Cartesian Bear
06-04-2007, 07:16 AM
{Casey, I'm putting this post here because the forum currently has no area for us to post Marketing Tips -- could you start such an area, please? I also hope that by suggesting things done by other POD's shopkeepers to boost sales, I am not violating our forum rules.}
Just before I came to Printfection, I joined a mailing list, Great Gear, for POD designers and shopkeepers. Though there are list members from everywhere (I think Casey is a member), the majority come from the largest POD, and much of the talk is unique to that company.
When I read about all the ways the shopkeepers help each other with marketing, put up websites with links to each other's shops, create tools everyone can use, ... I wish we had the same sense of community here. [I do get some help from Great Gear, and some useful ideas from reading posts, tbut here's a lot I can't do.]
There are, however, two special types of ads that could help us increase sales, if some bright programmer could come up with a method to do them. [The last programming-like thing I did was write Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet macros in 1990. Oh, and struggle to learn CSS here.]
1. Customizable banner ads. The idea here is that we would enter the link for a product on a web form, and get back code that will create a banner ad featuring that product. We could then take that code and paste it in our own web pages, or give it to others to past in their pages. We could even have different size ads, with different numbers of products.
2. Banner ads that feature a range of Marketplace products (see CafeWish (http://www.cafewish.com/wishads/) for examples). For these, the shopkeeper provides a list of keywords and other info, and gets back code to create an ad that shows a random selection of products matching the keywords drawn from the Marketplace. While this concept works best if there's an affiliate program, it can work without, too. [If I used my unique shop keyword, a selection of my images would be shown.]
I'd like to post more ideas I find, and I invite others to post marketing tips as well. Though if PFs current infrastructure can't deal with more business ... well, we can always get things ready for later.
--Liz
Just before I came to Printfection, I joined a mailing list, Great Gear, for POD designers and shopkeepers. Though there are list members from everywhere (I think Casey is a member), the majority come from the largest POD, and much of the talk is unique to that company.
When I read about all the ways the shopkeepers help each other with marketing, put up websites with links to each other's shops, create tools everyone can use, ... I wish we had the same sense of community here. [I do get some help from Great Gear, and some useful ideas from reading posts, tbut here's a lot I can't do.]
There are, however, two special types of ads that could help us increase sales, if some bright programmer could come up with a method to do them. [The last programming-like thing I did was write Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet macros in 1990. Oh, and struggle to learn CSS here.]
1. Customizable banner ads. The idea here is that we would enter the link for a product on a web form, and get back code that will create a banner ad featuring that product. We could then take that code and paste it in our own web pages, or give it to others to past in their pages. We could even have different size ads, with different numbers of products.
2. Banner ads that feature a range of Marketplace products (see CafeWish (http://www.cafewish.com/wishads/) for examples). For these, the shopkeeper provides a list of keywords and other info, and gets back code to create an ad that shows a random selection of products matching the keywords drawn from the Marketplace. While this concept works best if there's an affiliate program, it can work without, too. [If I used my unique shop keyword, a selection of my images would be shown.]
I'd like to post more ideas I find, and I invite others to post marketing tips as well. Though if PFs current infrastructure can't deal with more business ... well, we can always get things ready for later.
--Liz