Hmm, I thought Hillary was tweeting out a link to her own site but it looks like. . . wait a minute! Is this The Whine Seller? What the hell? It looks nothing like itself. When did she . . . where is the . . . God, I need a drink. -You, right now, with your mind blown

Miss me? :-*

Well my friends are all wedded and bedded (one assumes!!) and I am slowly emerging on the other side of one of the busiest summers on record. As I reemerge from the pile of work like some kind of rubbish phoenix, I turn to you, my humble readers for a little assistance.

Let me back up. I started this blog in literally seconds on September 30th, 2008. You may see posts that are older than the site but those are nothing but filthy cheats on my part as I imported them from another blog when I decided to split this off into a blog all it’s own. I grabbed the first WordPress theme that I could find and threw it up before I tweeted out that very first link to you. I’m not going to link to that first article because about half of you hated it. 🙂

But that “temporary” theme I threw up there was slow, impersonal, stupidly sized for ads and never worked with the plugins that I wanted it to work with. I hated it. “Get new theme for Whine Seller” has been on my To Do list for nearly a full year.

Well, at long last, I am relaunching the site with what I hope is a better and more fitting theme. This is where that favor I mentioned earlier comes in.

I am going on a Blog Tour starting on September 7th, 2009 to promote the relaunched Whine Seller. I would like one of my stops to be your blog, if you’ll have me.

Blog Tours are very big in author circles but for the benefit of my e-commerce readers who may not be familiar with the term, let me explain what it is. Simply put, just like a “Book Tour” where an author would go from TV show to TV show or newspaper to newspaper shilling their book, a Blog Tour is a similar round of interviews where the person in question goes from blog to blog. When you do a Blog Tour, you go from blog to blog doing interviews as a guest blogger to get exposure for whatever you are touring.

If you can promote a book with a Blog Tour, stands to reason you can promote anything, I say. A Blog Tour for a new webstore, a sale, a new podcast, a relaunched website perhaps. . . well I’m going to test out this theory.

Benefits for me: People will hear about The Whine Seller and maybe visit.

Benefits for you, the hosting blog: You don’t have to write a post for one day since I will provide most of the content and you may get some extra traffic out of the deal as I will send readers your way in turn to read the interview.

I have never actually done one of these before but, heck, let’s give it a shot. Sounds like fun, right?

“I would love for my blog to be a stop on your tour,” you ask. “What would I need to do?“

If you are game for this little experiment, first just let me know via email. Once you and I figure out the when element (I’m hoping to post a schedule of “appearances” ahead of time), then you just need to write up questions that you want me to answer. I am setting a general limit of 5 questions per blog but this is just a general guideline so if you absolutely have to ask more or less, that is fine. The limit is just so I don’t have to answer a billion questions when everything is done.

What kind of questions can you ask?

I am happy to chat about any just about anything. A few suggestions are. . . .

  • Selling or buying online, especially regarding the following: eBay, Lulu, Amazon, Bonanzle, etc
  • Social networking: Twitter, Facebook, etc
  • Marketing, branding, blogging (both for writers and e-commerce)
  • Self-publishing and print-on-demand including Booksurge, LSI, Lulu.com, etc
  • Collecting as a hobby/selling collectibles
  • Being an eBay Trading Assistant

What kind of interviews will I do?

  • Text interviews: You email me the questions. I type out the answers and email them back for you to post.
  • Audio interviews: If you want to give me a call to chat on your podcast or internet radio show, I am totally game.
  • Video interviews: I own a webcam so if you have the technology on your end to do an interview that way, let’s make it happen! 

I am putting out the notice of this far enough in advance to get this scheduled up ahead of time. This will also give me enough time to promote the upcoming blog tour stops so, if you are interested, please let me know and we shall set up the details.

Any general questions, please let me know below. As you would expect, I will blog about how the whole process goes after the fact so the curious will get a full report.

Again, if you are interested, you can email me here.

So, now that we are done with all the business, how do you like the new site?