Sorry it’s been a while. There is upheaval in them thar hills!

At the beginning of the year I said to myself I wasn’t going to spend any more money on the business but concentrate instead on getting visitor numbers and conversions up, thereby getting sales and profits up.

Yeah, whatever, it doesn’t work like that. Naïve isn’t the word!

Since the new year I’ve spent money on updating the look and useability of the old site, moving across to an entirely new site, a new Mac (which was no hardship), expanding my stock line, recruiting dog treat testers, moving over to a new Royal Mail postage account and hiring staff. And I’m one of the lucky ones, I don’t own a bricks and mortar shop so my overheads are low.

Sales have gone up, I had my best month ever in May, and I did a lot of PR, but June looks set to be the worst this year, such is the ebb and flow of online shopping. Everyone’s dead. We online shop owners say thank you to the Queen for her four day holiday, scuppers us every time! Then it’s Euro 2012, Wimbledon and the Olympics. No one I speak to on ecommerce forums thinks this is going to be a good year for sales, whether your shop trades in the ether or on the high street. 

Still, gives me time to work on transition. I’ve now got to that pivotal stage where I can’t do it on my own any longer. So I’ve hired my book keeper three days a week instead of three days a month, and my lovely friend Deb is training up to take over the ordering, packing and dispatching of all the orders five afternoons a week. Which will give me time to sit at my new Mac (we had to have a second machine and I was b*ggered if I was going to buy another PC, soulless things!) to write all the pretty words, work on marketing, update every website page and make sure the SEO (search engine optimisation) is up to scratch.

I’ve realised it’s all about the marketing. You can have a terrible idea, but if you execute it right it can be a soar-away success. Look at Beta vs VHS, Microsoft vs LINUX, sugar and ‘low fat’ vs healthy eating. And I have a good idea, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t succeed. But will it? I have no idea. I think you can plan and give and work very hard but in the end there’s a large element of luck. Some you make yourself and the rest is chance. It’s just a question of what you do with those chances when they come along. Grab it and run is my strategy!