I’m bored. The site is at a point where it’s boring me. I think I need to change it up. How, I’m not sure. I feel like all I do right now is send out direct mail, and wait for the orders to come in. It’s time to reevaluate the plan. It’s time to freshen things up.
Sometimes when I’m looking for a little excitement with the site, I change things around. I’ve blogged about this technique before. I move things around in the gift shop, or I change hats around on the red hat pages. For whatever reason, people buy when this happens. I think this is because a great part of my business is return shoppers. When they come to the site time and again, they have a pattern of where they go, and when you change the order they see what they haven’t.

I’ve found a navigation structure that works for the site, so I think I need to jazz up my masthead. I put my major departments along the top of the page that stays as is, no matter what page you go to, and then each department is broken down on the left side or center of the page.

I worry that there are too many departments to my gift shop. I even skim it and have a hard time locking in to what I’m looking for. I’m going to look into this also. Lee Ann and I go back and forth on this. I feel like less is more, but the opposite of that, in some cases, is also true. The more descriptive you get in your categories, the greater chance you will peak interest in a product, right?

Even though I’ve learned so much in the last few years, I still feel like I’m guessing most of the time. So I’ll try to change things this weekend, and then hopefully it’ll generate some excitement on the site.

I can’t find the features in Blogger to get any analytics. I am trying to figure out how many people are coming in off of my salemail to read an article. I think I can use Google analytics to get figures on how many click out of my email campaign into my blog, but I also want to know from blogger how many people are then going to the actual article at a different location.

I always question whether to pump people into the blog from a salemail, because many times you lose the opportunity for the sale when you send them somewhere to read something. I have lots of store links in our blog to bring them back into the store, but I don’t think it’s as effective.

I’m looking for accurate numbers for my traffic, because we are gearing up to start selling advertising in our blog. I’m not even sure I can do that with blogger, or if they have a policy against it.

Just for the record, blogger did unlock my blog within 24 hours of my request. If you read my last blog, you’d know that I was unable to post to it because my weekly SaleMail was sending people into it to read an article.

I have had a very crazy day. For those of you with kids you’d understand. school, then play dates then swim team, then home for dinner. I just sat down to relax, and it’s 8:30pm…I’m beat.

ok, so I thought I was so bright sending customers into my blog to read an article or grab a recipe that might be of interest to them. The redesign of SaleMail has been a good move. Our sales have increased a bit, and our blog is getting more traffic. But last night when I went in to change my “Weekly Read”, Blogger said that my blog is basically on hold because it’s suspected as being a SPAM Blog! And I thought..Is what I’m doing bad? I am sending people into my blog from my email list to read a pertinent article….No I’m perfectly within my rights to do that I think. So I asked for them to review this. In the meantime, I can’t post.

So, another issue, is that I am sending SaleMail out in a table format. With lots of whitespace. Since I know that many of my customers forward my email to their friends, I checked what happened when I forwarded it…it looks horrible. The table condenses into a few inches. I can’t figure out how to prevent this. Do I have a lock feature available to me in Go live that would maintain the measurements of my table? I can’t figure it out. And this is a big issue for me, because no one can forward my salemail right now!

I am curious how long Blogger is going to take to review my blog. I really hope this isn’t an ongoing problem. We’ve only been doing this for 2 weeks now, and the weekly Read is pretty well received, even if I can’t for the life of me get my customers to respond to the postings. They are reading it, and that means I’m getting traffic, which is important.

OK, that’s it for now. I’m going to see if I can figure out that SaleMail issue today.