November Traffic Boost
November 29, 2007 at 12:32 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: online business growth, shopping convenience, shopping online
We’re starting to see more traffic than ever before…we’ve stumbled past the 200 visitor a day mark. Several days in a row have been good. Sales have been slow, but steady. I think many people are out that window shopping. I expect us to shoot past the 5000 visitor a month mark by the time November turns to December.
I know for me, I hate going shopping. Especially during the holiday shopping season when the stores are so packed, that getting out of there as fast as possible is the most appealing thing. I don’t blame many people for searching online for gifts for others or even themselves. Its just more convenient. It saves time and at this time of year, time is the most valuable resource.
If I compare this year’s numbers to last years, it doesn’t even measure on the same scale. We were so new as an online store in November. We didn’t really know what we were doing. If I can project to next year. Where will we be at the end of November 2008? Will we see the 300% growth we’ve seen from 2006 to 2007? Probably not. But I hope we see significant growth. We won’t stop working hard to get new, and quality products on our site and continue to work hard on promoting and branding.
Key Wording Tracking part 2
November 27, 2007 at 1:07 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bag chair, extra large floor pillow
A while back I had posted information about tracking where our top keywords were falling in the search engines…I used Yahoo as a base of reference because it had been giving our top keywords the most significant positions. We held the top position in Yahoo for Floor Pillow….perfect for us, because we have a great selection of quality extra large floor pillows. We have a lot of options for our visitors to choose from. However, in the last few days, our floor pillow keyword has fallen to the second position. It makes no sense why we fell because I am constantly updating and optimizing our site. And falling to the second position is nothing to freak out about. But I hate to see us lose ground.
Worse than that, our Bean Bag Page has fallen off the second page of Yahoo and is now listed as the 31st listing (as of the writing of this post) This is very discouraging, because many people don’t traverse all the way to the 3rd page of the search results. About keyword positions falling, this is probably the worst time of year for our positions to lose ground. Especially today, during “Cyber Monday.” We are seeing a spike in traffic though. And I like when more people pass through our virtual doors.
Black Friday
November 24, 2007 at 3:49 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: black friday, holiday shopping
Since today is the biggest shopping day of the year, I expected most people to be out at the malls and stores across America and shopping for those wonderful deals that retailers put out there. I was surprised to see that some stores were opening at 4am in my area. DoorBusters were rampant. I don’t understand it. I mean this in the nicest way possible, those of you shopping at 4 am…Nuts!
Anyways…I expected today to be a slow sales day. I was right…no sales so far. We actually did get a Thanksgiving day sale. That surprised me. Even though we’ve had no sales so far, our traffic is still pretty normal. Maybe people are out there comparative shopping. I expect the next several days to be pretty good.
Holiday Gift Giving Guide
November 18, 2007 at 12:16 am | In online retailing | Leave a Comment
To make things easier for our customers, and to help people that need some gift giving suggestions, I’ve created a My Pillow Place Gift Giving Guide. I put a link on our side bar navigation right at the top of the page (in the golden triangle) so that no matter which page people land on, they will see it.
We love people who come to browse. We love people even more who come to buy. As a business, we’re doing the best we can to serve our customers. We’re anticipating a busy shopping season. Even though I hear all over the news that retailers are going to be struggling this year.
We’re doing the best we can to promote our products, get visitors to our site and make everyone happy.
Switching to Overdrive
November 17, 2007 at 12:46 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: cyber monday, floor pillows, online holiday shopping, soft furniture
It was right about this time last year that our new business saw a flurry of sales and we started to get excited about the possibility of what our online store could bring us. When I say flurry, that is in comparison to what had been happening from October 2006 to about November 15th 2006 which was almost nothing. I think during that month and a half period last year, we saw about 7 sales…frustration was setting in.
My Pillow Place was still relatively new. We had just added a new supplier of oversized floor pillows and other soft furniture. Since these products were new to us, these product pages weren’t about to show up in the search engines that fast. They weren’t even indexed yet and I did not have the knowledge then that I have now about how to quickly get pages indexed.
Well, based on the fact that a year later, we have more products, better keyword positions and a better selection of quality products than we did just one short year ago, I expected us to see a lot more activity. And don’t get me wrong, we’ve had more sales, more visitors and we seem to be on a good pace as we approach Cyber Monday. But so far, this month feels like each of the last few months. Our traffic has grown slightly. I guess I expected more. I can’t really judge the online shopping season until the holidays are offer, but every month you just strive to do better and when it seems sluggish, it can be frustrating.
Sometimes I think that maybe we picked the wrong market niche. This business would be a great supplement if we had 2 or 3 online stores. But as our only store currently, I want so much more out of it. There are areas we can improve. We have some keyword positions that could be better. Google could be helping us a bit more. And then there’s the fact that the economy, gas prices and housing market are making things sluggish for everyone.
We’re just doing our best as we can now. We’ll see how things go as we move into next week. I’m taking some days off new week from my day job and hope that I can research some new marketing methods to get more traffic to visit us. The good thing is, we’ve had quite a few fabric sample requests…hopefully they come back to buy once they figure out which fabrics they like.
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