U-Haul

I have a marvelous unexpected opportunity to become a U-Haul dealer, and I'm acting on it. I will be in the rental business on Jan. 2nd. I'm moving my business to the East Esso on Hwy. 1 East, next to the Knowles Motel. The second hand store will be in the former restaurant. The parking lot will be filled with U-Haul equipment for rent. I'll operate and dispatch the delivery service from there as well.

The Look

In April I had an opportunity to get into the delivery and second hand store business. I took it. I bought the vehicles and phone number of Bugger's Delivery, a well-known local delivery service. I also bought the stock of D's Look, a second-hand store he had. I renamed it The Look Second Hand Store and Delivery Service, and moved the store to 49 High St. W. It's thriving, doing very well. Here's the website: http://www.thelooksecondhand.com

So sorry...

Harold's Discount Decor is no more. I shut it down last week. The fee for the Doba Warehouse was due, and renewing didn't make sense. I made two sales in a year, both from an expensive pay-per-click campaign.

I have more time for my other stores now.

Update

Well, it's been awhile! Too late to say Happy New Year, almost time to say Happy Easter!

I had a good Christmas season on www.comforteh.com where I market moccasins, mittens and mukluks. Sales were brisk. I shipped merchandise from Indiana to California, and one pair to Alaska, as well as some sales in B.C. and Ontario. Moccasins can be worn year-round and make good slippers. I also visited my supplier's factory recently, and saw the manufacturing process for myself.

The Howells' new book has been published! It's a children's book called "Why Turkeys Strut", telling a continuous story about a farmer's animals. It contains "proof" that the world is round... at least to the turkey. See it here: http://www.theheartlandmusic.com/turkeys . Their first book, "If Centipedes Wore Shoes...", is also available, and I will soon reduce the price substantially. Both books are offered at great prices for good cowboy-style poetry and great hand drawings.

There's lots of good books, art and jewelry at www.faithexpert.com for all faiths, some cults, and for searchers and agnostics too. This online store has over 1,000 books.

Visit www.funbooksaboutanimals.com for good information and stories about almost anything that breathes and isn't human! There's over 1,000 books there too.

Happy browsing!

It's been busy

I moved on Sept. 20 and it was a lot more work than I expected! So I haven't updated this blog in awhile.

I was in a craft and trade show at the Cosmo Senior Centre on Sept. 28 & 29. I had moccasins, mitts and mukluks for sale, and the book "If Centipedes Wore Shoes...". It wasn't very successful. I will be there again on Nov. 24.

I just closed my accounts at LinkExchanged, saving me $20 per month. I haven't got a good exchange from there in a long time, but I kept all the good reciprocated links.

I've added some good pictures to Comfort, Eh! and some good books to Faith Expert. It's worth a look. I'm building site maps for all my stores. Search engines like them, and I hope you will too!

That's all for now, folks! Shop Claffey Enterprises for your Christmas gifts. There's lots of nice stuff for sale!

Update

I've spent the last few days building and updating my Squidoo lenses. Here's a link to one: http://www.squidoo.com/faith_expert/ . They're fun to build and work with, they're free ( like these blogs) and revenue from the Google ads can be donated to charity. I have lenses for three of my stores and I'm building one for Comfort, Eh! my moccasins, mittens and mukluks store.



I've spent a lot of time on sitemaps, without much results. I've tried the free service at automapit.com with some success; needs more work on my part. I'm also busy moving - no fun, but necessary sometimes.



This post is boring, not up to my usual standard. Sorry about that. Let's liven it up. This is the best joke I've heard (read, actually) this year:




How the fight started
I rear-ended a car this morning...the start of a REALLY bad day!
The driver got out of the other car, and he was a DWARF!!
He looked up at me and said "I am NOT Happy!"
So I said, "Well, which one ARE you then?"
That's how the fight started.

Keywords, New Links, Craft Show

I heard a long time ago that "Doing business without advertising is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark: You know what you're doing but no one else does."

I'm advertising soon in The Canadian Elk magazine, The Session magazine (from Sask Recording Industry Assoc.) and hopefully in the brochure for the Western Canadian Music Awards, which are here in Moose Jaw, Sask, in October. I stopped pay-per-click adverising on Google and Yahoo for clocks last month and started a rug campaign on MSN and Yahoo, but sales have been below disappointing. Miniscule is a better word. I'll soon switch to moccasins; winter and Christmas are coming!

