Hi Travesty,
This is so great to hear. I'll help you in any way I can. If you did that many sales already, you should do pretty well - that is a really healthy start for a new website.
I didn't write you back because of the holiday, and I'm days behind on my emails.
We have an online merchant community at
http://www.ebizinsider.com - please go there and subscribe for our magazine, it is free. Every month we send out a magazine of small business articles. We also have a forum that is directly about e commerce, with a few hundred Yahoo Store merchants that will answer questions on the fly.
You did an excellent job on that website, building it all by yourself. It looks great.
My best advice to you is never give up. You may want to try Google Ad Words, or Yahoo Search Marketing. If you do - take it slow!!! Make sure you dont spend more than you earn and NEVER buy keywords that are vague like "art". You want to make sure to buy VERY SPECIFIC keywords.
Use social media to your advantage... We have an article on the homepage of our
http://www.ebizinsider.com page called "Social Media - Confessions of a Social Media Addict".
One last thing... In your "Store Manager" - the page with all the links before you enter your store... Down the botton on the left is a link called "search engines" - under "promote". Go in there and make sure all of your "feeds" are turned to "on". There will be catalog.xml and objinfo.xml. You want those on. These will help search engines pick up your site.
Also, go to our online directory at
http://directory.solidcactus.com - it is new, but any inbound link to your website from a good source will help your organic SEO in the long run. Use coupon code "freedirectory". It will give you a free listing. Anyone here with an e commerce store that takes time to read this can also post a link in there for free using this code.
Also, I'm going to send a copy of this thread to marketing people at Yahoo. I can't promise that this will do anything, but the marketing folks at Yahoo are so wonderful, and they are always really happy to see their product changing the lives of people. Back a few years ago, after Hurricane Katrina, I volunteered along with some wonderful people from Yahoo helping small business owners rebuild. It was a wonderful experience, and Yahoo is a wonderful company.
PLEASE drop me a line and let me know how your are doing...
To Your Success - You Can Do It -
Joe
