I'm so excited about Y!Store101, that I can't sleep. I woke up at 3:37 a.m. and I realized I had to immediately get out of bed and write you about our new seminar and workshop.

Let's face it. If you're a Yahoo Store owner, you're slammed! You are extremely busy taking care of customers, managing your employees, maintaining your web site, processing orders, and running your business. If you are like 99% of the Yahoo Store owners I run across every day, you don't have any time to waste. Every second counts, so you must do anything you can to ramp up your business to better market your Yahoo Store!

What if you could pick the brains of three of the world's leading Yahoo Store design, development, and marketing consultants over a couple of days in sunny California? Do you think you could learn lessons from the most successful Yahoo Stores? Do you think you could spare the time? Do you think you could afford not to?

Introducing Y!Store101

Introducing Y!Store101, a 2-day Yahoo Store seminar and workshop designed for Yahoo Store Owners by Yahoo Store Owners: Istvan Siposs, Michael Whitaker and me, Rob Snell.

The sole purpose of our seminar & workshop is to give you the tools to take your Yahoo Store from where it is today to where you want it to be tomorrow.

THURSDAY - Y!Store101, Day 1: Learn what you need to know and what you can do in a classroom setting from 9:00 - 4:00.

FRIDAY - Ystore101, Day 2: Implement what you learned the day before in a hands-on computer lab workshop. (Two sections: 9:00 - 1:00 or 1:00 - 5:00).

Seminar participation is extremely limited because class sizes are small. There are only 36 spots per class, so sign up today if you want to get in the first two classes! When you attend Ystore101, you will learn what works -- the secrets of multimillion dollar Yahoo Stores:

* You will learn how to make more money! Drive more search engine traffic to your Yahoo Store! Convert more of your browsers into buyers, increase your average order size by up selling, and get repeat customers to order more often.

* You will learn how to save time! Automate your store management and order processing tasks to give you more time to work on your business. The most successful online retailers have streamlined their businesses to take full advantage of all the powerful Yahoo Store features as well as third party tools. Learn their secrets!

You also get to network with other successful retailers like yourself. There's nothing like talking to other successful folks who do virtually the same thing you do, but who don't directly compete with you. Share tips and tricks with folks in completely different industries.

Stop what you're doing, and take a couple or three days off. You work hard. You deserve a break from your day-to-day grind. Take a tax-deductible trip to sunny California (ask your tax advisor), and take advantage of this opportunity to learn how to make more money with your Yahoo Store. Sign up for Y!Store101, book your flight and hotel, and get moving pronto!

You can sign up now, or read more about what topics we are going to cover, who will benefit from attending, what you need to know before you can come, which retailers are invited, background on the Y!Store101 instructors, and more.

The Idea for Y!Store 101

The idea for Y!Store101 came about when Mike and Istvan invited me as a guest lecturer on marketing to add a little gravy to their RTML training workshops. We had so much fun talking about all the different ways you could make money online with Yahoo Stores, that we agreed we had to expand their Yahoo Store training classes to cover this information.

We know Yahoo Stores inside and out

Believe me when I say that we know Yahoo Stores. Between the three of us and our three companies, we've worked with thousands of Yahoo Store owners. We've driven millions upon millions of visitors to our Web stores, and designed, developed, consulted with, and/or owned Yahoo Stores that have sold tens of millions of dollars worth of products. We know what works, and we're going to share it with you.

Everything that you're going to learn when you attend Y!Store101 fits in one of two buckets: how to save time and/or how to make more money. That's it. Read on!

Who should come to Ystore101

There are 35,000 plus Yahoo Stores out there! Y!Store101 isn't for everyone! We've designed the Ystore101 seminar to keep the class size small enough so you will get individual attention. The seminar itself is limited to 36 retailers per class, and the half-day labs are limited to 18 people for each section for a very good reason: With a smaller class size you will feel comfortable asking questions and get the personal attention you need to make sure you profit from your participation.

Ystore101 is designed for the following people:

* Yahoo store owners. If you are a retailer and want to increase the sales on your Yahoo Store, this seminar is for you. If your store's doing at least $2000 a month in sales, then you can learn one or two things that should easily pay for the price of the seminar, your hotel room, your meals and your plane ticket over the next year.

