New Products

I'm adding new products that I'm hoping will bring in new customers that are looking for a top quality dog dish. They are unique dog dishes hand crafted by a company called Melia. I received a phone order for a pair of dishes a few days ago and the customer was very surprised at the low cost compared to other sites offering the same dog dishes. They can be personalized or not. I'm very excited to be able to offer such a quality product! Check them out for yourself and let me know what you think. Luxury Ceramic Dog Dishes

BISI Down For a day

This week was rough for Buy It Sell It account holders this week. Everything was lost up until the 26th for a full day and later restored. While the restoration was happening nobody had administrative access to their stores. This cause understandable fear and panic amongst store owners. BISI will lose many stores because of this outage. I myself am considering moving to zencart.com. I'm still trying to weigh the pros and cons. Everyone that has moved to zencart.org seem very happy with their stores. I'll have to search their community boards and see how many complaints there are. The cost of both are the same. However I did just sign up with propay a couple months ago for them to handle my credit card transactions and I can't use propay with Zen Cart. Luckily I wasn't impacted very much by the BISI outage, but who knows what will happen if there is a next time. In looking at the boards of BISI it appears that people are still having problems though. Check out these complaints from The Selling Lounge. Well I'm off to dinner and the park to relax and not think about this whole mess.

The weather is finally heating up around here. I can't say the same for the store sales. Because of that, and because it's been a few weeks I'm starting to think about another newsletter. I'll get one out in the next week or so. Haven't been doing much with the store in the last week or so. I wonder if that's why I haven't had many sales or because we're getting into summer full swing.

I've also started sending out coupon codes in the form of a flyer and attached business cards to everyone on my mailing list. Hopefully that will bring in repeat business and hopefully people will refer friends.

I've started to try entering more comments in blogs to see if I can get a higher ranking with my blog through google. I've actually found a few very interesting blogs in the process.

Speaking of search engines... Microsoft has come out with a new search engine called Bing.com so I've submitted my site there. We'll see if that increases my traffic. After a week or two of submission I don't see many people coming from there at all. As far as visibility of Bing.com... I've seen commercials for it. I had to be told by someone what it was though. Not really a good sign when you don't know what something is after seeing a commercial AND visiting the website. I haven't defaulted to using bing.com for myself but Bill Gates does know how to market and produce a great product so who knows where bing.com will be in 6 months.

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First newsletter was a success!

I included a 15% off coupon and someone purchased a dog pool. These have become very popular in the store. Of the 28 emails I sent I'm including the responses below. I don't think they are too bad. I like that nobody opted out.

• 28 Sent
• 12 Views
• 16 Untraced
• 8 Clicked
• 0 Forwarded
• 0 Bounced
• 0 Unsubscribed

On another note, I have begun to have an average of 1.5 sales per day. I'm very excited about that. The dog pool has been extremely popular. It is a terrific price with terrific quality so where could a person go wrong?

I've begun printing my snail mail flyer to send out to customers. With the flyer I am including a coupon code for 10% off anything in the store for them and if they refer a friend them and the friend will receive 10% off. I'm just waiting for stamps from USPS and I'll mail them out. I'm hoping for some good word of mouth advertising.

Newsletters

I have decided to sign up with a service called Mad Mimi that helps you create a newsletter for your business. For the long time I thought I needed to have lots of customers to justify this account. But even at 25 customers I can send out a newsletter. I mean they can forward these offers to friends, they can be reminded they purchased from me and remember the good experience they had with my store.

I have created the mailing list and now I need to create the newsletter. They have quite a few tools on there so that should make it easier than starting from scratch with the limited tools I have on my computer.

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So I've gotten 100 submissions with my forms using Jotform.com. I decided to become a paying member last night. It's $9 a month and there are discounts for signing up for a year. I'm not sure how long I'll be asking people through Twitter for their photos. Well, I guess it is a good way for people to look at the site. I was thinking it's time consuming to add the photos but I think in the end it's worth it. People enjoy seeing their pets on the website and it gives them a chance to browse the website while they're submitting. I signed up for the paid account last

I've also been pointed to a resource that allows your website logo to show up in the address bar. It's called a fav icon. The site I went to to generate my code is http://www.iconj.com/ . I'm excited about this little feature.

