Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

I’ve recently re-activated my adwords account to try and buy some traffic for products that should be selling well, but just aren’t getting enough love from the search engines. I’ve been testing out some new and highly specific ads that reduce the number of clicks I get, but the visitors that do come are highly targeted and hopefully potential buyers. I’ve used my Soft Foam Furniture products as the Guinea Pig.

I’ve also used our Large FUF Chairs and Small FUF Chair pages as very specific product pages to people will visit if they click those ads.  There are less, but more specific keywords that will come up as people go ahead and type those words into the Google Seach Bar.

I’m hoping for some sales out of this campaign.  We also have a 5% coupon code running until the 4th of July.  The coupon codeword is at the top of the left side navigation on every page.  We’ve already got a sale using to code.  I used a waving American Flag gif that will grab peoples attention before they make their purchase…

All of these things are geared to help us increase sales and finish June off strong and start July off the same way.  We are now 6 months through the year.  Its not hard to guess that due to the economy, we’re not matching the sales that we saw last year.  And a side by side comparison of the first 6 months of 2008 and the first 6 of 2009 are very different.  But maybe we can make up some ground if we have a strong 2nd half of 2009.

It took a week and a lot of hard work, but I’ve finally added the last item on my list of modern kids furniture products.  Our Jaxx Sphere Jr. Foam Chair was the final product on my list and now I can move forward and start working on our next site www.yourhomescape.com which will hopefully be up and running in the next week or so.  I also spent some of today creating a new Squidoo Lens to help promote our Modern Kids Funiture  products.  

I’ve worked more in the last week than I have in the last several months.  I’m excited about the possibilities of where our business can go once the economy turns around (unless we’re taxed back to the poor house).  So, even though its slow now, I’m prepping for the turnaround and just sitting here waiting for it to get going.

I know that it is only the second day of summer, but we’re seeing a tremendous jump in traffic relating to back to school items.  In light of that, its never too early to start promoting your back to school products such as dorm room furniture and accessories.  Last year I created a splash page specifically for the purpose of marketing certain products to kids going away to college.  Its always hard to determine how best to market to groups of people who you think would benefit from your products.  On the internet, its about figuring out how people search for the products they want.  So this year I am targeting a group going “Back to School” rather than “people searching for Dorm Furniture.”

In addition to my new marketing push, I’ve adding to my modern kids furniture lineup…in the last two days, I’ve added our Kids Lounger and Kids Foam Chair products.  Both quality products that we’re excited about.  I’m almost done adding product to our site for awhile and then I can concentrate on some other website projects that I’ve been planning.  All in all, in spite of the poor economy and my job loss, working on our internet business has been fun and exciting.

As My Pillow Place goes through several changes as I update and add product, I’m finding myself replacing old pages with new pages, rather than starting a new page from scratch.  Due to the fact that one of our lesser suppliers recently went out of business, I was stuck with two product pages that are no longer in use.  Due to the fact that I would rather recycle a page already in the Indexes of the the major search engines rather than start from scratch, I reused our old 18×18 plush throw pillow page.  It is now a part of our Kids Modern Furniture section.  And I made that specific page into our Jaxx Club Jr. Chair.  Simmer down! I know this is really exciting stuff.  Sometimes I amaze myself with how exciting these posts get. 

Ok…now that I’ve contained myself, I’ll continue….wooooo!

Anyways…the thing that I’ve never done before, as this post title suggests, is I actually went back and updated one of the articles I wrote many moons ago.  I know…exciting stuff again…(note to self…stop being so awesome!)  The reason for this, is that many of the pages that article linked to are of products I’ve removed…some of the information in the article is irrelevant now.  You add articles to your website to give content for the search engines to chew on.  The more often you add text rich content (such as said article) the better Google and the others like it.  So my updated article Decorating with Pillows now has new content and updated links.  (I know, crazy stuff…)

Next time I post, I’ll try to keep the excitement level to a minimum…its just so hard sometimes…

I spent my 2nd day of my recent layoff adding a new product to our lineup. We have a very popular product called the comfy cocoon which is a large round floor pillow/foam chair.  I’ve been clamouring for our supplier to create smaller version for kids that is not only high quality but available at a much lower price point.  They came up with the Cocoon Jr..  

This is the first of a line of smaller, modern and quality kids soft furnishings which are a little more contemporary than our kids play furniture as the next week goes by, I will be adding up to 5 more new products that round out this product group.  I love added new product.  The more products we add, the more opportunity we have to see high quality products.

I hope this kids line is every bit as popular as our adult line.  And my biggest issue now is to figure out how to market it.