* Yahoo Store staff. Send your us your geeks and production people! Most companies have one or more Web savvy staffers who take care of all their online stuff. Send us your Webmaster, designer, online marketer, personal assistant, or other staffers to learn very specific things to do to improve your store.

* Vendors of Yahoo Store compatible products and services. If you sell to Yahoo Store owners and want to get inside the heads of successful store owners, Ystore101 is the place.

Why you should come to Ystore101:

Here! Take this self-test. You should come to Ystore101 if:

* You want to make more money with your Yahoo Store. We're serious about giving you concrete, specific things you can do to increase your store sales!

* You are a merchant and you literally have more orders to process than you can handle. You may not be swamped all of the time, but you can barely keep up during your busy season. You will learn about many different options to take your Yahoo Store to the next level including an introduction to automating order management and customer service, saving hundreds of hours a year by performing database uploads.

* Your Yahoo Store sales are stuck at a plateau, or you're not growing as fast as you want. Some stores are like a Ferrari with the parking brake on, driving around in circles in the parking lot. You don't understand why your store isn't selling more than it is. You want to increase your rate of growth. Your sales are growing, but you know you're missing out on additional sales.

* You need to take your Yahoo Store to the next level. Whether it's increasing store sales so you can comfortably quit your real job and spend your full time and attention on your Yahoo Store, or simply increase your sales to meet your revenue goals Ystore101 is for you.

Here are a couple of other things you need to know about:

When you come to Ystore101, you get to visit sunny California! I don't think Mike and Istvan really understand how great the weather is in California compared to the rest of the country, especially during these winter months.

Also, MicroTek (the venue that hosts the seminars) is fantastic! You get free snacks (all the diet Coke you can drink!), a continental breakfast, and free high-speed Internet access, so bring your wi-fi enabled laptop!

Look: This seminar is for Yahoo Store owners only. Ystore101 is for serious, professional retailers who want to take care of their customers and ramp up their online sales. If you don't have a Yahoo Store, please don't sign up for Ystore101. Also, if you just opened a new account, but don't have the basics of store building and management down pat, Ystore101 is not for you. This seminar is also not for you if you're looking to get rich quick and cash in on the IPO lottery or spam the search engines.

Here's what you're going to learn at Ystore101:

Get plenty of sleep the night before the seminar because we're going to fill your head with 100+ new Yahoo Store tips and tricks. Everything that you're going to learn when you attend Y!Store101 fits in one of two buckets: how to save time and/or how to make more money.

You will learn how to make more money

My original presentation at Mike and Istvan's Yahoo Store seminar was a case study of how I took a real Yahoo Store from $15,000 a year (gross sales) to over $1.5 million a year in less than three years time. While not exactly typical, this 100-fold increase in sales came from a powerful combination of fixing a pretty ugly store and then driving more shoppers across it. The success of this case study still blows my mind!

When you attend Ystore101, you will learn what I did to this Yahoo Store as well as how I did it. Your store probably won't have a 100 fold increase in sales, but I know you can increase your store's sales by using these very same Yahoo Store specific online marketing strategies and tactics:

* Convert more of the browsers you have into buyers by building buyer confidence and closing the sale. Direct traffic that turns into sales by optimizing your Yahoo! Store for search engines and buying your way to the top with paid search ads.

* Learn the best Yahoo Store layout practices. Get tips and tricks to make your site more usable.

* Collect marketing tips: Learn how to effectively use coupons, trackable links, email marketing, and even researching the competition!

* Diversify your streams of traffic and revenue. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket, whether that's Yahoo Shopping, free search engine traffic, paid search advertising, banners on content sites, marketing to your existing customer base, or offline marketing.

* Profit from my strategy of profitable Internet marketing with keywords. Improve your store by making small changes every day!

* Market more effectively to your existing customer base. Increase sales by adding new products and selling these to your previous customers.

* Make your store a resource, authority, and a destination site. Add articles and other reader and search engine friendly content to your store.

