Archive for month: June, 2013

Choosing your lingerie online store name – PART II

As we already know from the first part of this article – the name of our online lingerie store is very important and the process of creating it should be closely studied from the very beginning. If you missed some helpful information you may want to read in the previous section.

So let us assume that we have had no problems creating a list of catchy names and there is some impressive base of our potential labels. The next question is: how to verify them and decide which one is absolutely the best. There are also some interesting external factors affecting future popularity of our brand’s name so we would like to mention them as well. Listed randomly, they need to be considered all together while choosing the best one.

The key words in our domain (in the name of our online store)

It is worth noticing that the usage of the key words in our domain can be very important considering SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine results pages). However, it has been observed, that this tendency is declining nowadays. In our opinion – worth considering, but certainly – not the most important factor anymore.

Sound and meaning

As we have already written in the previous article – good sound and hit meaning make a huge difference. Those two questions are very individual for many different countries and languages, so we want to have in mind the specifics of our target market.

Melody makers

Once again talking about sound – it is important that our name is not too difficult to pronounce. We have to take into account the potential pronunciation difficulties of our future consumers. It often happens when we choose some too rare and sophisticated words, especially in the foreign languages.

If spelling is too different from pronunciation and the word is not popular at all, our future customers may not want to say it at loud – because of the fear of failure (being “funny” saying it at loud or being not comprehensive). In some extreme cases it can even lead them to avoid buying our products… And that is definitely opposite of what we want.

Another essential matter is spelling. Running own company it often happens that we must spell our company’s name, e.g. on the phone. As we have already said in the previous article – it is good for the label to be short.

Excuse me, once again – what did you mean?

No harm to do a little research and make sure that there is no negative meaning associated with our chosen name in its original language. It is easy to “feel it” in our local market but when you try to sell your products to some foreign customers – that may sometimes be tricky. Easily revealed – just ask some native speaker of the chosen language – either your friend or some stranger met at any Internet language forum. The other way is to use Google Advanced Search. If you set the target language, look for the word and do not find any answers – there probably are not any connotations. If you find many entries – you may want to make sure about it and check most of them. Google translator is very helpful there or once again – asking some native speakers.

The art of choosing

So now we have narrowed the list of our potential names – it is high time we chose our best of the best. What needs to be remembered here is a following point of order: the availability. The only thing needs to be done here is to go to our domain supplier and check if our dream name is not used by anybody else. The website: ovh.com is very helpful here and we can strongly recommend using it. Of course, there are many other sites providing similar services here.

Another important factor is your domain extension – that is what follows your website name after a dot, e.g. in the website address: yourname.com the extension is: “com”.
This determinant depends on the country (or maybe the target market rather) in which you plan to work. If it is one country only you will probably want to choose the extension typical for it.

For instance:

The UK – .co.uk
France – .fr
Italy – .it
Germany – .de
Poland – .pl

Et cetera, et cetera…

For more international enterprises we encourage you to choose the most popular:

.com
.net
.eu

…and so on.

The End

If we are at the finish line of all those complicated recruitment processes – let us get a little break. Then, go back to the topic with some ‘fresh head’. Say it at loud, listen to yourself and check how it sounds. Ask some friends – their first reaction will always verify your choice, as it can be very easily observed if some word is a catch.

Hopefully, you have succeeded and there is no need to start our “castings” from the beginning… It is the high time you registered it now! 🙂

Powerful content

Think of your favourite newspaper or magazine. Every month you go to the store to buy it and this has not changed for years. What is it in it that makes us come back and buy another issue? We like it – of course. But there are also two major factors which subconsciously influence our mind. Those will be: frequency and quality.

As for frequency – there is probably no need to explain it further. Nobody wants to “hunt” for their favourite treat or wait anxiously to buy it again some time in the future. On the other hand, if we know exactly when our favourite pastime is about to appear, we can schedule it and that way make it our regular “must have”.

And what about quality? Just because something is published does not mean it is good. High quality is for sure the most important thing which had attracted us in the first place. Different people equals different needs. The editor of our favorite press knows exactly about it and consequently sticks to the plan. That is why we can count on e.g. pictures of cute girls in manly magazines, a little bit of humor in less serious newspaper, hot celebrity gossip in tabloids or some accurate and professional advice in business press.

Writing our lingerie store’s blog, visiting social theme forums or running our professional profile we want to be such an editor. And our newspaper is the online content signed with the logo of our company or brand. How to make it successful? There are some practical tips we have collected for you:

1. Be Regular – it is said that nowadays individuals need about 10.4 sources of information before they make a purchase decision. In a world of such a competition systematic publishing a valuable info is a necessity.
2. Do Not Repeat Yourself – do not sacrifice creativity under the pressure of production. Content made for content’s sake may lack originality and become simply boring.
3. Run Editorial Calendar – planning your long-term projects and writing down all your ideas immediately may be very helpful while organizing and reviewing your work.
4. 70/20/10 Rule – according to its author Eric Schmidt, the rule introduced to Google in 2005 requires the employees to dedicate 70% of their time to core business tasks, 20% to related projects and 10% to unrelated activities. In our case, it means that the majority of our content will be lingerie business’ core expertise and satisfying the customer’s top needs. Remaining 20% of our space we can fulfill with some related topics and leave about 10% of it to run experiments with some new ideas (room for risk and steps into unknown territory, to explore further opportunities maybe.)
5. Being on Top – this way we have come to another point – being “it store”. If there are “it girls” nowadays and some “it magazines” there can also be some “it stores”. Expertise in your field and create your contents as a girl creates her outfits – focusing on being noticeable but not wearing too much, with all the trendy accessories but being faithful to the individual style at the same time.

Following those rules you can be sure to build something strong and something “real”. That means, if you maintain to a content mix which keeps your audience interested, presents your brand capabilities and provides space for some new ideas – you will create your own, individual style at the same time. And if there are people looking for it, you will easily be “googled” (well found in search engines’ results).

Once published, if it is reliable and accurate, it can become more and more popular without your further help then. As people are bored with clichés today you need to be original and often share your experience, sometimes educate your readers.
To attract their attention – provoke them a little and try to inspire them. Sometimes, it is a good idea to arouse some controversy.
Being published regularly on your website, taking care of the details and sharing your experience and ideas in discussions with other experts at their blogs or some theme forums should encourage them to revisit.
This way, building so strong and consequent content, you will create original and noticeable image of your company at the same time.

In the next article please read about some further ways to enrich your content – that is: image building at numerous social media sites and the specific description of their roles and possibilities they give to its users.