Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

I’ve written before about how many stores in my town are showing signs of “for sale or for rent” because businesses are closing at a record pace.  Its been difficult to get excited about business when you turn on the news everyday and its incredibly negative.  I’ve actually been stressed out about the economy.  And I’m one who has a job and a business.  But the fear is that there is no end in sight.

I know there is and we will continue to work hard and prepare our business for the good times ahead.  I’m still working at adding links to our site.  Google still seems to not be recognizing our link volume.  That I can’t figure out.   I wrote about our link problems with google in this post viradian.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/links-coming-back/ and we’re still fighting to get Google to rank us higher.

I’ve also starting doing research about setting up an affiliate site.  We’d love to do a new site, but I don’t want to deal with a new set of customers.  I would just love to be paid to promote other people’s products and let them hand customer service and fullfilment.

About a year ago, we added Dog Beds and Pillows to My Pillow Place so that we could expand our product line.  However, we’ve had very few sales of dog beds over the last 12 months.  Why is this?  Is it because our products are poor?  No, we have a few of the best dog bed companies that we could find….quality products, good customer service…I would attribute it more to the fact that we don’t get enough traffic specifically for Dog Beds. 

People who come to our site find us in the pillow category.  But dog beds are so competitive, that getting listed in the search engines for those keywords is a daunting task.  We actually have the same problem with Bean Bags.  We have great Dog Pillows.  We have the bumper dog beds that people love.  We have the typical flat nap dog beds that you see everywhere….We even have eco-friendly dog beds made out of recycled materials. 

One of our existing vendors is adding a line of dog beds to their products SKUs, so we will of course be adding those as soon as they are available.  I’ve got to concentrate on promoting our dog bed line because if I can get more people searching on our site for those products, it will really help My Pillow Place grow.

2009 has been stressful for business owners.  I see in my own little town that many stores are going out of business.  Strip malls have stores that are showing more and more “for rent” signs.  The economy seems to be getting worse every day.  Online businesses have a different set of circumstances because there is little overhead cost to running a web store.  But sales still drive the business in order to compensate us for our time which is substantial.  And as February continues, we’ve actually seen a slight pick up in business.

Nothing crazy, but a few more sales at this point in February as compared to January.  The worst thing is, where we’re looking to grow our business, I feel like stagnation is taking over.   We can increase traffic to our site.  We do our best to make it easy for people to buy.  But we’re hoping to match last year’s sale numbers when we should be aiming to demolish them. 

This entire economy has made our vendors slow in introducing new products.  They raise our costs for shipping and sometimes the products.  We’re forced to keep our products priced lower than we want because we don’t want to scare potential customers away if money might be tight.  Essentially, we’re doing our best to weather the storm.

I am seeing more and more people I know who are losing their jobs in this horrible economy.  Even though I have a regular 9 to 5 job, in addition to owning www.my-pillow-place.com, I have fears that my day job is not as secure as it could be.  I feel thankful that we have enough work to keep us busy now.  But what happens in 2 months when our projects are completed?  We’ve already lost a few people when the government decided to bail out the banks and loans were frozen. 

No business is recession proof.  I know that if the economy were healthy right now, we’d be seeing some substaintial sales.  Right now, orders are trickling in.  Nothing to write home about.  We’re seeing sales plateau.  I’d like to see the bar chart show us trending upwards.  But, I think it will get worse before it gets better.

This does give us time to re-evaulate our site.  See where we can optimize pages to see where more traffic can be gained.  I’ve been real lax, lately on fixing the site.  That’s such a dramatic change since I started making radical site changes back in October.  A website needs to constantly change and evolve.  New content needs to be added all the time.  If it doesn’t, search engines lose interest and your listings fall back.