I want to make this an experiment which means I will be trying lots of “theories” on SEO and see which ones really make a big differece. I will try good white  hat methods, perhaps some grey and black hat techniques (in the name of research of course!)

Project Specifics:

It is one physical product I will be selling, different types, models etc but still just one product.

I have no experience selling this particular product before, have just had a nagging idea for a long time.

Literally everything needs doing, from the website, marketing, management, etc (thankfully I am an experienced web developer and online marketer so I can do a lot myself)

I have set aside a budget of £7,000 to get the idea off the ground, needless to say, when I make money from it I will be investing that back in.

My big aim is to be geared up for the Christmas shopping period in 2012 and take it by storm.

My realistic goal in terms of income (probably quite a way into the future) would be £80,000 a year in profit (I calculated what is doable), although there is a lot of hard work in front of me to reach that.

I will start right away to prepare things and by the next post I should have the groudwork down.

Please feel free to comment, I would love the feedback!

The show is at Earls Court, London (see map below) from Tuesday – Thursday with lots happening, there will be keynote speeches by executives from Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, LinkedIn,  and Amazon to name but a few -something well worth checking out.

I will be updating this blog with highlights of the event throughout the week, so stay tuned for that. As for those of you who are coming, I look forward to meeting you!

I am running WordPress like before, but with a few major differences. It has a very customized core that has been designed to fit the needs of this site exactly. Lots of the fluff has been removed and the code architecture improved. As you might already know, two things I strive for on the web are speed and scalability. This new WordPress core is very quick, right down to the way comments are processed. Some of my old posts would get hundreds of comments which slowed the page down while loading, that problem is now solved along with post loading time.

stephenb.co.uk is sporting a new theme which is designed solely to increase performance. I have used image sprites, minified CSS, JavaScript etc and used as little code as possible. That has resulted in a score of 86 on the chrome speed test, let down only by my server. That will be upgraded in time.

I have worked hard on scalability due to the sheer amount of traffic the site used to get (around 200,000 visitors a month), it really used to push the shared hosting to it’s limits, no need to worry about that now though. The optimized code will support a lot more requests. Another big help is the new hosting I am moving to soon. I have been trailing Amazon’s cloud solutions with a virtually dedicated Linux box, things are looking good at that will probably become the new home for the majority of my hosting needs.

I have a lot more to post about so stay tuned……….