Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

I am writing to introduce the last of the dog beds I am adding from our best Dog Bed Supplier.  Our newest Dog Bed, the Tuckered Out Bolster Dog Bed is now available.  I am pretty pleased with how quickly I was able to get all of the products from this supplier updated and I now have one last thing to do for the customer and for the sake of SEO.  And that is to provide clickable links between these pages for easy navigation as well as for search engine spider crawability.

I have a few new dog beds to add over the weekend, but they are from one of our other vendors.

This week, I’ve realized that I’ve neglected the dog bed portion of our site. And when we added these products over a year ago, I was really excited about the possibility. But due to my neglect, this section of our site has seen little action. So, I went in to overhaul the products and the look of these pages.

On top of that, We have a new line of dog beds that should be up this week. I’m sure I’ll write a post about it when its up because I know all of you wonderful readers can’t get enough about wonderful dog furniture!  I know I can’t. 

I’m glad that one of our existing companies has added a line of dog beds to their offerings, because finding new companies requires jumping through many hoops.  And I just want to add products and move on.  I’m pleased about the rate at which I’ve added new things to our site in the last few weeks.  Keep it rollin’!

I’ve spent my day off today working on improving and updating our large foam chair and small foam chair pages.  These are two product pages that drastically needed attention as I had never updated the fabrics that had changed over the past year.  As a side note, not keeping your products and options up to date can cause you problems with customers if they order that product (ding goes the “obvious” alarm).

I also took that opportunity to add a couple of the very large sizes that I had avoided adding before, the Extra Large and the Extra Extra Large.  I’m not entirely sure of the demand for the really big sizes, but I like to give people the option.  I will spend the rest of my day adding back in our U-Shaped Pillow and updating our dog beds pages.  I just realized now that our dog bed suppliers have changed a bunch of their dog bed products and I have not updated them yet.  It is time to get everything current.

I have been wondering lately if my Blog is a one way ticket to boredom-ville.  I wonder while I write things that are happening to our business and the things I am doing, if this is a snooze fest.  But how would you spice up this topic?  Maybe if I used crazy words to grab attention.  Or maybe if I get controversial and stick odd little comments in on what I think about politics or religion…who knows…I’ll try to be more interesting.  I’m not even sure if I could go back and read a bunch of posts myself before I lost interest.  Kaaaa-Boom!

Here we are in the first few days of March and the first product I have added in 2009 was just added last night.  A while back, I was all about trying to add one new product a week.  That lasted for a short while because you get busy when you run a business.  I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up that pace this year, but I’ll do the best I can.  One of our vendors has a new catalog coming out next week with some new and exciting products.  I’m excited to see what they are and add them to My Pillow Place.

So, the product we added is essentially a square bean bag.  My wife noticed in our stats that we were getting searches for Square Bean Bags, so we went to one of our old, reliable vendors and noticed they had a cube shaped foam chair product that we never added.  So, we did that yesterday.  Let the sales roll in…

An interesting thing that happened to me yesterday is that I was interviewed by a magazine that I subscribe to called “the net effect”.  Its a monthly magazine that puts out cutting edge information about SEO practices.  My interview was regarding what I thought of the magazine and what types of things I used from it that produced increased traffic, sales or improvements to our site.  My interview will be used in a promotional way for the magazine owner’s products, I’m sure.  I thought the biggest benefit will be that we get more exposure for our site.  More exposure never helps.  They say to make your site a brand that people trust.  We’re on our way to doing that.