I've also added a Share and a Bookmark icon to the site. Hopefully people will use the buttons.

I'm in the process of working with Mad Mimi a service where you can create a newsletter and hold your newsletter subscribers. It's free up to 100 names. I'm nowhere near 100 names so I'll be good for a while unless I'm lucky and suddenly get a lot of new customers.

1 day after I fixed the credit card with Propay I got 2 credit card orders. I hope it continues.

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I'm trying something different with Cat Dish Store. I'm charging $6.99 for shipping on all products. I don't want to do it with Dog Dish Store just yet. That would mean updating hundreds of products. I don't have a lot of products on the Cat Dish Store yet so I'll see how it goes there first.

Just added a book-mark button and share button to the my Dog Dish Store site to encourage people to bookmark my site or share with a friend. Even if they don't push the button it might get people to think about taking the long route in doing so.

I checked my abandoned carts on Google on Friday and saw that I had 200+ in the last 30 days. Maybe that's average... not sure but to me it was alarming. I tried to process a transaction on the site for a penny to test it and found that that my credit card processing system wasn't working. I use Propay with Buy It Sell It. Looking through community threads in Buy It Sell It I was able to see that I needed to contact Propay. I apparently had some kind of restriction on my account at Propay that wasn't allowing credit card transactions to go through. So I charged a penny successfully. So we'll see if that change impacts my sales for the better.

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A Couple New Sources for you

22 followers now! Welcome to all!

I've started my catdishstore.com twitter account. I've changed my welcome message to ask people to submit cat pictures and dog pictures for the dogdishstore.com and have gotten quite a few responses. I'm very pleased with the level of response as a matter of fact.

If you need a company to provide you with forms for your website check out jotform.com. It's free up until I think 100 submissions. I'm hoping I don't reach that with how many photos are being submitted but it might be close. Whenever possible I ask people to email me the photos to avoid the form submission.

I continue to be very pleased with my Twitter accounts. It's bringing customers and now photos to my store.

I ordered my business cards from vistaprint.com last week. The business cards are free and you just pay for shipping. I spent $11 and got 250 business cards being able to download my own design and I got an address stamp. I'll be sending these out to customers with a 10% off coupon code for them to use on their next purchase. I'll be providing them with 2 business cards. One of them is to pass along to a friend. If their friend makes a purchase, that friend gets 10% off their first purchase AND the referring friend gets 10% of their next purchase as well. I'm in the process of working on a flyer right now. I'm not impressed with my design skills, but it will get me by I suppose.

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Cat Dish Store

Well I have officially started working on my next store. It is Cat Dish Store! I'm very excited about it. I'm working on stocking everything right now so it's still in its very beginning stages. I'm trying to decide if I should go with a scheme like Dog Dish Store or make it a blank canvas like it is right now. I've started building my followers on my new twitter account. There are so many steps involved in getting this going. It's easy to forget all I've done in the last 5 months in getting Dog Dish Store up and running.

I've also been spending more time in The Selling Lounge getting questions answered and chatting with a lot of helpful people. If you are interested in starting an online store or business I recommend the Selling Lounge.

SEO tips

Someone on Buy it Sell it was concerned about her traffic so I gave her some suggestions. I thought it maybe helpful for others.

I'm no expert but I wanted to give you some input on your titles and stuff that might help you get more traffic. I have to admit I'm a bit bored at work and that's why I have time. :-)

I recently optimized my pages and my Google percentages went up by 2% (according to the BISI stats on our Dashboard. I was at 25% until I started tweeting a lot so that brought me down for google percentage but not down in Google search quantity. I used google adwords to find the best words for me. After I was done I went to SEOCetro.com and used the keyword analyzer to be sure page title is in sink with my keywords and description. Also you want to have the keywords you find in google adwords to be the first words in your title.

