Fired!!

[Joanne Reay]

Hi everyone. Up untill last Wednesday I was quite happily working full time at a shop where I had been for over 6 years. I also worked at home making up curtains etc and selling on ebay. In January I opened a EKM powershop website to start trading there also. My boss didn't mind me working at home doing the sewing and he also knew I sold items on ebay.

As you do - I did check on my ebay at work and I also went on the EKM forum at work.

My boss realised this and fired me instantly as he said I was running a website and selling on ebay in competition with him in his time.
It was a shock.
I held my hands up and admitted to it and apologised.

Now I am very determined to make a go of my website.
The url is http://www.cwfurnishings.co.uk and I am franctically trying to get all my products on there (a long way to go yet!)
Any help will be gratefully received. Any ideas on improving the look.
It has only been live for about 2 weeks so I'm not getting many hits. Any advice on linking.
Thank you for reading
Joanne

[Nikki - Web Mums]

Hi Joanne,

Firstly - when you post in lone of these mini groups it can easily get overlooked as it doesn't appear on the 'latest activity' until someone replies. So if ever you put a post in and don't get a reply then that is why! I'd hate to think you were fired and now think everyone is ignoring you!!! To get your post seen - just reply to it yourself and say 'HEY!! NEY POST'

Secondly - What a terrible shame about your job. I would take that and look at it as a positive thing. It may have been the push you needed to get your own business off the ground, which judging by your site - you seem to be doing extremely well!

I love the products and the layout looks great on first view. I'll have a more in-depth look later though. As for links - well, to get your site well ranked and into the search engines you need good quality links to get you there. The easiest way to do this is go to Google and put in a website address of a competitor that is doing well on the google search engine - put it in like this:-

link:www.curtainpolesdirect.co.uk and see who is linking to them. Then contact the people linking to them and see if they will link to yours!
You can do a similar thing on Alexia.com - use their traffic search facility.

Also make sure that you are using your keywords, title, descriptions etc to their full potential. You have furnishings in your web address which is good, so make sure you also have furnishings in your shop description, keywords/meta tags and through the product descriptions within your site. Do the same with other relative keywords and you will see your rankings climb.

Also get links to your site via blogs (if you have time) - create one on here and then open a few other blog accounts, like www.blogger.com, www.wordpress.com and there are many more. Then you can copy and paste your blog posts around the internet.

Also, as you seem to be an expert in your field - write some articles. Perhaps you could write a 'simple guide to making a blind' or '5 steps to the perfect curtains'......you get the drift.......then submit it to various places. There are many ezines around the internet that will publish these free of charge and then other people not only read them but they use them on their own sites - with the link back to you and your site in place. This is a great way to get backlinks and customers!

Everything in SEO is time consuming - but it's time well spent. You could have the greatest site EVER but it will fail without the correct SEO proceedures!

I wish you all the best in this Joanne! x

[Joanne Reay]

Hi Nikki. Thank you for all the encouragement. Also thank you for spending the time with the detailed reply - very helpful and much appreciated. I have tons more products to enter my website which I'm trying to get on in between SEO. One thing I'd like to do is to create a data feed on my page of the products in my website. I've just been on google base to try and get my head around getting ebay items on there, but don't understand.
I'll pm you
Many thanks
Joanne

[Nikki - Web Mums]

Joanne - I have included all of the urls that you need in the example below. I could have just given you the url, but I thought you would prefer to follow it step by step.

To subcribe to a feed - you need the URL of that feed. So to put your eBay shop feed onto your Web-Mums profile, you need to do the follow:-

1. Go to your eBay shop here
2. Scroll down to the very bottom of the page and at the bottom left of the page you will see a little orange box with RSS written in it.
3. Click on the RSS box and you will be taken to an 'RSS Feed of your eBay listings.
4. Highlight the url address in the bar at the top which looks like this http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?FeedName=StoreItems&siteId=3&... and then copy it.
5. Come to your profile page on WebMums and find the RSS feed box on the left hand side of your page. It should be an empty box that says click edit to specify the RSS feed for this box.
6. Click edit and you will see a drop-down box. Give it a title - Compleat Furnishings eBay Store for example, and then paste in the url that you copied from your RSS feed on eBay in the URL box under the title.
7. Decided how many listings you want to show and whether you want a detailed view - which will include a pic of your item and that's it!!

If you need any further guidance on this - then just give me a shout! Just a word of warning - in the near future there will most likely be a charge for using an RSS Feed for eBay listings or to products being sold elsewhere - this is just to cover the cost of the increasing bandwidth - it won't be more than £1 a month. At the moment I'm just monitoring it and will give notice if I put the charge in place!

[Joanne Reay]

5. Come to your profile page on WebMums and find the RSS feed box on the left hand side of your page. It should be an empty box that says click edit to specify the RSS feed for this box.

Hi. I can't find the above on my page - looked everywhere!

Can you point me in the right direction. Sorry for being such a pain

Joanne

[Nikki - Web Mums]

Hi Joanne,

Well, I'm a little stumped to be honest. Can you give me in order - the boxes that you have down the lfet side of your page. This would be alot easier if we use the live chat box on the right of the screen. I'm just going to lay my daughter down for a sleep - and I will be back to help you sort this out. Have a go with the live chat box in the meantime and get used to it, see you in 5....