What's Left to Say?

After all these years, this blog might be finished.

When I upload a post to Blogger, an app called IFTTT (which stands for If This Then That) is supposed to copy the post title and URL to Facebook, which then sends it to Twitter. Nearly all of my readers come from that Facebook post. I don’t use Twitter, but it puts a link to the post at the bottom of my store page, and that drives the rest of my readership. Virtually nobody ever comes here except from those two links.

IFTTT failed to cross-post my last update, and turned itself off. “There was a problem with the Blogger service,” it says, with no details. I suspect it has something to do with the cookie disclaimer that all sites are required to display now for some reason. Today I turned it back on. If it manages to publish this post, I'll be back occasionally. If it doesn't, I am just screaming in an empty auditorium.

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My plan to close Curio City by the end of December hasn’t changed. I cleared out a lot of stock over the summer and hope to sell more during one last Christmas season. QuickBooks says I still have $11,800 worth of inventory on hand (down from $17,400 in January), and I’d love to get that below $10,000 before I write it all off. Today I killed the "mayor@curiocityonline" email address that had turned into a spam bucket...but I also renewed my SSL for another year, so I still haven't done anything irreversible.

Blue Hills Editorial didn't meet expectations this year, but I haven’t done anything to flog it yet, either. I'm pretty sure I lost one of my biggest clients when they were unhappy with an assignment that I turned in (I won't go into why, but I believe the blame for that is mutual). 

So far this year Curio City has only paid me $3,400 (gross!). I only need one big (or two average) editing projects to make that up.

Still...Can't...Stop

In case you didn't guess from the 486 blog posts that have piled up over the past 10 years of Fridays, I'm a creature of habit. Skipping a post, as I did last Friday, might disturb habitual readers who are as compulsive as I am. I've said just about everything that I can say about Curio City in those 486 posts, so I'm trying to be more relaxed during the summer doldrums. If nothing happens during a week, I won't post about nothing happening.

This happened: My first order of 24 Create-a-birds sold out in two weeks. I'd like to think that the next 24 will go just as quickly...but a single order for 20 kites distorted the first batch. I noticed that Jackite is finally back in stock on Falcons, but since I only noticed that when I was receiving my most recent stock order, I shouldn't bring them back in until my credit card statement period resets on the third. "Shouldn't" isn't the same as "won't", though, and I'll probably wind up placing another order before the holiday weekend.

How's that whole paying-off-debt thing going? I still Can't...Stop...Spending. I should have spent $1,100 or less on merchandise this month just to hold my ground. I've already spent $1,850 and vendors keep tempting me with extra-discount and free-freight offers. My debt has shifted from Mastercard to the zero-interest Amex now, but it rose from $5,500 to $7,000 during the transition. Shocked by seeing me carry a balance for the first time ever, the enablers at Amex raised my credit limit to $20,300. Part of me is tempted to spend it all and go out in a blaze of glorious red ink. 

I shouldn't need to order anything except kites until September or October. I'll probably be okay if I can whittle the debt to $5,000 or less by then. And my workload is light while my hoarding money is my primary goal, so that's kind of nice. 

And yet...the vendor who supplies most of my Christmasy items is running a special until next Thursday: An $800 order gets me 10% off, and $1,200 adds free freight. On one hand, an $800 order would only add $80 to my bottom line (and only if I sell the entire order) and the $1,200 level would increase profits by about $175; I'd have to store the stuff for five months before it starts to trickle out; and I really REALLY need to reduce my debt. OTOH, I'm going to buy that stuff anyway; it won't be billed until August 30 (Net 60 terms); the vendor will sell out of some items by the time I would normally order in October; I have idle time on my hands now; and Amex has zero interest until January. Gods help me, it's hard to resist when the Other Hand holds so many good cards.  

