Bad Luck Continues
March 16, 2010 at 9:59 pm | Posted in online retailing | Leave a commentTags: Bean Bag Chairs
I have stated before that January and February were good months, but as soon as the calender clicked over to March, the sales have dried up. It is unexplainable. We’ve done a few measures to try and entice people to buy, like offer significant coupon codes and specials. But it really hasn’t drummed up sales at all. We’ve been getting the bare minimum. We even had a 3 day period with no sales at all. That hurts. Now that we’re living off this money, making no money really hurts. You see, its great to have your own business. But when there is no money coming in at all and you are relying on that money, there is nothing you can do.
On a happier note, I am happy with our new My Pillow Place header design. I have had to tweak it 2 or three times since I changed it, but I am very pleased with the final result. I think we’ll be keeping it. Its nice to make a positive change to the site every so often. I hope this new logo improves our online results. Many sites go with a very clean and simple design. That’s what I tried to do with this one.
I’m rather stunned that My Bean Bag Place does not have a listing for Bean Bags in Google in the first 50 pages…it makes me think that Google is sandboxing this site for a time. If that is the case, I hope we eventually show up when this sandbox thing is over. We’re really looking to get our Bean Bag Chairs page listed in Google so we can sell that stuff. That was the purpose for creating this new site. Also, today marks exactly a month that we got our last sale on My Bean Bag Place. I’ve been tracking the traffic numbers and sources for this new site and it is all over the place. I think the key is to get listed for more sought after keywords.
Irritating
December 20, 2007 at 12:39 am | Posted in online retailing | Leave a commentTags: Bean Bag Chairs, floor furnishings, link exchanges, SEO
Something happened the other day that really irritated me. One of my link partners emailed me to ask me to remove their link from my site. People usually don’t mind having links. A link to your site can’t hurt you. It the sites you link to that can penalize you with the search engines. I’m not sure why someone would make this request. Maybe he figured my site was banned or something because of my recent pagerank loss…I removed the link but didn’t email the idiot back to let him know that I took it down…he’s emailed me again asking to have it taken down, but I just deleted the email. Its already down, if you checked it yourself you would see that, dumbass! On top of that, if it is my pagerank decline that caused this issue, it is ridiculous. I am sure that this is a temporary glitch and once Google updates its index again, I’ll get me rank back…again, all my keyword positions have not only remained, but some have gotten better since the PR of 0…
Anyway, I digress…I’ve watched, in Yahoo, my floor pillow page float between the 1st and 4th position on the page. We’re still getting a good amount of traffic. Our sales have trailed off a bit, but we’re still getting more than I expected based on the fact that our shipping deadlines are well past. I will be spending some time next week working on the website and improving things. Optimizing for the engines, maybe writing some articles and other things like that. I also might consider redesigning our homepage for 2008…That would be fun. On a final note on my keywords. In Yahoo, my bean bags page has almost fallen off the map….at one point, My Pillow Place was the 13th listings…now we’re several pages back…what’s up with that?
Building Trust
October 17, 2007 at 11:50 pm | Posted in online retailing | Leave a commentTags: Bean Bag Chairs, Oversized Floor Pillows, Yahoo Directory
Yesterday I made a big step into earning more Trust from the search engines…and in particular, Google. I decided that we had earned enough to allocate the funds to a submission to the Yahoo! directory. Every expert I have ever read has said that it is worth the expense to submit to the directory, even though it is an annual fee of 299 dollars. It is a little nerve wracking that if you submit and don’t get in, you just lost 300 bucks. But I am confident that our site will be good enough to merit a listing.
My biggest issue is broken links and I spent last night trying to fix all of my broken links. I just ran a link report with Xenu (a free link checking program) and found that I still have 12 broken links. So I will have to go home tonight and fix the remaining links.
I’ve started to notice that we’re getting an increased amount of traffic from our Squidoo Lenses. Particularly our Oversized Floor Pillow Lens and Our Bean Bag Chair Lens. It is really great to see that you are getting traffic that is not entirely reliant on the search engines.
October has really surprised me in terms of sales…we’re actually doing ok and I expected nothing from this month. But I am pleased with our number of sales…though most of the tickets have been smaller amounts….this is the first month in about 5 months that we haven’t gotten that one huge sale that boosts our numbers. But actually, I’d take slow and steady over one big splash and then nothing, any day.
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