Growing my business

I started FlyFishingCRAZY.com 1) because I'm passionate about fly fishing and 2) to earn a couple hundred dollars a month to take some more trips fishing or to see my grandsons in Indiana.

I want to keep my website simple!  I have set up dropship agreements with all my vendors and I offer free shipping on all my products to all my U.S. customers.  My goal is to have the lowest prices on the web for the products that I carry.

Some of my vendors restrict how much I can discount, so hopefully the free shipping provides my edge.  I also offer value added sales, i.e. buy a certain fly rod and reel and the price of the reel will be discounted at checkout.

My site was published June '09, I had 3 sales in July and met my goal of $300/month profit the last quarter.  2010 has started off a little slower but sales have been covering expenses.

Advice for others

For online stores, learn to write good meta content.  Make sure your keyword density is around 4 to 5%.  Keep the content of your site updated and current.  Create a sitemap.xml file in your root directory of your site and keep it updated.  Resubmit your sitemap to search engines every time you update it.

Social Networking is crucial to getting your name out.  Use Facebook, Twitter and tie them together.  Creating a Blog and writing blogs about your business theme using keywords in your blogs that you use in your website.  Create links from each blog to your site.

Create a links page on your site.  Look for similar websites on the internet, contact them and ask them to exchange links.  Post a link to their site if they post to yours.  Keep the links relative and make sure they keep the link to your site up.  The key is to have as many or more links coming in than you have going out.

Cross you fingers!