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Speaking of not stopping: I whacked my 387 active Constant Contact addresses down to 157 who have opened at least one newsletter since February. I exported those "good" addresses and rang up customer service to close my account and save $21.25 per month. First they offered me half price for 12 months. Then they warned me that Mailchimp has no customer service at all...well, in nine years I've been with Constant Contact, today was the first time I ever contacted them, so that's not exactly a big concern. They also claimed that Mailchimp requires a two-step confirmation process for new contacts that makes it very hard to grown one's list (Constant Contact just requires me to tick a box verifying that people opted in). That could be a dealbreaker if it's true. So Constant Contact offered me one free month to see if Mailchimp is going to work out. If it doesn't, I can call them by Aug. 1 to claim the half-price offer.

I need to set up a Mailchimp account and produce one newsletter during July to see how that works. July is just about the worst month of the year to test a marketing tool, but I'm evaluating functionality, not results. Free forever is better than half price for a year if it works as expected. 

Email marketing broke when Sunshop removed the newsletter signup dialog from their responsive templates, making it next to impossible to recruit new subscribers. My mailing list only ever gets smaller as old addresses go invalid. I have approached my programmer about fixing that later this summer.       

OK, 2014, Let's Dance

I wish that I could predict sunshine and lollipops for 2014. I ought to be counting my money and planning how to invest it; this year I’m not going to be able to pay my January Amex bill. Mastercard will want a few hundred bucks a couple of weeks later, and then I’ve got to scrape together $1,115 for tax preparation and fees. Right now all I see are bills stretching out forever and a checking account that’s stuck in neutral.    

I have two goals for this year. The first is simple: Don’t fail. That just means paying the bills and beating the low targets that 2013 laid down. In business as in life, I only ever hope to survive, but that won’t cut it this year, so the second goal is to succeed: That is, to beat 2011’s high water mark by 1% and restore real growth. That requires a seemingly impossible 22% increase over LY. 

The only strategy that I have in mind will cost a little money, but maybe not too much money.  

  
I passed up the last two Sunshop updates because they didn’t contain enough features or fixes to justify the cost and risks of upgrading. The only intriguing item is something called “responsive themes.” I’m not entirely sure what that means except that the new templates are supposed to make the store display better on smartphones. 

Who cares? I don’t have a smartphone, I don’t understand them, and I can’t afford to get one, so adopting a “responsive theme” is a shot in the dark. My existing website already looks better than I expected on my wife’s Android phone. Analytics says that nearly half of my December visitors arrived on a smartphone and that they were worthless. 84% of mobile users bounced away without looking at anything (vs. 67% of desktop users); those who stayed only looked at 1.5 pages (vs. 3.33); and only 0.48% of them bought anything (vs. 3.9% on desktops and 2.6% on tablets). Knowing that smartphone traffic is of notoriously poor quality I had already reduced my ad bids for mobile devices by 25% to avoid wasting money on their clicks. But they came anyway. If I can’t get rid of them and I can’t force them to use real computers, I have to figure out how to exploit them. 
  
Even if the “responsive” thing goes nowhere, a new coat of paint can’t hurt. Curio City’s appearance hasn’t changed since 2007. Turnkey will do the upgrade for just $75, which is considerably less than I usually pay my own developer (assuming they don’t charge $75 per version!). I might be able to squeeze in $75 as early as next month. I'll be throwing away six years of accumulated customizations in my old “modern black” template. Bringing them along could cost hundreds of dollars in developer time plus potential downtime. But I need to play the only ace up my sleeve early in the year if it’s going to make any difference, even if that means starting over with a generic, uncustomized template.

If Turnkey releases the all-new Sunshop 5 it negates all of this, but that’s been just around the corner for two years now.  

I need to do this as soon as we get through the holiday hangover and I can cover my immediate bills. Meanwhile, I’ve cut my bids for mobile devices further so my limited ad budget can reach better quality customers.

