Archive for year: 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.

Advertising via Internet Search Engines

As we already know from the article about Effective Advertising the search engines are considered to be the most important and influential source of powerful advertising. We also highly recommend using them. There is probably no need to give the further explanation of a search engine here. Just a quick reminder – it is a program or a website which helps to find some answers to the questions and queries given by us. To dispel all the doubts we will also say that the most popular one is of course: Google. On the basis of it we would like to show how the typical search engine works in the following article.

Ok. Typing the query into the search engine box we will get the series of results most adjusted to our question.

There are two kinds of results possible:
– organic search results – they come “naturally” and usually those will be top ten results per page of our search listings. The engine will show them in terms of their accuracy and relevance to the question given.
– non-organic search results – those are sponsored links of Google Adwords – that is an official Google advertisement. In a CPC (cost per click) model we pay each time someone clicks our ad . The links are located on the right at the search results page or it can be also placed as the top three positions over the natural listings.

Right, so how is this all relevant to your online store and why do we recommend this form of advertisement?

Imagine the potential customer wants to buy some lingerie online and he is looking for the “online lingerie store” results. Our website is shown among many other listings, the client finds it and enters the page. Of course, it depends mainly on our offer – whether he likes our products and prices, considers them more attractive than those of our market competitors’ and if he finally decides to make a purchase and place an order. However, assuming that the client was searching for the phrase we can say that he is obviously interested in that particular kind of offer. So we can say, that it is him looking for us, not really us looking for him. And that is the main advantage and superiority of a Google search engine over the other advertising ways, which decides about the effectiveness and efficiency. We can also be sure that our advert in Google will not seem to be too insolent. If it does not suit the query of a customer, it will simply not be showed in the results.

Having in mind how important it is to be present in Google, let us go back to two kinds of search results and let think how they differ and which way to choose.

Organic results – SERP (search engine results positions) – those are theoretically natural listings and for showing them Google does not want any payment. In practice, it looks quite different and it is far more complicated. The process of getting high in search results is called SEO (search engine optimization). You need to follow the Google specific guidelines in order to get the optimal position. Google shows pages on the basis of its index algorithm. It involves over 200 different factors and nobody does exactly know what they are (except for Google itself of course). The SEO techniques and the website setting adjustments are the themes of numerous books and it is a whole separate field – very developed one. We would like to make some things easier here and teach you as much as possible.

In short: SEO is a long-term process. Because of how competitive the keyword is (for example: “the lingerie store”) getting some satisfying results may take even a few months. Of course, taking into account that we know how to do it and have enough time and money for it. As we have already mentioned, Google does not charge for its services, but the SEO companies do.

To sum up – optimization of being high in the search engine result pages is a key issue and the foundations of our lingerie store working. It may seem to be a little complicated at the beginning of an online activity. That is why we recommend the beginners starting with the Google Adwords and buying some paid advertising in Google. Setting it is much more easier and does not require any advanced skills. Results (online ads) we can get immediately and we can fully control the budget at the same time. More about the improvement and development of our strategies soon.