To eBay has long been a verb. I’ll eBay that later tonight I’ll tell my wife when we are uncluttering the house. The company, to all intents, own the online auctioning moniker and they sweep up quite nicely in most categories from automotive to collectables to antiques and more recently residential property. That’s not to say that dominate in all ecommerce verticals as there is one that is bubbling away quite nicely that I have been using for a year or so now.

Parkatmyhouse.com is the eBay of parking spaces if you get my drift. The site allows users to effectively market their car parking space, garage, forecourt to a market of would be buyers/drivers.

Imagine you are going to see Andy Murray at Wimbledon this summer. The weather is set fair and the strawberries are looking good but you want to drive to SW19. On street parking is a no no and the various car parks in the area will be doing a mean trade at very high prices. So instead you visit Parkatmyhouse to see that there are currently 147 spaces currently available for rent, ranging from daily rates (usually between £5 and £10) to weekly and monthly rates for the longer term visitor or commuter. In theory, if you get in early enough its possible to bag yourself a secure, off street space for your car and enjoy the tennis without worrying about traffic wardens, parking meters or timing restrictions.

The beauty of the idea is it’s simplicity. Connecting buyers/drivers and sellers/renters. And the site makes this process easy and painless to do. Parkatmyhouse has certainly profited from one of eBay’s weaknesses - its inability to flex its product to the needs of a particular marketplace. By focusing on one niche - the lack of spaces or cost of parking spaces in particular areas - Parkatmyhouse has designed a very smart, functional platform that works incredibly well for both buyer and seller.

After creating an account I listed my parking space within a matter of minutes and because of the site’s use of geo-tagging, you can quickly see who else is “selling their space” in the local area via the onsite Google Maps. That helps you check your daily rate, the quality of your description. Payment can be under your terms (including PayPal) and Parkatmyhouse simply take 15% of every successful rental.

I’ve been using the site now for a year and have rented out my space about 5 different times. Its certainly not enough to build a business around but in these times when we are watching the pennies more than ever, £5-10 in the pocket at the end of the week is very welcome.

Is there anything I’d improve? Well they site experience is pretty slick and they try to make it as easy as possible but I do find that on each booking I have to send some detailed instructions on the space and how to find it etc. It would be nice if I could save these as templates. Also, and I would say this, adding video would be fun. That way I could really show the renter the space in detail as I think its pretty easy to over sell the space as being better than it really is. They allow for photos so I expect video to simply be the next iteration on this.

All in all though an impressive service and one that is probably very welcome in today’s climate. Like eBay, it has the power to make entrepreneurs (parking attendants) of us all!

Perfect if you have

• an audio file you want to share (perhaps you are a musician and you want to show off your talents!)
• a podcast you want to share with your listeners
• a company jingle, advert or PR you want your buyers to listen to

Once uploaded, vzaar return the file in the following player. The size of player defaults to 334x86 pixels at present.

When I first arrived at vzaar, I had very little knowledge of Adwords and I was wondering how I was going to be able to attract to the site new customers with no adverts on the radio, billboards or other forms of conventional media used for advertising. As I started to get familiar with the concept of bidding on keywords, writing new ads and managing a budget I quickly came to realize the amazing opportunity that Google offers businesses who want to compete at a global level.

Whilst Google Search appears to be simple and intuitive to use, Adwords seems a bit complicated when you first dip into it. It took me a fair share of time reading books, watching tutorials, attending webinars and some expert best practice sharing from the good guys at Swoopo, before I really get started but today I can say that I don’t regret it all and neither would you if you do ever decide to work with Adwords.

The main and most important thing I learnt is how to attract numerous visitors towards a specific website with a minimum budget in place. Whereas before I wasn’t familiar with the real detail of online advertising, I often used to ignore sponsored links and associate them with pop ups, banners or other modes of spam. In reality they represent a real chance for all e-commerce merchants to get significant more exposure on the web and change their visitors into targeted prospects whilst only paying when a user clicks on one of your ads.

