"Yahoo Store! For Dummies" Book is Done!

You're probably looking for my yahoo store blog ...
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MY BACKGROUND -- For the record, I still own, develop, and market (and love) Yahoo Stores. Still live in Starkville, MS!

If you want to know more about what I do / believe, read my ystore blog or goto http://ystore.com. Poke around my portfolio and contact anyone you want. I'm 40. Never had a real job. Self-employed since college when my baby brother and I started Snell Brothers which now consists of the COPY COW copy shop, gundogsupply.com, and our Ystore dev business. We sold our retail stores in 2000.

Sold everything from dog collars to Pokemon cards to Sun Servers & Workstations to Tron Paul action figures. I've spent most of the last 8 years figuring out ways to "make more with a Yahoo Store."

I'm a retailer turned web designer/developer turned marketer who has FINALLY figured out if you increase your CONVERSION RATE, you can radically increase your sales without increasing your traffic. Then you can increase your traffic. :)

Helping others (at the expense of my own income) seems to be the best marketing I've ever done. I probably am overpriced for Yahoo Store design / development, but I've picked up some really cool marketing techniques doing all of these stores.

In my blog you'll see I post a lot of answers to questions and give away Yahoo! Store tips and tricks. If I can help folks with a quick email, or a 5 minute phone chat, I'd rather do that than open up a new client folder.

I would also rather teach my clients how to do their own maintenance, like datamining their converting keywords, or optimizing their PPC campaigns because a lot of the maintenance stuff is pretty boring, and I have a pretty full plate with this new start-up. I've been fortunate to have more than enough clients since we started doing design & development, and folks ALWAYS want to buy cheap hunting dog training supplies.

You *CAN* learn everything you need to know from poking around these boards, and places like Webmasterworld and Search Engine Watch. I learn more from being inside real stores (300+ Yahoo Stores and (last year) lots of MC Stores and seeing what each retailer does better than anyone else, and how they adapt to the constantly changing marketing landscape.

Every time I get a new trick, I simply add it to my portfolio of tricks and then spread the knowledge around to friends and clients.

Also, I've learned lots by sharing "best practices" with a group of like minded SEO consultants, in-house seo peeps, and Yahoo Store friends who don't really compete in any of my retail niches.





Rob Snell
Somewhere in Rural Mississippi

Mike and Istvan are two of the smartest guys I know, but especially when it comes to getting things done with a Yahoo Store. I mean, they practically wrote the book on RTML, the underlying proprietary scripting language that is the foundation of your Yahoo Store. Getting the chance to sit down and pick Mike and is Istvan's brain about what you can do to your Yahoo Store with RTML is worth the price of admission alone.

For instance, I was a guest speaker at one of the last seminars they did and in the middle of one of the classes I made an off-hand remark about how it sure would be nice to do have a template that did something, but that I couldn't figure out how to do it. Istvan just smiled, and in a few seconds, knocked out the RTML code to do what I've been wanting to do for several years. Holy cow! Like Joe Morin always says: It's not what you know, it's who you know...