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.

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.

I signed up with Twitter a few days ago to use that as a source of advertising. I've gotten a few hits from there so far. It's easy enough to use so I figure I'll use it for a bit to see if it helps. Follow me!!!

It was pointed out to me the other day by someone on Buy It Sell It that I didn't have the information on my blog page for people to follow me on here. I'm thinking that made it difficult to gain followers so I've added that.

I've been using sitemeter to follow my stats for my store because for ME it's more user friendly than Google stats. I'm sure google contains more information so I'll have to explore that more too. Well, I realized the other day that I didn't have the sitemeter code on ALL of my pages so I was only getting reads if someone came in through my home page. I've fixed that and now I see many more people visiting. I can see that they're coming in through google so I'm very excited about that. I also clicked on one of my items and noticed that when it appears in Google Base it shows my name rather than my store name. I'd MUCH rather it show my store name of course so I've made the adjustment that I think will correct that I just have to watch for it to change. I'm expecting it to take a day or so to take affect but I might have to do some investigating to figure out why it hasn't shown up as DogDishStore yet.

I've been posting more in a dog forum to try and get customers. It's pretty nice. I've been adding input regularly on there.

I've gotten a few places to link to me and I'm thrilled about that. I have to work on getting more of that going. It's kind of tedious but VERY necessary to rank high with google.

I hadn't realized how much I've done until I wrote it all down. I think I need to give myself a pat on the back. :-)

Update

Lately I've been busy adding items to my store and of late, I am going back to all of my listings to edit them for duplicate content. There are so many listings that hardly differ from the next but to keep my items from being banned from Google I need to be sure they are on duplicate. I've gone to jpeterman.com for inspiration. I can't believe how descriptive and poetic their product descriptions are. If you ever need motivation to write better content, check out jpeterman.com.

I see I have two followers to my blog now. YAY! Welcome! Feel free to send your friends. :-)

What has changed via Buy It Sell It of late:
* They have come out with a new template as of yesterday and everyone is buzzing about it. I love it myself. It's really making me want to come out with a cat dish store, but I should really do more with the dog store before I focus on two sites at once. At least that's my current thought. There are still so many items to post in the dog store and so many things to better about the store. Although I know there are always things I can make better about the store so that part won't keep me from moving onto creating a new store.
*Statistics on our stores has also been added to Buy It Sell It so that will be helpful. Google Analytics is great, but it seems that stats from Buy It Sell It will include more visits than Google includes. I always feel like I'm shorted by Google in looking at my page views in Buy It Sell It so hopefully this will help me analyze what I can/should change about the store.
* I was able to add more featured items to my home page so now it's at 9. You really can fumble through html and get buy with a Buy It Sell It store. You may have questions now and then if you want to get a little fancier, but there is always someone there to help. I know people have been scared away from custom templates on there because they think they need to know html, but if you look at it often enough you can figure out how to make minor adjustments to do something that an unpaid user wouldn't be able to do.

This past week I got 2 sales in 1 day that I'm very excited about. What's even more exciting is that it looks like they found me through Google. VERY key to being successful on the internet is ranking high with Google. Hopefully there are many more sales to come. I'll keep ya posted!

So I've decided to take the plunge and purchase the E-Book for the SEO class I'm taking. People report better results with it, and I figure the book is probably more organized than my notes.

I've been continuing to post new products in my Dog Dish Store. I have to admit that I'm getting a bit discouraged. On my to-do list currently is to get people to add my site to their site, and the response for this is VERY low. Kind of frustrating really. But it's one of those not so fun tasks of setting up this successful site. It's a job I don't want to do but really HAS to be done to get my name out there in Google. The more links the more likely Google is to crawl my site and the more likely I will move up in their rankings.

I think one reason why I've been discouraged is that the SEO class is coming to an end and while I feel like I've learned a lot I'm not at the top yet. And maybe unrealistic, but I think I expected to have more hits by now. It's only about 20 hits per day. That's nothing. I would love at LEAST 100. And for more to be coming from Google. I only get about 9 per day from google. The others come from buyitsellit community boards or Selling Lounge. All great people, but I guess I'd rather people get there without me putting the website right in their face.

I should also point out that I have found another fabulous online community full of sellers helping sellers called Selling Lounge. I only wish there were more posts on there, but once people start coming from buyitsellit.com and plumdrop.com hopefully it will pick up.