In at the deep end

Well here I am, in at the deep end and splashing about like a drowning man, at the age of 46 I find myself with an online shop, a whole new direction in life after working as an Electrician, struggling to get by from week to week.

So this blog will follow how it goes...or how long it goes for, success and failures...will it be Barbados? or Bust?

I'd never thought about why results pop up when you "google" something before, I thought it was only because people visited that site, the most visited were at the top...not so it seems, Now I find I'm having crash courses in SEO...what? I've never heard of it, Search Engine Optimization. Then there's Meta tags, back links and hundreds of other things...Eek!

So, I have a site...which I bought, now that saves loads of time, except you don't know how it works. HTML...what's that? there's so much to learn adding my own products, finding them from reliable sources, dealing with people....probably the hardest task of all.

I think the main thing is not to get impatient, I find myself poking about trying to get everything right today when in reality I have NO idea what I'm doing yet, think long term....don't expect 1000 visitors the first week.

So. What do I do next? my best thinking is done while walking the dog...so that's the next move, off to the hills of Wales for some air.

Well a few hours later I've returned muddy and with more questions than answers, which is to be expected, like do people actually make money on the internet or is it just existing shops subsidising their real shop with online sales? I decided the question..."do people make money on the internet?" doesn't matter, the question should be "can I make money on the internet?"
and the only answer I'm allowed to give is "Yes"


One Week later:

Well I've been struggling with submitting my site to Google, something that's actually really, really easy to do when you know how, all you do is insert a bit of code into your site and ask Google to read it...simple when you know how to do it but as I have no idea it's taken me days of trying it in different places, finally I placed it right and google have Verified my site.

Next is to submit a site map of my site to google, again something that's simple when you know how, it took me two days to research how to do it and finally submit a map of 11,015 URLs, Google have indexed only 39. I have no idea why yet.

The next plan is to submit my products to Google's product directory, this again should be easy as my site produces a file ready to upload to Google...only it doesn't work correctly, what a nightmare.