both "often searched" key words. Also, I have hit the top ten on Yahoo for personalized books before - it lasted less than a week before I was bumped back down to 12 or 13 and I expect this time to be just as short lived (but maybe that is just the pessimist in me).

For the web site to be truly successful, I need to crack the top ten on Google for personalized books. We are getting there (a drop from 69 to 36) but still have a ways to go.

Listing books

So I have made my way through about half of the 2000 book I bought from the Russian EBay seller a few weeks ago and have been able to list about 280 of them. My estimate is that I'll get about 500 altogether listed. Not so good you say? Well considering that I have been able to list them at an average price of around $12.00 each, the 500 books should eventually bring me in about $6000.00 dollars- a pretty good profit on the $300 dollars or so I spent on them. It is time consuming though (three and a half hours today to list 30 books for example.) Plus, what do I do with the 1500 or so books I can't sell??? Right now they are stacked up in various piles all over the basement.

Other book selling news - I did get Steve Weber's book and have already put some of his suggestions to use - full review coming soon. And some idiot decided to give me fair review as a seller because they didn't read the Amazon description that gave the publication date of the book and would not remove the review even after I gave him a full refund. So sales have been slow despite the many new books listed. Oh well...

Strep Throat Blues Post

Here's another benefit of working at home - when my daughter came down with strep throat yesterday, there was no scrambling to call in sick at work and try to get someone to cover my workload. She sleeps peacefully on the couch now, having traumatically downed her first dose of antibiotics, and I sit beside her on the recliner and try to get some work done. I still have most of my 2000+ used books to list and more personalized books product spotlights to write...

A lot of used books from EBay

I alluded to the fact that I had something in the works to jumpstart my Amazon Marketplace used book selling business (to supplement the off-season income that the personalized books are not bringing in) in my last post. Well the something in the works was that I was bidding on a lot of used books that someone was selling on Ebay. The lot was over 2000 books, supposedly from an ex-Amazon book seller that had gone on vacation accidentally leaving her inventory up for sell on Amazon - the books were selling and she wasn't shipping and Amazon froze her account, or so the story went from the guy that was selling them on EBay. I went ahead and bid on the books site unseen and ended up winning the bid for a little over $200. I had been looking for something like this - that is a bunch of books for a low price from a local seller (they were stored in a shed some 40 miles from my home.)

So I rented a Van and picked up over a thousand of the books on the first Monday after winning the bid, and paid off the seller in cash (and recieved no receipt, not so smart I know). And have since picked up another 1000 or so from the shed - all that I deemed worth taking.

My total expenditure was about $350.00 (buying price plus van rental plus gas), and what did I get? Of course I haven't looked at every one of them yet but I can tell you what I've seen so far. The general condition of the books is not that good - most of the ones I've listed, I've had to list as "acceptable" the lowest rating Amazon allows (you are not allowed to list "unacceptable" or "poor" or "piece of trash" books - don't ask me why, I don't know...) And many of them have the back blank page suspiciously ripped out (this would be the page that the library would put its pocket or electronic signal thingy in - I don't want to think too hard on why they would be ripped out). Of the 2000 books I'll probably be able to list about 200-500 of them for an average price of $10.00 or more - so say $2000.00 to $5000.00 worth of books - so a decent profit, though a lot of work in weeding out and discarding the junk.

Would I do it again? Maybe, but probably not site unseen...

Steve Weber's Selling Books

I believe I touched on this before but one of the blogs I generally follow is Steve Weber's Selling Books blog, wherin Weber imparts his wisdom and experience in selling used books on Amazon.com. I am trying to make used books sales a major part of my business activities (instead of the $250 or so in sales I made from them last year. I have a few things in the works including finally coughing up the 20 bucks to by Weber's book, The Home-Based Bookstore, which I just ordered form Amazon of course. I'll give a review here once I get it and have some time to read it. And look for an upcoming post on a recent (actually I am still in the middle of it) adventure in buying used books to sell.

Still selling

So I haven't posted anything here since October 9, 2006 as I threatened in my last post. But I am still around: the Children's Book Blog is alive and thriving, and we are still selling personalized children's books over at MadLuck Books. I am also working on growing the online used books business slowly but surely.

What's not going so well: Staying focused on doing work instead of goofing off now that the Christmas rush is over. And while we made great strides in the business end, it still looks like I will need to keep working part time for some time before I can truly, completely quit the day job. And my fiction writing is at a stand still, though I have gotten back into sending the old stories out and collecting the rejection letters for them. I have time to write (see the note on goofing off) just am fighting motivation issues...