Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

I’ve been spending (wasting) a lot of my days lately updating one of our suppliers product line because they keep discontinuing products.  This really sucks, because our product line keeps shrinking.  In response, we are racing to find new companies to boost our product line.  Here’s a pro tip:  Do not put all of your eggs in one basket.  If you find that you are relying on one or two companies for the bulk of your sales, diversify as much as possible.  If that company ever has an issue or goes out of business, you will be screwed.

One of our competitors rely’s on this one vendor almost completely.  And they are losing product left and right.  On another note, I have re-defined a few of our products with some new meta and title tags to help boost traffic on these products.  Our Square Animal Pillows for Kids as well as our Round Animal Pillows need to get more exposure.  These products have been redesigned based on customer feedback that we passed along to our manufacturer.  So, its time to push these wonderful children’s pillows.

Also, yesterday I, in the name of diversification of manufacturers, have just added a giant Bean Bag Pillow that can be used indoors as well as outside.  Its a unique product in our line because of the fact you can use it outside on your pool deck or even just in your backyard.  I hope we sell this product, because I like it a lot.

I’ve started to focus on throwing visitors from our Yourhomescape.com  website (which is our new affiliate site about home improvement and home accessorizing.) So, using our Rec Room Section, I post products from My Pillow Place (among other affiliate program products) to get more targeted traffic to some of our products.  I find it helpful to have another source of traffic to give to My Pillow Place because we are trying to grow and grow and increase exposure and there are some things I wish I had done earlier.  We created a Facebook Fan Page to let people keep up with our new products and sales.  (Sorry, shameless plug coming:  If you have a Facebook account, become a Fan, tell all your friends, spread the word, you’ll be a hero!)

But anyway, back to our YourHomescape site and integrating it with My Pillow Place to create a sybiotic relationship that can help both site perform better.  The Rec Room Furniture has become probably the best area to help My Pillow Place get people to visit.  I’m not trying to overwhelm and manipulate at all.  I’m just trying to increase exposure of both sites and the Facebook page to help us grow as a business.  And in this economy, we can all use a little help and exposure to increase and grow our business.  I wonder if I should add a My Pillow Place Facebook badge to YourHomescape.  Is that a little too much?  Hard to say.  I may try it for awhile and see what happens.

This past week has seen a spike in sales and visitors.  Good deal!  And we finally got this pending sale from a local school that was uncertain for awhile.  The school contacted us 2 months ago about providing them with some Square Floor Pillows and Rectangular Floor Pillows but, funding was not approved until then end of last week.  So now the sale came through and that makes us happy.  I, in turn, hope the customer and end user is happy with their purchase once they receive them.

September could end up being a decent month for sales.  Projections for the holidays say that sales will be down.  I hope that is not the case.  Today, I added a new product called the Bean Bag Puck .  The Puck is a combination between our round floor pillow and a bean bag chair.  Our supplier says that it is a very popular product and I regret that we didn’t add it a long time ago.  But it is now up on our site and ready to be sold. 

I’ve been pleased with our growing traffic and I feel that my link exchange work and optimization of our product pages has been paying off.  When the economy eventually bounces back, we’ll be positioned to accept the quick growth of traffic and people who finally have more disposable income.  We hope that is soon for everyone.

As I have been on a mission lately to continually add new products to My Pillow Place.  I found myself adding a unique product called the Contour Convertible.  This is a foldable floor mat than can be used as a seat, a fold out matress and even as a coffee table or ottoman….in my haste, I added the product.  A week later I find out that our manufacturer of this product will be discontinuing it.  Arrrgh!…that was a few hours of wasted time creating the page. Then doing all of the things I do when I add a new products to get them indexed in the search engines quickly.  Including posting them on this blog.

I quickly rememdied this situation by replacing the Contour Convertible with the Jaxx Club Chair and Ottoman.  A foam furniture set by the same manufacturer.  So, I was going to add this product anyways, I wasted the time last week adding a product that was disappearing soon.  I could have added something that would actually be available.  Here’s the deal.  Make sure you check with your suppliers before wasting time.  The problem is, sometimes you check and they still don’t let you know what’s going on.  We’ve had that problem too, but you do the best you can.