I launched my eBook store a few days ago that I blogged about previously. Today I had my very first sale. Sure it was only $20 but I’m still excited because every sale is just profit, and the entire sale is automated. My only cost is developing the site.

I feel the project is working as planned because in a week I’ve gone from no website to achieving quite a few tasks:

• Installed Zen Cart
• Found a template and modified the crap out of it with my own logos, favicon.ico, etc.
• Setup up the PayPal modules to automate the payment process easily
• Inspected the product download systems to ensure security of the products
• Figured out how to provide product images to Zen Cart
• Submitted an XML sitemap to Google which ultimately was the only links to the website
• Several days later after getting indexed in Google, having several specific keyword hits from Google where my website appears in the top 3 results for those search terms. Additionally for those keywords my website is certainly the most relevant result Google returns so I’m predicting the ranking will only go up

So far I’ve only added about one third of the total product range. I plan on investing all profits from this project for at least the first 6 months in product expansion. However it seems the challenge with this project is it may quickly become a full time occupation. Then again it may not, because I don’t really know the depth of the market and probably nobody does due to how unique the market actually is.

Depending on how sales actually unfold I may even invest in some online advertising but at this point that seems unnecessary due to the extremely good search ranking I’ve achieved very quickly at no cost. Perhaps with some of the products I intend to expand my range with, I may need to invest in advertising in order to bust into these markets.

I did actually manage to track down a single competitor. They also run Zen Cart except with a default theme and have quite a clunky website. Running the same scripts I’ve quickly out-ranked them on Google through the use of good design and the XML sitemap likely made a significant dent.

I should also make it clear that I won’t mention the name of this website because the topics I discuss with that business could potentially be useful to competitors, but I am trying to blog about it in a way that inspires thinking outside the box for new business ideas.