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Advertising is my only major variable expense. I probably can’t cut the actual spend without slitting my throat, but I might be able to squeeze more revenue from it. For starters, I’m taking another hard look at Bing/Yahoo ads. I spent $200 for just 13 conversions in December, but I screwed up the statistics when I wasted $84 advertising cheap Buglit flashlights -- 3,359 clicks and 0 conversions before I caught that mistake. I’m going to monitor my Microsoft Adcenter spend through January and cut it off entirely if it doesn’t perform. This isn’t the first time I’ve threatened to do that, but it’s the most serious I’ve been about the threat.

How did 2014’s first accounting week go? Well, I beat LY on five out of six days and would have enjoyed a small lead had it not been for a $500 bolt-from-the-blue Switchables order LY. So I’m already running 50% behind LY. And I had two other bulk orders in January 2013 that I can’t expect to repeat this year. I’ll declare victory if January 2014 can merely match LY without the benefit of any big shots in the arm.

I like to end on a positive note whenever I can. That’s a reach this week. Economists are predicting two or three years of normal, healthy growth, and that passes for boom times in the wake of the Great Recession. Curio City has historically done best when the economy has done worst, and vice versa, but I don’t think there’s a causal relationship there. Trickle-down economics has been resoundingly discredited, but a rising tide should lift all boats by at least a couple of millimeters if we can stop the leaks.

I’m in decent shape for merchandise and supplies. I shouldn’t need to buy anything for a few weeks.

There are a couple of silly tricks in my favor: First, Excel’s 2014 will have 53 weeks after it steals December 29-31 from 2013 and January 1-3 from 2015, because both of those three-day segments belong to the four days of their adjacent weeks. That fiction won’t affect the Quickbooks numbers that I report here, but it ought to be good for a few hundred bucks in the numbers that I use for planning and measurement. Second, we decided not to take a summer vacation this year because our cat is too old and fragile to leave alone and we need to put the money toward a new roof. That ought to be good for another few hundred dollars, but this plan could change if Iggy dies soon.

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I realize that this blog is in a hand-wringing rut. I’m tired of writing about lousy sales and broken budgets, so Friday entries are going to become more sporadic. Readership has fallen into single digits anyway; maybe more engaging topics will lead a surge back to double digits.

Jewelry, Recycled

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, call me crazy: I rolled out a new jewelry line for Valentines Day. Bottled Up Designs ties in with my recycled products theme and might entice the Switchables demographic, too.

Jewelry is a low-risk proposition: I create pages, then sit back and collect money; the jeweler actually fulfills the orders. If it works out, I get a few high-end sales each month for very little labor. If it flops, all I’ve lost is my time, which is worth less than $8 an hour anyway. I spent the best part of last week creating pages for just half of the available products.

Previous jewelry lines all failed for one reason or another. Typewriter key jewelry started out well, but the supply of popular letters was limited – every typewriter keyboard has only one M key, after all; if you want a necklace that spells out “mom” you just depleted two typewriters. It died out when customers could no longer order the messages they wanted.

Then I tried a line of silver nature jewelry from Lovell Designs. Its main merit was that Anne likes it. It wasn’t particularly unusual and didn’t enhance the Curio City concept. The company was unenthusiastic about selling online, let alone dropshipping, and they didn’t communicate well. I finally pulled the plug for lack of interest. Their money clips and cuff links did alright (men’s jewelry being comparatively rare), but not well enough to keep the relationship open.

Switchables jewelry sells a piece every now and then, but not nearly enough to justify adding more styles. They don’t dropship so I’d need to tie up inventory dollars. I keep it alive for cross-marketing with their very successful night lights.

I negotiated for weeks to land a Morse code jewelry line that would have done very well, but the jeweler finally refused to customize and dropship her jewelry. Customization was the key to this concept’s online success, so that was the end of that.

This fourth attempt will be different. Oh yes, it will. It complements my other merchandise, commands a high (but not prohibitive) price, carries a good markup, and requires minimal work after the initial setup. The strange thing is I’ll probably never actually see any of this jewelry myself.


