We send everyone all the best from Austria! I hope you have a great New Year 2010 and may there be lots of cute things happening I added some photos from our stay in Austria again. We booked a private plane to take us to the Austrian and Swiss mountains for a great view. It was snowing the night before heavily and on the day of our flight, it was a perfect sunny day so we could take lots of great pictures of my home. Enjoy!

beautiful Lake of Constance, my hometown Bregenz is right next to it

bird's eye view of Lindau, Germany, the island in the Lake of Constance

the Austrian Alps: beautiful and breathtaking

Wanna go skiing? It was a perfect day for doing that.

me on the plane being super happy

Alan was the Co Pilot

and one more pic of the gorgeous white mountains

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas 2009! We are in Austria now visiting my family for Christmas and enjoying our holidays a lot. To give you guys an idea what we are doing, I added some photos below:

Christmas Dinner at my home

we went to Nurnberg, Germany to visit the famous Christmas market

in the Austrian mountains, it was snowing crazily and we had lots of fun.

We had to cover our mouth and nose because it was so freezing cold.

one of our many crashes with the sled. We always landed in the soft snow so it didn't hurt.

An old customer of us visited me today in my office. He is from Germany and wanted to see our current products. Last year in April he visited me for the first time, I wrote about it here. He was our first visitor visiting us at our new office. Today, he ordered some items we had in stock and we may be also helping him to make a new online shop and optimize it for Google. His current shop isn’t suitable for Google and Alan will be able to optimize it for him. Alan is really knowledgeable about Google Search Engine Optimization and a very skillfull programmer. Anyone interested in Search Engine Optimization SEO, please have a look at his website: SEO Expert

I checked my Google Analytics Account today to see how many visitors we had in our online shop over the weekend. Usually Germany is number 1 and USA number 2. But yesterday, Austria was for the first time number 1! The reason is very simple, my interview was publish yesterday and the shop link was placed very prominently under the headline. So some people wanted to check out my shop after reading my interview. We even got an order from a nearby village where I grew up. I guess I should do more interviews?!?

Our online shop is getting more traffic and we overload our current capacities. Therefore, we decided to move to a new server at our server provider in Germany. There are less websites on this new server, that means less traffic and higher capacities for us. I guess this server should be strong enough for the coming months.

Wow, today we received already our 2nd order from our new online shop. Another lady from Germany bought our Tenshi Neko bags. They are our top sellers on eBay as well. Keep ordering people and you will make me happy

Philipp, my friend from Germany, who lived in Hong Kong before and is now living in Thailand (Koh Samui) visited me today in the office. He came to Hong Kong to discuss a new project with Alan and me. They are interested in getting a similar online shop like ours from us. Christan, another German who works with Philipp, prepared a design layout and we discussed their plan. Alan will be responsible for the programming part while Christian is doing the design.

They want to sell their mp3 player in their new online shop and they are very keen in getting our online shop template as Alan invested lots and lots of time in improving the XT-Commerce standard shop. XT Commerce is a very successful online shop template from Germany and you can get it for free. But there are some disadvantages: First of all, there were a lot of logic bugs, programming bugs and a horrible English template (they translated the German template word by word into English). Second, the template doesn’t have any kind of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so your shop will be listed at the back of search result pages. It is crucial for online shops to be listed on the first page for important keywords to be able to get new customers. So Alan spent night after night (he has a full time job during the day) on changing the template and make it more attractive for search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

And I must say: IT WORKED! Our online shop was almost fully indexed after just 2 weeks being online. Furthermore, we are listed for many important keywords on the first page, sometimes we are even the number one! From ZERO to page 1(!), what a great result!

So Philipp is even more keen to get our template now But he has to pay good money for that. haha. But it will be worth it, I am sure about that. So anyone, who may be interested in getting his/her own online shop with a fully SEO optimized template, please check out SEO-Expert or contact me (in English or German) and I will forward the details to Alan.

YES, today we received our first order in our onlineshop modes4u. The lady is from Germany and bought 4 items at once to make sure that she gets the free shipping. We offer free shipping for orders above 60 Euro. I am sure this idea will work very fine with my customers as they usually order more than one item.

Unbelievable, today we had already our 2nd visitor coming to our new showroom within 2 weeks! They are from Germany as well! I picked them up at their hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui and took a taxi to our showroom with them. I offer such a good service They are interested in ordering some custom made products for their company. I will try my best to find suitable factories and products for them.

That’s why we opened the showroom and everyone is invited to come by and have a look at our products. Just give me a call in advance. You can find our address here.

Today, our first visitor came by to check out our new showroom and our products. Great, just 4 days after we opened it.

At the moment our “showroom” doesn’t look nice yet. We still have to buy some extra shelfs and hangers so we can present our products in a nice way. And there is still some decorating to do. But one step after the other. Our customer is a buyer from Germany who is looking for new products for the german and dutch market. I have to say, he found what he was looking for