Thanks for visiting the blog. If you haven’t noticed, we’ve sort of been neglecting the Hermansen Brothers Blog since the beginning of its existence. If you have been trying to follow us, we apologize. We have been VERY pre-occupied with our new project and it is finally here.

The new project is called Store Coach. You can check it out at http://storecoach.com. Store Coach is a 100% free eCommerce training course. There are (or will be) hundreds of videos, hundreds of articles, and even more free help in the Store Coach Community Forum. Right now we are in a Beta period, but that shouldn’t stop you from heading over and creating a free account.

We start at the very beginning and teach you all of the basics about eCommerce. We cover everything from finding a niche to sell in, finding a good domain name, and building your store to a point where you are making good money. With your free account you will also get access to some AMAZING tools. The process that used to take us hours, if not days, to find a niche to sell in now takes a matter of seconds. It really is incredible.

Even if you ultimately decide that eCommerce isn’t for you, go check the site out. The account is free and it’s worth looking into.

Many of you may have signed up for our Flipping Websites course from over 2 years ago. Well, this is it. The program has evolved and changed into what we now call Store Coach.

I’m the 2nd Hermansen brother, just younger than Dave and just older than Mike. I think all 3 of us caught the entrepreneur bug from our Dad. When we were young, instead of playing video games like “normal kids”, we’d play a “fake money” game where each of us ran a business and traded completely worthless goods and services with each other. I typically ran 3 businesses: a bank, an art gallery (featuring my own masterpieces), and a sort of game show. Strange combination, I know!

I took a more “traditional” approach with school and career path than Dave or Mike. I graduated with a bachelors and masters degree in accounting and tax (yuck, I know!) and worked for a CPA firm for three and a half years. I was running a few different online businesses on the side, which is the only thing that kept me sane. Throughout those years I spent in “corporate America”, Dave and Mike invited me to join them several times. But I was making good money and climbing the corporate ladder quickly, and I guess I was a little scared to make the plunge into self-employment.

But as time went on, I could see that Dave and Mike were making more money than I was and, more importantly, they LOVED going to work every day. I couldn’t say the same! So in August 2009 I quit my job (raising a lot of eyebrows at the firm) and joined the Hermansen Brothers team. I’ve never looked back. I make more money now than I did at the firm. And there’s something truly amazing about being able to say that you ENJOY going to work. Very few people can say that, and I’m grateful to be one of them!

What we’ve built at StoreCoach.com is, in my completely unbiased opinion , the best ecommerce resource on the web. The free video-based training is straightforward, easy to follow, and totally comprehensive. You’ll learn the exact process we’ve used to build dozens of highly profitable ecommerce stores. Plus we offer all kinds of tools for helping you through the entire process, tools that save oodles of time and boost your likelihood of success exponentially.

On a personal note, I’m happily married and have 4 great kids, all boys except 3. I enjoy sports (basketball, soccer, ping pong, volleyball, tennis & racquetball), water skiing & wake boarding, strategy-type board games, reading, and spending time with my family.

Just thought that I would throw up a real quick tip for anybody in eCommerce. One of the quickest and easiest way to start getting traffic to your online store is to put all of your products up in free shopping portals. There aren’t many FREE portals out there, but there are a few. The best part of all is you can use 1 type of feed for all of them.

We are the owners of FrogIt, a 100% free for merchants shopping portal. At FrogIt, you can have your products added to our site within a matter of minutes. If you have multiple eCommerce stores then you can add all of your stores into a single FrogIt account. Most portals are not set up this way. You would usually have to create a new account for each store. Within your merchant account, you can choose to give additional information about your store. You can enter shipping information for your products, your social networking links, hours of operation, contact us pages, etc. All of this information will be displayed to the shoppers at FrogIt to help them make an educated decision about where to shop.

Like I said, we are the owners of FrogIt, and we encourage anyone and everyone to head over to the Merchant Center and create a free account. In addition to FrogIt, there are a few other places that every new store should get listed in if they want to be successful right off the bat. These place are Google Shopping and TheFind. If you have your products listed in all three of these free shopping portals, you should already be seeing some sales trickling in on your brand new store.

