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Greetings once more - your favourite supplemental GAD fest is back again, taunting you with prizes you probably won't win like a carrot in front of a donkey. If you didn't love it, you wouldn't keep coming back.
Something a little different this time, in that this competition actually requires you to think a little rather than splatter your 'artistic' daubings on a banner :) What we'd like you to do is come up with some ways in which Special Reserve could promote themselves effectively. Bear in mind we haven't exactly got the backing of the Sultan of Brunei, we'd like you to drop us a few ideas on how best to get across the fact that Special Reserve are cheap, reliable and have a wide product range.
This could be improvements to ways we currently run things, new product ranges you think would appeal to our customers (bear in mind we currently sell rather a lot of stuff - see left sidestrip), new exciting ways to advertise our existing offers or just any ideas that have been floating round your head. Is there some range of products you just can't get hold of that would be perfect for us to sell? Let us know!
Post your ideas in this thread and we'll announce a winner at around the end of February, let's say the 27th. The best suggestions will win whatever prizes we give them, most probably yer standard £25/£50 GAD prize.
(And before anyone brings it up, yes we do think about this stuff ourselves, but we wanted to see what you lot think as well. So button it!)
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And the winner is..... phi11ip, for the following suggestion:
"Here's an idea, and if carried out correctly could be very beneficial. I've got a nice example too just to prove to you just how beneficial it is. www.staghosting.com was a free hosting service set up last year with the intention of boosting the ratings of a a few sites belonging to a company, one of these sites was www.actiondays.co.uk. Basically, unlike your free hosting, this hosting only offered hosting to domain names, you get 200MB disk space and 4 Gig bandwidth a month, you can upload from any connection unlike Freeola. So basically the company which has nothing to do with hosting has just set up a hosting site, sounds stupid doesn't it? What the requirements of this free hosting are though is that you must display a couple of small text links on your site, on mine you can see them on the links section on the side of the page. Google counts each link as a 'vote' and increases the pagerank of the site in question meaning that it shows up higher in searches, I see you've got 'cheap games' pretty much sorted but you don't show up anywhere when 'PS2 games' is typed in. If people were to display these text links on their sites it would soon make you appear high up on the search results. www.actiondays.co.uk was absolutely nowhere when it started, it had a low pagerank and didn't appear on searches. Have a look now though and you'll see that searching for 'corporate event' on Google.com returns the site as number 2 out of 6,500,000. Think about it. You've already got the hosting capabilities, all it would require is a server and someone to monitor the sites every now and then to make sure the links are there."
Congratulations and well done to everyone who entered.
Something a little different this time, in that this competition actually requires you to think a little rather than splatter your 'artistic' daubings on a banner :) What we'd like you to do is come up with some ways in which Special Reserve could promote themselves effectively. Bear in mind we haven't exactly got the backing of the Sultan of Brunei, we'd like you to drop us a few ideas on how best to get across the fact that Special Reserve are cheap, reliable and have a wide product range.
This could be improvements to ways we currently run things, new product ranges you think would appeal to our customers (bear in mind we currently sell rather a lot of stuff - see left sidestrip), new exciting ways to advertise our existing offers or just any ideas that have been floating round your head. Is there some range of products you just can't get hold of that would be perfect for us to sell? Let us know!
Post your ideas in this thread and we'll announce a winner at around the end of February, let's say the 27th. The best suggestions will win whatever prizes we give them, most probably yer standard £25/£50 GAD prize.
(And before anyone brings it up, yes we do think about this stuff ourselves, but we wanted to see what you lot think as well. So button it!)
---------------------------------------------------------
And the winner is..... phi11ip, for the following suggestion:
"Here's an idea, and if carried out correctly could be very beneficial. I've got a nice example too just to prove to you just how beneficial it is. www.staghosting.com was a free hosting service set up last year with the intention of boosting the ratings of a a few sites belonging to a company, one of these sites was www.actiondays.co.uk. Basically, unlike your free hosting, this hosting only offered hosting to domain names, you get 200MB disk space and 4 Gig bandwidth a month, you can upload from any connection unlike Freeola. So basically the company which has nothing to do with hosting has just set up a hosting site, sounds stupid doesn't it? What the requirements of this free hosting are though is that you must display a couple of small text links on your site, on mine you can see them on the links section on the side of the page. Google counts each link as a 'vote' and increases the pagerank of the site in question meaning that it shows up higher in searches, I see you've got 'cheap games' pretty much sorted but you don't show up anywhere when 'PS2 games' is typed in. If people were to display these text links on their sites it would soon make you appear high up on the search results. www.actiondays.co.uk was absolutely nowhere when it started, it had a low pagerank and didn't appear on searches. Have a look now though and you'll see that searching for 'corporate event' on Google.com returns the site as number 2 out of 6,500,000. Think about it. You've already got the hosting capabilities, all it would require is a server and someone to monitor the sites every now and then to make sure the links are there."
