After releasing my VB Keyword Combiner yesterday I started doing some research to see if anyone else had written a similar tool. I was looking for a tool (either web-based or downloadable) that could combine multiple keyword lists together for use in Adwords or any other PPC advertising program. I wasn't expecting too many results, but to my surprise I found quite a number of them in searches for "keyword combiner" and "keyword combination".

Since the majority of the results I found were web-based tools, I decided to make a web-based version of my own. My Adwords Keyword Combiner is a web-based tool that allows you to enter a list of base keywords, then optionally a list of prefix and suffix keywords and it will generate a new list that contains all possible combinations of the 3 keyword lists.

But how can this be useful? Here's an example. Let's say you owned a website that sold shoes and you wanted to use Adwords to advertise your site. Rather than bidding on a broad serch term like "shoes", you would more than likely bid on a more descriptive search term such as "nike shoes" or "reebok shoes". To make it even better you might even bid on keyphrases containing individual shoe sizes, such as "nike shoes size 10" or "reebok shoes size 11" that bring users to individual product pages with those sizes pre-selected. But what if you had 100 different brands of shoes available on your site and each shoe came in 6 different sizes. That's 600 different possible keyword combinations. On top of that, what if you wanted to bid on the keyword "shoe" and "shoes", that's now 1200 different possible combinations. It would be rather tedious writing out all those keyword variations by hand so that's why I wrote this tool. You simply give it a base word such as "shoes", then tell it which words you want to add before that word, such as "nike" and "reebok", then tell it which words you want to add after that word, such as "size 10" and "size 11". Then it will generate all the different possible combinations that can be made from those words.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

Read the rest of this entry »

As I was going through my old Visual Basic projects I found this one tool I made on July 22, 2006 called "Percent Calculator". It was just a simple Visual Basic program I made that could tell you what percentage one number is of another number. For example, it could tell you what 22% of 86 is or what 32 is, as a percent, out of 50. Sure, these are just simple mathematical operations you could perform in any calculator but it was helpful to me, as a person who just learning Visual Basic for the first time, to see how these operations could be done. Since it was such a simple tool I decided to make a web-based version of it too. If you're one of those people who hates math and needs to calculate a percentage of something, give it a try!

Visit Percent Calculator (Web Version)

Download Percent Calculator (Visual Basic Version)

Read the rest of this entry »

Here's an Amazon Marketplace Fee Calculator I wrote to help people calculate what their fees and profit would be when using Amazon Marketplace. If you've ever bought anything from Amazon.com before you're probably familar with Amazon Marketplace. Amazon Marketplace allows sellers to offer their new and used goods directly alongside Amazon's own offerings. You can easily recognize it by seeing something like this on a product's details page...

In a way, this is similar to eBay's Half.com. Both systems allow you to list your item for an extended period of time without paying any fees until your item sells.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here's my newest online tool, an eBay Motors Fee Calculator. If you've ever wondered how much it would cost to sell a vehicle or vehicle parts and accessories on eBay Motors, then this tool is for you. This calculator supports all of the different vehicle and listing types available on eBay Motors and includes a special option just for Parts & Accessories. You simply enter the price of your item and the calculator figures out what your fees would be and what you would receive after fees if you were to sell an item on eBay Motors for that amount. It includes options for all of the different eBay Motors listing upgrades, has a built-in series of editable fee rate tables, and can optionally include your PayPal fees as well. It also comes with a reverse fee calculator that can tell you what price to charge for your item or what amount to charge for shipping & handling to receive the amount you want after fees.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since a lot of people have been requesting it lately, here's my new eBay Stores Fee Calculator. If you look at the fees page for eBay Stores, you'll notice their fee structure is very different from eBay.com. This is because having an eBay Store requires you to pay a monthly subscription fee and Store listings have an increased duration of 30 days. Store listings also have slightly different visibility on eBay.com, which you can read more about on their FAQ page. Since the fees for eBay Stores are so much different I thought it would be better to make a entirely new calculator just for them rather than adding them as an option into my existing eBay fee calculator.

Read the rest of this entry »