Platform Bed Blog : Bed News and Updates

BestPlatformBeds.com, which is a content driven site that provides shopping guide to online visitors, is renovated by using Joomla CMS.

After rebuilding the site with Joomla, now the site is equipped with many more cool functions such as comment, phpBB forum active post listings and the ability for syndication. The main reason we redesign the site is because that we want to serve the online shoppers better. We want to clear every concerns customers may have when shopping for platform beds online. When the time is right, we are considering turning the site into a platform bed shopping site so that customers can shop platform bed directly here.

As we know, when promoting a new site, writing an article is an cost-effective way to spread out the word. In an article, you need to raise a question and concern to your audiences and then provide a solution to the question. Most often, the solution you provided is a link back to your site or product and you articulate how your site or product can help them solve the question in real life.

Similar to writing an article, writing a press release is also a great way to advertise your site. Unlike writing an article, press release must be “newsworthy”, which means it must generate interests to the media. Additionally, it should answer “what”, “when”, “where”, “why” and “how”.

To get more exposure to BestPlatformBeds.com, I decided to write a press release and with the help from my Wholesale Furniture Brokers, it goes live today. You can view the press release at Platform Bed Press Release Online.

The article “buying gap data reveal big bedding opportunity” reported by FurnitureToday shows that the bedding has the third highest buy-shop ratio of 71%.

What does that mean? 71% of people who shop for bedding actually bought the item. This does look like a good number to most of the marketers. However, if we look at the other side of the story, there are 29% of people who just walked away. An estimated of 4.8 billion was lost last year in the bedding category.

That does represent an opportunity to the bedding industry. Before we start thinking about how the marketers can further bump the ratio up a bit, let us take a look at the main reasons that caused the “walk away without action taken”:

• Many consumers are confused by the shopping experience. They see beds have very similar components but offer only slight differences
• They see beds that are almost the same with a large price gap
• They walk away for more choices, but at the end, they decide to delay the purchase

We should wait to see how the industry would handle this situation and whether they can make an improvement on the buy-shop ratio.

A few days ago, I read an article on cnn.com - “Is a good night’s sleep worth $50,000?” that I think I should share with all my audiences here. First of all, I was really stunned by the fact that mattress is actually costing more than cars and college tuitions. Vividus bed, which was produced by the Swedish manufacturer Hastens, cost approximately $50,000. Can you imagine that? I am wondering what is the mark-up on this incredibly priced mattress? Is it 100%, 200% or even more than that….?

Not surprisingly, since people are valuing more towards a good night’s sleep, the market value of the wholesale mattress industry has increased nearly 40 percent, climbing to $6.4 billion in 2005, according to the trade group International Sleep Products Association. The luxury market makes up much of the trend here. Premium-priced mattresses, which costs more than $1,000 — represents 21 percent of sales in 2005.

The driving force of the supply has always been the demand. The higher demand to the luxury mattresses drives more and more manufacturers to focus on the luxury market. What’s behind these high demands? It is not hard to notice that the high demand towards the luxury mattress signals that people are valuing a peaceful night’s sleep over their hard-earned dollar.

Well, all the hard work starts to pay off. I have found that the traffic to my site Platform Bed Shopping Guide got tripped during the last few weeks. What’s all about that?

By using Google Analytics, I found 80% of the traffic is from Google search! Isn’t that amazing? Specifically, I found that the key word “platform bed” and “platform beds” ranked #13 and #15 respectively. I used to have these key words ranked well on MSN and Yahoo, but I value the ranking much more when it is on Google simply it is so much harder to get ranked well on Google than on Yahoo and MSN.

So here I would like to take this chance to tell all the web masters that, keep working on your on-page and off-page optimization and do not give up simply because you did not see a boost of the ranking. If you keep adding fresh and quality content and building quality inbound links to your site, I promise that some day you will see your site get recognized by Google. Once Google recognize your site, sooner or later, Yahoo and MSN will pick it up.

