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I had this question when I noticed one son playing with something toy that is called dinosaur train toys. Initially, I was not sure of what is the origin of the toy. After asking my wife, I realised that it is the merchandise of a popular PSB cartoon series called Dinosaur Train. This series is created by Jim Henderson, who also called the Muppet.
While I am sure the content is good, I don't know how it can be better than the comics that I read when I was young. Somehow, the present characters felt very shallow in terms of characterization. Most of them sound very one dimensionally and lack the richness that characters such as Spider man or Batman possess.
I remember the best thing about reading comics was the wide virtual world that built in my head. It seems that the world the comic characters lived in was real. After reading, I was always feel with a sense of wanting to know more about the world which the comic characters lived in. It just seems so full of possibilities.
When I sat down one weekend evening to watch the Dinosaur Train, it seems very repetitive. Maybe it is great for young children but as an adult, it just pales in comparison to the comics that I loved so much.
One of the most popular manga series currently is Naruto. It is therefore not unusual to see a huge volume of merchandise items being produced. Among the many items available for sale, Naruto headband is one of the more sought after item. The reason why they are so well liked can be credited to the fact that headbands are an important part of how the characters dressed.
You can purchase the headband from shopping retailers such as Walmart or Target as well as from online sites including Amazon. The range of headbands is actually quite wide, with different patterns, colors, materials, designs etc. The names of these items mostly come from the names of the characters in the series so you might think that the naming convention to be non traditional. Some the common descriptions you will see include Naruto rain headbands etc. Your children can definitely find the headband that his or her favorite character worn in the series.
The first impression people possess of these catered-to-fans merchandise is that they are of questionable quality, however nothing can be further from the truth. These accessories have went through good manufacturing with most of them being made from high quality metal base materials. The designs are quite authentic and can definitely be a great additional to the collection of any Naruto devotee. A minor thing I like about the headpiece is the added cushions on the front that makes it more comfortable to wear so that it will be worn instead of becoming a display accessory. In fact, you can wear it not only as a headband but as a sash or belt around their waist.
For saving money and getting discounts on these headbands, a good tip is to try price comparison sites such as Savebucks.co.uk. What these site do is to pull in prices from the numerous shopping sites around the Internet which have these items in their stores. Leveraging on these such websites can allow you to easily spot which sites are offering discounts and offers.
Sorry for the lack of updates as we are launching a huge experiment to Twitter this week in our attempt to increase the online traffic for our site. I have said in my previous post on why people are not buying your products that the main reason is due to the fact that traffic coming from social sites are not buyers. Period.
So, why am I doing the Twitter thing?
The reason is two fold.
One is the build awareness. For that purpose, Twitter is great because of its broadcast nature. If you build an incentive for people to spread a message, they will. That brings you a temporary boast in traffic. However, if your product is not cool, then it will be for nothing.
The other reason is to build relationships with people who matters. Twitter allows our relationship building to scale beyond ourselves. We should take full advantage of this to know people who can impact your company and product. These can be people who other people in your community respect, they can be your future sales leads, they can be your passionate users etc.
However, Twitter by itself is not for making sales. If you have the right expectation then you will not be disappointed. If you expect your Twitter to convert to sales, you will be in a huge shock.
So, what is this experiment we are doing. It is actually very simple. We are running a competition for the most innovative use of our software to create interesting content. We want people to know about this competition through Twitter and we incentivise this by using prizes. In this case, all the user has to do is to retweet the word "I want to win 4 iPads from @KooBits" and they will stand a chance to participate in the competition. Because of the broadcast nature of Twitter and the interest in iPad, people who saw this message will also participate by retweeting,. This goes on until it becomes viral.
To make such viral effects work, your Twitter campaign needs to:
i) Be easy to participate. In our case, it is just a retweet
ii) Be interesting enough to attract other people to retweet. In our case, it is winning an iPad.
iii) Have a powerful landing page to let know your products when they are at your site.
This is how awareness about your company is built. Along the way, you will get to meet the important people who you need to build relationships with so that there is revenue further down the road.
If you have the right expectation of what Twitter can and cannot do, it can a useful marketing tool.
Hi to all of you who might have voted or read some of my past rambling thanks for taking your time. I would like to know you better so if you can leave a comment, it would be great!
Back to today's post. There might be some of you who have traffic to your site but are not making sales. Why is that so? Why is your traffic not buying you stuff? There might be many reasons but I suspect the main culprit is the type of traffic you are getting
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That was one of the tough question that my company had to solved. We have not completely solved it yet but we have more traffic now than three months ago, which was how long I have been with the startup. If you are in the same situation with your online business, here are more tips and tricks that we are experimenting to get traffic.
One tip I mentioned the other time was to leverage the trusted factor that many Web 2.0 article directories. By using low competition keywords that can ranked well in our article submissions for these sites, we are creating sales funnel to our site as these articles can rank easily in the search engine without much effort from us. You can read more about it in this post on how to get free traffic from hubpages and ezine articles
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Following of my last post about using free resources to get traffic to your online business, this post will zoom in specifically on how do you exactly leech the traffic off these article directories.
What I am going to say can be applied to any sites that are trusted by Google in general. By surveying the search results, you can have a sense of who has earned that trust. I choose Hubpage and ezine because I often see them appearing in many long tail keyword search. This tells me that if I do my keyword research properly, i can get many of my articles to rank in Google without much work, and have organic traffic flowing from search engines to my articles (on Hubopages and ezines) to my site. That is how the traffic funnel will work like
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The thing about working in the startup is that we have to work around limited resources in terms of our online marketing. We need to constantly think of ways that can gives us the results we want at the minimal cost. This of course needs our creativity and is part of the challenge (and fun!) in working for a startup. Here are 3 ways to get traffic without spending a ton of money.
1) Leverage on SEO (search engine optimization) to get free traffic from search engines and in particularly, Google
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Welcome to this blog on Internet marketing for startups. My name is Aaron and I am currently in a startup developing technology solutions for the publishing industry. I like to take this blog to document the different Internet marketing strategies that we are trying as well as to share my thoughts in general. If you are in a startup and needs ideas on how to get traffic and traction for the product you are building, I hope this blog will help you to get those creative juices flowing.
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