Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Continue to grow

I’ve always believed (and have also heard others say) that a larger website will always do better than a smaller site. So I continue to add products to My Pillow Place when I can.  I’ve added a new Foam Lounger to My Pillow Place today.  I have several  other products to add this week.

The thing is that over time, some of the products we used to sell have gone away.  Sometimes its hard to keep up with replacing products that have been discontinued by our suppliers. I’m fine with having products disappear that aren’t profitable.  But I hate when our site contracts.  I also hate when our suppliers take products away that may not be profitable to them, but are to us.

I understand that that is a business decision, but I don’t have to like it.

Falling Listings

Over the last few months, I’ve been targeting some important keywords with a deep linking strategy.  I went from page 47 to page 5 in the last 3-1/2 months.  My goal is still to get to page 1 and maybe even take the top spot.  But some random happenings today…My listing fell from page 5 to page 10 in Google overnight.  This is ridiculous.  I have a suspicion why this happened, and I think it has to do with an over optimized Title tag on the home page at www.my-pillow-place.com. 

So, I’m doing an experiment to see if I can get the home page re-indexed again quickly and change the title tag back to what it was before the last cache date.  If I’m right, I should go right back to where I was.  This is frustating though. It takes so much hard work and waiting to get your site up higher in the rankings and then you drop overnight. 

Its insane.  However, there’s also 2 other possibilities.  It could be that I’m just viewing a different datacenter that has my site listed at a lower position.  Or it could also be that Google is going through an update that throws the SERPs into disarray for a day or 2 and then they go back to normal (or even show an improvement after all is said and done.)

The keywords I’m currently targeting could potentially triple my daily traffic immediately once I get my site listed on page one of Google.  It is vitally important that I keep pushing and working hard to get my site on that first page. I want to be there before the holiday shopping season because that could mean thousands of visitors and hundreds of extra customers.  If my calculations are correct, this could be the best holiday season for My Pillow Place ever.

Super Slow Month

Every time I hear about how many people are out of work, it seems like it affects our sales.  Every week the jobless numbers grow higher and less and less people spend money.  Even the people who have jobs are sitting there with worry and uncertainty.  All I can do is work hard on our websites every day and hope that the sales start picking up.  We’re going for another record low month in July and I can only hope that August is much better than this.

I’ve been preparing to add new products to the site.  I did add the Palermo Foam Chair to My Bean Bag Place this week.  Which I had added to My Pillow Place recently.  I’ve also started to pick some new products for the site.  But, even though I work hard improving this site, we’re still not seeing the results we want. 

In the last few days, I’ve discovered the Like Button from Facebook.  I’ve gone and added it to a bunch of pages on our site.  I think I like how this can improve popularity of individual pages.  I like how this can help traffic grow virally when people simply click the Like Button.  And I like that it tells you how many people have clicked it.

Long term, I’m not sure if this will be a good or bad thing.  I hope good.  But since I hate Facebook so much, I feel hypocritical using this Like Button feature.

New Groupings

As I prepare to add a new product to both My Pillow Place and My Bean Bag Place, I’ve also started to create new splash pages to show different groupings of products and also to optimize for different keywords.  I’m off the belief that a site with more pages casts a wider net to bring visitors.

The other day, I created a Dorm Furniture splash page for My Bean Bag Place and yesterday, I made a Kids Playroom furniture page to group some great products into that category.  My Bean Bag Place is still a relatively small site and I need to grow the product line and website size.

Slowly, but surely its coming along.  What I am preparing for is what I hope is a good holiday season.  However, due to the increasingly scary economy, there is no reason to think that things will improve.  But I’m optimistic.  And maybe they will get better.  If people stop fearing the economy and coming taxes, perhaps comsumer confidence will grow. 

Actually, things may change after the November elections.  If we get some fiscally responsible people to represent us, we may bet some better tax policies and business friendly politicians.  But who knows…

Long Time

I didn’t realize that I haven’t posted here in over a month…but I’m back and better than ever.  Whatever…anyways…what’s been happening at My Pillow Place & My Bean Bag Place over the last month.  Well…truth be told, business is slower than it should be, but we’re still getting sales.  Traffic has been steady.  I’ve seen many of our product pages rise in the search engines due to my excessive deep linking strategy.

My Pillow Place has seen some updates to our Foam Bean Bag Page and our Dorm Furniture Page.  I found some errors I had made on both of these pages and made some technical updates, as well as some SEO enhancements.

On My Bean Bag Place, I added a Dorm Room Chairs page.  I mean, now that it is after the 4th of July, people are going to be gearing up for back to school in less than a month.  So I have to be indexed and prepared for that.  I actually should have created this page a while ago.  Other than that, not much else is happening.  Our Facebook Page for My Pillow Place finally has over 100 Fans (or Liker’s, since they changed to the Like system).

And some new products will be added to both sites as I finally catch up with some of these stuff.