Archive for Entrepreneurship
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I received the sample clips that attach the hang tags to the my line of Silverback undershirts from the Chinese manufacturer about 3 weeks ago. If you look carefully, they made a spelling error in spelling my company name (”APRAREL” instead of APPAREL). I did not find this funny at the time, but I’m somewhat amused now, even through it ended up costing me $3000 to air freight the replacements to keep production on time.
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How do woman differ than men in business and as consumers? I have been focusing mainly on male consumers in my effort to understand consumer behavior, but now I want to know more about woman? Knowing your market’s consumer behaviors is vitally important to understanding how to successfully approach it with your product offerings. Woman spend 4 times more than men in the US consumer market which is a number that I cannot ignore. It means that I must tailor my marketing to be female inclusive, even though (for the time being) my product offerings are exclusively for males. The fact that a significant percentage of my sales will be to women buying for men I am thus forced to create a second set of copy and landing pages focused on converting female traffic. This begs the question: How are woman different from men in their spending and shopping habits, and how do I address this?
The answers to these questions may lie in reports released by several major public companies recently. They may allow me to explain how to format my site’s content to account for spend habits of both sexes. But before a look at the results of this research, I want to see what your thoughts are in the form of a comment in this post. Discussion: How are female consumers different than male consumers in behavior. A conclusion to this post will come in a couple days.
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I have always wanted to know the general public reaction to the Silverback Apparel logo. In person general reactions have been overwhelmingly positive but what does the online crow have to say. A month and a half has gone by now since I chose the Silverback Apparel logo after a competition between 32 designers and earlier this week I found the answer to this question.
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Yesterday my new toll free number (1-877-7SLV-BAK) has been activated giving my company a central caller switch board. The service I chose was Gotvmail and it give Silverback Apparel a full caller dispatching system for less than $10/month. Not only will it allow me to add lines once employees are hired, it saves me the cost of having to buy a fax machine and $20 per month for a dedicated line. So my consumers and business clients are now able to phone and fax free of cost giving them to opportunity to communicate with a real person if they have any concerns.
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Remembering all that has been learned by documenting nuggets of knowledge in this blog has made me realize the great gift ouelletblog.com has given me. I remember every topic that I have ever posted on clearly, where as the heaps of recent information from the past 3 weeks is a state of disarray in my memory. Basically: Blogs make people remember what they write about.
The hardest part of having a blog is remembering to write in the blog. I have not been keeping up to date in the last 3 weeks in my posts which is unfortunate. In the past 3 weeks there have been so many new developments regarding my corporation and general business knowledge that I regret not have documented them. So I will force myself to track back all the valuable information and document it here so that I can remember it. I would suggest you follow closely because these bits of information will benefit your quest to success
I have made great advances in understanding the following fields: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Affiliate Marketing, E-Commerce, Content Creation, Copywriting, Split Testing, Layout Design, Traffic Qualification, Traffic Conversion and much more.
Unfortunately the traffic that my site has accrued over the last 3 months has dropped off to nothing but a handful of uniques per day. I will be changing the focus of this blog, and I will be using it as a test bed for various marketing techniques that I will put into practice. This means that I am going to have to find my niche in order to succeed. Stayed tuned to this site to follow it upcoming progress.
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If you notice right below the post title of this website I have added a “Share This” and “Digg It” link a while ago to increase traffic and although I have not been very active with my blog in the last week they have proven to be useful in developing traffic. They have allow many users to share specific posts but the “Digg It” button has only been used a few times. Once I start developing a more technically oriented audience it should prove very valuable. Something that I have noticed is that posts that I have been spending more time developing have brought in more traffic. Especially with organic traffic (traffic derived from when your site ranks high in search engine rankings and users click on your link). I have brought my organic traffic to about 20% especially because of my posts on Blog Rush and John Chow. What I intend on doing is furthering the development of certain keywords and link building to relevant sites (linking back from sites that are topic relevant by posting comments that link back to the topic). Something that everyone should be mindful of is the “post slug” option whenever you write a post. This changes the name of the URL when ever you post to what ever you set as the post slug. This is important because if you are specifically targeting keywords then youI should post more in regards to this later on to see who successful my endeavor is. I also noticed that Blog Rush has been a completely useless tool for for me, but I’ll see if I can’t tweak it to maybe change that. PS. On the topic of traffic in the real world I just have to say stay away from your car in Toronto Fridays at about 5 pm. Especially when you are driving out to Niagara Falls and Buffalo, NY.
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I intended on commenting on the US Dollar’s (USD) acquiescence to the Canadian Dollar (CAD) last Thursday when I received an email from Yahoo!, but I have been too busy to do so. As a result of a the half point drop in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve on Thursday we found for parts of the day (first time in 31 years) the CAD to be worth more than the USD. The reason I bring this up is that I wrote a paper 2 years ago on the projected value of the CAD for an international finance and economics course. The inspiration that made me choose the topic of this paper came when the VP of the Canadian Central Bank came to lecture our class on monetary policy and the future of the CAD. The findings in my paper paralleled most economist’s predictions about the CAD and how it was projected to make significant gains on the USD (It was roughly at around $1.25 CAD/USD the day of the lecture). From what I remember, I concluded that the CAD would surpass the USD and possibly by about $0.10 ($0.90 CAD/USD) based on the economic indicators of the time. I am not current enough in my knowledge on recent indicators to give estimates on the what is in store for the CAD (and I would have to brush up on a lot of theory…lol). I still think that the CAD will remain strong at least for a while purely based on what I have been reading recently about the international markets. This is especially rings true when we look at the Chinese currency peg to the USD and the huge amounts of USD China needs to achieve this and how global trade has shifted to demand increasing amounts of commodities from our resource rich nation.
