Search Engine Optimization and Christmas Cards

For the past three or four months I have been taking free online classes from "Cricket" to learn more about search engine optimization, css, marketing and now photography for online sistes. Her main site is here:

GNC WEB CREATIONS

Before taking her classes, for half of my keywords for custom Post-it notes and personalized Post-it notes keywords I was in the top five, but for the other half I was in the hundreds. Google burped and I went down in all of them, but since the last adjustment I have been in the top 3 for the first batch and up to 30-40 for the other half. Not great, but a vast improvement. And I have used what I have learned to market some of my wedding items as well; my monogram cake toppers and fan wedding programs are top 3 in Froogle. So if you have any kind of online business or a website you want to draw people into, check her out. She is amazing.

Finally, we are getting our Christmas cards up on the cceasy shopping cart. There are some of the really cool "Something Different" ones up as well. I have chosen the Thanksgiving-type ones, a Courage Card style, I will send for business (I ordered 1400 this year! compared to last year when I sent 500!), but I haven't decided on our personal ones yet. More are going up almost every day.

Back from vacation!

Well I survived being away from my home office for 3 weeks! The kids and I went out to visit family for three weeks and I was working from my cell phone and my brother's computer. I had to save a few projects for when I got back, as I had artwork on my home computer, but otherwise I was able to manage pretty well. The experience did convince me that I need to go more paperless with my recordkeeping and I am working out just how to do that now, at least for most customers. Using gmail to access all of my email accounts and then the online shopping cart access allowed me to process orders. I emailed myself a copy of my Excel invoice program so I could use that as well. I did miss my Photoshop and had to make do with Steve's Paint Shop Pro, which is probably a fine program but I am not familiar with it. It has been 2 18 hour days since we got back getting caught up. I apologize to everyone who had to wait for a return email or phone call during the 3 day drive back!

What is hot this summer, besides wedding program fans, is "handwritten" custom Post-it notes. I am getting an order a day for just this type. Nonprofits and real estate companies seem to be the biggest user of them. When I get a scanned version of actual handwriting and print it in blue on canary yellow Post-it notes, it looks so real you can't tell the difference except that the custom Post-it notes won't smear!