Elusive
June 5, 2008 at 6:15 pm | In online retailing | 1 CommentTags: floor pillows, relax lounger
As a young internet store, we’re still searching for that elusive month where we get at least one sale every day. Already in June, we got nothing on the 2nd day of the month. Maybe July will fare better. The one thing that is frustrating about an online business is the inconsistency. However, I see this new store that just opened up near where I live. Its a little specialty store for dogs. And I’m sure the woman running it was excited about starting a business. And did a lot of prep work and rented a space…but I never see anyone go in there. I can’t see her being in business very long. In an economy such as this, that kind of store won’t survive because of how people spend their discretionary money.
I’ve added a new product…its kind of like a combination floor pillow/couch…the Relax Lounger is a neat product. It lays flat like a giant floor pillow, but it has straps and clips on it that allow it to curl up and transform into a neat little seat. Well, not so little.
I’ve also looked at our square floor pillows page. This individual product page gets a lot of traffic, but the conversion is low. When looking at the page, I thought, maybe the page is too busy and there’s too much information…Maybe too much for the reader to easily skim. So, I’ve reorganized the page and posted it. Hopefully, this format will be better and I’ll adjust many other product pages to this format.
Tax Season
March 6, 2008 at 8:45 pm | In online retailing | 1 CommentTags: dog beds, floor pillows, taxes
One of the worst parts about running a small business is paying taxes on the money you make. When you have a regular job where you are employed, your employer witholds the taxes and other things from your paycheck…when you run your own little business, you have to do that yourself…and the government expects you to pay estimated taxes at the end of each quarter.
I was worried about this for a while because I didn’t know how to pay estimated taxes. Plus, I wasn’t sure what percent of my profits would go to the government. Last year was easy because we were operating in the red…but this year was different. And we had to pay…luckily it wasn’t as bad as I thought. It still sucks to see a big chunk of your profits go right out the door.
Google has been playing ping pong with our Floor Pillow listings lately…up at one, then fall to 3…its so hard to figure out how to stay ahead. Crate and Barrel keeps jumping over us, then we leap frog them…I just want to stay on top for good. I’m sure Crate and Barrel has professionals working around the clock to figure out how to beat us.
We’ve started to collect more and more product information to add to our dog bed niche. I am looking forward to this new line as I think it could be good for our business.
Bean Bag Optimization
January 25, 2008 at 12:53 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, floor pillows, Foam Furniture
Well, my success in optimizing my Floor Pillows splash page has prompted me to do the same for my Bean Bags splash page, as well as my Foam Furniture splash page. I found my Bean Bag listing all the way down at page 29 of Googles listings. And many of the pages that are ahead of me are completely irrelevant to the topic. So, with a little work, it shouldn’t be too hard to jump ahead of many of these pages.
I have managed to get the Bean Bags page back up to the 4th page of Yahoo!, but people don’t really get to the 4th page of any search engine’s results unless they’re desparate. I’ve worked hard to begin a series of inter-linking of pages on my site in order to create an authority hub. By interlinking pages with common anchor text, it should help to spread some of the Google juice around the site and help it become more important to Google. With any luck, in a week or 2, my listings should climb up many places…
Gone as fast as it came about…
January 7, 2008 at 10:58 am | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, floor pillows, kid furniture, Video Game Chairs
I was boasting in my last post how I finally got to the first page of Googles listing with my top keywords. Floor Pillow and Floor Pillows. And just as fast as it rose to the sixth spot, it slowly decended to the 8th spot, then to the 10th spot. It was like watching a helium balloon slowly run out of helium and gently float downward. We stayed at the tenth spot for about 3 days…and now, we reside on the 2nd page of Google for those important keywords. Its such a game…now I have to figure out how to get back where I need to be. Our traffic and sales were terrific for the short amount of time we resided on the first page. Our traffic is still ok, but there’s a reason why the first page is so coveted.
I’m still having trouble with the Bean Bag page as well. It has fallen to page five out Yahoo and it really needs to get back closer to 1. I am not really sure what else I can do to get these pages up higher. I’ve noticed that our average visitors per day has risen to about 200. And thats a marked improvement from the 130-150 we were getting just a short month and a half ago. All in all, we’re seeing better results, but there’s still so much more work to do.
One last item of note…we’ve started to see many more searches and sales of video game chairs. So, we’ve added a new link on the side bar navigation so that it would be much easier for people to find. It takes a visitor right to the kid furniture page. But the video rockers and tempo chair are visible right at the top.
Holiday Shopping
December 15, 2007 at 11:22 pm | In online retailing | Leave a CommentTags: bean bags, floor pillows, googlebot, holiday shopping
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that my Google PageRank has been pushed down to 0. And there is no reason for this to happen. I haven’t really noticed any other website that I monitor getting punished by Google this way. I’ve never done anything that I am aware of that Google considers bad or manipulative. Needless to say, sometimes sites get reviewed by the algorithm and punished…that’s the problem with a computer determing your rank.
Aside from that, my keyword positions are stable and we’re getting a good amount of traffic and sales. We always want more than we get, but I’m not complaining. In Yahoo my pages for Floor Pillows and Bean Bags keep dropping. Not sure why. I know I haven’t been working on SEO much, but the business has been busy, so I’ve put it off. I have to get back to creating good and unique content. I think one of the things I might do to my homepage is reduce the size of my opening text and add more information. Googlebot can’t read the images that I have at the top of the page…that is more for the user anyway.
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