Even as a child, I remember being fascinated with business. I loved watching businesses grow and develop. I loved seeing new businesses pop up and I loved to imagine that I was the owner of that business and try to guess how much it cost them to start that business, pay the employees, pay for the product and the utilities and determine how much money that owner was making.

Back then, internet businesses were a fairly new concept. I knew for a fact that when I grew up I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I didn’t know exactly how I was going to go about doing that. Well, as I was going through college, my brother, Dave (Coach), was really getting started in eCommerce. At that point, I didn’t even know what he was really doing. I knew he was making great money. I also knew that he was working for himself from home and didn’t have to answer to anyone.

When Dave came to me and asked me if I wanted to start an eCommerce store with him, I jumped at the opportunity. I had no clue how to do anything on a computer but I was eager to learn. The first store that I was involved in was http://www.jerryspaintball.com. When we built that store, we weren’t even to the point yet of using an eCommerce store solution. We built the entire site using Microsoft Frontpage. All of the pages on the site were 100% custom html. We had to build in our own “Buy it Now” buttons, had to build the breadcrumbs from scratch, etc. It was a real pain in the rear end. I was a total newbie so it took longer than it probably had to, but I literally spent months building out that store. The most impressive part of all… Dave taught me html OVER THE PHONE. He told me to open up this page and look at this line and add in this piece of code. It was a very tedious process but it did the trick.

Within three months, we had built a site for a few hundred dollars and sold it for $60,000. I was of course hooked on eCommerce at that point and haven’t looked back since.

At Store Coach, you really have no idea what you have your hands on. What took us 3 months to build literally takes Store Coach members a day or two to build. It took us days, even weeks sometimes to find a niche that was worth going into. The tools at Coach make it possible to find a killer niche within seconds. It seriously amazes me the kind of tools that we have here. Please, take advantage.

Now about me… I have a beautiful wife, Barbara, and three awesome girls. I’m about 15 credits away from getting my degree in Entrepreneurial Management, which I intend on finishing up here soon. I spent most of my college days at Idaho State University, but I’ll end up finishing up school at Boise State University since that is where I now live.

I make a full time living online. I am part owner on several eCommerce stores. We are also the owners and creators of an up-and-coming shopping portal, and of course, Store Coach.

If you own a website and you are constantly tracking your rankings in Google, you’ve probably noticed that your rankings have recently fallen dramatically (in most cases) or they have taken a complete turn for the better. I hope for your sake that you fit somewhere on the latter end of that statement. Let me open this article up by telling you of our experience with SEO.

My very first experience with eCommerce was building out jerryspaintball.com. This was several years ago now. I was a newbie to eCommerce and SEO and really had no clue what I was doing at that point. While I built the store, Dave did the SEO. Dave was my mentor and teacher and taught me the in’s and out’s of building a web page. I was simply not allowed to copy a single word of content from another website. Although it was tempting at times, every word of that website was 100% unique content. The product descriptions took a lot of time to type out. After the first 30 products, it was tough to think of unique content to write about on the remaining 150 similar items. After a month or so, I had done it… All 180 products (or about that) were complete.

While I was building the website, Dave was doing the SEO. Typically, SEO would be hired out to the so called “professionals.” But that’s not what Dave did. Instead, Dave spent about 30 minutes every day doing SEO. He didn’t bother paying for a single link. He also didn’t bother contacting the webmasters of completely unrelated sites requesting link exchanges. The ONLY thing he did was spend a few minutes each day finding highly related websites that were willing to link to our uniquely written webpages.

Now, I tell you this story for the purpose of emphasizing two things…

1. Unique content

2. Steady, Solid Link building

Let’s step back for a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of a searcher. As a person searching for a particular item to purchase or a subject to study, you could not care less about how many backlinks are going to a particular page. All you care about is the content that is on a page. If the content is good, then you are going to stay on that page and you are going to make a purchase or you are going to do your research. If the content is bad then you are almost immediately going to leave the page and not ever come back. Let’s face it… the creators of Google are geniuses. I HIGHLY doubt that the content of a webpage is simply skimmed over, as many SEO gurus may suggest. I believe that content is king. Before you should worry about a single backlink to your website, start worrying about the uniqueness and quality of your website. The better the content, the better your rankings will be… PERIOD.

