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The Dessert Cafe: Dale Muhlenberg

A SWEET Deal!

When Dale Muhlenberg says his Virginia-based business is 'sweet,' he really means it! He's built a successful business shipping gourmet cheesecakes, chocolates, gourmet cookies, specialty coffees, gift baskets and other treats.

Dale says that a couple of years ago he was thinking to himself that there just had to be something he could sell online. That turned out to be cheesecakes, and even though he sells two or three cheesecakes a day, Dale still considers it a hobby. (His primary business is selling gift baskets.)

After looking for a few weeks at different web design companies, Dale found MightyMerchant's price point to be the most desirable. "I liked what you guys had to offer," he says.

Dale admits that selling two or three cheesecakes a day isn't many, and some of his competitors sell much more, but, "I don't do any PPC or anything," he says. "It's all natural listings. If you search for 'cheesecakes,' I'm somewhere between 1 and 5 on Google. People put in 'cheesecakes,' or 'cheesecake delivery,' and my site pops up, and my prices are a little bit cheaper than everybody else.
The big thing is links. Links, links, links."

Dale achieves a high level of links by submitting his site to a lot of free online directories. "I don't pay for links, " he says. "I refuse to pay for advertising. This is a hobby." There are times when Google will restructure something and he'll lose hundreds of links overnight. "It happens, and as soon as you lose those links your sales drop."

Go to The Dessert Cafe

TheDessertCafe.com website was specifically designed to be visually appealing, and incorporate SEO with a clean, attractive layout. He calls his site, "very easy to use." "There's not too much stuff on it," he says. "People can go there, they choose what they want and they check out. If I'm on a site and it gets too complicated, I just leave. I always get compliments on the website. It's very pleasing to the eyes."

Dale appreciates how easy MightyMerchant's software is to use, especially regarding SEO, which he spends a lot of time on. "That's the most important part, making it easy for other people to do [SEO]. It's pretty much intuitive, so someone could hire someone else to do it and it wouldn't take them long to figure out how to do it."

Dale is anxious to be able to start doing downloads through CSV files, a technology which MightyMerchant has in development. (A CSV-comma separated value-file is a way to send the data from any table to another table-oriented application, such as Microsoft Excel.) "That will make things a whole lot easier," says Dale, who would like to download his ordering and tax information. "I think it would help anybody. Each time you cut and paste or retype there's a chance of making a mistake."

Most of the people who order cheesecakes from TheDessertCafe.com are doing so to celebrate birthdays. The cheesecakes are good, Dale says, "they're really good!" People from all over the world, from China to the Middle East to Thailand, buy these cakes. "It's pretty fascinating," says Dale.

Dale Muhlenberg, proprietor of TheDessertCafe.com