Also big changes coming…I think we will be saying good bye to My Bean Bag Place.  That was an  experiment in building a store and trying to maximize exposure of our product lines.  But it has been unsuccessful.  On top of that it costs money to run the site and well…I just don’t want to do it anymore.  I’m focusing my energies on My Pillow Place.  And I also want to pursue some other business ideas that will bring a more passive income.

We’ve also brought on a new vendor of Kid Products called KidKraft. We will be spending the next few months reviewing their products and adding them in a new kid furniture section on My Pillow Place.

I will also be promoting the comic book/graphic novel I created called SPECTRE: A Dark Matter which is available in paperback and recently added a kindle addition on Amazon.  With this I will be creating an eBook on how to make & publish your own comic book.   So I will be tying all of this stuff, on the comic book side of the business, with my Comic Book promoting website Tibari Outpost.

This is really exciting for me because I have been drawing and creating the characters in my book for many years.  And now their getting exposure to other people.  And maybe someday, someone important will notice my work.  But even if they don’t, I love the idea of being able to put my work out there.  Tibari Outpost is more of an information site on the characters, locations and other things involved with the universe I’ve created.  But it is also an opportunity to promote my book and upcoming books, teach people how to create their own and expose them to the tools I use to do the work that I do.  Things like photoshop and other software products.

Finally, we still have our affiliate site, turned adsense site called YourHomescape.com.   I want to expand this site with more information and remove the affiliate part of it and just post useful articles that can help people with information on things around the home and make a few extra bucks with adsense ads too.

That is about it for now.  I want to pursue some other online businesses in the future.  But I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and I want to finish these current projects before I move on to the next.

Next, we’ve added the Jaxx Critter Foam Bean Bag Chair. Chair to My Pillow Place.  This is a really fun bean bag chair and I think kids will love it.  If I was a kid, I would want one…or two.  The cool thing is that our manufacturer only released this product to a few retailers and I’m pretty sure we’re the first to post it.   Check it out below.

Now, we think they’ve screwed themselves.  They’ve basically pared down their product line to a few crappy pieces that are expensive to ship.  They’ve taken their fabric selection from over 50 to less than 10 choices.  And the worst thing, all of the helpful people who we worked with over there, have either been fired, or quit.  And that means the customer service is suffering so badly that we’re having problems with almost every order and no one to help us fix it.

So, we are basically removing their products one by one and replacing them with items we can actually sell that are high quality.  That reminds me, another thing that got worse with this wonderful company that supplied us product for the last 4 years…the quality of their product has greatly diminished.  And we just could no long justify selling products that we wouldn’t buy ourselves.

With this change in our site, we’ve added a few areas of focus…new categories of product if you will….First we added a frame furniture section which includes items like Scroll Chairs and End Tables.  These items don’t necessary fit into what My Pillow Place started as, but we like the idea of expanding into other markets.

We also added an Outdoor Patio Furniture Section.  This is because we seem to have a lot of people calling and asking if some of our products could be used outside and we wanted to fill that request.  Your potential customers can really give you insight to what you should be selling.

Lastly, we  added a section called accessory furniture.  These are items that can act as accessories to your existing furniture or compliment the furniture you buy from us.  This includes things like accent pillows, Block furniture and more.

Check out the multitude of new products at My Pillow Place.  We’re adding a few new products every week with the goal of expanding our site and finding a whole new group of customers to please.  We’ve even added a whole new group of quality Decorative Accent Pillows…

The Jaxx Cocoon, for those who don’t know, is a very large (6 ft diameter) Round Foam Pillow.  It is around 12 inches thick.  It can best be described as a large round crash pad.  But if you turn it on its edge, it becomes a Foam Chair large enough for two.

Like I said, this thing is great, if you have the space.  Many people don’t.  My sister is one who bought the big one and has no room for it.  I’ve been asking for a mid-Sized Cocoon for a long time and the manufacturer finally has listened to me.  I’m not saying that I am the reason they made the 5 Ft diameter Foam Cocoon, but I did ask for them too a while back.  I’m also pushing for a Mid-Sized Pillow Sac, another one of their products that remains a top seller.

Any-hoooo, here it is….the Jaxx Club Cocoon…and we welcome it to My Pillow Place, and before long will bring to to My Bean Bag Place.

I also started adding new product to the site.  In the Read in Bed Pillow section,  I’ve introduced the Bedlounge to My Bean Bag Place.  The Bedlounge should be a great addition to My Bean Bag Place and I hope it does well there.  I actually would have added this product awhile ago, but there was an issue with the company that makes it.  They had been out of fabric that they make their covers out of  for the last 4 months.  So we basic have only had about 1 or 2 fabrics to offer our customers.  Well, today, they must have gotten a huge supply in because we were able to re-post the fabrics on our site.  Thankfully…I can’t imagine how many sales we’ve lost for this product over the past several months.  Maybe they’ll all come back now.

In the next several days I will be adding more reading pillows and a few more body pillows….This is another opportunity to cast a wide net and get more visitors/possible customers to our Sites.