Now, let’s again pretend that I am a searcher for a moment. Do I care about the NUMBER of backlinks to a webpage? NO. Again… all I care about is the quality and content of the webpage that I am visiting.

So are backlinks important at all? The answer is YES!! Backlinks to a website are very important. Backlinks are what helps Google decide what site is looked to as an authority in the market. Backlinks are what help Google decide how much trust to put in your site. But do you really think for a minute that the quantity of backlinks matter? I sure don’t. I think a lot of sites would be much better off if they went around requesting link removals rather than link requests, and here is why… If I own a website that is completely centered around ‘baseball,’ why on earth would a link from a website that is centered around ‘cooking’ help me out??? That is like asking an auto-mechanic to give the nod of approval on a plumbers work. It makes no sense. Google will take one look at that backlink and immediately know that something fishy is going on. Google may not penalize you for a bad, unrelated link, but they sure aren’t going to reward you for it either. It will look a lot better to Google if you have 30 related links than 1000 unrelated links.

The truth is, it is a whole lot easier to hire an SEO firm to do a bunch of link building for you and cross your fingers and hope that your rankings are magically going to rise to the top, but I doubt that will happen. The Panda Update is about getting rankings back on track and rewarding the companies that are doing it correctly. If you have a crap site, then you will have crap rankings. If you have crap backlinks, same thing.

To learn more about our tactics and techniques, visit storecoach.com

A couple of years ago, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by the New York Times to interview us about our success in eCommerce. You can check out the article here.

It’s not very often that you get an opportunity like this. In fact, when we got the email from the reporter at the New York Times, we thought it was a practical joke of some sort. We knew that we had had some pretty good successes, but enough to attract the attention of the world’s biggest newspaper? Apparently so. The New York Times had heard about us because we had recently sold a website on flippa (previously known as sitepoint) for $173,000. A year or so before that, we had sold another site that we had built for $60,000. The reporter from the New York Times contacted Flippa in hopes of talking to a few people that had sold sites for a lot of money throughout the past year. For that period of time, at least, we were at the very top of the list.

What’s funny about the whole thing is we didn’t even plan on becoming known as the “website flippers.” We were just doing our job and when we thought that it was time to move onto another project, we’d just sell the stores off. We had no intention of doing it for a living. As soon as the New York Times featured us in the paper, we were almost instantly contacted by Fox Business News and Kurt the Cyberguy. We were also featured in hundreds of affiliated programs and papers across the country.

With the instant bombardment of exposure we knew that it was the perfect time to launch a training course about eCommerce. We had been bouncing ideas around for several months about starting a training course, but it was a no brainer at that point. Within a few weeks, we opened up a VERY small video series here at hermansenbrothers.com. Within a few short weeks we had a hundred or so signups and we were starting to make some decent money with it. Over the past few years, that training course has evolved into what we now call Store Coach. The training at Store Coach is 100% free for all users. All you have to do is create a free account and go check it out.

Thank you for visiting the Hermansen Brothers blog, where we help you succeed in eCommerce. We encourage you to visit often and contribute by leaving useful comments or asking questions. Within a very short period of time you will begin to see your knowledge of eCommerce expand and sales from your eCommerce website start to skyrocket.

Dave, the oldest brother, got started in eCommerce over 7 years ago. He started out with very little knowledge but a huge desire to learn and expand his knowledge. He stumbled upon the bird cage market and within a short period of time, his website became one of the biggest online stores in the industry. After only 2 short years, that store sold for over $170,000! In the meantime, Dave partnered with his brother, Mike, and built and sold many stores in various markets… a paintball store purchased for $200 and sold for $60,000 after only 4 months… an auto upgrade store purchased for a few hundred bucks and sold for $18,000… a pet store purchased as a new domain for $8 and sold for $40,000… The list goes on and on and on (see the entire list here).

In 2009, Dave and Mike partnered with their other brother, Kevin, and together built over 20 eCommerce stores. When it comes to eCommerce, they know what they’re doing.

Here at the Hermansen Brothers Blog, we will be sharing tips, tricks, and secrets about ways to increase your sales and ultimately make more money from your websites.

Feel free to ask questions and give us feedback. We know a lot but we certainly don’t know it all. We want to hear what you have to say.