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An email from “Quest”, the Department of Unemployment Assistance’s new website, said that I had a message waiting in my Correspondence section. Well, it must be important if they felt that they had to send me an email telling me that I had email. Hmmm, nope; nothing there at all. Oh well, they no doubt want their money. Holy crap, did DUA ever make it hard to pay them! Quest is a program only a bureaucrat could have approved. The Department of Revenue site that slurps up my other state tax payments is much, much easier to use. Oh well, at least the amount due came out right to the penny. I’m a little nervous that I now have to report hours worked, since I’m below minimum wage for three quarters of the year. I guess I’ll just have to divide my total pay by $8 to figure out how little I should have worked each quarter.

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The blogcast thingie for Facebook looks like it’s working (props to Dave for suggesting it). I’ll try to jazz up my lead sentences now that they’re going to appear before my FB fans every Friday. In the interest of perfect entanglement here’s a link to the blogcast tab on my FB page. I can't see why anyone would want that, but I'm being thorough.

New readers: “Curious Business” is about the weekly ups and downs of running a home business. It’s not a marketing tool except inasmuch as it converts the rare new Curio City groupie. You’re reading my 183rd post since I started blogging in 2006, so you can trace the whole history of my company if you’re a masochist. My posts are sometimes tedious and narcissistic, but they’re always candid.

The 150

Remember how I once said that Curio City is too small to fail? Well, here’s an angle I hadn’t considered. Advanta, the number one credit card issuer for small businesses, is reportedly cutting off all of their million customers effective June 10 (they haven’t notified me yet). I use my Advanta Mastercard for all of my merchandise purchases -- $26,000 last year – because I like getting the 1% cash back. Now I’m left with only my Amex Platinum Business card. I consider myself lucky – a lot of businesses my size lack any fallback.

I broke down and applied for the Visa business card that UPS keeps pitching me, month after month, but I’m skeptical that I’ll be approved in today’s tight credit market…especially with 1 million other small business owners suddenly looking for credit. Carrying a UPS-branded card will be bittersweet anyway, given my feelings about that company (see the Reasons to Hate UPS tag). But feelings have no place in finance.

Incidentally, remember how I said last week that I could theoretically finance my modest expansion plans with credit card advances? Uh, not any more. Losing Advanta cut my available credit by more than half.


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I finally sifted through a lot of SCORE member biographies and found four whose backgrounds might be helpful. I’m going to approach the first of them this afternoon. I don’t know why I have such a mental block about involving outsiders. I am not bound by their advice.


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Four years. That’s how long it took to reach Google AdSense’s $100 payout threshold. My check arrived last week. Today the repair estimate for my nine-year-old wristwatch came in at a cool $100. Thanks for clicking on those ads, readers. Now let’s see if we can reach the next $100 in less than four years. You know what to do…clickety click click!

Google changed their AdSense placement routines recently so that readers’ browsing habits now determine the ads that you see on my blog. When I look at Curious Business on my desktop gaming machine, I see much more interesting ads than the boring banky things that appear on my work laptop. That ought to generate a lot more clicks.


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My wife, who is learning about using blogs and social networks for business, tells me that I don’t post often enough. Now, I think that once a week is plenty. It takes me that long to polish a post, and after writing 150 posts (as of today!) I don’t have much more to say. So she suggests that I start a second blog aimed more at casual readers than business people. I guess I’d be spewing my endlessly fascinating news commentary, economy observations, and political opinions. Or something like that. The secret agenda, of course, would be pimping my products and my store.

I suppose I could give it a try. It’s not like it will cost me anything, and it might expand my little online empire. She’s trying to convince me to revisit Twitter, too, because all of these things are supposed to reinforce one another and ultimately feed me customers. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work; it seems like I’d be spending an awful lot of time writing about work instead of actually, you know, working.

Not that I’m doing a whole lot of that. May is not going to be one for the record books. Sales are slow and there’s no money to spend, so I don’t have a whole lot to do.


