Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Yesterday morning I checked the links google is showing by using the link:www.my-pillow-place.com command in the Google search box.  It said 8…so that means…I have gone from 32 links to 8 in less than a month.  And considering that I have traded more links in the last 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 years before that, this did not make sense.

I checked again at the end of the day yesterday, and my link total had grown to 21.  This is a good sign.  Either my links are coming back or Google is finally indexing the recent link exchanges I’ve been making.

On another note.  We’ve been having some trouble with some of our Vendors.  The economy is taking a toll and some of them are cutting back on their drop ship programs…some are reducing staff.  As a result, their customer service has not been what it should be and we’re not getting product out as fast as we’d like.  So, in 2009, My Pillow Place will have some new product lines from some new companies.  We’ve started contacting the suppliers we’re interested in and getting the paper work squared away to set up our accounts. 

Its exciting to make changes to your business.  You get rid of the products that are not selling and you add products that could do much better.  As well as getting some new business relationships that can grow over time.  Even though the economy is tough, our Square Floor Pillows seem to be doing well for us still.  We’re still happy to be doing our business and getting more exposure.  Even with the poor economy, our traffic numbers will be the most we’ve had in any month since we’ve been in business.

In an effort to widen our net for traffic, sales and product.  We’ve created a splash page for Video Game Furniture at My Pillow Place.  I’ve taken a small sample of products that we have listed in some of our other categories and assembled them into one location.  I’ve also added a new product that will be featured in this video game chair line. 

This is another example of how we’re trying to expand the uses of our soft furniture.  We want to show our visitors that these items have flexibility and can be used in many different situations.  Its another opportunity to grab the traffic that is out there and bring it to us.  Our feeling is, the more eyeballs that come to our site, the more exposure we get.

I have been trading links like a madman over the last several weeks and what has been insane is that every couple of days, Google shows the number of links I have going down, not up.  I’ve seen a slight bump in Yahoo, but nothing significant.  Now I understand that Google may take longer to index some of my newly gained link partners and also doesn’t always show all of the links it knows about…but I expected to see a little bump in the positive direction…I just don’t understand why the number is going down.  I will continue to trade links and improve the popularity of my site.

I had optimized one of our round floor pillow pages for the keyword Cushion Pillow and was not getting the results I was looking for.  So this morning I went ahead and rewrote some of the text on that page and will also seek some more links to it using appropriate anchor text. Hopefully this does the trick.  All things considered, it should bring me some results.

I’ve been on a huge decorative pillow kick lately.  The supposed traffic volume for this type of product is too great to ignore.  I’ve added a new decorative kids pillow to our site, which comes from one of our existing vendors. We’re experimenting with pricing on this item because I’m not sure what the shipping costs will be for us. 

I’m not sure if its due to the season or if my optimization techniques have been paying off, but we’re seeing a little bit of a spike in traffic this month.  We’re seeing well over 400 people per day.  I’ve noticed that our site is getting linked in several forums which is causing a bunch of people to click through to My Pillow Place.  We’re definately getting more exposure.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’d like to see how our business would be doing in a good economy.

My Bean Bag problem continues.  I can’t make any headway in higher listings for that keyword.  In fact my poor listing has led to a virtual de-listing of my important pages. That makes no sense.  So, I may have to try this from a different angle.  I’d like to start over and see if I can make this problem go away.  I’ll focus on longer tailed keyword phrases such as Adult Bean Bags and Kids Bean Bags.  As well as my continued efforts to trade links with many other websites.