Leading the Googlebot

I expected to slip another $800 behind LY because a big lighted cap sale had set this week’s bar ridiculously high, so I flogged Mothers Day to cushion the damage. My first newsletter and coupon in four months turned out pretty well. 271 emails got two bounces, two opt-outs, 58 opens (which is below my usual 74; mentioning “Mothers Day” in the subject line probably made some recipients ignore the email), 19 clicks (33% of opens is considered very good), and two sales. That’s two more than usual, and enough to justify keeping my Constant Contact account open.

The related Facebook post supposedly reached 104 of my 159 followers. It drew 2 “likes” from the usual suspects (and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for those charity clicks; please keep ‘em coming!) and two new ones. None of my personal FB friends answered my plea to share Curio City’s coupon. Oh well; with FB you get what you paid for.

Decent Mothers Day traffic narrowed this week’s anticipated $800 slippage to just $500 -- it turned to crap yesterday after a very encouraging start. The intermittent web-hosting woes that started to plague me at this time last year depressed my sales targets over the next several weeks, creating an opening to catch up.

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I finally figured out how to do the “301 redirect” that a couple of Ess-Eee-Oh experts told me I needed. Search engines see a URL with and without the “www” as two separate sites. The redirect tells Google that they are one and the same and will supposedly boost my esteem. It felt good to take that silly little chore off my nag list.

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My wife slotted me in as a "guest lecturer" for her online e-commerce class. Yup, I’m going to teach some grad students the secrets of wealth and success. I’ll use next week’s post – which, incidentally, will be my 300th – to outline some ideas for these youngsters. At least it won't be more boring trivia about the ups and downs of weekly sales.