Let me give you an example.... You have this title for a product. Black and White silk/sheer hair clip. Double loop I would change to Girls Hair Clips Black & White Silk / Sheer I always put the spaces before and after the slash so the search engine sees the two words separately otherwise I think they are seen as one word. Most importantly the title I'm showing puts the Girls Hair Clips front and center. That's the keywords you're hoping people will search for. Why? Because in Google it shows people look for that phrase is 1,900 in a month AND there are 618,000 pages competing with you. Now if you change that to Hair Clip you get 301,000 searchers but you don't know if they are looking for women or girls. AND you are competing with 2.36 million other pages to get your page to the top of google AND to be clicked on by the customer. So with Girls Hair Clips you are targeting more of a niche group and they are more likely to be interested in sticking around. And take note when you go into Google that the S on the end of a word makes a huge difference. In your case, I would use the S exactly where I have them.

I know some people on Buy It Sell It think you don't have to add SEO attributes and they'll be added for you, but I think it's just added as whatever you have on your home page... that's not going to apply to all of your items. And when I see my percentage increase by 2% from optimizing I beg to differ with them that it's not necessary to add your own. I had always been adding to SEO, but I wasn't as diligent with my title.

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Are you getting the most out of your Twitter account?

I don’t pay for any twitter tools and I recommend you do not as well. There are plenty of free ones out there. I don’t claim to be a Twitter expert, but I wanted to write this after seeing that many of you don’t have a lot of Twitter followers. I consider that to be less than 200 for many and less than 50 for even more.

If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with friends and fellow sellers that’s fine, but if you want to market yourself on Twitter that won’t work. My purpose in using Twitter is to get sales and market to people that might be interested in my products. To use Twitter as a marketing tool you MUST get MANY followers that are interested in your product line. As of right now I have 1,100+ followers. I’ve been with Twitter only about a month and I do not pay to get that many followers. A lot of people will ask if you want thousands of followers and they’ll want you to pay for a tool, but who knows if you’re targeting your niche market with those techniques.

How have I gotten 1,100+ followers? Twellow.com (and Search.twitter.com sometimes) and Tweetlater.com. Allow me to illustrate. I did post these two tools in another post but I wanted to post them here to encourage everyone to take full advantage of their tweets.

Twellow:
• People fill out profiles on Twitter. Find the people that are interested in what you sell and start following them. If you’re lucky they will start following you. If they don’t follow after a few days or weeks (whatever time limit you set) UNFOLLOW. You don’t have space for that. I’ll revisit this topic further down. The interest I look for is pretty easy. I sell Dog Supplies so I just have to find people that are interested in dogs. If you have troubles figuring out what your customers may be interested in or who to direct, post here and I or someone else may be able to give you suggestions. If you sell antiques I bet there is an interest for antiques. If you sell rummage sale items you can probably find people interested in rummaging. Rummaging interest could probably also be for antique sellers. If you sell kids clothes look for moms.
• Twellow.com is where I found most of my followers of late.

I use twello in conjunction with Tweetlater.com. Some points about tweetlater.com:
1. Unless you are really interest in what someone has to say (like for me it’s celebrity dish) don’t follow the person unless they follow you. Some people start following you just so you follow them then un-follow you once you are following them. You don’t have space on your account to follow people that aren’t following you. You have a max of 2,000 people you can follow before Twitter starts looking at the ratio of followers to following on your account. I don’t know what the ratio is but I hit 2,000 the other day and they wouldn’t let me follow anyone new so I knew it was time to clean out a bunch of people that were following me. I give people a few days to follow me before I will un-follow them. I try to keep the follow to followers ratio pretty close.
2. I don’t recommend un-following people that are following you just because you think you got ‘em. If you do that to someone like me I will un-follow you automatically.
3. Tweetlater has sooooo many functions. One being to un-follow anyone that un-follows you AND to automatically follow anyone that follows you. This is such a time saver.
4. You can also keep your multiple twitter accounts here so you can tweet from one central location.
5. You can set it up to receive emails when people tweet about keywords like your store name, something you sell or whatever you think you need to watch out for. I should note this tool hasn’t worked for me as I only received one email from it.
6. Tweetlater also allows you to set up tweets when you’re away from your computer. If you want people to constantly get messages from you set it up here. Remember that MANY people that will be following you will be following 1,000 others. So you want to make sure they read something from you everyday. If you only tweet once or twice a day you are going to get lost in the shuffle.

