You might be wondering what I’ve been up to. That is if you’re at all interested in my life. How self involved :-( Anyway, I’m doing good. Here’s the rundown.

The shipping thing is under some control. I’m getting into a system with it. I’m doing shipping on Monday, Wednesday, Friday so that there’s a good flow of orders going out and customers don’t get too antsy. It’s still taking about 4 hours for as many as 18 orders. I haven’t gotten a max for the number of orders that can be done in 4 hours yet, but I don’t think that 18 is the ceiling. Looking into an order management system so that I can cut a significant amount of time down in the paper touches.

Fixing some conversion problems that we revealed with our site once we maxed out advertising. One whole in the checkout process and a site redesign.

Got a blogger for the commercial blog. I was getting too personal or too detached. This person is phenomenal. I knew her from the blogosphere and she’s very good at building rapport and readership.

Taking a sales class and getting a lot out of it. We had this extravagant plan for this year to meet our million dollar goal and it’s boiling down to 2 things: traffic and conversion. On the conversion side, we have the site redesign, but we also have the idea of making the site a place for people to visit for information. As a result, we’re posting more content around the store (blog, articles), and giving more robust product descriptions. Also starting to build the company name outside the site with article distribution and press releases. We’ll probably do some blog carnivals as well. Those things will help with traffic as well. The big thing with traffic is getting ranked and building real world visibility. For the real world stuff, I’ll be doing a lot more networking around town. Getting the word out.

The link builder was a bust. They just could not deliver with the stipulations that I had. Most of us have them as netrepreneurs.