I’d like to heartily recommend Make Serious Money on eBay Uk by Dan Wilson. This new updated edition not only has a comprehensive guide to selling on eBay as a business but also covers other vital areas such as amazon marketplace, Google and setting up your own website.

The perfect stocking filler?

Shopping comparison engines are an increasingly important way for retailers to reach their customers and drive website traffic.  I recently caught up with Maricki from Become UK to talk about their offering and plans for the future.

Tell us a bit about your company

BecomeUK is a comparison shopping engine operated by Become, Inc. Become, Inc. is a global leader in comparison shopping and lead generation spanning several verticals, including product shopping and education.  Become, Inc. delivers qualified leads to businesses and helps consumers find products and services using its world-class search engine. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, CA, with offices in Tokyo, London, Karlsruhe (Germany) and Milan, Become Inc. operates numerous sites including become.com, become.co.uk, become.co.jp, and education.become.com.  Become, Inc. was founded in 2004 by Michael Yang, who was also a founder of comparison shopping engine MySimon.  Investors in Become, Inc. include Texas Pacific Group, Transcosmos, and European Founders Fund.

What makes Become different from other online shopping channels

Become Inc. has differentiated itself from other shopping channels through the use of comparison shopping technology and features, such as colour search and Percent Off, which are intended to simplify the online shopping experience and assist the shopper in identifying the best products for them.

We also operate www.shopaholic.become.co.uk, our shopping blog. We try to give customers news, advices, opinions, reviews and helpful tips about particular products. Our blogs are written by product specialists who familiarize themselves with both the products and the market trends they report on in order to deliver reliable and professional blog posts to online shoppers.

How do you produce your results?  Is it purely on a PPC basis.  Any free listings?

Our business model is strictly CPC, and on our shopping portal each retailer is reviewed prior to approval; we do this to ensure best quality control.

What are Become’s strongest categories

Become UK has a variety of categories to suit our wide online audience. Home and Garden/Technology and Clothing are typically large categories in online shopping and we find that Become’s largest categories tend to reflect the online retail market as a whole.

How do you market Become.co.uk?

Through our functionality including colour search, percent off and the number of products on our site means we get a large amount of repeat visitors. Also for a comparison shopping engine, search relevancy is very important, and our team strives to produce relevant search results which reflect the needs of online users trying to shop for products through our site.

Do you offer any tracking functionality?

For our retail partners, Become UK offers a free ROI tracker in order to optimize their campaign with us. For more information on this, US retailers can contact sales@become.com and international retailers can reach out to sales@become.co.uk.

Plans for the future?

Become, Inc. has recently acquired the German CSE company Pangora, which will assist in our European expansion and continued improvement of our service and features for online shoppers worldwide.

Postage is a bit of a painful subject at the moment, what with the Royal Mail in turmoil.  I recently had a chat with Eric Nash from Stamps.com, a package which allows small business (including eBay sellers) to print postage from their computer.

Tell us a bit about your company

Stamps.com is a software-based program that allows you to print USPS-approved postage right from your computer.   You can print postage directly on to an envelope, shipping labels or even plain paper.    Stamps.com was the first PC Postage vendor licensed by the US Postal Service back in 1998.   We also are the largest with more than 400,000 customers.

How does your service compare with other postage options such as a franking machine?

We feel we that online postage is a much better option than a postage meter for a small business owner.   If you are a shipper, Stamps.com offers discounted rates on Priority Mail (up to 10% off) and Express Mail (5% off) that you cannot get from a postage meter or even at the post office.   Also, we are a monthly service with no hidden fees and no long term contracts.   Postage meters often get you into long term agreements and then require you to purchase many other services (proprietary ink, maintenance agreements, etc.).  With Stamps.com, you print postage directly out of your existing PC and printer – no additional hardware is needed.   A big advantage you have with Stamps.com is print flexibility (unlike Postage Meters).   Stamps.com allows you to print on shipping labels, regular paper, thermal labels, or directly on to envelopes.  You also can print the delivery address and postage at the same time.

Has there been a good take up of your service by eBay and amazon sellers?

