This is a guest post by Jamie Murray Wells from glassesdirect.co.uk. We like to feature guest posts from people who are running successful & innovative online businesses as a break from the normal SEO talk.
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“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” Coco Chanel
 I’m more likely to quote Seth Godin than Coco Chanel, but when Carole on my team quoted Chanel at me this week it gave me the idea for this post. In a week where we’ve added Vera Wang and Nicole Farhi glasses to our growing designer collection it seems appropriate to start with a style legend.
What was Chanel talking about? Innovation and the ability to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. In the current climate, where investment is scarce and competition for funding is fierce, innovation and differentiation are more important than ever.
There are lots of examples where this advice is appropriate today – the job market and the online PPC market are just two - so my advice is look at your current business and decide whether you’re innovating enough to survive and thrive in the next 3-5 years. Stelios Haji-Ioannou started out with only 2 planes in 1995 , but through innovation in air-travel Easyjet is now flying all around Europe and helped create a new business model.
Glasses Direct was founded on innovation in 2004. We set out to answer a problem that no-one else realised they had. Running with an idea and making your own space requires a strong belief in what you’re doing. 5 years later, we continue down this path and continue to grow.
For example, we recently added a Home Trial service, the first of its kind in the UK. People often tell us that they need to try the glasses on in the store to “be sureâ€. But wouldn’t you prefer to try your glasses on at home? With a variety of different outfits? And have it cost less than the parking and petrol for a trip to town? Traditional opticians have never needed to do this because they are relying on the status quo. We think people deserve better and that’s been our mission from the beginning.
This summer we’ll be doing the same for prescription sunglasses and designer sunglasses. It’s a very competitive market and we’ll be competing with Chanel herself. With that in mind, I wanted to finish with one last piece of advice – once you become successful, keep an eye on your competition. If you aren’t constantly innovating and improving then you’re going to be overtaken soon.
Good businesses, especially online ones, come from challenges to the status quo. Think about how your business could challenge “the way things are” and make a difference in 2009 and beyond.
Aroxo has been named the UK’s Hottest Start-up 2009 at the London Business School Technology Summit.
We’ve had a sneak peek at the Aroxo system and it certainly deserves the award. Imagine a buyer-driven selling platform or a reverse eBay with a whole lot more besides.
Matt Rogers, Co-Founder of Aroxo commented:
After 2 years of hard work, it’s great to get such positive feedback from so many technology people, industry experts and investors. We’re really excited about launching Aroxo and helping UK buyers save money and time on their purchases.
The Aroxo marketplace provides a completely new way to buy and sell online. It’s not an auction site or shopping comparison site, but uses a new buyer-driven mechanism to help buyers get the best prices.
Both buyers and sellers are now looking for new ways to interact and do business online, so Aroxo has been built to work for sellers too. They gain access to a whole new sales channel as well as a range of simple tools allowing them to target buyers at prices that are likely to disrupt the market in a way not seen before.
Will be interesting to see how it goes post launch.
This is a guest post from the Insurance Blog an insiders view on internet marketing in the comparison industry.
We’re the little guys in the big corporation. We’re the insiders in the establishment. For the last few years we have been exposing companies in our sector of UK comparison sites. We’ve been telling you, the reader, what it’s like to work inside a large company and how the playing field now includes unethical data sharing and underhand tactics to get marketing exposure.
Our boss doesn’t know who we are – that’s why we remain anonymous – we’ve slammed our own company a few times so what you read is the truth. We’re honest and opinionated!
Insiders View started as an insurance blog and for the most part, it is. However, we also provide information on some of the latest techniques used by online companies to increase sales on the Internet. As one comment on an affiliate forum says:
He outs all the insurance companies…and no one knows who runs it, reckon there would be a contract on his head.
I’m going to give you two key areas to look out for in the comparison market:
Battle is about to begin
It’s going to be a war. Billion dollar affiliate sites like moneysupermarket have become comparison sites. They’re now being challenged with the rise of cashback sites such as quidco and greasypalm. Consumers are being educated by clever journalism from UK newspapers. Customers are now getting educated – they can now make a choice. The third fighting faction is the existing, smaller affiliate sites.
They’re all competing for the same space. They want eyeballs, clicks and sales. But, they’re now offering direct payouts to consumers, that’s something that not even the large comparison sites can handle. The power of the smaller sites with low overheads and customer payouts could just push the market over the edge…exciting stuff…are you ready for the change?
Who is the Fairest of Them All?
Reputation Management is going to be vital. The press have always played an enormous part in the success or failure of companies (just look at celebrities). When Norwich Union quietly launched zuzzid.co.uk last year (now in the deadpool) it supposedly provided impartial, user generated reviews on insurance companies. Was it impartial? No. Just like Admiral own confused.com or Budget own comparethemarket.com – there’s always a vested interest.
There are tons of companies out there indulging in SEO sabotage and mass defamation. Staying on top of your brand in the press but more importantly in the search results is going to be fundamental. If your SEO company hasn’t spoken to you about dominating the results for your company name, perhaps it’s time to hire someone else?
