Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Have you ever seen those viral videos that people send to each other through email links?  I always hear about these fun videos that people send and then a site that has it posted gets thousands of hits on that day.  It’s crazy.  I needed something to put on our site that can maybe spread through word of mouth, (or email).  I don’t have any crazy and funny videos that people will spread through the land like a wildfire.  But, awhile back I’ve created a comic book that I never published.  So, I decided today that I would put a few pages on the site and link to it through our kids pages and dorm room pages.  At the very least it will help people stay at our site a little longer than they might have.  My comic is an original creation that I spent years working on.  It doesn’t really relate to selling pillows, but it is accessed through the kids furniture section and the dorm room section.  I am making a little stretch there, but as a young kid and a college kid, I read comics…It may bring people and it may not, but its actually cool to see my original work published somewhere. 

 I also spent some time adding a new product.  We’ve added foam filled bean bags in the shapes of baseballs, footballs, basketballs and soccer balls.  It extends our line of Kids furniture.  Traffic has been light the last few days.  I know here in the midwest we got slammed with storms over the past few days.  I wonder if it is keeping people off of their computers.  I know many people lost power in our area, maybe others around the country have too.  These thunderstorms have covered a lot of the middle of the country.  Flooding is rampant.  I’m sure many people have more concerns than shopping online.

Its really hard to tell what makes a visitor buy from you.  There are so many factors that go into it.  I see that we’re still getting right around 150 visitors per day to our site.  On top of that, we’re seeing a conversion rate of about 1%.  But even though that is an acceptable standard, I think it is a low number to shoot for.  I would like to see a conversion rate of around 5-10%.  There must be a way to help increase these numbers from 1% to somewhere around 5%. 

Aside from just converting better, I would like to see our traffic numbers increase.  I’ve noticed that we’ve been hanging in the range of 120-160 visitors per day for about 3 months now and I would really like to see that number start to climb closer to 200.  I’ve added new product recently.  Whenever I add more products I just keep telling myself that these are more pages to get indexed and found by people searching for pillows and soft furniture.  We’re up around 92 pages to our website.  Granted, a bunch of those pages are links pages and general information, but we’re getting up there.

I’ve noticed that a few of our keywords have taken a fall lately.  Not far, just a few slots in Yahoo.  And I’m still waiting for that surge of traffic from Google.  As well as a PageRank update which still hasn’t happened.  Maybe it won’t anytime soon.  I don’t even know why I care about PageRank as it is really just an ego thing.  Search listings are by far more important than your Rank.

I sometimes try to make myself look at our business a month at a time as opposed to day to day.  That is because there is a serious lack of consistency when it comes to getting sales.  Frankly, I don’t know what makes one consumer buy from one site and not another.  I do know that sometimes its hard to find things on a website so a visitor quickly gives up looking.  I also know that sometimes price is a factor. 

Its funny because when you are the consumer, you navigate through websites for different reasons and make decisions to stay, go or buy based on those decisions.  But when you are the one creating the website experience, you just can’t pinpoint the flaws that make people turn away.  The problem is that everyone has different reasons.  There’s no magic bullet that makes everyone happy and turns them into satisfied customers.

I’m writing this post because the last 5 days have been light on traffic and on sales.  We had a stellar first half of August, but I desire to finish strong.  We’re poised to have our best month ever in terms of sales.  But, I’m not satisfied with that because I know we can do much better.  I’ve done so much in terms of updating and optimising our site.  Adding new product and getting the word out about My Pillow Place that until I do more research, I can’t even figure out what else I can do to bring more traffic.

I am pleased with many of the new products we’ve added over the last few months.  We’ve had a decent response to most of them.  That makes me feel like it wasn’t a waste of time creating those pages. Today was a slow day, but I hope tomorrow will be better.