This is what a typical Tuesday looks like for us that the Springfield Farmers Market. We now mainly do repeat customers who want multiple bags. I now have to bring more than 100 lbs of popcorn, more than 50 lbs of sugar and at least 9 oils. If it rains and we don’t make it, certain customers get bitchy that they didn’t get their corn for that week.
Take a look at our first blog post from June 2006. Our first day in business was at this market. Notice it says: “we sold about 50 bags that day”.
OK, the William Tell Overture music was an obvious steal from Stanley Kubricks film “A Clockwork Orange”. When I hear this music, I immediately think of Alex and the two girls scene. Rent the film if you have no idea what I mean.
I normally don’t gush over a product, but this is such a necessary thing if you’re selling stuff from under a tent. www.canopiesbyfred.com sells EZUP awnings, EZUP canopies and other things for your craft fair, farmers market tent. Someone on this site turned me on to them and I immediately bought one. They are the greatest thing. (see video) You get an extra 2 feet of overhang with your tent without going beyond your allotted 10′x10 space.
But I have to give some crap to Freds website.
His website optimization (SEO) stinks. I LOOKED REALLY HARD to find a canopy for my EZ UP tent. I knew these things existed by couldn’t find one online. This is why I got excited when I finally located one. If you do a search for “EZUP Awning” or “EZUP Canopy” Freds site doesn’t show up at all on Google. I think he’s listed as #37 on Yahoo. Fred is losing sales bigtime. In fact, because I’ve labeled this blog entry “EZ UP Canopy By Fred”, I’ll bet my video or this blog entry will appear first before his website.
Next day update: OK, I found Fred’s website. He’s on page 6 for the search term “EZ UP Awning”, this stupid little video on Youtube now shows up on page 4 for the search term “EZUP Awning” (no space). The point of all this is you’ve got to be explicit on your spellings and cover all the variations if you want to be found by Google. I would’ve bought one of Fred’s awnings years ago.
While we’re on the subject of SEO. In my book, “How To Start A Kettle Corn Business” I go into proper web optimization for your website. I had stated that if you want your kettle corn business to be found in your state, include your state in your URL. (i.e. kettlecornkentucky.com) Go ahead, do a search for “kettle corn kentucky” on Google. Guess who? Yup, that’s me on the first page.
Since I set up my Kettle Corn Directory page, Google is now listing me way up there for any search that goes by “kettle corn + state name” for all 50 states. This was never my intention, but this certainly explains why I’m getting people going to my website FROM my kettle corn directory page. OK, fine you guys, DON’T listen to me.
A few days later: I get this email:
Hey Eric! What can I say????
I just received some orders and one of the customers said he heard about our
canopy awnings from you. He was in California. The next customer called me
and he also follows you. He was in Washington. I understand you have a
following. So I checked out your sight and was sent to You Tube to see the
video.
Thanks so much!! It looked great. The best of luck with your business!
Well, another year starts up again. This time we’re armed with my high-def camera, so we’ll be giving you video updates for no good reason. We’re slowly acquiring loyal customers. This was the best opening day we’ve had yet. People have been “jonesing” over the winter for their kettle corn fix and they’ve now descended on us. Velma brought a book to read and she never cracked it open.I’m trying to figure out how to advertise locally on the internet to help promote this event. Google can let you target a certain area of the country and that’s what I’ve started to do. It lets you pick a radius of say 7 miles from where we are and it’ll stick your ad on everybody’s computer. We’ll see how that goes.