Don’t just post about your store on twitter. For me, that gets boring. If someone is following you that is only following 50 people they are going to get frustrated if all you put up all day is visit my store with a link. Frustration leads to an un-follow. Tell everyone about your day so you are seen as a real person. See what everyone else is tweeting about. It can be dumb stuff like “I just got the laundry out …. I hate laundry.” You might start a conversation with someone else that hates laundry. It makes you more personable.

I hope this helps everyone! I want to see higher numbers out there from everyone… if you want to use Twitter as a marketing tool.

Great Twitter tips and tools

Check out the tools I love on Twitter

1. http://search.twitter.com/search: This allows you to search what people are talking about. For example if someone says "my dog" or has dog in their comment and sounds like the like or love dogs I add them as a follow. Then I hope they'll follow me and see my advertising.
   
2. I also use this http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter to find people with "dog" in their name or profile. I add them and hope they add me. I currently have 600+ follows.
3. If you have multiple accounts on twitter you can use http://hootsuite.com/
   Someone recommended this site the other day. I guess you don't have to log in and out of your accounts. That will come in handy when I start my next website.
4. Check this out.... this site lists all the cool twitter tools. I'll have to browse every now and then for stuff that isn't helpful today... might be helpful tomorrow.
5. I love the Karma tool. It even shows the last time the person tweeted so I drop them if it's past 100 days. I'm seriously considering 60 days. There are so many different accounts I log into that if I haven't updated one for even 30+ days for me it's not a very important account and I may never touch it again. In addition I've gone through the people I follow and if they haven't started following me within maybe a week or so I'll stop following them. I try to keep # of people I'm following and people following me pretty even so it's not so obvious that nobody wants to be my friend. LOL
6. The one I've been using the most lately is Tweet Later. You can schedule tweets. So I think of things (personal) that I might be thinking later. And I'll post products. Then I'll schedule them for 2-3-4 hours from now. I have 10 tweets set up for after I go to bed.... if I ever get off the computer. You can also shorten your URL that you include with your tweet when you create your message.
7. My new favorite tool is Twellow.com. You can enter interests of people to find them and follow them right from that page. With Search.twitter.com you have to click on the person, be taken to Twitter then follow them, but you can follow very quickly and easily from this site. This might allow me to get to 1,000 followers by the end of the month. I'm running out of time.
   
   Another thing I love about this is that I can indicate preferences to follow people automatically if they follow me, I can set a preference to unfollow people that unfollow me (love that).
   
   And you can set up automation to send a message to people when they start following you. If twitter already has that as a main function I haven't found it.
   
   ANOTHER THING: If someone says my dog, dogdishstore, or dog dish store, or dog dishes, I will get an email with those people listed every 12 hours.
   
   

I'm building my list to have many people per day that I have in my advertising audience.

I try to post at least 5 product links a day. It doesn't have to be something I JUST added. Just usually something I haven't posted on Twitter yet. That will get me about 25 views on that product in about 5 minutes. Pretty quick advertising!

I also talk about my personal life on there so it doesn't seem like I'm just posting to get people to look at my site. It's a nice place to talk about what I want to talk about without wondering if people I know will here. I can remain anonymous kind of. Sure if someone investigated me they'd find I made comments about so-and-so, but I haven't done anything that will be investigated so I should be good. :-)

Just some helpful hints I've come across in the few weeks I've been on Twitter. I'd love for everyone else to share any techniques they use on there to help their business.