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Dayclocks did start selling again after I marked them down to what looks like their new prevailing price. So I’ll keep carrying and advertising them despite the reduced markup...at least for awhile. Who knows, maybe they’ll go back up to their rightful retail price eventually.

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OK, so that's all I've got for post #150. Sad, huh?

Uh-Oh

Did you miss me these past two weeks? Probably not. A few regular readers have added Curious Business to their RSS readers; presumably they at least see the subject line of new posts. But if it’s become a chore for me to write these entries, it must be a chore to read them, too. My recent posts have only been interesting if you’re following Curio City in obsessive detail. Hell, even my own wife doesn’t read my blog. It’s no wonder the hit counter at the bottom of the page doesn’t move much.

Only a small fraction of the 115+ posts in my archives might entice a curious browser to stick around. So I’m going to finish up the few topics that I still have on the hook, and then break my weekly posting compulsion. I’ll update when I have something compelling to say.

Last week’s vacation killed sales deader than did either of my previous absences. Traffic dropped from 150 visits to 50 per day. LY I enjoyed roughly 65% of normal sales during my vacation week. This year I did barely 30% of normal. More worrisome, sales did not recover along with daily visits when I flipped my ads back on. This week is breathtakingly bad. I’m hoping that technical problems are to blame.

Eric found the time last weekend to upgrade my site from Sunshop 4.1.0 to 4.1.4 (on the same day that Turnkey released 4.1.5, keeping me one step behind). I’ve turned on several new features. The best one is a javascript rollover photo app. To see what I mean, just go here and sweep your cursor over the little thumbnail pics.

There’s also a new cross-selling feature on the shopping cart – “users who bought this product also bought…” And a little currency converter on the main page lets you see prices in a variety of other currencies. Currency conversion is supposedly turned off, so it only shows up because of a bug in my template. But even though I don’t especially want to encourage more non-US sales, I think it’s kind of nifty. I’ll keep it for now. Every sale is precious.

Google Analytics should be using the new Sunshop modules now. That would mean one less customization to maintain going forward. I don’t think Eric has commented out his own code yet, so I’m not positive that Sunshop is doing the heavy lifting. I really ought to verify this, although I’m loathe to perturb something that’s working.

So, what’s the technical problem I mentioned? Twice since the upgrade, I’ve seen this message instead of my website:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: User kraken has already more than 'max_user_connections' active connections in /home/virtual/site152/fst/var/www/html/include/db_mysql.php on line 47

There seems to have been a slight problem with the database. Please contact the server admin to report this problem.

If I have hit it twice in routine checks, how many customers has it driven away? This is one of those frustrating things that I’m powerless to fix myself. I’ve been seeking help from Turnkey, MochaHost, and poor longsuffering Eric. Between the three of them, it will get solved. Eventually. Meanwhile I’ve been paying for ads that direct people to a crippled website. This morning Turnkey posted an easy fix that seems to have worked, so far. We shall see.

If it looks stable, I will try next week to implement flyout menus myself. There are a couple of other minor amateur modifications that I think I can attempt, too. After that, I can finally try again to find a new (permanent?) contract developer.

On a cheery note, I’m still selling some old marked-down merchandise that I won’t replace, liberating long-imprisoned inventory dollars. Unfortunately, my usual bestsellers barely have a pulse. Shoppers must be spending their increasingly scarce dollars on back-to-school necessities right now, while the macro economic news keeps getting worse. Or maybe my website is just broken.

• Tick…tick…tick
• Legal extortion
• The zombie store
• Wacky ideas

The Blogcentennial

Not a whole lot has changed since I first wrote about Why I Blog. I’ve met a few other small business owners, although little has come of it. I’ve struck up rudimentary dialogs with a few customers and interested onlookers, but Comments are an awkward way to converse. I’ve signed up a few newsletter subscribers. I’ve accumulated a few AdSense clicks. (Very few clicks; the boring ads that Google reliably serves up week after week speak ill of my writing. I really do appreciate that readers gamely click an ad or two every time I mention them -- like now). My blunt tone has accidentally cheesed off at least one vendor and insulted one customer, so it’s not all good. Honesty and marketing don’t go together, and I've never been much of a diplomat.

