Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

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.