I feel like I’ve finally come out of the “new baby” haze. You know that feeling you get when you’ve endured months of nighttime feedings combined with the hormonal daze that you’re in after giving birth. Not to mention trying to figure out a new routine, which is impossible because your new little bundle of joy changes his mind every other week about what his routine is. I vaguely remember being in this place with my first child. It’s a space that I like; motivated, refreshed and possibly a little desperate as I imagine saving for two college tuitions instead of one.
Last time I had a new baby, I ended up with a new business that allowed me to stay home and work. This time, as I start to look around I see that I’ve lost a lot of ground in that business and I’m ready to really get back to the grind and start building again. I’m feeling like I need a bit of a jump start, but I’m not really sure where to start. So, I’m taking stock. I started by analyzing my sales. Eeek. My sales have dropped by 75% since the baby was born. I knew we were struggling, just hadn’t really taken a look at it. Sure, the baby coincided with a market downturn, people got more particular about where and how they were going to spend their money, but I’m guessing that it really has more to do with less hours at work, less focus in my marketing strategy and a total abandonment of SEO.
The good news is that I know that it’s possible to get back – I did it in the first place. And, I’m confident that the second time around, things can happen much faster – after all, I have been here before, I have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t.
The first thing I’ve done is take a good look at my website’s stats and rankings. I always use AWStats – it comes with my hosting and gives me a ton of information, including how many visitors I’ve had to my site. While my actual site visitors has not fallen as drastically as I expected, given the decrease in sales, it has fallen. Looks like my site visits have fallen by about 30%. This is a rough estimate based on comparing my site stats for a 6 month period last year – I chose April – September – to the same 6 month period this year. The next thing I did was checkout my Alexa rankings. If you have never taken a look at your site in Alexa stop what you’re doing and go there now. It’s a great tool to see your traffic trends and compare your site to your competitors. A quick peek at Alexa shows me that my ranking has gone from about 850,000 last year to about 1,900,000. Wow, that’s a tumble. And, when I look at my main competitors, their rankings seem to be even better than they were when I was at 850,000. It’s no surprise either that my highest month in sales was when my Alexa ranking reached the 800,000′s.
Taking a look at AWStats, Alexa and my sales took me about 20 minutes, and really, what I can see very clearly is that I need more traffic. One of the main things that I stopped doing right around the time the baby was born was using Google Adwords. I fell into that trap of thinking it was too expensive, when really, it’s too expensive not to use it. When I started utilizing Adwords effectively, for about $150 – $200 a month I saw my sales double. Clearly, baby brain got the best of me, because I completely forgot how effective it was. So, the first thing on my to do list is re-activiate my Adwords account, which is super easy, because everything is saved, so with one click I’m back in with Adwords. For now, this is my marketing plan, I can add on later.
Next I need to look at my SEO. This is a little more complicated, mostly because I hadn’t tracked my SEO very well before. I had worked on it, and I know that I was on the first page of several categories, but I’m not sure which ones those were so I can’t compare. Clearly I need a tracking system for SEO – something quick that will take me 15 – 20 minutes a week to run through. Never wanting to re-invent the wheel, I seem to remember somewhere seeing some tracking worksheets for SEO. Yep – here it is – Your SEO Plan, and they’ve got several worksheets to track your SEO, including one to track your keywords – beautiful. I will begin filling that out asap – it’s something I can check once a week or bi-weekly and chart, which will be super easy since I tend to check my keywords on google at least once a week anyway, just not in any organized fashion and with no checkup of the data. There is a ton more I could do with SEO, but I think for now this is a good start.
Finally, my schedule. I’m constantly thinking in my head, I’ve got to work smarter not harder, but I’m not always sure how to do that. Usually, like the mom in the illustration above (and probably lots of other WAHM’s out there), I’m doing 18 things at once, in hectic fashion.
Again, I’ve forgotten the things I learned before the baby, like scheduling. I used to schedule my work day fairly well. I admit, it’s easier to do when you don’t have a newborn in the house. And, I did go from finally having a full day for work, because my daughter was in kindergarten, to having a new baby. But, naptimes are more consistent now and my daughter is back in school full time now that summer vacation is over. Before my daughter was in kindergarten, I used to work a lot at night and I created a schedule, making sure to give my husband some off time and keep some family time open. I think if I add 2-3 hours 4 nights a week, combined with 4 hours of naptime on the day and one weekend, I’ll be able to actually concentrate on work when I’m working. As things get back up and going I can always hire a sitter for a couple of hours a week to give me even more time. I know from the past that if the time is scheduled, it will happen. Just like when I worked outside of the home, I had stop and start times, and lunch time planned, if I stick to a more concrete schedule I’ll be more productive.
OK, so in 30 minutes I’ve come up with a plan to jump start my business out of this slowdown. My homework for the week will be to get the tracking spreadsheets downloaded and started and to do a little research in maximizing google adwords. Quick and easy, I’ve got a great jump start to building my traffic and business back up.
