Showing posts with label Drupal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Drupal. Show all posts
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Google Search
It's always scary for the entrepreneur when the bulk of customers are from one source. If the source goes away, it could spell disaster. In our case, most of our customers find our product from a Google Search. I don't think Google will go away, but our ranking on Google is never a guarantee. We constantly monitor searches on SleepPhones and the listing for our main keywords: sleep headphones, headphones for sleeping. We've optimized those terms as much as possible in our website so we do show up highly in those searches. That's an achievement not to be taken lightly nor messed with frequently. We'll probably upgrade our website to Drupal 6.0 after the holiday season. Making changes right now that might change our ranking is just too risky, since our December sales are typically double a normal month and help boost our sales for the following year. We're working on bettering our search results in Yahoo, Bing, and Ask now.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Extensive SleepPhones Work This Weekend
Website Changes
Over the past 36 hours, many changes have been made to the behind-the-scenes SleepPhones website and marketing technology.
Our brand new SleepPhones System page has been created and launched. It has many more choices than previously available. You can choose the color (midnight black or deep blue), music (none, CD, or digital player), and packaging (with lavender, in a nice storage tin box, or in a gift box).
The original design of SleepPhones has been discontinued from our website. We are sending the rest of that inventory to Amazon. There, they will continue to sell the original design in Gray and Lavender colors, but with limited sizing options. A few other miscellaneous products have been discontinued as well.
I updated the Contact Us page to include our social networking connections.
Due to all of the changes, especially in the Products section, I ran some link checkers to make sure we didn't have any dead links in the website.
First Email Newsletter
We reached 50 mailing list subscribers on AWeber yesterday! So I wrote the first email newsletter for AWeber. Included in that newsletter are a Halloween Coupon and a way to get a $10 rebate on a previous order. The Halloween Coupon webpage launched yesterday will be up for 1 week. It was advertised on Facebook, Twitter, this Blog, and the Newsletter.
Statistics for Marketing
Updated AdWords Campaign Management for better tracking statistics, including view of the SleepPhones System page and the Mailing List Subscription Confirmation page. No major AdWords keywords or ads have been changed this weekend. In Google Analytics, I set goals to track views of the SleepPhones System page and shopping cart page.
Social Marketing
We are up to 570 Twitter Followers today. The Twitter Giveaway continues. Jason found the search function in Twitter, which saves us lots of work. Facebook is now linked with Twitter, so posting on Facebook for SleepPhones now automatically posts a Tweet. I also invited nearly all of my friends to be a fan in Facebook. Hey, some friends are customers too. As for this blog, I've been posting nearly daily for 3 weeks now! I don't know how long I can keep that up, but I do have 2 more posts already written and scheduled to be posted. Maybe this habit will last longer than previous attempts with exercise, yoga, swimming, and vegetarianism.... Now I have to figure out if there is a way to automatically put these blog posts to Facebook and Twitter. Marketing is dominating my time lately, which really feeds my internet addiction.
Drupal
Jason is upgrading the SleepPhones website content management from Drupal 5.0 to Drupal 6.0. That will include a new Ubercart, which will hopefully make shipping calculations and coupons be more straightforward, before reaching Google Checkout. Right now we're just using a hack to do priority shipping by making it a product. And the survey discount is also a product, just with a negative dollar value. Theoretically one could completely negate any charges with an order by adding lots of survey discounts. You can't place an order for a negative amount and get money from us - I did test that. No one has deliberately abused the discount so far, probably because people are generally good. (I actually still believe that, despite handling all of the customer service emails and phone calls.)
He's appropriating Dreamhost settings, loading Drupal modules, and copying over the content to a test server here at home. Once the testing passes, he'll roll it into production. We hope to have that available in the next few weeks.
Our brand new SleepPhones System page has been created and launched. It has many more choices than previously available. You can choose the color (midnight black or deep blue), music (none, CD, or digital player), and packaging (with lavender, in a nice storage tin box, or in a gift box).
The original design of SleepPhones has been discontinued from our website. We are sending the rest of that inventory to Amazon. There, they will continue to sell the original design in Gray and Lavender colors, but with limited sizing options. A few other miscellaneous products have been discontinued as well.
I updated the Contact Us page to include our social networking connections.
Due to all of the changes, especially in the Products section, I ran some link checkers to make sure we didn't have any dead links in the website.
First Email Newsletter
We reached 50 mailing list subscribers on AWeber yesterday! So I wrote the first email newsletter for AWeber. Included in that newsletter are a Halloween Coupon and a way to get a $10 rebate on a previous order. The Halloween Coupon webpage launched yesterday will be up for 1 week. It was advertised on Facebook, Twitter, this Blog, and the Newsletter.
Statistics for Marketing
Social Marketing
We are up to 570 Twitter Followers today. The Twitter Giveaway continues. Jason found the search function in Twitter, which saves us lots of work. Facebook is now linked with Twitter, so posting on Facebook for SleepPhones now automatically posts a Tweet. I also invited nearly all of my friends to be a fan in Facebook. Hey, some friends are customers too. As for this blog, I've been posting nearly daily for 3 weeks now! I don't know how long I can keep that up, but I do have 2 more posts already written and scheduled to be posted. Maybe this habit will last longer than previous attempts with exercise, yoga, swimming, and vegetarianism.... Now I have to figure out if there is a way to automatically put these blog posts to Facebook and Twitter. Marketing is dominating my time lately, which really feeds my internet addiction.
Drupal
Jason is upgrading the SleepPhones website content management from Drupal 5.0 to Drupal 6.0. That will include a new Ubercart, which will hopefully make shipping calculations and coupons be more straightforward, before reaching Google Checkout. Right now we're just using a hack to do priority shipping by making it a product. And the survey discount is also a product, just with a negative dollar value. Theoretically one could completely negate any charges with an order by adding lots of survey discounts. You can't place an order for a negative amount and get money from us - I did test that. No one has deliberately abused the discount so far, probably because people are generally good. (I actually still believe that, despite handling all of the customer service emails and phone calls.)
He's appropriating Dreamhost settings, loading Drupal modules, and copying over the content to a test server here at home. Once the testing passes, he'll roll it into production. We hope to have that available in the next few weeks.
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