Tomato Sauce Marketing

For those of you who know, I was in the shoe industry (in an ecommerce capacity) some years back. Well as a kind of intellectual challenge I am going to build out an affiliate conglomerate focusing on the shoe industry and doing some fairly innovative internet marketing. With the idea of blogging about some of my techniques and methods as I go.

Starting point is setting up some hosting. I like Dreamhost - I have used them for over 3 years and they beat others hands down. They are reliable, they are honest, they are big, they add new servers the whole time. Best of all they don’t use cpanel, using there own easy to use panel which provides a LOT more control. Ping me for more details. (You can also use the promotion code “tomatosauce” and receive $50 off hosting and 3 free domain registrations - enjoy). You will land up paying $69.40 for 1 years hosting with the $50 off and get 1 domain name free plus another 3 free from the promotion code.

Some tips when setting up Dreamhost. I like to use a secure password generator to obtain unique user names and passwords. Once setup I immediately go into my panel found at panel.dreamhost.com and go right to the users tab and edit my user for ftp, shell and telnet. Note the machine name in the same screen and that will give you your shell and ftp information ie username@machine.dreamhost.com

Next I register the three free domains - going to Domains - Registrations. If you have some domains already (for example hosted with godaddy, make sure you set the name servers to ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com and ns3.dreamhost.com - then at your panel Domains - Manage Domains.

Some interesting things to explore at dreamhost - they offer VPN, and checkout the goodies folder plus the integration with Google apps!

If you need to get domains registered outside the free 4 above I highly recommend godaddy.com.

Once domain is registered and hosting setup I then install my own application which will build out the niche sites. To feed it I need lots of good keywords. (more to follow, as I do it…). My favorite tool for keyword selection is keywordspy.

For example it tells me what the big 3 vendors are using as keywords and ads.

1.	Zappos.com	228,555
2.	Shoes.com	64,234
3.	nordstrom.com	384,305

Next…

Some important shell and environmental housekeeping is needed. Firstly I like to setup ssh so I don’t have to login by moving id_ras.pub into an authorized_keys file. I also like to get my bash_profile right and especially so I can connect to my CVS. I use CVS to store all my software and changes. Then I need a simple cron job which pulls from the CVS on a daily basis - thus all my sites are kept fully up dated. You can’t really do this without understanding CVS. Nowadays subversion is an effective replacement for CVS but commands are the same.

Once ready I can simply checkout one file which is my grand installer. The installer will then bootstrap the rest of the process when run from a browser. So I just copy installer into each domain and run it from a browser. It will then pull all my code from CVS behind the scenes, setup crontabs and basically get the whole thing working.

Once my site is built, I can begin the marketing side. The first priority is to get the crawlers visiting. The best ways o do this are;

• build a xml sitemap for Goolge and Yahoo
• send some bookmarks to the social sites
• place some comments and trackbacks on some relevant blogs

Of course this can be done manually or one can use some tools - for more information on applicable tools (I benchmark a lot) please connect with me on the About page.