Random Student at Barnes and Noble

Last night we had about an hour to kill before our dinner plans with friends, so we stopped by Barnes and Noble. Jason's a bibliophile. We have a library with 10 tall bookshelves and no cable TV in the house.

Anyway, we saw a friend (the best cupcaker maker ever - her snickerdoodle cupcake was spotted at the entrepreneurial women's expo) who was knitting at a table there. We have a whole group of cult-ish friends who meet every Monday night at Barnes and Noble to sit around and knit. They even have a name badge and T-shirts for the club. They are called the Knit Pistols. They nearly swept the County Fair's knitting contest this past year, having entered for the first time.

My form of knitting is quality control on this latest batch of SleepPhones. I put on the Velcro cord wrap, check the speaker placement, and make sure everything works just right. I happened to have my bag of SleepPhones with me because I work on this in the car when Jason's driving. So while the Knit Pistol Baking Fool Hannah worked on her flip-top mittens, I worked on my SleepPhones. Surprisingly, Hannah had not heard of our company. So I started telling her about how I couldn't sleep being on call and how I needed sleep headphones. She is so excited about our product that she's going to blog about us now!

Meanwhile, a random student was sitting around, waiting for a friend. She turned around and said, "Wait, what? Headphones for sleeping? I totally could have used them last night." So we got to talking. I showed both Hannah and this student all about SleepPhones and how they are the coolest things ever. I gave the student my card, and she said she was going to tell all of her friends about them. (I've learned by now to always have my card everywhere I go.) Yes!

That was a very productive hour of random marketing at Barnes and Noble.

Pictures from the Entrepreneurial Women's Expo.

About 2 weeks ago, SleepPhones attended a local women-owned business expo.  It was there that I decided to start keeping a blog for SleepPhones.

Here, Gina and I set up our expo booth.

Gina, one of our employees visiting a photography booth.

Carrie, another employee (and avid SleepPhones user), talks to her mother Linda, who happens to be our small business advisor.

Kerri Smith, in her wedding dress, of Nittany Weddings has been very helpful for our marketing efforts.  

The MC (left) and the organizer (right) of the Expo.
So who is London Wolfe? It's these 2 talented photography gals in Altoona. Their apprentice took most of the pictures on this page.   

Automated Email Services

We have now signed up for an email service called AWeber Communications.  It is a tool to collect and organize email lists from website visitors.  It will send auto-responses when someone signs up.  And users can automatically unsubscribe.  It was strongly recommended to me by Kerri Smith, a local marketing expert at Nittany Weddings I met at the Entrepreneurial Women's Expo.  Constant Contact is another service that many people use, but because of our business model, AWeber was our choice.  I've installed the sign up box on 2 pages of our website.  Many people arrive on the Free MP3 Download page, where they are encouraged to sign up for a free download.  Hopefully that will translate eventually to sales. Most of the people looking for free stuff never end up buying anything right now.   They just download the free music and never come back.   If they land on the Home page and read far enough down, they are encouraged to sign up for valuable announcements in the future.  Hopefully this is be an easy way to recruit new customers who are not immediately ready to buy at this time.

Entrepreneurial Women's Expo

We had a great time at the Entrepreneurial Women's Expo in State College, PA on October 7, 2009! Here's a picture of our display.

Here is a picture of the whole table, which we shared with our friends, the Knuetes clothing line and Eifrig Publishing.

Looks like we'll be having another Expo in 2010! See EWE Website for more info।

The show motivated me to finally do some things to ramp up our marketing and gave me many tips on how to do it - easily and cheaply! Thanks EWE! For example, I'm starting this blog. I plan for this blog to be more business-oriented and less customer-oriented. For customers, we have Twitter and Facebook pages.