The idea behind the link wheel is to create content (and it should be good, informative content) on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, Squidoo and Hubpages.  And basically, link them all together with well researched keywords and then link them all to your money site.

If you diagram it, you will see your money site (in this case, My Bean Bag Place) at the center of a wheel that is surrounded by Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages, WordPress, Weebly and there are many more.  Each 2.0 links to the next one on the wheel and then they all link back to the center money site.  So my first web 2.o site is a Hub Pages Page.  And this “Hub” is one where I targeted “Bean Bag Chairs” as my keyword phrase.  The link a few words back will take you to the Hub Page posting on Bean Bag Chairs, and My Bean Bag Link above will take you to My Bean Bag Place.  Thereby creating a triangle with will become one section of my link wheel.

I will continue the process until a wheel is created and as these posts get found and theses links are given credit by Google and other search engines, I will monitor my keyword positions and see them rise.  I will report back to see how long it takes to start seeing some SERP and traffic improvements.

Over the next few days, I’ll add the smaller Comfort-U Petite and the Straight body Pillow.  I’m hoping these products see as much success as they do on My Pillow Place.

Business is continuing to improve.  I’ve just looked at our sales compared to this time last year and we are a little bit ahead.  I remember last year, the business pretty much died once March hit.  We had half the sales we had from the previous month of Feb. 2010.  But this year, the momentum continues through mid-March.

I’m happy to see that.  And I’d really like it to continue into the summer, which is traditionally our slow time.  I’m really anxious to add new products to both sites and hopefully something.  We need to find some new vendors because some recent changes to one of our biggest might require us to drop them.  I don’t know if they’ll be able to hand the holiday season based on the changes they’ve made.  But we’re not there yet and we’ll see how the year goes.

I’ve slacked a little bit in my link building.  So I need to re-dedicate myself to that task.  Taxes are almost due and I have to get all of my profit and loss statements together and get ready to do the business taxes.  Hopefully I won’t owe this year.  My quarterly estimated taxes usually take care of us, but last year we owed a little bit.

The good thing about this product, is that the quality is superb, and it is one of our more economical pillow items.  I’m actually trying to work with this company to create a bigger size for us with more fabric options.  The only factor that bothers me about this pillow is that it comes in one size, 20″ square by 5″ thick.  That’s great for a child, but if you need a large size, there is none to be had. 

Fear not, however, as I am working on it. 

I thought 2011 would bring some new products to our sites and I’m still hoping to see a large selection.  You see, I’m starting to realize, that the sites that do a lot of sales offer many, many more products than we do.  Bigger sites get more traffic and more sales.   We need to start offering our customers more…and this will be the 2011 plan.

The sales even continued into the new year with several on New Year’s Day, 2011.  Happy New Year, by the way.  I only bring this up because on New Year’s Day 2010, we sold nothing.   But I’m happy to start out strong for 2011.  What was really great, is that this past December became one of our top 5 selling months…It actually may be in the top 2…that is saying something in this economy. 

There are two things that I want to talk about in this post.  The first is how www.my-bean-bag-place.com, this sister site of My Pillow Place, continues to struggle.  We were lucky to get one to two sales each month.  Why I’m confused is that when we started My Pillow Place back in 2006, I had no idea what I was doing.  I didn’t know how to optimize a website, or how the search engines worked.  I was just following the teachings of various, self proclaimed gurus that were out there.  They were easy to find, once you start looking.  But even back in 2006, by the end of the year, we started selling some things.  And it ramped up greatly in 2007, improving our sales and traffic by 500%…

But My Bean Bag Place in 2010 was a dud…and I like to think after all these years, I’ve learned a few things about selling and optimizing on the internet.  Could it be that the economy was just poor and the people who happened to stumble upon My Bean Bag Place were just not motivated to purchase?  That is possible….but I’m wondering if there is just something fundamentally wrong with My Bean Bag Place in general.  The site is very similar to My Pillow Place, but My Pillow Place does leaps and bounds better business than My Bean Bag Place.  I can’t figure it out.

My Second topic is something I’ve never addressed on these pages before.  And that is how much work goes into running a website once it becomes busy and starts selling.  My Wife and I run this business.  We split the work and she is responsible for placing orders, customer service and dealing with our vendors.  My job is maintaining the website, optimizing and accounting…and I will, if need be, deal with vendors when bad crap keeps happening. (Like shipping delays, or customers receive incorrect items from the manufacturer). 

You see, what happens is the amount of work that goes into taking care of this business when it becomes busy is significant.  And it is even compounded when there are problems….and problems could be vendor issues, or even customer issues sometimes.  Its pretty stressful.  When the holidays arrive and people expect items by a certain date, we feel extra pressure to get orders out, even though it is our  vendors who have to make and ship these items for us.

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone looking to start an Online Business…do not sell products that have a manufacturing time.  Sell things that are made, stocked and ready to ship within a few days.  Many of our items are manufactured to customer specifications after the order is placed, but no matter how many times and how big of text you put that on the page, people will call you 2 days after they placed their order and ask when it is shipping.  It amazes me…Here’s to a better and problem free 2011.