Business and Pleasure!

I'm knocking off early today. Although the project I'm working on took 3 times as long as I anticipated, I reached a major milestone today. The details are quite involved but the rough sketch is like this -

Given what's been going on with the economy and my MS, I decided to pull back from local marketing and concentrate on working on the web site. Initially I ran some ranking tests with a newly released product from a vendor. Reviewed the product on the web site. The ranking went well, so I moved on to trying to try to improve rankings on the product keywords for the one product that came with the web site. I quickly realized that I needed to change the way the product was represented on the web.

When we purchased it, the web site was an engine for sales of a publishing product that I understood in general but not in particular. Since the long-term goal was to sell physical products instead of a software product, I concentrated on laying in a framework for e-commerce. Since then I've realized that I could probably double sales of the publishing product while building credibility of the site until we made the transition to physical products. Lately I've been thinking that physical products are too hard. Sales of the publishing product are easy, take little customer interaction, and just run in the background. Its a super model if you can get enough products and visibility to product income streams.

When we re-designed the web site, we just took the old site architecture from the previous owner and tried to overlay it onto an OS commerce framework. The content came over intact for the most part, but the original content didn't create a sales funnel to make people feel good about purchasing the product. I needed to re-work it so I could take a new prospect and walk him through to a purchasing decision. As I tried to build content for the sales funnel I kept stumbling on false assumptions I'd made about how the product worked. So, over the course of 3 weeks I was forced to learn everything about the product to be able to accurately represent it.

Since the product has been on the market for 8 years, we sell to existing customers and they've put up with no funnel and minimal instructions. My wrestling with understanding the product features and grappling with how to generate osCommerce content is finally nearing the end. The framework of the funnel is complete and live. All that's left is some cosmetic work on the new pages and re-writing and re-formatting some of the support pages. Then its on to integrating electronic delivery of the product so we're hands off except for tech support and accounting.

The long and short of it is that now that I understand how the product works, I can start submitting it to shareware sites to drive more traffic. And product descriptions makes sense now for the prospect so forum post referrals and email advertising have some hope of success. Although it took too long, I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment.

Knocking off early to head to the mountains. Things have been so hectic with the kids and wifey's work and my work and the MS that I've been out there once in 2 years. With my teenage son. Three months after we moved in. My original plan had me taking what I hoped to be my wife out there to propose, then convincing her to move there with me. heh. Life comes at you fast I guess, and it never happened. At least she's my wife though.

So now I'm taking her. Complicated by the requirement of taking the daschund with cancer and the younger son. And, there's not enough money to buy her a diamond for the occaision. But I'll put the old engagement ring on her finger again and imagine we're both 20 years younger. The leaves are supposed to be at peak. Hope it clears up out there by tomorrow morning.

I hope you have as good a weekend as I'm planning to have.