As we’ve added a lot of new shipping features to the software over the last 18 months, we’ve been able to increase our ecommerce customer base to about 30,000-40,000 subscribers.    And now with our free eBay program launching, the response from eBay sellers has been great!  This new program allows eBay sellers to use our software for free to print USPS shipping labels for goods sold through an eBay store.   Stamps.com has great features that are not available on PayPal’s shipping program such as:

• Ability to print First Class Mail International
• Send all sizes of Priority Mail Flat Rate
• Get 10% off package insurance
• Insure packages up to $2500
• Batch printing up to 1000 labels at a time

To get this special limited time offer, you must go to:  http://www.stamps.com/ebayfree1

The program is limited to shipping goods sold through your eBay webstore however — customers wont be able to utilize the other software features such as printing postage on envelopes, importing data from amazon, Yahoo! Stores, shopping carts, etc.

To get access to these other features, customers will need to upgrade to a paid subscription account.   Our new Version 8.5 software includes the ability to import data directly from ecommerce platforms such as amazon, Yahoo! Stores, Google Checkout, PayPal or your own shopping cart.  As an example, if a seller was selling their product on both eBay and their own site via a shopping cart, they could manage their shipments for both sources from one interface — Stamps.com.   The seller could then batch print all of their labels at once using multiple mail classes to ship for more effective time management.

Plans for the future?

We have many more exciting programs in the works such as an option for Mac users and deeper online reporting.   Version 8.5 also includes all of our great shipping features such as 10% discounts on package insurance,  insurance limits up to $2500 (vs. only $500 from PayPal), the ability to hide the postage amount on shipping labels and free delivery confirmation on Priority Mail.

I’ve been doing some research into the social media uptake of major online retailers and usage is patchy to say the least.  Here is a list of the top online retailers in the UK taken from Hitwise.  If I have missed out any features, this is because they are hard to find!

I was particularly surprised at the low take up of blogs.  Don’t Argos, Tescos et al realise that blogs are great for driving traffic and connecting with customers.  Take up of twitter is high, but even sites like Debenhams and M&S who use twitter do not display it anywhere on their websites.  Tesco have a twitter account but have only tweeted once, last april.  Debenhams have a blog, twitter account and facebook page but you would never know that from their webpage.

Best in class is Top Shop with well advertised social media profiles containing quality content.

Gentle Readers,

I would appreciate it if you could vote for my manifesto on Change this entitled The Fallacy of the Great Idea.

Please follow this link: www.changethis.com/proposals/1754

Thanks

Trevor

At Hello Baby we have recently launched our own iPhone app, which has been extremely successful and I’d like to share how we did it.

The Idea

My 2 year old daughter loves my iPhone and so I got the idea to develop an app specially for toddlers.  Toddlers aren’t terribly sophisticated when it comes to software and so got the idea for an app which would show a picture of an animal when it was shaken or the screen touched, and make the animals noise.

The app is free to download but branded Hello Baby with a link to the store.

Development

Being cheap I found a developer via eLance to develop the application.  In case you are not aware of it, eLance is a an international marketplace for services and I have used it in the past for blog development and link building to great success.

My developer, Qiu, lives and China and certainly knew his way round iPhone development.  My advice with offshoring work is to work out a tight spec for the product and give this to the developer along with all the collaterals.  I had some design work done in the UK by Maria Fung and used additional materials from iStock photo.

Publicity

I wrote a press release for the iPhone app which I distributed using Daryl Wilcox publishing and journalism.co.uk.  I’ve used PRWeb in the past but these two platforms (especially DWP) seem to have a network of UK journalists who actually read the press releases.  The distributed press release got us coverage on Mac world and family friendly working.  I also emailed the press release to the major baby magazines an got coverage in three of the nationals.

Results

As well as generating some great PR, the app is now contributing 80-100 unique visitors to the site a day and has had around 11,000 downloads.  Not bad for about £600 outlay.

Incidentally, field tests with the target audience (2 year olds) have been mostly positive!

Times are hard and many businesses are to tightening their belts.  However, for savvy businesses, there are several highly effective marketing techniques which require no initial outlay apart from time and effort.  Use these leaner times to experiment an innovate.

Learn Search Engine Optimisation

Attracting search traffic from Google is undoubtedly the most cost effective way of marketing a business.  Time spent learning how to optimise a website to maximise traffic from Google is time very well spent.  Fundamentally, there are two optimisation factors, the content of the website and the quality and quantity of incoming links.  Whilst getting onto page one for competitive phrases is very difficult, creating quality content and being on the look out for linking opportunities can make a significant difference to website traffic.  Remember that each visitor to a website is a potential customer.

Local Search

Local search services such as Google Maps, Yelp and Qype are free to register and can provide a steady stream of web traffic.  This traffic is particularly relevant to location based services such as shops but any business can register.  Local search results are now also appearing on Google’s main search page for location based searches.

