Author: Pamela Swift

Up Your Website Traffic

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 6, 2007

StartupJournal: Start by figuring out what phrases people are typing into search engines when looking for your type of products online. Once you know that, you can buy paid search ads, such as pay-per-click ads, using those phrases and pepper your site with them to boost its search-engine rankings.
Showing up high in search-engine rankings is very important since most people use search engines to shop for products online.
There are some key-word suggestion tools that help identify popular search phrases, usually available free. For instance, Google Inc.’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker.com let you type in words and see which related phrases get searched most often. Type “Made in America” into the AdWords Keyword Tool, for instance, and you see phrases like “clothing made in America” and “toys made in the USA” have been searched fairly often recently. But “toys made in America” was searched hardly at all.
You also can experiment with various search phrases by signing up for an advertising program, like Google AdWords. The programs let you bid on various phrases. The price you bid is what you pay the search-engine provider each time someone clicks on your ad. The more you bid, the higher an ad for your site appears on the right-hand side of a search-results page. These programs have monitoring programs that let you see what phrases are most effective in generating traffic and customers on your site.
Increasing Traffic To Your Web Site [StartupJournal]

Entrepreneurship

Survival Instincts

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 4, 2007

YoungEntrepreneur.com: Most entrepreneurs who start a business will fail. The statistics vary but as many as 80% of people who start a business today will no longer have their company in 5 years. That is a pretty big failure rate.
According to the Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick:

“I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.”

What many new business owners fail to recognize is that entrepreneurship is first about survival, then about building a company. I have seen too many entrepreneurs to count who have grand visions of where they want to go but never even get to first base. They close down shop before they can execute any of their big plans because they run out of money.
If you cannot make enough to pay your basic bills then you will not be around in the long run to fulfill your dream. It takes a lot longer to get a company off the ground that most people think and in the beginning it is all about survival – do whatever you need to do to keep yourself, and your company, going.
Entrepreneurship Is About Survival [YoungEntrepreneur.com]

Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneur Profile: Ben Kaufman

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 3, 2007

Inc.com: Ask Ben Kaufman if his company, Mophie, will still be making iPod accessories a year from now and he’ll answer without skipping a beat: “God, I hope not!” And that’s after his line of slick gear — headphone splitters, FM transmitters, and remote controls, all of which function with a protective case — won a Best of Show award in the innovation category at MacWorld last year. So what gives?
“The thing about this industry is that everything is the same,” says Kaufman, 20. “So we set ourselves apart by branding.” Sure, Burlinton, Vt.-based Mophie (named after the CEO’s two golden retrievers, Sophie and Molly), makes cool products, but that clears just the first barrier to entry in a crowded marketplace. For Kaufman, the real key to his company’s distinctive brand identity is the product-development process, which can be summed up in three words: open source innovation. It’s a popular concept these days — allowing communities of users to drive the product development process — but one that can be tricky to execute.
Kaufman, who started his company as a freshman at Champlain College, decided to put all his cards on the table in January at the 2007 MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. “We said, ‘OK, we can have a regular booth, or we could shake up the floor and say we’re not going to have products today. We’re going to build and develop.'” Mophie’s team handed out pads and pencils to attendees, uttering one simple command: “doodle.”
In four hours, they collected 120 new product ideas for iPod accessories. That night, they scanned the drawings, put them up on the company website, and asked the expo attendees to vote for the best doodles. The result of the process, which Kaufman calls Illuminator, was a line of three new products, the first of which is a combination iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, and keychain called the Bevy. Its designer, 18-year old Jared Fiorovich, gets credit on Mophie’s website.
The Innovator [Inc.com]

Branding

Lingerie Brand

Post author By Pamela Swift
Post date August 2, 2007

FORTUNE: Lingerie retailer Bare Necessities spiced up sales by making it easier for women to find undergarments that fit online.
When we last met Bare Necessities, the lingerie seller, based in Avenel, N.J., was profitable but battling a personality problem: It lacked one. Enter FSB’s Makeover artists – five experts from Frog Design, the product design and branding firm known for its work with Apple. The Frog team led company employees in creative exercises that sparked fixes, which CEO Noah Wrubel says boosted growth.
“Business is unbelievable,” he says. The family-owned firm won’t give figures, but an industry magazine pegged its 2006 web sales – now about 90% of revenue – at $26.2 million, bringing total sales for that year to around $29 million. In 2005, Bare Necessities had total sales of $21 million. This year sales should hit $35 million.
The Makeover revealed that many women find buying underwear tedious and ego-deflating. Guided by the Frog session, the company revamped its branding and website (barenecessities.com) to change that. Now the site gives advice on fashion, quality, and, most important, fit. To execute this work, the company set up a new web-focused creative department and hired Victoria’s Secret veteran Jessica Jackson as vice president of E-commerce, a new post.
Move over, Victoria’s Secret [FORTUNE]