AZDana

Archive for April 11th, 2007

I don’t know if you’re into sewing or not, but this pattern for making a cute kitten out of terry cloth looks pretty easy to me. I doubt if I’m going to make it anytime soon, but I may just whip up a couple before Christmas.

Which reminds me, it’s almost time for me to start Christmas shopping. If you start watching online sites right now, you can find some great buys to stash away for later.

If you try to read the information at the Menu Foods website, it can be confusing. To compound the problem, the header on the page with the recall information actually says, “Menu foods income fund”

Thankfully, the great people at www.thriftyfun.com have put together an easy to read list that has all the details we pet owners need.

My sister, the normally gleeful MLL, is feeling rather sad and lugubrious today because she can’t find a decent artist to design their next t-shirt. She tells them what she wants, and they end up making the head look like a pumpkin. When she told one guy that she wasn’t pleased, he replied by telling her that he wasn’t just another clip art factory and that she had no final say in his artistic control.

Wow!

You’d think that they’d want to build repeat clientele, but I guess that’s why they are called “starving artists”.

Seriously, if you know someone that can take a concept and bring it to production status without getting their ego in the way, please reply here or email me at dana @ azdana.com and I’ll forward the info along. MLL sells a lot of shirts and she needs someone she can work with on this project as well as future ones.

Even though I’ve had a commerce site online for several years, I really haven’t given much thought to internet marketing . I don’t exactly hold to the “build it and they will come” theory, but I also haven’t spent much time contemplating other ways to make sales other than advertise my site on anything and everything that I think is remotely relevant.

But I just had a bit of an epiphany after reading a short post at Marketing Monkey. (Don’t you love that name?) It talked about qualifying your leads in order to build more sales.

Right now, I kind of feel like I’ve been hit by a ton of bricks because I have not even thought of that. I’m also wondering why I have been advertising to anyone and everyone, when I actually need to target a niche market in order to increase sales and build a customer base.

Marketing Monkey looks like it’s brand new, so that means we all can get in on the ground floor of all the information it has to offer. Who knows, you may find the site to be so valuable that you decide to ape some of their ideas. But please, don’t steal the concept of the “paper mache monkeys”.

Fruit flavored jelly beans, that is! bwahahaha

I know I should grab a banana or something healthy. But sometimes, you just have to go for the gusto and grab the jelly beans by the horns. Tomorrow, I’ll behave, but for now, I’m going to enjoy these jelly beans.

Oh LOOK! I just found a licorice one……

Until now, web directories usually rank listings by various factors such as alphabetical order, traffic, or even submission date. However, Bigweblinks.com offers a bidding web directory which means the the listings are ranked by the dollar amount contributed to the listing.

Personally, I think this is a great idea because it gives the web site owner much more control of their listing. After all, when a business puts their listing in a conventional phone book, their placement is determined by the amount they pay to the phone company for that listing. I think it was a smart move for Bigweblinks.com to realize that site owners do want to pay more for better placement. My sister MLL has a very successful business and apart from her hard work, one of the reasons its very successful is that she knows it makes good sense to pay to keep her company name highly visible to the public.

I just heard on the morning news that one type of Royal Canin is being recalled. I don’t remember which specific type, but I want to urge everyone to remember something very important that I found out while doing a lot of research online:

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to make up a fictional pet food company, let’s call it Comet Cat food. When it came to the recent pet food recall, Comet announced that its “Comet Chicken Casserole” was part of the recall and the Chicken Casserole was pulled off retailer shelves. However, retailers continued selling “Comet Crunchies” and “Comet Cajun Delight”.

What the press didn’t say and what I found out was that just because they continued to sell the Crunchies and the Cajun Delight doesn’t mean that they are safe. As a matter of fact, there could be toxic substances in all Comet brand food, but the levels in the “Crunchies” and “Cajun Delight” are considered not to be at unsafe levels.

In other words, if the retailer has a toxin in one type of food they sell, the toxin could be in all their food, its just not considered hazardous enough (yet?) to warrant a mandatory recall, especially when its on a large scale like the prior recall.

I had switched the BBD to Royal Canin, especially when their site was filled with assurances that none of their food was processed in the same facilities that were affected by the recall. I guess I’m just going to have to feed her human food from now on.