So it’s been a full day since I purchased www.bonsaiforsale.com for $275. The domain was transferred early yesterday and I got to work right away.

The site originally had a turnkey script installed called Build A Niche Store - it grabs new products from Ebay and creates static pages on your website. Now..there’s nothing wrong with this script - it works pretty good actually, but it doesn’t give me the level of control I prefer to have. So I decided to not buy the script and go with a custom blog layout.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Ditched the Build A Niche Store script in favour of a custom a blog layout.
• Tracked down well suited bonsai affiliate programs and signed up.
• Did some research on the bonsai market to determine the best direction to take with the site.
• Created a mod_rewrite to redirect the old pages on the site to the newly created pages (in order to keep existing traffic)
• Started adding affiliate products to the website as “Featured Products”
• Added Ebay Partner Network Links
• Modified the Wordpress search page and setup a dynamic affiliate link in place of the not found page. This way if users search for something that is not listed on the site, it will recommend them to Ebay via a targeted search.
• Started an Adwords campaign and started sending small amounts of traffic to the site to get a feel for visitors. I like to send Adwords traffic to new sites I’m working on so that I can tweak every aspect as I go. It cost’s a few dollars (I keep it at $7-10 a day) but it is well worth the visitor information you can gather if you have a keen eye.

All in all I havn’t got very far yet as much of my time was spent on the little details - transferring over the site and getting everything running smoothly on the new server. The wordpress template I am using is a semi-custom template (the same one as LovnLivn - slightly modified). My main goal for the day was to get the site to the point that it’s functional for incoming traffic and I achieved that after some minor frustrations.

Next comes the real work..

The Scripts:

• Create custom script to query Ebay, return relevant products and turn them into a blog post - similar to the build a niche store script, however self-contained and compact, and more suited for what I need.
• I will also create a script for a complete Bonsai Shop - the bonsai shop will be auto-updated via Ebay RSS feeds.
• Create a script to scrape affiliate sites and post featured products on a daily or semi-daily basis. In order to avoid duplicate content, I’ll include this along with an article.

Once I have all these scripts complete, the site will auto update from 2 or 3 sources (Ebay/Affiliate Program(s)/Articles) and will require no work on my part unless I want to add extra content.

Next comes the promotion, first I’m going to….stop writing this post and save that for another day!

Ryan S. Bombard