In a previous post I mentioned that my domain was BabySlingsRUs.com. I should have looked into it before I grabbed that. I chose it because my keyword phrase is baby slings so I wanted this in the domain. I also wanted it to appear at the front so that it grabs the eye of the person, especially if I do pay-per-click ads that show the domain name. The name people see can influence the click-through rate greatly (how many people actually click on your ad).

However, decided to check if “R Us” is trademarked, and it is. Apparently Toys R Us went after a couple of companies who used “R Us” in their names. True, the companies were something ToysRUs would not want to be associated with (GunsRUs and AdultsRUs) but it shows that they really could take legal action against any company that uses R Us if they wanted to.

Since I haven’t had much traffic anyway and haven’t invested a lot of time into getting links, now would be the best time to change it.

So my new site is Baby Slings Direct. I still have Baby Slings at the front, and I think “direct” indicates it is being sent directly from the manufacturer, which it is since they drop ship for me.

Emailed StoresOnline to have them activate the domain. Two days later, no response and no activation, so I asked the online chat person. He had me “on hold” for a few minutes and then said it was done. A couple of days later, no site. Asked another online chat rep who checked and told me the first person hadn’t done it after all.

Sigh…it seems like I get the right answer 60% of the time with StoresOnline help. It may be more than that, but perception is 90% of reality.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 4 Comments »

Well, my homepage is showing up in Google. Can’t believe I was so dumb as to forget to put a metatitle on my homepage! D’oh! So of course Google looked for the highest H tag it could find which was…"Shopping Basket" in my side column. So my very nice Google result has a title of "Shopping Basket." Double D’oh!!!

By the way, here’s a little tip. The absolute fastest way to get your website to show up in Google results is to put a link to it from a blog, provided that blog is hosted by a big blog company like Wordpress and not just on your own website.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 3 Comments »

When I published my site a couple of days ago, I also set up some Google Adwords ads.

Today I reviewed my Adwords. I didn’t get a single click, but it did give me some valuable information. I had originally put in keywords by using a keyword selection tool (I used this one, not the one in StoresOnline Merchant Services, which has data that is from 2006). But in looking at what keywords got impressions in my Adwords account, I discovered that there were 18 impressions of my ad that had to do with one particular use of my product.

So I spent today creating another page on my site which targets why my product is great for that particular use. Then I put the Google Adwords keywords for that particular use into its own ad group and pointed them to this special landing page.

I’m hopefully that this will get me at least one sale, my first sale, in the next few days. We’ll see.

I also delved more deeply into the StoresOnline forum. I found some really good tips in the SOL Storebuilder 5.0 forum room, including how to make columns bigger in any template.

I also discovered how to make my products show in multiple columns—by choosing table in the layout dropdown of the product list element. Must have missed that the first time around. Looks much better this way.

I’m still not listed in Google, though it’s only been a couple of days.

As a sidenote: I received an email from another StoresOnline forum member. She mentioned that she has only had a few sales in 10 months of her site being up even though she gets 5 – 30 visitors a day. I checked out her site—it looked pretty good to me. But then I put in a test order and chose to pay via Paypal. Instead of it working, I got a big, fat, red Paypal error that said it couldn’t process the sale because there was something wrong with the email they had on file for her.

I emailed her about the problem. Who knows how many sales she’s lost because of this.

So, it just goes to show you, always test the ordering procedure, especially if you’re getting visitors but no sales.

Posted by susb8383 under StoresOnline Review | 1 Comment »