Now one last, bonus point. We’re going to be publishing some leaked insurance data (think AOL data leak). Subscribe to the Insiders View RSS feed if you want to be first to know.
Online PR is something that we’ve been (unknowingly) offering for a few years under various different names. Social media marketing, social media optimisation, blog marketing are all names we’ve used to describe what we have been offering but moving forwards these will all be encompassed under the label of online PR for one simple reason.
Clients understand what it means.
Most companies have worked with a PR agency before, if they haven’t then it’s likely they are either a small business or have a good understanding of PR themselves. Either way it’s much better to use a phrase people understand than to confuse potential clients with jargon about social media.
So what exactly is online PR and what does an online PR offering from somebody like Branded3 look like?
Essentially online PR boils down to 5 set services:
Market Research
Finding out which websites are discussing subjects related to your brand, industry and your competitors.
Examples include forums, social networks (Facebook/Myspace), blogs & news sites, microblogs (Twitter)
Relationships
Establishing relationships with the decision makers and content creators of the target websites and understanding what they talk about, who they link to & why.
Content
Creating the sort of content that the influencers at the target websites will enjoy and hopefully write about or link to from their websites.
Expansion
Branching out from targeting websites & targeting target audiences directly. Where are the target audience spending time online? Which sites are they visiting and how can we get featured on those sites too?
Monitoring
Monitoring the web for brand names, competitor & keyword mentions on all types of websites. Actioning a quick response strategy to handle positive or negative press or sudden changes in the industry.
The following are services which we certainly do not offer as part of an online PR package
Article submission & syndication
Unless the article is being published on a leading authority in a clients industry then article submissions are not part of online PR. Perhaps they might help for SEO but that is a separate subject.
Optimised copy or keyword rich press releases
Press releases need to be written by somebody skilled in the art of press release writing. Press releases should not be used to help with search engine optimisation unless that is the primary goal of the campaign.
Syndication statistics
If you press release was syndicated on 6 million websites that would sound quite impressive wouldn’t it? Syndication statistics are useless – the only figures that matter are the number of people who read the press release and the number who visited your website as a result.
This afternoon I’m going through the applications for our weekly SEO clinic and every single website seems to need the same tips. I thought it would make sense to write them all down in one helpful article as well as choosing one site for review in another post.
Blogs & social media
This is a no-brainer and is one of the main things our clients are wanting at the moment. There simply is no better way to market a website than by getting your products and services mentioned on as many blogs as possible.
Not only do the links help you shoot to the top of Google for your target keywords but your brand will be seen by some of the millions of people reading blogs every day.
Getting mentioned on blogs can be the easiest thing in the world if you have the right product but unless you know how to promote your product to bloggers the likelihood you will create a successful blogstorm is pretty slim. Start engaging with bloggers and find out what they like, perhaps meet up with some to get expert guidance on what they write about and why.
Design
Having a nice looking website is the most important step. Beautiful & easy to use websites attract more links and are, in general, more likely to be successful. it doesn’t have to be anything amazing but it does need to be well organised and easy to use and navigate. Google isn’t heavily designed but it’s the easiest site in the world to use.
If you don’t want to invest the money in good design why would anybody trust your site?
Credibility
Closely related to design is credibility and trust. If you have a nice office or offline store then put a picture of you and your staff outside the office on your “about” page. Add press cuttings and links to any online publicity. The more legitimate your website and company appears the more likely it is to attract links and new publicity.
SEO
Getting traffic from search engines is what most website owners expect when they launch an online business. The best way to achieve this is to find a well known SEO company and get them involved in the project before any designers or developers start working. SEO needs to be integrated in every part of the website and every change needs to be signed off by your SEO consultant.
Marketing hooks
Most people who commission a website think about how it’s going to sell products and ignore the marketing hooks that will draw links and help the site market itself. A good SEO company will help you insert the right marketing hooks in the site from the start and make ongoing promotion a lot easier.
For example an e-commerce site could have a product information wiki, buyers guides, video tutorials, suppliers directory and a blog to draw links and traffic.
Hire an offline PR agency
One of the most effective ways to get brand awareness and traffic is to be mentioned by a large newspaper either in print or on their website. The best way to achieve this is to hire a good PR agency.
Even established brands are struggling through the recession, so what hope does a start-up have?
As usual, it’s a case of working smarter – not necessarily harder. Paradoxically, with a sizeable chunk of businesses cutting PR in response to the economy, it could actually be easier for your voice to be heard right now as fewer companies are fighting it out for the same media space.
So if you start on your PR now, you could be well on your way to becoming an established brand by the time the economy is looking cheerier.
You don’t necessarily need a lot of money to get you started on PR, but you will need to set aside some time and energy to engage with the media and get the right message across.
Here are a few hints and tips to get you started:
Set out your objectives. Think about what you want to achieve. For instance, do you want to increase your SEO rankings and drive large numbers of consumers to your website or is it more about getting a specific message to a niche audience?
