Happy Numbers

Last week was another doozy, even though traffic gradually drifted back below 300 per day. I raised my spending cap on Google Adwords to an obscene $20 for 100+ clicks per day, and I’m not seeing many conversions. But I’m not going to pare that back until the cash register stops ringing next week.

And ringing it is, as Christmas hangs on. Over the last two weeks I will have personally earned something just over $20 per hour, or nearly $40,000 per year. When you add the substantial end-of-year profit distribution that I’ll be paying myself next week, I would be approaching what I earned in my last real job – if, of course, I could sustain the last two weeks for 12 months. (In fact, if sales kept up at this level all year my profit would make me downright rich.) That’s much more than I ever imagined this whole owning-a-business gig could possibly pay. It’s really encouraging. Makes me wonder what would happen in a growth economy -- or if that would make any difference at all.

Now I’m feeling combat fatigue. I am too old to keep up this physical pace. Next week I look forward to having time to place some reorders, calculate my year-end bonus, tidy up my office, sort out some weird accounting things, deal with vendor errors, tune up my AdWords, work up some proper blog entries, read my trade magazines, and just generally sit on my butt. Meanwhile, I’m happy to keep slogging through frantic orders and watching my bank accounts swell for as long as shoppers are desperate to throw money my way.

I’ll try to write about something more interesting than sales numbers now that the holiday is past and I’m getting some free time back. The year-end report is going to be something to crow about.