About keywords: A recent newsletter suggested that meta tag keywords in text links to pages in the site are very effective. I spent about a week changing all the keywords and text in Faith Expert, http://www.faithexpert.com/, but I'm still not in Google's first 15 pages for three keyword phrases I looked up. Then I realized that site's only two months old! Google doesn't pay much attention to new sites.

The Cosmo Seniors Center here in Moose Jaw, Sask., Canada holds a craft sale for two days in late September and one day in late November every year. This year it's Sept. 28 & 29 and Nov. 24. I'll be there selling moccasins, mittens and mukluks from Comfort, Eh! (http://www.comforteh.com/) Drop by if you're around! As with all local sales, I'm paying the taxes, which is like a 10% discount.

Have fun Christmas shopping! There's lots of great gifts at all five of my stores. Two are mentioned above. The other three are: http://www.funbooksaboutanimals.com/ , http://www.theheartlandmusic.com/ and http://www.haroldsdiscountdecor.com/ . Stay tuned, life ain't dull!

Busy guy!

The last couple of weeks have been busy and full! Lots to do.... doing it. I researched my pay-per-click advertising campaign. Since December I've spent about $1,000 to make two sales with a profit of $50! Not successful! I found a new way to target the ads using keywords that have lots of searches and not much competition, using Overture's tool. I'm trying again with a rug campaign. View a great selection of rugs at www.haroldsdiscountdecor.com .

I've added two photo albums for sale at www.theheartlandmusic.com . One is of a darts tournament, the other is a variety of my snapshots of Saskatchewan, my home province. $15 CDN each.

I'm about to start a fall sale on www.comforteh.com , moccasins, mittens and mukluks. Get ready for cooler weather... it's coming... it always does!

Online Business Ethics

This article from Entireweb states my philosophy pretty clearly. I agree and adhere to what it says.

Online Business Ethics

Very simple: Be a source of integrity. Don't be phony, people will know and not come to visit your site again. Even worse, they will post a bad review somewhere on the web and others will not even come to see for themselves. If you don't know about something, don't pretend that you do.
Respect your customers, or prospective customers, and offer them something of value. Give good information that will draw your customers' attention and this will help to build trust. It also gives them a reason to stay or come back again for more. Follow-up with your customers, but don't be a pest. Basically, don't spam, don't steal, and don't lie.
Just as in an offline business, there are ethics and standards that should be followed. If you are starting an online business, you've probably spent some time online already and can see that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses trying to sell their products and information and services to you. Study how they do it.

Spend some time visiting the websites of your competitors, much like you would when preparing a business plan for an offline business. Look for and evaluate the following characteristics to determine the integrity of the business as a whole:
What are they selling?
When you first come to their index page, can you quickly and easily figure out what they are selling? Is it a real product, an information product, a membership or a service? Do they offer something of real value right off the bat for free such as informative content or a related ebook? If you cannot determine within the first 30 seconds what they are selling or why they are in business, chances are that they are just a hodgepodge of links put together to make the owner affiliate revenue. However, if you do see something of value, stay a bit longer and evaluate further.
Can you contact them directly?
Look on the main page. Contact information could be in the top nav bar, on the side nav bar or at the bottom of the page. Also, look for a direct link such as Contact Us. Click this link and see where it takes you. Do they provide a physical address, a contact name or email, and a phone number? These three things are a must for a legitimate business. If an owner is not confident in his business enough to put an address and contact phone number on his site, he must be hiding something. The final test is to send an email to the company and see who responds and how long it takes to get a response. Most one-person web businesses should be able to answer your email within 1-2 business days.
Is the content valuable and correct?
One of my biggest pet peeves is spelling and grammar. If the owner has done his research and knows what he is talking about, this should show in the quality of the information on his site. A professional image depends on attention to details. Presentation is everything. If you are going to put out information, it has to be presented in an organized fashion with no mistakes. When I see more than one misspelled word or grammar mistake on a website or page, I move on. If the owner has not proofread his own material or verified the information on his site is correct and presented professionally, I won't be trusting that his products are much higher in quality.
Is there a free trial or guarantee on the products and services being offered?
Those businesses that have developed a quality product or service and are confident in it will not hesitate to put a guarantee on it. They will stand behind it 100%. Even better are those companies that let you try the product or service for free. This way you can test it out to see if it is indeed what you need and meets the quality standards of a legitimate business.
How do they advertise?
Look at the other links on the website. Visit some of them to see the quality of partners associated with the first business. Do the links take you somewhere valuable and helpful? Is the business partnered with other legitimate businesses? Also, how did you find out about the website in the first place and what in their ad drew you in? Did the ad lie to you? Make sure that when you advertise that you don't misrepresent what you are offering. In addition, don't be a spammer. Make sure to develop a double opt-in email list that you can use to send valuable follow up information to your customers. This will help to build loyalty as well as word of mouth referrals.
Visit forums and pay-per-click sites to see the companies who are advertising the same products and services that you are to find out what promotion methods they are using. Use them as a starting point and try to set your standards of quality and honesty a step above when developing your ads.
The bottom line is, there is good karma and bad. Even though we all know those people in life whose bad karma hasn't caught up with them yet, don't join the crowd. Be a leader, be a source of integrity, and provide a quality product or service that you can stand behind. In the long run, this will help you build a profitable, long-standing business rather than a fly-by-night get rich quick scheme.