Social Media

Social Media platforms such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter are all the rage.  If used properly these services can both generate web traffic and also position a business as a leader in its chosen field.

Blogging.  In case you have been living on Mars, a blog is a website where users can post content in a chronological order and then readers can add comments.  Blogging is highly effective form of communication for a number of reasons:

• Conversational.  Blogs create a two way conversation between a business and its customers.  It provides an easy to keeps customers up to date with and receive feedback
• Easy to update.  Blogs add a dynamic element to a website allowing a business to provide regular updates and interact with their customers.  They are typically built to be very simple to use, allowing anyone to get blogging!
• Give insight into company.  Blogs help to put a human face on a company, giving customers an insight into how the business functions.
• Search engine friendly. The major search engines such as Google give preference to frequently updated content so frequently give high search placement to blog postings.
• Syndication.  Blogs posts are published via RSS feeds which allows readers to subscribe to the content.
• Position Company as Knowledge Leader.  By posting interesting, informative posts a company can demonstrate to customers and potential customers that they are a reputable, knowledgeable supplier.

Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging platform where users can post short updates on what they have been up to. The service has recently become very popular and is a great way for business to both interact with their customers.

• Get to know customers.  By following customers you can respond to their questions and
• Keep your customers up to date.  By following your tweets, customer can keep to date with your latest news and deals.  By tweaking about your products you can drive traffic to your website and generate sales.
• Follow trends.  By following your brand name on twitter you can see what people are saying about you.

Facebook.

Businesses can create their own Facebook pages, allowing them to interact with Facebook’s massive community.  Companies can post all kinds of content about themselves on their Facebook page such as posts, forums, photos and video.  Facebook users (including your customers) can then add their own content and become a fan of your page.

Press Releases and PR

Journalists are always on the lookout for interesting stories to cover and many of these stories come directly from press releases.  Public relations firms make a business out of pitching stories to media outlets, both on and off line, however there is no need to be a professional to get coverage.  By writing a press release and submitting it to free press release sites, emailing relevant publications and posting it on the company’s blog (if available) it is possible to get a message out to the right people and available to Google search.  Another option is to use a paid for press release distribution service such as PRwire to increase distribution.

Write a White Paper

Writing white papers which provide useful information can be a very effective marketing tool. Writing a white paper demonstrates a knowledge of the subject matter and an open attitude to sharing knowledge.  Furthermore, if the white paper is good it will be distributed via email and encourage incoming web links.

Below is my manifesto proposal for Change this.  Please vote for it at www.changethis.com/proposals/1754

Many entrepreneurs feel that they cannot start a business without a great idea. Without one they believe it will be impossible to be successful as someone else will have cornered the market first. Only by venturing into uncharted territory can they achieve their dreams. This is the fallacy of the great idea.

In truth, most ‘great ideas’ will never make their investors a penny. True, some companies have made billions from a unique product, but close inspection of many world beating businesses reveals that their unique selling point is hard to pin down. Can anyone honestly tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi? And at the end of the day, McDonalds and Burger King both sell burgers.

The simple truth is that it is perfectly possible to create a thriving business without a big idea. In fact starting up with a tried and tested idea is very sensible. Entrepreneurs should not be embarrassed by not having a claim to be original. The real key to success is focus and brilliant execution.

Thanks to Felix Dennis for the inspiration.

Here, in no particular order, are some pearls of wisdom for your consideration:

Beware of Marketing and Advertising Salesmen

Everyday (at least until I turned my phone onto answer phone) I get around 10 sales people trying to sell advertising and marketing services of a dubious quality.  Be careful before investing in any kind of marketing service as most of them will not be the once in a lifetime opportunity they suggest.  Particularly for online services it is reasonable to ask for a trial before spending any money.

Keep it Simple

May people think that to start a business requires an original idea.  In his book, ‘How to Get Rich’, millionaire publisher Felix Dennis calls this the fallacy of the great idea.  In reality great ideas are few and far between.  For every Google there are a thousand similar companies which had what their founders though were great ideas but have unfortunately been consigned to the dustbin of internet business history.  To be successful does not require a novel idea, just a good idea expertly executed.

Learn Search Engine Optimisation

Attracting search traffic from Google is undoubtedly the most cost effective way of marketing a business.  Time spent learning how to optimise a website to maximise traffic from Google is time very well spent.  Fundamentally, there are two optimisation factors, the content of the website and the quality and quantity of incoming links.  Whilst getting onto page one for competitive phrases is very difficult creating quality content and being on the look out for linking opportunities can make a significant difference to website traffic.  Remember that each visitor to a website is a potential customer.

