Fantastic Marketing Resource!

Another recent website I’ve come across is hubspot.com. It is a fantastic educational website for people starting their own website. I’ve listened to a couple of webinars and read some articles. They are very helpful! They have products they sell to make life easier on a website developer, but they aren’t shoving it down your throat. They show you the long way around if you don’t want to go the easy rout with their product(s). It’s an exceptional website and is well known on the internet with thousands of references throughout the internet.

SOME of the topics that are gone through are:
• Blogging. Why it’s important to your website.
• Marketing analytics and how it can work for you.
• SEO
• List of other marketing tools available.

There is an excellent workshop that Hubspot did. It’s available for everyone on-line actually.

If you’ve worked with hubspot or listen to the workshop, post a comment. I’d love to hear from you!

It's been a while since I've written. I've changed the name of the website to Your Pet Store With More. Now I can offer various pet supplies and don't cater to only dog lovers and their friends. I'm starting with adding cat supplies. I'm excited about the change!

Since I've written last I've been continuing to work on the website in the matter of marketing and adding new products.

I have found a few very helpful resources of late. The first is Website Magazine. Only a few stories into my first issue and I love it. The issue has reminded me that I need to keep up on my network marketing to get my store noticed.

I've added a page to my website that lists all the places I can be found on the internet. Helps me keep it all straight AND helps my customers find me.

I've started a lens on Squidoo. More on that tomorrow.

This update brought to you by our Savvy Tabby Cat Toy
-Our Interactive Cat Toys by Savvy Tabby called Jungle Jabbers are creatively designed cat toys in fashionable animal prints.
-Feathered balls make an enticing peeping sound.

A few new sites to use as tools

The first that I've actually received two customers from is merchantcircle.com where you can add promotional advertising for your site. I put a 10% off coupon there and have gotten 2 customers from there so far. Well worth the cost... FREE. :-) Here is the coupon I posted. Just took 5 minutes.

Another site I found from a posting on buyitsellit.com community boards is all4webs.com. You create a web page where it's a little like a home page. You direct people to your website with this tool. Here's my page.

The final website is weebly.com. You can create a blog here, but for now I'm treating it like all4webs and just creating a front page for people to click for my real website. Here's my Weebly page.

All of these were very easy to use and just took a few minutes to set-up. Hopefully it will bring new visitors.

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.

This blog post brought to you by

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.

This post brought to you by our Dog Agility Training Course.

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.

This post brought to you by our popular Guardian Gear Large Pool .

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.

This blog entry brought to you by a Unique Kitty Hideaway

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.

This post brought to you by our welcome mats

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.