Work out the top three messages that you want your audience to know about your company. Make sure that whatever you are saying to the media reinforces these messages.
Identify your audience. Find out what your potential customers read and get to know the kinds of stories that get published in your target media.
Research who to contact at your target media. Bear in mind that what the media wants is a good story, what you want is good coverage. To start a relationship with the media you need to be as helpful for them as they are to you.
Choose your stories carefully. Be realistic about what your target audience wants to hear about and try to tie in what you have to say as a business with the media agenda.
Be creative, but don’t lie, be overly critical of the competition or assume that any comments you make will be “off the record”.
Cut out the marketing twaddle. Editors don’t like it and won’t publish it.
As with everything in business, learn from your mistakes. If something didn’t work out quite as you had expected it, look back and try to figure out why. It will help you on your next PR project.
Joseline Macdonald is the Marketing & Business Development Manager at Skywrite Communications.
CNN Money has an interesting article today about a company in the US producing video adverts for small companies who want exposure on sites like YouTube and anywhere else that accepts video adverts.
The cost is quite low at $1000 and the whole advert is shot and produced within a day. Apparently one restaurant received 300 extra customers from the advert in a few months.
With Google pushing video ads via AdWords and the popularity of YouTube at an all time high I wonder how long it takes for agencies in the UK to team up with video production studios to offer online video advertising starter packs?
TurnHere is fast becoming the first choice for local businesses around the country that want to show off their wares in a quick online movie, but have no idea how to make it look professional. Analysts say spending in this niche is set to explode. By producing videos as fast as it can, TurnHere is already cashing in.
“Our market is the 70 million Web pages out there,” says Inman, 56. “They can all use video.”
TurnHere isn’t shy about telling clients exactly what should be in their videos, either – as Antoine’s found out. “I thought I knew what I wanted,” says Wendy Chatelain, the family-owned restaurant’s head of sales and marketing. She lined up one of her waiters to record a sound bite and listed the signature dishes she wanted to show off. But TurnHere’s producer-cameraman made the waiter into the star and narrator of the video and filmed the restaurant’s flaming Baked Alaska, which wasn’t on Chatelain’s list. “It was great,” she says of the end result.
Best of all, TurnHere shot, edited and uploaded the one-minute ad for a mere $1,000, and the spot attracted 300 new customers to the restaurant in its first month online.
Insurance comparison site Compare The Market has been running a Compare The Meerkat campaign recently. Today a Blogstorm reader spotted confused.com doing some funny PPC advertising on the phrase.
The Daily Background has today uncovered a Belkin employee apparently using Amazons Mechanical Turk system to pay people to write positive reviews on Amazon about Belkin routers.
The practice, known as astroturfing, is unethical around the world and if it involved a UK company would be illegal too. Unfortunately the only evidence in this case seems to be the fact that the Mechanical Turk adverts are placed under the name of a Belkin employee – who’s to say they weren’t placed by a competitor?
Mechanical Turk is a great system with a large number of people using it every day. My guess is you could do some serious damage with it.
To start with you could pay thousands of people to write spam blog comments on high profile WordPress blogs with your competitors name URL. This would upset the bloggers and get your competitor blacklisted by Akismet which is very hard to resolve.
Next you could pay people to continually submit your competitors website to all the major social news sites such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. That would get them banned in less than 24 hours.
After that you could give people a list of websites to email requesting a paid link to your competitors website along with a few examples of other paid links your competitor has. The list would include the email addresses of every high profile blogger, SEO and search engine employee.
If your competitor is listed on any review websites you can pay people to flood the sites with fake positive reviews and then tip off the site owner. This would be a good way to get people kicked out of Google Local.
To be really nasty you could pay people to start spam forum threads promoting your competitors website meaning any legitimate threads are likely to be deleted in the future.
How about paying people to click on your competitors AdWords adverts all day so their budget runs out by lunchtime? Or keeping your competitors customer service department busy with hundreds of stupid questions and requests every day.
Finally you could pay thousands of people to file spam or paid link reports to Google about your competitors URLs and hope Google takes more notice of sites with large numbers of complaints.
Obviously I don’t advocate any of this but it just shows how one person with a few hundred dollars could cause a lot of damage to even a large online business.
Feelunique.com has come up with a fantastic offline campaign to promote their website – advertising it on peoples eyelids.
We’ve covered offline marketing before but this is a first and has potential to get a lot of coverage at very little cost.
With the credit crunch continuing to bite why not try an alternative way of making money by renting out your eyelids as advertising space.
feelunique.com is offering people the chance to earn 10 pence per wink in return for displaying the company’s logo on their eyelid space.
People who sign up to star in the campaign will have the feelunique.com logo temporarily transferred onto their eyelid and will be paid on a Pay Per Wink (PPW) basis – up to a total of £100 per model.
Amy Rebours of feelunique.com says:”We all take notice when we’re being winked at so what better way to advertise feelunique.com than on people’s eyelids. It’s a genuine marketing first, which encourages people to spread a feel-good winking moment and earn some much-needed extra income in the process.”