As we know, when promoting a new site, writing an article is an cost-effective way to spread out the word. In an article, you need to raise a question and concern to your audiences and then provide a solution to the question. Most often, the solution you provided is a link back to your site or product and you articulate how your site or product can help them solve the question in real life.

Similar to writing an article, writing a press release is also a great way to advertise your site. Unlike writing an article, press release must be “newsworthy”, which means it must generate interests to the media. Additionally, it should answer “what”, “when”, “where”, “why” and “how”.

To get more exposure to BestPlatformBeds.com, I decided to write a press release and with the help from my Wholesale Furniture Brokers, it goes live today. You can view the press release at Platform Bed Press Release Online. I attached a screen shot for your convenience.

In the google, yahoo and msn news section, this release already achieved a #1 position. Here is the screenshot:

Google News:

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Yahoo News:

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MSN News:

Whenever you start a blog, you should marry your blog to feeds . To let other people know immediately whenever you updated your blog and keep your readers become returning audiences, a feed would be the best solution at least for now. If you have a site or another domain, integrating blog to your site is a great way to promote your blog especially your blog is relevant to the topic of your site. You may even get returning audiences if they become interested in your blog.

I just found this great feature in feedburner called “buzzbooster”. In general, BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML and you for your convenience, it gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates. By filling variables, you can have full control over how many blog headlines you want to display on your page. As you update your blog, the content on your page will also get updated. You can view how that blog looks like on my site at Platform Bed Blog, and I also took a screenshot here:

To apply BuzzBooster, you need to set up an account at feedburner (you really should if you own a blog), and then click Your Feed-> Publicize -> BuzzBooster. Other than BuzzBooster, they have a lot of other cool features and I am sure you will be pleased with that.

I don’t think any of you would have noticed that the rank of the primary keyword Best Platform Bed was targeting－”platform bed” dropped to the 3rd page on MSN(I did not expect to get ranked well on Google, since there is a “sandbox” there). At that time, I reanalyzed the title, meta tags and keyword density of the top 10 sites on MSN and accordingly, I optimized my site again based on this analysis. However, the ranking remained the same and I started to get frustrated. I was telling myself to be “cool” and “let it go”. What behind this “cool” is the fact that I am telling myself do not over optimize the site, which is to say that don’t always change stuff like title, meta description, keyword density… these onpage factors whenever you see your site got dropped. Give the SE some time to pick up the changes and pray if you like….

Now, my site gets back to the first page on MSN if you do a search for the keyword “platform bed” on MSN. http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/results.aspx?q=platform+bed&geovar=56&FORM=REDIR

I don’t think any of you would have noticed that the rank of the primary keyword Best Platform Bed was targeting－”platform bed” dropped to the 3rd page on MSN(I did not expect to get ranked well on Google, since there is a “sandbox” there). At that time, I reanalyzed the title, meta tags and keyword density of the top 10 sites on MSN and accordingly, I optimized my site again based on this analysis. However, the ranking remained the same and I started to get frustrated. I was telling myself to be “cool” and “let it go”. What behind this “cool” is the fact that I am telling myself do not over optimize the site, which is to say that don’t always change stuff like title, meta description, keyword density… these onpage factors whenever you see your site got dropped. Give the SE some time to pick up the changes and pray if you like….

Now, my site gets back to the first page on MSN if you do a search for the keyword “platform bed” on MSN.

After implementing some basic SEO techniques and with a high ranking on MSN, The traffic to www.bestplatformbeds.com has dramatically increased over the past two months. Therefore, I decide to take my site to another level by allowing a more open and easy interaction with my audiences. The easiest way for facilitating the interaction with my audiences i s to build a forum where the audiences can hang around and post any questions they have about platform bed. In this way, audiences can help each other and they can easily share their experiences with each other. In the forum, i also included a section just for platform bed manufacturer such as Lifestyle Solutions and Rizzon Furniture so that online shoppers will be informed quickly if there is any new styles available from the manufacturers.
To view my forum, please visit : Platform Bed Forum