Congratulations and well done to everyone who entered.
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It's probably been mentioned earlier, but I don't think I will be looking back 21 pages to find it.
Sponsorship. Plaster your name at football/rugby grounds, on race cars, snooker/pool/darts players etc. Or even sponsor a TV program - "So & so was sponsored by Special Reserve Discount Network - incredibly low prices even if you're not a member!"
Surely you'll rake in more punters like that.
Sponsorship. Plaster your name at football/rugby grounds, on race cars, snooker/pool/darts players etc. Or even sponsor a TV program - "So & so was sponsored by Special Reserve Discount Network - incredibly low prices even if you're not a member!"
Surely you'll rake in more punters like that.
Of course, keep the classier items...
Keep the beard/nose trimmer thingies though.
Don't sell downmarket products if you want to be taken seriously. Change the name, take all the crap like BB guns, inflatable sofas, toy Liberal Democrat MP action figures or whatever you have on at the moment. I don't know if you still have the women fondling herself all over the products, but if you do get rid of her.
Shoot her with the spare BB guns. Best of a bad job.
Shoot her with the spare BB guns. Best of a bad job.
They used to, if I remember rightly - think one was Quake, or Quake 2??
You could run a few game servers.
Produce an html newsletter every week. GAME do this and it is very good (for a company one) and highlights key offers/preorders/games just being added to preorder. More importantly I actually READ the email. Whereas the current SR ones are just text text text text etc *yawn* Try adding some email only offers where you only those with the email get the URL of the offer, that kind of thing. You know this idea works because everytime GAME or Gameplay advertise an offer by email Snuggly has to go ballistic telling people to shut up about it, like last Halloween and the New Year stuff...
Add some service committments;
E.g.
If you order an item that is stated as being "In stock" but turns out to be not available, you get a free upgrade to first class postage or, if you paid for first class, an extra Reddy.
Also, when an item ends up being out of stock for a significant amount of time, over a week say, anyone who ordered it gets an email telling them and asking whether they want to continue to wait or get a refund - which they have to ring up to do.
Neither of these will make you more money (probably) but I think they'd keep customers happy. Look at Shrubber, the poor lad has been waiting a month (from what he has said in the forum) for a game!
E.g.
If you order an item that is stated as being "In stock" but turns out to be not available, you get a free upgrade to first class postage or, if you paid for first class, an extra Reddy.
Also, when an item ends up being out of stock for a significant amount of time, over a week say, anyone who ordered it gets an email telling them and asking whether they want to continue to wait or get a refund - which they have to ring up to do.
Neither of these will make you more money (probably) but I think they'd keep customers happy. Look at Shrubber, the poor lad has been waiting a month (from what he has said in the forum) for a game!
Sell Televisions.
I don't know if you do this already:
With some Getdotted domain names, you could enforce pop-ups, or banners that advertise SR...
IF you don't already do that- read on.
Maybe the Getdotted domain names that enforce banners are half price
(or so much % off), but advert-less full price.
If I just wanted to make a budget website, I’d go for the cheaper option with SR banners and Pop-ups...
That way, everybody is happy. People who want the cheaper option go for the domain with banners and adverts, which will give you a lot of hits to your website(s) and people who don’t want adverts will pay full price.
The more expensive domains might have less or more percent knocked off depending.
Just something else to ponder over.
With some Getdotted domain names, you could enforce pop-ups, or banners that advertise SR...
IF you don't already do that- read on.
Maybe the Getdotted domain names that enforce banners are half price
(or so much % off), but advert-less full price.
If I just wanted to make a budget website, I’d go for the cheaper option with SR banners and Pop-ups...
That way, everybody is happy. People who want the cheaper option go for the domain with banners and adverts, which will give you a lot of hits to your website(s) and people who don’t want adverts will pay full price.
The more expensive domains might have less or more percent knocked off depending.
Just something else to ponder over.
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