Category: Business

I spent the better part of a couple days looking for article “engines”, places where I could submit articles. They had to meet one critical criteria. The publisher’s site must have a backlink from the article site. In other words, my sole purpose for article submission on this round is link honey. I want the links. This was a tedious process. First, I went through this list of article directories. For each directory I picked a 2-3 month old article. I then checked the backlink of the site listed in the resource box. If the article directory was not listed in the backlinks, it did not make my list. Once I had the backlinks, I found other article directories in the list. I went to those directories, checked to see…

I feel so far behind. September is not as productive as I would like it to be and I am seriously contemplating stopping at 3 sites. I would have 5 in all, excluding the e-commerce site which is more like a business onto itself. Here is my update for the month so far: Do homepage template for e-commerce site. This is a seasonal template that needs to be swapped out. Immediately. Done today. Do article submission for e-commerce site. Commission 50 more articles for e-commerce site. Complete April through August financials for e-commerce site. Complete 30 articles for each of the affiliate sites. Update: 3 articles on site #3, 2 on site #2, and 1 on site #3. Do 30 directory submissions and 20 feed submissions for affiliate sites. Figure…

Site #1: 2 articles Site #2: 2 articles Site #3: 1 article [Before TV] I am dragging. I just want to sleep, but I persevere. I cranked out one article per site today and did the same yesterday. I have not done anything about the homepage yet, nor have I written anything for site #3. It’s not for lack of interesting info swimming in my head. It’s the organization of said information in a cohesive manner so that I can write. I know, I know, I should just push through and do it. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do because I have to start somewhere. It’s not going to be perfect, but it has to get done. No articles today means an even tougher rest of the…

Site #1: 3 articles Site #2: 2 articles Site #3: 1 article I almost overlooked it completely. I did $5 yesterday. Sadly, I am not that enthused. I am so tired. This brings to light a serious problem with Site #1. It’s not bringing in any money despite traffic. I’m going to have to change the theme in order to improve my ad placement. This is the reason why I don’t like right hand navigation: left or 3-column is the way to go. Once people read the content first, they only go to the right menu if they are purposely looking for something. On the other hand, novice web users still read the left column first. Despite the blatant block of content in the middle. BTW, I tried in content,…

As I was lamenting today again on how laborious this shipping process is, I reminded myself that there was a time when we re-typed orders into Quickbooks and addresses into USPS. Imagine how much time that would take. I am grateful that that is no longer the case. I’m beginning to isolate the problem areas. The biggest fat is in the number of times we touch the product. We unpack it and put it on the racks, then we check to see if it’s what we ordered, then we check to see if the stuff that we have to send out is there, then we pack it. Too many touch points for the products. I also think that we spend a lot of time walking around that tiny room. Clipboards…

Today went much better. I am finally getting into a rhythm with the operations. It’s taken some effort to transition. I eliminated a touch by checking the shipping slip and inventorying items in one step, as oppose to checking them in, then putting them in inventory. Doing some clean up work on some items. Once I get into a groove with this I can concentrate on stuff I like, like marketing.

So we turned AdWords on full throttle at the beginning of the year. I spend my evenings tweaking the copy to test ads for double digit CTR. Since we’re spending this money on AdWords we expected our sales to increase proportionately. They have not. Last Friday I was in full panic mode. Today I had a severe panic attack. Yesterday we talked about it in our weekly meeting to try to figure out what our action would be. The beginning of January is usually dead in terms of traffic and sales, so we decided to give it another week at least. This is the week that things have to turn around. We looked at our logs, turned out we’re losing 75% of the people who start the checkout. Upon further…

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…

Almost at the end of week 3 of January. Things are going considerably better as I get into the groove. The transition was a bit rough, but it’s almost over. I am so realizing what Kiyosaki meant by the importance of a good team. I have a phenomenal lawyer, banker, accountant and coach. I always thought that these people were out of my league. I mean we’re not running a multi-million dollar company. YET. However, having those folks just take the edge of. This week I had to submit a credit app to our supplier to up our limit. Since we’re doing so much volume and all. The reason for the low limit was because no one at our previous bank would give any information. Truth be told there wasn’t…