Nice momentum

"In business" one week and things are starting to gel nicely. Leads are coming in at a steady pace and we are staying well within budget.

The hardest thing this week is to keep my hands off things. The website is nowhere near what I want long term...but I really need to analyze the traffic funnels before I make drastic changes.

Bonehead move of the week

Trying to do too many things at once I guess...

The primary landing page for my AdWords campaign had a mispelling in the header. Well, the header automatically generates the URL for the page. When I corrected the spelling errror I also let it change the URL...but I didn't think to change my adwords campaigns to the updated URL,

Essentially two days of clicks down the drain...of course I've been driving myself crazy for the past 24 hours trying to figure out why site reporting wasn't lining up with the Google clicks. Measure twice, cut once, right?

I also have a logo now...

Panic attack

Geez...I didn't realize how dependant I was on Google until I couldn't access anything Google related this afternoon. Everything else on the web seemed to be acting fine except Google....then CNN didn't seem to work and then finally I couldn't log into my GoDaddy account.

Reboote the router and everything seems to be fine now. Almost thought I was out of business before my first week was up. Now I understand I need to have more back up systems in place.

First Lead

Wow, it's almost like I know what I'm doing ;-)

AdWords has been running about 6 hours. I got my first click and it converted into a lead. 100% conversion to lead ratio so far...l sure hope we can keep that streak going.

This was a slightly refined version of the first ad I put up this morning. It's tought to not go in hog wild and create umpteenillion different ad variations right away. I'm gonna do my best to stand pat through tomorrow before I start throwing more stuff in there.

One conversion per day would be very good on the front end. We don't want to spread ourselves too thin to begin with.

And Awaaaaaaaaay we go!

We are up and running. Parted ways with the company today and made arrangements to liquidate the pension for startup cash if needed. Unfortunately I lost my health benefits effective today...I thought I'd get at least 30 days of those. It's all good...we already have the pieces in place to shift those things to the wife's employer.

First Adwords campaign is running as well. Pretty basic, pretty simple, just want to get the lay of the land over the next few days. Biggest frustration at the moment is conversion tracking with this site. There seems to be a conflict that we need to work out.

An interesting site about a previous employer of mine

http://www.cwa-union.org/idearc/action/idearc-action-change.html

I'm thinking I might have to attend the share holders' meeting this week. It should be interesting.

One step at a time

It looks like we'll be getting this new venture off the ground some time next week. It's gonna be very interesting if nothing else. I've been wanting to do my own thing for quite a while now so I'm kind of happy my hand has been forced.

I'm seriously contemplating keeping the blog updated with the day to day trials and tribulations of starting a new business from scratch. I doubt that it will be interesting to anyone else, but it will be a good way for me to look back this adventure no matter how it sorts out.

K