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"EGAD - SR Brainstorm - Winner Announced!"

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.

You could offer online trade ins for games - users look up the price that they'll get if they 'trade in' their game, of which you could set up a list of, and they alert you that they're sending in game x and they want to swap that and £xx.xx for game y, and you wait for it. once it arrive, you alert them, and tell them their game is on their way.

fussy, it could be, but i'm just emptying my mind whenever I get an inkling of an idea.

Mystique's fantastic suggestion:

Have an affiliate scheme for people/companies with their own websites. Have a load of banners/search engine box thingies/annoying pop-ups made and offer something like 1% or 1p to the affiliate site from every click that ends up in a transaction.

Oh, and the magazine - the last time I saw it, itr was little more than the crappy things you pick up at GAME or Gamestation. You need to make it as though the SR magazine is a 'must have', and a good read, rather than an advert for your Prices. You should re-structure your magazine to have a little news section at the front, from upwire, then with possibly a few posts from the forums in an article style format, with a few user/staff reviews as the main body. After that I suggest using your walkthrough and Cheats from the GAD entries to bring an end to it all. Of course, you'd have your prices and offers dotted around the magazine. in other words, make it more subtle and passive for the reader, whilst harnessing your GAD entries for good use. A good magazinme with SR advertising? super Cool.

As ,any people have already said, also, make the site more dynamic, as less on the obvious side - this design reminds me of 1998, and, although it's very strong, it doesn't really give it a sleek feel. If the site looks cool, the customer will be more likely to think a game from you is 'cool'

Someone tell me to hush..

They've thieved your brain my boy.

Yeah, I saw that already.
But is everything electronic already?
Already?
Did they use my idea already?
That's idea thieveieriry. Already.

FinalFantasyFanatic wrote:
> Let people claim their reddies via the internet instead of only via
> post. Like put a special code on every reddy which you can type into
> the site to claim stuff.

Check your details.

And, though this has nothing to do with it:

As you've now got sticky topics (oh-er! etc) you could put the GAD winner's posts sticky for a few days afterwards. 'Twould be nice.

And more use of the word 'Trolling' (preferably changed to 'Trollage") would go down wonderfully. Trust me, I'm dahn wi' da crew.

I could ramble for the worker drone's pleasure.
Just grease my palm with ... well, grease, and I'll be yours.

OH! OH!
Nope, still nothing.

OOHHH!
Something to do with 2 inch ply