When I started doing this, I didn’t even know what a blog was. I just knew that the experts agreed that I should have one. Since I had kept a private journal for about 20 years, documenting my thoughts came naturally, although doing it publicly did not. A hundred posts later, it’s become routine – maybe too routine. So this week I tried to jazz things up a little, within my limits as a technical moron. I discovered the “Blogger in Draft” beta site, where I could access new content like the RSS subscription gadget. I also added a couple more silly gadgets to my sidebar while I was at it.

I have a logo and link to Technorati, but I’ve never been sure exactly what that’s supposed to do...with the predictable consequence that it doesn't do anything. There’s something called “del.icio.us” on my browser’s menu bar, but I don’t know what that is, either – online bookmarks? why are those any better than normal browser bookmarks? Digg? StumbleUpon? Just names and logos to me. I tried offering a poll once, but after a month, the winning choice (with two votes) was “I don’t like polls.” Fine. Have it your way.

I could invest some of the ample time that I waste writing blog entries investigating some of these mysteries. It seems futile…the technology will inevitably change within six months of figuring it out anyway. And it is so incredibly boring. This is the type of thing I wish I could farm out to an expert.

More than one observer has recommended getting WordPress and moving Curious Business to its own hosting account (or somehow shoehorning a second URL into my Curio City or Kraken Enterprises hosting accounts; I don’t know how, but it might be possible.) I think the idea is to raise my blog's profile above the commoners who use free services. Yet Curious Business is too narrowly focused, and I’m too dull, to even seek a large popular audience. What’s the advantage to learning a new software package and paying $75-100 per year for a second host account? I don’t get it.

Google owns Blogger, so (despite some irritating interface bugs) it keeps up with technical innovations and is likely to be around for a long time. It's easy to use, it’s free, and I’ve got a 100-post database built up here. That’s some powerful inertia that I have no incentive to overcome.

Is blogging worth my time? Curious Business is my #14 overall source of traffic so far this year, and my #8 source of referral visits. While I certainly appreciate the 34 visits that those numbers represent, it’s still only 34 visits. With my 2.25% average conversion rate, those visitors should’ve made three-quarters of one purchase. My average order value was $47.68, so statistically speaking my blog brought in $35.76, or $2.38 per post. If the average post takes me 90 minutes to write, then blogging is earning Curio City about $1.59 per hour, of which 27 cents goes into payroll. That’s a lot more than I would have guessed. Based on a 40-hour week, my gross salary is $2.93 per hour so far this year. That’s very good money (compared to LY's $1.45 hourly pay rate), and blogging contributes nearly 10 percent of that. So yeah, blogging really is worth my time. That is not the conclusion that I expected to reach, but there you have it.

Of course, this is all just statistical masturbation. See how good I am at avoiding actual, productive work? As I said the first time I wrote about this, the primary reason I blog is to compose my thoughts and create a history that I might refer back to one day. I’m flattered that a few people find it interesting enough to read, and even leave comments. Any sales that Curious Business delivers are just gravy. I’d continue writing for my own selfish reasons anyway.

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Sales turned around in the middle of last week. Maybe it’s the beginning of a Mothers Day surge, or maybe the AdWords rewrites and tune-up that I’ve been chipping away at are paying off. For whatever reason, this is already my best week since early March, and, with a day and a half left to go, could potentially even rival early February. For the month, I’ve demolished LY and achieved my plan with a week left to go. Today I’m feeling fat and happy. And a little bit stressed. I've got a lot of work to do today, starting with processing a large Canadian order and a smaller UPS 2nd-Day Air sale that came in overnight.

Coming topics:

• Focus, Juice
• Social Networking Sites
• Rearranging the Deck Chairs
• Running with the Big Dogs
• Legal Extortion
• Where Traffic Comes From