Fred's Blog

Came across a very honest blog post from a guy who started a web site. He tells how much new stuff you have to learn to grow your company.

When you start a company you are suddenly supposed to know everything about recruitment, accounting, cash-flow, marketing, tax, health & safety, and so on. Truth is, most of the time you just wing it.

Read his blog post here

Word of mouth is a great way to market your company. It is free, it comes from a trusted source (a friend), and it spreads really fast.

There are lots of things you can do to help word of mouth happen. Here are two ways to get started: conversation starters and prepping.

Conversation Starter

This is anything that helps people start talking about your company. Typical examples are t-shirts, stickers, pens, etc.

For DoneDeal the conversation starter is often an email someone sends to a friend with a link to a specific ad on DoneDeal. Or they might share an ad on their Facebook page. The ad might have a cool or funny photo, or it might show a cool car, cute pups, a bike with super-duper go-faster-stripes, or anything else interesting.

Emails and Facebook entries can be great conversation starters, but real-life items can work even better. For example, we often use prizes for competitions as great conversation starters (t-shirts, beer koozies, balloons, etc)

Prepping

Prepping is when you coach people to tell others about your company. You educated them with stories and anecdotes that they can bring up during conversations.

For example, customers who know how your company got started might discuss it with a friend over a beer. Any interesting facts they know about your product or company help them talk about you more often.

So, go on, tell your customers more about yourself, your life, your company, and your product.

More

Read more about Word-of-mouth marketing on the clever TrendWatching site.

We are testing a new technology on DoneDeal, where you can see the site in 3D. It creates a whole new experience when you browse a web site, and it enables us to create totally new and different ways of navigating and using a site.

It is early days yet, this is only an initial pilot test. But we are very excited, and we really believe this is the future of web browsing.

Please have a look, and let me know what you think. Read about it on the DoneDeal blog.

Have you heard of the Young Entrepreneur Programme in Kerry?

It is a great project to help students start a business during their transition year. It helps the students write a good business plan, and they get access to a number of different mentors and entrepreneurs.

Last week theProgramme held a half day conference in Tralee, with over 500 students taking part.

One of the speakers was the clever Hugh O’Donnell from Kentz. He shared some wise thoughts about how to pick your customers:

“Only work for clients who want you, clients who have money, and clients who actually want the project to finish.”

Might seem like obvious advice, but it is not always easy to know if a customer will actually be a good customer.

Do you send out a regular newsletter? It is a great way to keep in touch with your customers, and to subtly remind them about your company.

If you expect to have more than a hundred subscribers you should definitely use a reputable company for your email newsletter. Otherwise there is a great risk that your server is blacklisted, if it suddenly starts sending out a large amount of emails.

Here are the five most important things to look for when choosing newsletter company:

1. Reports on how many people have opened your email and which links they clicked
2. Automatic compliance with Data Protection Act (including easy unsubscribe, etc)
3. The company should have a good relationship with Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other big email domains
4. Automatic forms where customers can sign up for your newsletter
5. Great templates that work in all email programs (Outlook 2007 is especially tricky)

Here are a few great email marketing tools to try:

1. CampaignMonitor
2. VerticalResponse
3. Newsweaver