Doing something special for #WorldAIDSDay

Hiya,

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving and there's a lot we all have to be thankful for. It's been awhile since we've last posted and there's been a lot of development here at Remembered.com in the last few weeks. But before talking about what we've done, let me tell you a bit about what we are doing for World AIDS Day.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. And although it may not be in the limelight like it once was - AIDS is still a very much here and taking lives much too early.

World AIDS Day, observed December 1 each year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. It is common to hold memorials to honor persons who have died from HIV/AIDS on this day. For this reason, we are offering Free Memorials for anyone who has been lost to AIDS or HIV complications for the entire month of December. Details here:

You can help spread the word and bring about more AIDS/HIV awareness by posting this on your Facebook status:

#WorldAidsDay - World AIDS day is TODAY! Paste this message to your status - Help us build HIV/AIDS Awareness. http://bit.ly/ihgJa6

Okay - now onto our latest developments for Remembered.com ...

• We've put in place a new firewall to protect against DOS attacks and bad people on the internets.
• We've added a Memorial Wall, which lets invited friends and family post comments and condolences
• We've upgrade our Facebook Connection and are able to take advantage of Facebook's more powerful API features and functions.
• We've added a new activity list, which shows all the activity associated with a memorial.
• We've integrated Remembered.com even more with Facebook, allowing activities to stream over.

Hopefully you like everything we've accomplished so far, and if you have any suggestions be sure to
let us know about them here... http://remembered.com/suggestions

Thanks!

Hey - Do you think we're just a bunch of boobs?

Did you know that 12.15% of women will have breast cancer in their lifetime? October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we're doing our best to contribute to awareness by offering free memorials for anyone who has passed due to breast cancer. Did you know that if you catch it early enough - your 93% likely to be still kickin' after 5 years. Another interesting fact is if you're ever diagnosed, taking aspirin is a great way to improve your odds of surviving.

We're hoping that awareness of catching it early will help increase long term survival rates and well, give us less business here at Remembered.com.

We got a lot accomplished since leaving Beta. We did a bunch of tweaks to the website layout. Launched a new Funeral Notice service that we think will take a lot of time and distance out of the bereavement process. Put our first sets of ads onto Facebook (which are doing quite well, as opposed to Google Adwords) and things are rolling along. Traffic to our website is up 88% week over week and the average visitor stays for about 5 minutes and views 5 pages of content. All good numbers for a site that's just starting out.

But as good as news gets, it's never good enough is it? This week was a bit humbling for me. I hired a consultant (I know!) to review our site and give us some ideas to a. make process improvements and b. build traffic. Oh - well here's the punch line - He's a Rabbi. Yep - He knows a bit about life and death business. But those weren't his only qualifications - he's been awarded Entrepreneur of the year and mentioned in dozens of business magazines. What the heck - why not find out if what we're doing is errrrr.... Kosher?

Apparently, we are a bunch of boobs (at least this month) and we have absolutely no idea what we're doing. In 45 minutes our good Rabbi proceeded to give me a L O N G list of things that need to change. Some ideas were great - like having a way for people to donate to charity right from the memorial, or putting testimonials from people on the site. Other ideas - like raising the prices to $39.95 and $19.95 for memorials took a little more convincing. I'd rather keep it affordable for everyone. On a scale from 1-10 I'd give our man a 9. So if you've got a small business and you need a little bit of accelleration give the good Rabbi a shout out.

So be on the lookout for a bunch of changes to the website next week. I leave you with this thought :


Q: Most bees make honey, but there is a certain type of bee that makes milk. What kind of bee makes milk?


A. Boo Bees!

Save your groans, you know you're going to repeat it at work tomorrow.