Economise

As a start up, money will be tight and it really goes without saying that economies should be made wherever possible, especially in the current climate.  I saved thousands of pounds by choosing really cheap office space and outsourcing work to the far east.  Instead of employing someone in the UK, I have a full time employee in Thailand who I found through eLance.  This works out at around quarter of the cost of a UK employee.

Write letters

Sending letters the old fashioned way via snail mail is a highly effective way of getting a point across.  Unlike emails, paper letters cannot be deleted at the touch of a button; they sit around and demand action.  When writing a letter I advise going straight to the top and writing straight to the CEO.  Be polite but firm and remember that a letter of complaint does not have to be a great work of literature. In the last year I have been refunded £5000 though writing letters of complaint.

Be Assertive

When working with contractors it is important to have a good idea of the quality of the work which you want to delivered.  Do not to settle for second best.  It is in human nature to cut corners and so go though all deliverables with a tooth comb to ensure that they are up to scratch.  With web sites, for example, do not assume that the site has been properly tested, it almost certainly has not!

Watch Your Time and Get Organised

Entrepreneurs have multiple demands on their time and often there will be no one to delegate to.  It is possible to waste a huge amount of time though pointless meeting and phone calls.  Being disorganised is also the thief of time as it is much more time consuming to correct mistakes than get it right first time.  However, by learning time management techniques it is be possible to make a huge impact on personal productivity.  The two books I recommend are ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen and The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (read Tim Ferris for his ideas about efficiency and in my view, avoid his ideas about business)

Reading Free by Chris Anderson recently, I discovered that one of the first home computers was designed solely to organise receipes in the kitchen, as that was about the only task for which the engineers at Honeywell thought a computer might be useful.  To enter receipes required a working knowledge of Hex.  It is not known whether any units were sold!

Fast forward 40 years and it turns out that computes are pretty useful for collating and sharing receipes after all.  Carol Savage from MyDish recently secured funding from the famously picky Dragons of Dragon’s Den for her food lovers online community.  MyDish is also based in the Old Truman Brewery, where only the very best businesses are located.

Carole was nice enough to answer some of my questions.

Please give us some background on mydish.co.uk

I came up with the idea for MyDish when my husband came back from South Africa after his mother had passed away. He brought back two scraps of paper with recipes on: one for Banana Bread and another for Lemon Meringue Pie. For mu husband, the recipes were so much more than a list of ingredients, they were memories. They reminded him of being a little boy. I told this story to lots of people and everyone had a similar story.

I’d recently sold a business and was looking for a new challenge so I hit upon the idea of MyDish: the internet seemed like the perfect medium to share and store everyone’s treasured recipes.

What made you want to go on Dragon’s den?  Had you exhausted other funding roots or were you attracted by the additional publicity?

Of course, we didn’t actually know we’d get funding but we thought DD was a good way of raising cash and our profile at the same time. It’s been a very rewarding experience and we’re all looking forward to working with Deborah Meaden.

The surge in traffic, registrations and new recipes since we appeared last week has been extraordinary and much more than we expected. We’re still getting a lot of traffic thanks to iPlayer.

What was the Dragon’s Den experience like?

It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve blogged it here: http://www.mydishblog.co.uk/

I didn’t see the programme before it aired, which meant I didn’t know what to expect. It was very nervous wracking not knowing what they would choose to show.

Any tips for building a community and driving traffic.  Do you see likes of Facebook as a big competitor or are you in an entirely different market?

One thing we’ve found to be very successful is having an authentic and honest voice. That’s why we try and keep the site personal and friendly. We can come across as a site that people want to use.

I see Facebook as a vehicle. The great big communities are obviously very popular, but I think there’s space for niche, focussed and specialist social sites out there. We successfully use blogging, forums, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter to generate traffic and buzz. Twitter in particular is very good because it’s such a conversational medium. During the show and since we’ve been able to communicate directly with viewers and visitors which has been great.

What are your plans for the future.  You mentioned some interesting functionality on TV.

We have two main priorities. Developing the community and site to drive traffic. We’ve got lots of features that we want develop that we hope will be popular with members including the menu planner and a shopping planner.

Building revenue through partnerships. We’ve successfully done deals with brands like Heinz and Clover as well as linked up with Ocado and Asda, We can offer a highly engaged audience to brands which makes us a powerful aveneue for advertisier. But there has to be something in it for the members. We don’t want to bombard them with pointless, untargeted advertising.