About the Author: Ruth Harris is a real entrepreneur who has helped many others start and promote their online business. Visit http://www.iprofit.viral-business.com/ to get over 170 best-selling eBooks and software titles with Master Resell Rights and ready made profit-pulling minisites all for one low price.

Why Home Decor?

Here's an excerpt from the article I wrote for Harold's Discount Decor - About Me page. It may explain a few things.

Why home decor? When I got divorced, I moved a few boxes of stuff into a storage unit and was homeless for over five years. I lived in the sleeper unit of my long-haul truck. Then I rented a 400 sq. ft. bachelor apartment and fully furnished it. I lived there every third weekend for four years. Then after my back injury I rented a large (to me!) luxurious one-bedroom apartment with a big balcony and bought a lot of furniture and home decor items to transform it into my home. I know what it's like to be homeless. I know what it's like to furnish and decorate an empty apartment. When looking at items to add to this website, I can draw on my own experience.

Sitepal; Mission Statement

SitePal offers very reasonably-priced animated characters to add to websites with a 15-day free trial. I went for it and spent most of a day writing and recording scripts for each of my websites and placing the characters. All five of my stores now have greeting messages in my own voice! Hopefully it'll lead to more sales. It definitely makes my stores more friendly... Or does it? As always, your comments are welcome.

I also added my logo and mission statement to every page on every store. The gurus call it "branding". I think it looks cool, but I did it to tell people who I am, what I stand for, and what I'm trying to do.

The story continues...

Updated Links Pages

I've updated the Links pages on all my sites. They're a lot easier to use now, and the descriptions of my sites are a lot better. The secret to success seems to be: constant improvement. "All things cometh to he who waiteth, as long as he who waiteth worketh like hell while he waiteth." "Be like a duck: calm and unruffled on the surface, but underneath, paddling like hell."

Launched!

Everything I've been working on is now online. Visit my new store: www.faithexpert.com then visit the church site I helped build: www.mjanglican.org then rest awhile. Play solitaire. Take a deep breath, relax. I know I'm good. The rest of the world will find out soon. You just did!

Sidewalk Days, Moose Jaw, Sask., Canada

I'll have a booth at Sidewalk Days Thursday, June 14 to Saturday, June 16. It's my second local promotion effort; the first was at the Focus on Trade show at the Moose Jaw Exhibition in April. Most of my promotion is right here on the Net because that's where my potential customers are!

Sidewalk Days is a huge event with participation from many local businesses. There's three stages featuring local talent, two beer gardens, and a Firefighters Competition. See you there!

The Story So Far...

I bought my first computer in 1982 or so, a Commodore Vic-20... too much information. Fast forward to 2006. I started building stores online in October. The first two stores I built were single product stores, to sell "If Centipedes Wore Shoes..." a book of folk art with cowboy poetry for children, and "Family Reunion", a CD of mostly country music by my friend Carmen Moerike. Both items are for sale at www.theheartlandmusic.com . Then I built a great big home decor store, www.haroldsdiscountdecor.com and a bookstore, www.funbooksaboutanimals.com . Next was a store selling winter apparel accessories, www.comforteh.com , which features moccasins, mitts and mukluks. I'm currently building a store for spiritual and religious items. I've registered the domain name: www.faithexpert.com . I've also rebuilt www.moosejawelks.com , the site for the local lodge of the Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks of Canada, which I joined last winter. Last but not least, I'm supervising the building of www.mjanglican.org , a site for my church.

I'm busy! Much more to follow. Stay tuned!