durtbagz: this is hard. i mean, really hard.

okay, i really want this to be a positive post, considering it’s the day after christmas and all. i’m in a weird spot.

for the first time ever in my 30 years of living, i’m being challenged. big time.

i’m lucky in that my life up to now has been fantastic. school was never really hard for me; including college. i’ve always made great friends wherever i’ve moved. i’ve always managed to get a job and a place to live shortly after moving somewhere on a whim, which i’ve done multiple times. i’ve been able to have a really great marriage for almost two years now and considering both the husband and i are only children, i think this is quite an accomplishment. i’m good with money and have always managed to keep myself afloat and then some for my adult life.

and then i decided to build my own company.

and i quickly learned the definition of the word “challenge”.

i have to be honest. i thought that this idea for bagz was unique enough that once we got the website live, we’d be golden and start selling bagz. all we had to do was just open the door and people would come. call it naivete. call it lack of experience. call it dumb. that is really what i thought. if my friends told all of their friends and they told all of their friends…we’d be selling bagz like hot cakes, no problem.

turns out, this isn’t how it works.

number one lesson: if you build it, they might come, they might not.

opening the doors does nothing if people don’t a) know who you are or b) can’t find you very easily. and durtbagz fits into both of those categories right now.

the solutions? marketing and SEO. i’ve been racking my brain for some seriously fun, unique, weird, innovative ways to market durtbagz both online and off. i’ve met with PR people to help me come up with different plans in different mediums. setting yourself apart is freaking hard, all right? it’s hard. i’m working on creating a ‘bat signal’ type sign that we’re going to try out at events at night. laugh now; until you see it on the superbowl. i’m not joking. i’m really working on it.

the SEO? this was supposed to be done by my web-tards and guess what? it isn’t. i’m going to go ahead and take this opportunity to vent for one short paragraph. i made the HUGE mistake of contracting my website and first 6 months of SEO with a local firm here called MISSIONE COMMERCE. people, unless you want to make your life extremely annoying for months and maybe years, don’t use these guys. top ten reasons why you shouldn’t use MISSIONE COMMERCE:

10. they promise you the moon. they deliver a stale bread crumb.

9. i’m pretty sure they’ve never really done a site with serious programming like mine before. or they just like to pretend they haven’t.

8. they don’t follow through.

7. they don’t communicate with each other. at our first meeting, i explained in great detail what my site entailed. i also wrote it down. i also explained it again to the first project manager. 7 months into the project, the third project manager had no understanding of he concept of each page for the site. nothing that was discussed in our initial meeting went any further than that.

6. even they admit they take forever on sites. my project manager admitted to me that there are sites way more behind than mine. such a warm and fuzzy that was.

5. you will pay thousands (tens of them) to baby-sit grown men so they will do their jobs for you. when i’m told i’ll hear back on something the next day; it’s at least a couple of days after that before i get any actual information. and that is with me contacting them daily.

4. even after the site is launched, they don’t fix the little things (don’t click on the envelope on my site; it STILL takes you to the wrong page, 5 weeks and 5 requests to fix it later).

3. you will not be taken seriously. i gave them a specific list of items i wanted done for my SEO. their response? be patient, relax. let us do our job. which we won’t really do; not one thing on the list has been done. it’s been two weeks.

2. they will threaten to take down your website after 11 days of being online if you haven’t paid them the balance due. which, contractually you have 31 days after launch to pay AND  the site still has incorrect links and issues for repairing.

1. you (the customer) are not valued. period. i sent brian treat, director of sales, the guy that sold us, an email, detailing the issues that have gone on during this whole thing that show how different things have actually gone compared to what he promised us. guess what his response was? NOTHING.

DON’T USE THESE PEOPLE IF YOU WANT TO STAY SANE.

moving on.

bottom line: durtbagz isn’t taking off like i thought, right out of the gate. i’m having to get creative and spread the word on and offline with basically a 0$ marketing budget. anyone know anybody with a blimp?