* Measure how you're doing. See what's working and focus your efforts on the marketing that gives you the best bang for the buck.

You will learn how to save time and effort

Save time by learning how to automate repetitive tasks. When you come to the Ystore101 seminar, you'll get an overview of how hundreds of Yahoo Store owners just like you automate repetitive tasks including:

* Uploading product information via database uploads to add new products and update existing ones. Uploading product photos in bulk, hundreds, even thousands at a time

* Exporting order data from the store manager into third-party order management software like Order Motion, Mail Order Manager, and StoneEdge. Never retype any customer information.

* Automating customer shipping notification. Imagine no more emails sent by hand!

* Exporting shipping address data from your Yahoo Store to your UPS WorldShip software. Never type a shipping label again. We'll even show you how to set it up!

Ystore101 Seminar Format

Y!Store101: Day One is a classroom style presentation that runs from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Each segment will last anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes.

Y!Store101: Day Two is a half-day hands-on Yahoo Store workshop in MicroTek's computer lab where you can work on your store. You'll either be in the morning section or the afternoon section. Implement what you learned the day before, or get marketing help and professional feedback on the design and marketing of your Yahoo Store.

Breaks: There will be plenty of breaks in between segments so you can check your e-mail or deal with what ever fires seem to pop up when you are out of the office.

Thursday, Y!Store101, Day One (Lecture)

Lecture - one section from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Learn what you need to know and what you can do with Yahoo Store. Mike, Istvan, and I will walk you through our PowerPoint presentations with an overhead projector. We will also have access to the Internet, so we can go online and show you specific examples of real world applications of all these cool Yahoo Store tips and tricks.

One instructor will present information and the other two will provide color commentary in a panel style set up. Your class size will be small enough so we don't need a public address system or microphones to be heard.

You will be able to ask questions and get feedback and information extremely relevant to your particular Yahoo Store situation. Hopefully, you will participate in discussions and share your experiences and opinions with fellow retailers. If you're shy (like me!), don't worry! We won't pick on you, but the more you participate, the more you learn. How can we cover all this in a single day? Don't worry!

You will not get bogged down in the details. You get a free copy of my Dummies book, Building a Yahoo Business For Dummies (The Yahoo Store Book) as well as copy of Mike and Istvan's latest book, 101 Yahoo Store Tips and Tricks where you get detailed, step-by-step instructions that you can take home and implement all by your lonesome. How-to procedures are provided in both these books and in your additional course materials.

Friday, Y!Store101, Day Two (Lab)

(Computer Lab - two sections: either 9:00 - 1:00 or 1:00 - 5:00 depending on when you sign up)

You'll have a brand-spanking new Windows XP workstation with high-speed Internet access in MicroTek's PC lab. You'll also have three Yahoo Store gurus within shouting distance to answer your questions. I love the format of these labs! We have chosen to limit the class size so there's one instructor for every six seminar attendees in the labs.

On the second day, it's time to get to work! In the labs, you get to show off some of what you learned the day before. On Day Two, what you do is completely up to you! We'll give you some suggestions, but you'll probably have more ideas than you can implement.

The Y!Store101 seminar is a little different than most seminars because the second day is customized for each retailer. You get to focus on your particular needs and get answers to specific answers to your store's situation. You can walk through any of the examples in my book, or Istvan and Mike's books.

If you want, we can give you a personal review of your Yahoo Store, talk you about different templates, show you how to do database uploads, consult on various order management solutions, and generally field questions about the problems and challenges facing your particular Yahoo Store.

On Day Two you can do some or all of the following:

* Find your converting keywords. Learn how to dig keyword gold out of your orders and statistics .

* Get more search engine traffic. We'll look at your search engine optimization efforts and paid search advertising campaigns to show you new ways to get traffic.

* Improve your store's conversion rate. If you have the traffic but they're not buying anything, your store can get a usability and conversion rate improvement analysis.

* Upload product data. If you need help uploading product data, or exporting customer and order information, we'll help you get started.

* Explore RTML questions. Get answers from the folks who know what works on Yahoo Stores.