This high dollar does pose a major threat to to all our domestic export oriented firms (although import oriented firms will be rejoicing). We have been blessed for a long period of time here in Canada with a trade surplus which has aided out economic growth and has sustained us in harsher economic times. The economy over the last 30 years has been subsidized by a less valuable CAD, and this has had a definite effect on our economy and the competitiveness of our firms. With a rise in the CAD we are starting to rely increasingly more and more on outsourcing to remain competitive and this will only increase. There is some positive in all of this that we must not forget. The extortion of corporations and the immoral and selfish behavior towards society by unions will hopefully loose ground as an increasing number of union jobs are relocated to countries with a competitive advantage in the labor market.
All jokes aside though, this actually really sucks for me. As the CAD increase, the value of Silverback Apparel sales in the US will diminish as long as I am living here in Canada and eventually converting profits back into CAD. I guess that means I might have to price everything in CAD if our dollar starts doing any better. Anyways I am expecting an early November launch of my first products (October 31th seem unlikely but I’m shooting for the Christmas shopping boom) online and in retail shortly thereafter. Keep up to date with my progress at the Silverback Apparel website.
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BEWARE THEY ARE VERY VERY SOPHISTICATED. When I posted the Google Apps: An Office And Email Solution Every Company Should Use 2 days ago I did not think that spam would be a problem. Considering that I average at the moment only 80 users per day I never thought that this would affect me. Well I would just like to say that within those 2 days spam bots have gotten a hold of my email address and I have received and influx of spam emails. If I did not have the protection of the Gmail/Google Apps spam filter this of course would be a huge problem and it would annoy the hell out of me. I did a little research and I suggest that if you are ever going to post your email address somewhere do so under either a secondary address or replace the ‘@’ symbol with ‘[at]’. I recently discovered that with Google Apps has a feature that lets you assign email ‘Nicknames’ (nickname@yourDomain.com) that are an extension of your email address. If a nickname is getting too many email then all you have to do is create a new one and remove the old one.
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Today I setup Google Apps on SilverbackApparel.com and I have to say that I have been amazed by Google once again. Google Apps essentially plugs Gmail, Gcalendar, Gtalk, iGoogle and Gdocs into your website and allows you to manage those under you own domain name. I for example am using [Edit: Removed Email Address Because of Spam] (one of my corporate email addresses) and instead of using some third rate email solution to manage my emails, I get to manage everything from withing a Gmail interface. I personally love using gmail because it has made email so simple, reliable (unlike hotmail), fast and junk mail free. Not only this, you get 2 GB of storage and POP3 access for Outlook as well just like Gmail. What makes this all the better is that all of these benefits apply to Google Apps for a very Googlish price: $0. With Microsoft you’d pay maybe hundreds, but at Google yes it’s free…And here is the kicker…You can them everything to fit you corporate image.
Check out the pages I have setup and branded with my corporate logo
start.silverbackapparel.com
mail.silverbackapparel.com
docs.silverbackapparel.com
If there is any interest and you want a step by step of how I did it just post a comment and I’ll go through it.
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Note: The views and opinions of Sean Anderson in this guest blog post are not endorsed by OuelletBlog.com, Inc!
I’ve been following the progress of John Chow’s blog (www.johnchow.com) for several months and there’s no arguing that it’s a great resource and a massive success, enriching the pockets of John Chow and his legion of readers alike.
That being said, I feel as though John is starting to lose significant credibility and slip into the same category as the same unscrupulous ebook marketing gurus that he denounces on his blog.
Case in point is his recent promotion of a traffic exchange widget called Blog Rush (and Agloco before that, for that matter!). Now for those who have experience with banner exchanges and/or network marketing, it’s easy to see the flaws in the system.
First, the exchange system itself is easy to game and defraud. I’m not going to go into significant detail, but it wouldn’t take much more than setting up a page and directing hit bot or cheap, unproductive traffic to boost the credits system in your favor. That’s just what happens when you base a credit system on impressions vs. productivity. Programs like this have been employed in adult site networks for a long time and this impression trading scheme amounts to nothing more than one big traffic circle jerk!
Second, as with network marketing, the math just doesn’t add up. Those at the top are enrichened (i.e. John Chow), while those at the bottom are left dissilusioned. If you think you’re going to get an equal amount of *quality* traffic back with this setup, you are fooling yourself. Go ahead and try the widget out for a week and prove me wrong!
It’s one thing to be “evil” and employ crafty tactics and strategy, it’s another to knowingly promote something that is outright fraud. And as one the most widely read, influential bloggers, it’s absolutely amazing to me that John Chow would risk his reputation in exchange for the being at the top of the Blog Rush pyramid. John, how about taking the same critical analysis with Blog Rush that you take with your $400 reviews? Sooner or later, the lost credibility is going to hit you in the pocket book.
Now, to conclude, I’m not saying that you should throw out the baby with the bath water and not read John Chow’s or any other guru’s blog just because the occasional lapse of judgement, but you should critically analyze anything that you read either in a blog or in the newspaper before blindly taking action. Don’t be one of the legion of Blog Rush lemmings!
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