On a daily basis I work towards acquiring always more users and converting them into paying customers through targeted ad campaigns. These ads are inspired by a very detailed list of keywords which we know people use to find our service. One thing I had to my advantage was that I didn’t have to start advertising from scratch as there were already a few campaigns that has been launched by the vzaar team and I must say that’s what helped me as I could observe and analyze what had gone before.

When I started, just 6 campaigns were launched and each had their own ad groups targeting specific themes and keywords we felt were relevant to the video product we are trying to sell. I had the chance to develop and manage more of them during my internship and I had a lot of autonomy in my work, leaving me free to do any changes I wanted as long as I could justify them. The beauty with adwords is that statistically its very easy, after a few thousand impressions, to see what works and what is doesn’t. I picked up Adwords on March 1st and you can see how over time our numnber of daily new users grew.

But the period in which we had the most people signing up was around late March and new users peaked on April 1st. This proved to be an April Fools of the acquisition kind though as we then realized that a lot of users from Asia and India were signing up for free without demonstrating any intent on uploading video. Adwords lets you target specific geographies so it was very easy to simply stop targeting Asia for a while and see if we could develop some better quality, local customers. As a result the volume of daily conversions fell but over time the quality of them improved. We’d take quality over quantity any day!

In the next two months before my internship ends, I am focusing on how to optimize our existing campaigns day by day and ensure that our performance sticks to the budget as close as possible. Adwords is an ongoing science that requires daily attention. I’m also researching new opportunities for vzaar by finding new businesses to target. I look forward to sharing some more insight before I leave.

When videos are created with the simple and noble goal to honestly explain, demonstrate or showcase a product, not only can they be used as a conversion machine on product pages, but also as a powerful lead generation tool outside of an e-commerce site. The content is the ad, the ad the content. The Ad is the Content, videoretailer.org

Just what we keep saying. This is why we don’t run adverts over our videos at vzaar. It’s because the video is the advert. We want to support you by creating the best video service around so you can showcase your products. Not so we can make money by showing someone else’s products on top of yours.

The ad is the content. Your content is the ad.

Last year we needed some extra development, and started looking for resources. We had no intention of looking outside the UK, although an outsourcer in China had contacted us so we thought we would follow up with them, and see if it was a possibility.

The Chinese outsourcer was very quick to get back to us. We set them some development tasks to do and sent it off.

We then posted a few job postings for developers on some of the jobs boards. Gumtree because it was cheap, and a few of the free rails boards.

And boy did the onset of emails begin. About 50 mails from individuals, outsources (USA, China and India mainly) and recruiters. I quickly developed a filter system of Yes/No/Maybe and started cutting down the mails. It soon started taking over my life.

Fortunately a small company based out in Cracow (or is that Kraków) with a affection for muffin logos dropped us a mail. We sent off the same home work task and got on with filtering the emails.

Applicake completed the homework within a day or two, and impressed our in house developer. A few skype chats and a phone call later we took them on as our development team.

2 Weeks later the Chinese outsourcer replied to us.

Our in house developer decided to move onto some work of a different technical nature leaving Applicake as our primary development team, and if I said we were happy with their work, I’d be lying.

We’re ecstatic with their work.

But as anyone in project management and technology will tell you, there’s lots of good developers out. A good team is more than their technical skills. And Applicake is aces.

Here’s an example. Every Tuesday they break early (where early is 6pm) and the whole office goes to a group Business English class. This says a lot to me as a client. It says they are dedicated, they focus on improvement, and they want to serve their clients better.

I’ve never met such a hard working team who act as if they are part of the company, not as a vendor. The amount of times they have worked late hours, or weekends, or helped out in a emergency are too numerous to mention, and again shows we made the right decision in picking this fantastic company.

I was lucky enough to meet all four founders, (3 of whom I work with) Pawel, Agata, Ela and Bart in the last few weeks as they were all in London. Agata and Pawel even worked from our offices for a few days of a big release which was great. A nice group of people you couldn’t meet.

Applicake have just release their own product in the web space called Pipejump which is online sale software. If you make deals or sell stuff, you’ll want to check this product out.

Other than I can only say

Dzięki Applicake, jesteś fantastyczny zespół. Czekamy na długi związek z wami chłopaki.