It's mid February 2008 and starting the business update for this
year begins with the follow through of fixing our shipment issues
of last year. There were a couple 13x18 framed prints arriving
in a less than perfect condition and a glass replacement refund
had to be issued to both customers, who were satisfied with the
settlement. Hence, new shipping boxes were ordered that allow
hard insulation packaging similar to the way our larger prints
are shipped. We have shipped several orders without issue to date.
Business tax season is upon us again and every January begins
the process of determining this past year's efforts. While we
have finally managed to overcome our road expenses, our internet
advertising efforts and basic overhead cost still have us in the
red. The cost of the Google Adword learning curve has been expensive,
but going into it to achieve success had been a known, researched
factor. Our cost of doing business from last year to this year
was overall about the same, unit sales were up 10%, while our
net sales increased by 36%; which can be attributed to selling
more framed product.
Our latest cost cutting effort deals with our merchant services
account provided by Nova International. When we first opened the
account in 2001, the rates for our audio response unit service
(ARU) were 2.32% at $0.95 per item with a $5.00 monthly statement
fee. Well, our volume of sales back then were no where near the
present levels, so the rates seemed reasonable. Bring it up to
the end of 2007 and the rates were 3.21% at $1.11 per item with
an $8.50 monthly statement and a $30 monthly minimum. These rates
are also based upon an ARU service, which by definition are more
expensive from any merchant service provider. Given our current
position we went shopping for services and ended obtaining a new
account with 1st National Processing (1nbcard.com), a subsidiary
of iPayment and a registered independent sales provider or member
service provider (ISO/MSP) of Wells Fargo bank. Their link was
found as a service provider on the Art Fair Sourcebook service
site. Our new merchant service is now a Store and Forward based
service utilizing a Lipman Nurit 3010 portable card swipe unit,
with keyed in option rates for internet / mail / phone sales.
Our basic monthly volume rates will see a decrease of over 40%,
an overall per item decrease of about 60%, monthly statement fee
increase of $1.50 and no monthly minimum or annual fees. Cost
of unit with shipping and setup is around $190, while we believe
the termination fees to our Nova account should be around $95
and current February fees of around $38. Currently awaiting the
unit and will provide overall feedback at a later date.
Further modifications to our 4 month old Google Adword account
over the past month finally yields a daily click through rate
(CTR) average of around 4%. This in turn has gained higher position
in the sponsored link ranking at a lower cost per click (CPC).
Our aim is to keep our relative positions for the strong keywords,
also based on cost to maintain and impressions, on an average
around the number 5 position. For the weaker keywords, cost to
maintain versus position and impressions, on average around the
number 7 position. Just about all of the keywords maintain the
Great status for ad and landing page association. We maintain
a negative keyword association list of around 250, a negative
site listing of around 30 and are no longer listed on the content
network due to various characteristics of the CPC generated. Of
course, at the end of the day, the real metric to measure success
is the associated sales for the advertising campaign. Given the
market economics and our unique artwork makes this difficult,
so currently the target is to obtain a not so painful monthly
cost versus sales until various methods can be produced to achieve
higher sales (i.e. more designs and better page rank on search).
Currently we have modified down to 14 campaigns with about 10
- 40 (football - triathlon) keywords per campaign all targeting
the exact or phrase version of the desired keyword. Cost per campaign
is at $2.00 per day, so $28 for the whole account. The target
account cost is around $2.00 a day in CPC until we can get the
sales to cover cost, at which point, based on varying factors
the individual campaign cost can be increased to get more impressions
per day per search. At the moment the target cost is for one framed
piece of small artwork to cover the monthly cost of advertising.
This maintains a head barely above water mentality, gasping for
air position if you will...while pushing ahead. It'll have to
do for now.
Which brings us onto the next topic of website design. The current
framed based site has been optimized, renamed files and directories,
images file updated...blah, blah, blah...it's still a framed based
site and search engines do not understand it's framed content
indexing nature. Many users have liked the basic site design,
but many have commented, negatively, on the window re-sizing,
navigation, frame reloads back to the index...etc. It also leans
more towards an artistic flavor and needs to be brought back a
little more towards the commercial, more comfortable to users
buying flavor. Given that our keywords for the sponsored site
position have excellent placement based on a variety of characteristics,
including relative strength of the landing page...but, these pages
are called into the frame content which the search engines cannot
seem to ferret out even with a site index file. Page rank is also
suppose to play into the Google Adword algorithm for placement
and cost of keywords, yet a search of our keywords leads to a
nonexistent page position. The overall home index frame page has
a page rank of 2 out of 10; which is crap. Plus, an image search
yields no keyword images anywhere except from our other shopping
sites; which is more crap. This, in no way, helps our cause...time
to change again. To make a longer story shorter, Dreamweaver CS3,
full retail version, was purchased to step up from our version
4. It is completely different, with the utilization of cascading
style sheets (CSS) and spry menu navigation functionality. Got
a lot to do...currently on chapter 9 page layouts, but the new
website layout design is slowly fermenting. Also found the freeware
IcoFX to update the website icons...pretty cool stuff. Onward...tortured
soul.
Mid-March brings us to Chapter 9 in The Missing Manual for Dreamweaver
CS3, the purchase of another missing manual series of CSS, several
additional designs loaded to the website, business taxes completed
for the first quarter, one merchant service terminated with another
performing well for the moment, all variations of art festival
applications in the mail (including 5 new shows), internet orders
out the door and finally the constant massaging vigil over the
Adwords campaign on Google. Also, determined not to be in a rush
to get another website online, but instead modify where required
on the existing one while designing the new one and get more designs
completed for the current online site and art festival season.
It's been real
We'll have to do it again real soon.
Talk at ya.