Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

I’ll start out by saying that as August comes to a close, it has been a much better month for sales than both July and May.  We’re still not where we want to be, but as we keep track month to month, things seem to be improving.  That is a good thing, however talk of a double dip recession coming are not boding well for the future.  Deficit spending is killing the economy and people still are getting laid off.  I don’t need to tell you that people without jobs don’t buy Floor Pillows and Bean Bags.

Speaking of bean bags, we’ve just added an Adult sized BeanBag to our bean bag section.  Its a product that I’m not exactly sure why we never added before because its been available to us for a long while.  However, we now have it up and I hope people like it.  I guess I would market it as a product that people looking for the nostalgic 70s furnishings might want.  The nice thing is this Bean Bag comes with an inner liner. The liner smooths out the furniture and also lets you remove the cover for spot cleaning and even machine washing (if you get a machine washable fabric).

I still struggle to get our Bean Bag Pages noticed in the search engines.  There is a lot of competition for bean bags.  And I’ll be honest, I’d rather sell Foam Chairs.  I think they’re better, I think they’re more comfortable…They definately last longer.  But the fact is that more people know about bean bags than know about foam chairs.  Not too long ago, my local mall had a store in it that sold foam chairs in it.  I remember walking by the store and you’d see people sitting on the foam chairs they had spread around the room. But that store went out of business.  And I’m sure other malls, in other cities saw the same fate.   Now, it seems the only place to buy these things is online.  I guess that’s good for us.  We do sell the foam furniture.  It sells pretty well.  And I’m sure the fact that most stores carrying these products don’t exist anymore helps us.

Posting is becoming a challenge because so much seems to be going on right now. Sometimes you work really hard and the fruits of your labor are not always rewarded. Not right away, at least. I feel like we are preparing for a time when the economy is recovered and people have a little extra money to spend on non-essentials. I’ve been unemployed from my Architecture job for just about 2 months now. That means, www.my-pillow-place.com is very important. Making this site as good as it can be with the best quality products is very important. Giving good customer service is now more important than ever. (It was always important to us, now even more so!)

One thing I’ve been proud of is that our traffic seems to be improving.  That doesn’t necessarily mean more sales, but we’re getting exposure.  Maybe there are ways to improve each product page so that people know they need to buy what we’re selling.  Maybe its just people visiting our site to buy things in the future.  We always encourage people to bookmark our site so they can come back later.  There is an easy “bookmark this site” link at the top of the home page.  Click the link and it adds My Pillow Place to your favorites automatically.  I’ve heard that sometimes people visit a site up to 6 times before they actually decide to make a purchase.

Sometimes we see some people who have visited a large number of pages on our site.  Sometimes in the neighborhood of 60 or 70 pages.  Maybe they are not there to buy anything, just to check out my pillow place….like competition, or suppliers who may want to offer their products through our store.  But its weird to see that sometimes.  All in all, we’re working hard on My Pillow Place.  Some new products will be on our site as we approach the holiday season.  Also, we’re working hard on building a large amount of useful and entertaining content at yourhomescape.com.  Its an exciting endeavor.  I would love to see improved success on both sites.  We just want to give people information and products that they will like a lot. Still working hard…never gonna quit!

I’ve been taking the last month and a half of my unemployment trying to learn about affiliate marketing.  Affiliate marketing is where you associate yourself with a company and promote their products.  Through special tracking software, the company can tell if a customer came from your promotion and if a sale is made, you earn a commission.  Its much different than the online retail world of My Pillow Place.  So, now we’re are essentially trying to run two websites, and then there’s my contributions to this blog a few times a week.

Home Living Style 

Our affiliate site, Your Homescape.com is based on Home and Garden improvement related to architecture, landscaping and interior design.  I am using my architectural background, as well as people who I know in the industry to contribute articles and information on improving and enhancing people’s homes.  In the midst of these articles and posts, I sprinkle in some related advertisements in the hopes that people will come for the content and then buy a related item.  I’ve been working for over a month straight on this new site.  Its been hard.  I’ve been trying to add appropriate, home related content as quickly as possible.  But getting visitors to a new site organically ( i.e. not through pay per clicks) has proved difficult.

I feel that my articles and posts can attract people through Google and Yahoo, but casting as wide a net as possible (writing many content rich articles) takes some time.  I’ve written about 4 articles so far.  I will try to add 2-3 articles per week.  I’ve then tried to find appropriate affiliate partners to give my articles some weight with applicable products.  For instance, I wrote a Bedroom Closet article yesterday, and found a perfect affiliate that sells closet organization products.  That product combo, with my article sounds like a win.  But traffic is still trickling in.  4-10 people a day will not create any income.

On a happier note, My Pillow Place traffic and sales are picking up in August…the back to school season is in full swing and perhaps peoples wallets are loosening because of it.

We put on a coupon code over the weekend to try to drum up some business.  August started with a few sales, however none of those customers used to code.  I keep thinking to myself, “how many people would be motivated to buy if they new they would get an extra 5% off instantly?”  Did they not see the code?  Its located at the very top of the left side navigation…It has an animated image there to draw your eye to that location.

Are people really not seeing it?  So we tried a little experiment today.  At the very top of My Pillow Place, on every page, there is a little note telling people  that everything at My Pillow Place ships for free.  Again, another factor to help motivate sales. But today, I changed that message to say, “Coupon Code Ends Today, Save Now!” to help those who are on the fence about making a purchase to “do it today, don’t wait until tomorrow.”

So far, so good…a sale came in an hour later, and they used the coupon code.  Tomorrow, I will be trying a new formatting technique for our entire site.  I’ll write about it after its in place, just to make sure it works the way I want.  Several things have happened over the last week.  I got our Large FUF Chair and Small FUF Chair pages on the first page of Google for both the “FUF Chair” and “FUF Chairs” keywords.  It took me about 4 weeks, but I went from pages 5 and 6 respectively, to page 1…now, I am vying for the top spot because that could be a great source of traffic for us.

Also, we’re continuing to see a jump for dorm room accessories.  Some of these soft foam furniture pieces we sell are just great  for dorm rooms and college apartments.  So, we need to market to the “going back to school” crowd.  Other than that, I’ve been very please with our growing traffic numbers, now, I need to motivate those visitors to buy…remember, it helps the economy.