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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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Which means make it more obvious!
That does bring you back down to a simpler design. The bars at the top and the side are very cluttered, and whilst I find it OK, I'm sure plenty find it overbearing. Rather than have a million links on the one page try having rollover sub menus for PC components etc.
That does bring you back down to a simpler design. The bars at the top and the side are very cluttered, and whilst I find it OK, I'm sure plenty find it overbearing. Rather than have a million links on the one page try having rollover sub menus for PC components etc.
True, but unless you click DVD Players you wouldn't know. I only discovered that a few days ago.
"Bring back DVDs to the website"
They have a load of dirt cheap DVDs already.
They have a load of dirt cheap DVDs already.
If these have already been said, I apologise, but I haven't had the time to read through everyone's messages:
My ideas:
• Bring back DVDs to the website
• Bring back competetive pricing - I've seen Game beat some of SRs prices - now that's shocking!
• How about selling music CDs?
• Maybe for us sad gamers, import soundtrack CDs that aren't normally available in the UK.
• Have some 'exclusive to web customers' products/offers
And that's it for now.
My ideas:
• Bring back DVDs to the website
• Bring back competetive pricing - I've seen Game beat some of SRs prices - now that's shocking!
• How about selling music CDs?
• Maybe for us sad gamers, import soundtrack CDs that aren't normally available in the UK.
• Have some 'exclusive to web customers' products/offers
And that's it for now.
gerriod_the_princess wrote:
> They've thieved your brain my boy.
Already?
> They've thieved your brain my boy.
Already?
Most people will never have heard of SR. You only have 8 shops and they're in no-name one horse towns I've never even heard of (well, apart from Bristol and that) so advertise it as an online site, ala Play/CD Wow etc.
Stick some adverts in local papers, nothing too cheesy or you'll look like a right Mickey Mouse operation, and splashing "FREE GAMES!" everywhere will only make people cynical - after all, nobody gives away free games (except SR, but they won't believe it, I know I didn't) so just say "Cheap games/Discount games" (whatever) and give some examples.
Don't try and sell the forums as being "teen chat" - that stinks of paodophile city. If you want to advertise these fine forums, say they're a place to talk about films, games, music, life - anything they WANT to talk about (except rival companies, of course)
Talk to Teletext about getting an advert on Game Central (is that the name of the new game pages that replaced Digitiser?) They have adverts for cheat phone lines etc, try and get them to advertise your many sites (they have a couple of pages devoted to adverts) like ukcheats.com ukwalkthroughs.com gameaday.co.uk etc. etc.
That's all I can think of at the moment - more to come.
Stick some adverts in local papers, nothing too cheesy or you'll look like a right Mickey Mouse operation, and splashing "FREE GAMES!" everywhere will only make people cynical - after all, nobody gives away free games (except SR, but they won't believe it, I know I didn't) so just say "Cheap games/Discount games" (whatever) and give some examples.
Don't try and sell the forums as being "teen chat" - that stinks of paodophile city. If you want to advertise these fine forums, say they're a place to talk about films, games, music, life - anything they WANT to talk about (except rival companies, of course)
Talk to Teletext about getting an advert on Game Central (is that the name of the new game pages that replaced Digitiser?) They have adverts for cheat phone lines etc, try and get them to advertise your many sites (they have a couple of pages devoted to adverts) like ukcheats.com ukwalkthroughs.com gameaday.co.uk etc. etc.
That's all I can think of at the moment - more to come.
Join up to kelkoo.co.uk.
Every day you get countless reviews, why not include some of these in the magazine, just to show other members and buyers what real people thought about the product. Also didn't you do a feature before where you took someones user name and made up some funny stuff about it. Bring that back.
Driving home I heard an advert on real radio to do with how the radio advert increased the sales of some company. Why not advertise on radio just to point out the sites address and the main selling products that you offer.
As for products you don't offer, what about import games and products that aren't commonly sold in this country.
Or games related merchandise such as action figures, posters, clothes etc. Not sure how many folk would want them but I'm sure there must be some folk who like to buy those kind of things.
Driving home I heard an advert on real radio to do with how the radio advert increased the sales of some company. Why not advertise on radio just to point out the sites address and the main selling products that you offer.
As for products you don't offer, what about import games and products that aren't commonly sold in this country.
Or games related merchandise such as action figures, posters, clothes etc. Not sure how many folk would want them but I'm sure there must be some folk who like to buy those kind of things.
And just as an extension of the 'flash game' suggestion before, you could give away the SR games free on a CD with your next magazine, to increase public interest, maybe.
I am going to enter this as it looks cool.
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