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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.

Hello again all you vzaar readers, it’s Sami the spring intern at vzaar. I posted an article on the blog last month, talking about how vzaar had started to develop Adwords and SEO Marketing campaigns. This week I’m looking forward to share some more insight with you by suggesting a few useful tips for those of you who are interested in developing an Adwords strategy for advertising your business online.

Be Specific, Stay Focused
First of all I must say it is important for you to be relevant in your marketing strategy ensuring you focus on exactly the product or service you are selling. Providing mixed Google adverts by amalgamating your offers and messages or being too general will ultimately cost you as you’ll generate a lot of clicks from a wide audience. Know your buying audience and pitch to them as if you would face to face. That’s why it may be preferable to stay focused on your niche and the people you usually target. Google mainly rewards relevancy - keep this in mind!

Know Your Keywords
Try to use specific and targeted keywords specific to your business: this is the key to relevancy. Remain as precise as possible in the words you think your customers will use and explore all the combination’s you can think of. Of course some keywords will be more useful than others but you never know when which one will be used and meanwhile keeping some on standby won’t cost you much. Try to think like a buyer. What would they search for. You really have to enter into people’s internet searching habits to guess which keywords and which ads are more likely to getting click-throughs.

Remember you can also choose which negative keywords you don’t want your adverts to be associated with. This helps you avoid a lot of impressions on irrelevant search terms that could easily be eating up your budget.

You may have seen this site recently on how to use twitter for marketing and PR.

At vzaar we have been finding Twitter rather useful for marketing and some minor PR. Jamie (‘business guy’ on the blog), takes a bit of time each day to respond to people looking for video solutions and communicate with them. Sometimes this is one way, but it can also become the opening to a conversation which is the best way to find new users. Conversation, not broadcasting.

I’ve also noticed a lot more people following our @vzaar twitter feed in the sales space (i.e. online selling of something). What I find interesting is the average follower count of these people is normally in the 1K-10K range.

I find this curious. On my personal feed I tend to block most (not all) followers like this. I don’t want someone following me to boost my follow count, or because they expect me to follow them back. I want people following me who either actually know me, or want to follow me because they find me interesting. I would say I have probably an 80% hit rate of genuine followers out of my 250ish followers. On our work account I would say this hit rate is probably more like 20% out of the 200ish followers we have there.

But then in fairness, we follow 206 people, and we don’t read the stream of people we follow. We read the search stream and we follow our own personal streams, but we don’t follow the stream of who we follow, as we’re all just too busy, so we’re equally as bad.

I would love to reduce our work twitter stream to people we actually follow and read, but we all follow them on our personal accounts anyway. I think Twitter is splitting into two groups. Those who use them for personal conversations, and those who use them for work and/or to amass followers.

I think there is much more value in real links than the empty links you get when it’s a game and the winner is how many followers you get.

The coffee shop and restaurant above our office, just started a twitter feed. @thepantrylondon only has 14 followers. But all of those followers are valuable as they are all people who live or work nearby. I would rather have 14 valued followers than 10000 empty ones.

They don’t have to be the most followed coffee shop in the world. What they need is people who might by coffee from them, to have an interaction with them when they are not in the shop.

That’s how you use Twitter for PR and marketing.

Hi all you vzaar readers, I’m Sami, the spring intern at vzaar. I come from France, where I’m studying Business & Management, and look forward to graduating in the field of marketing in 2010. My interest in sales, communication and new technologies made me choose coming to vzaar in order to experience a new form of online advertising; namely Search Engine Marketing (or Google Adwords if we are being more honest!).

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.

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.

Last month vzaar appeared as part of a panel at the ChannelAdvisor Catalyst event for eBay and online merchants and retailers. We were invited to be part of a larger discussion on the theme of Turning Browsers Into Buyers. A great theme given that the room was largely full of vendors looking to optimise their sales and marketing tactics in what is a ever increasingly busy and competitive space.

Joining me on the panel, which was chaired by Michael Jones of ChannelAdvisor, were

• Andrew Main of Frooition
• Michelle Hocking of Webloyalty
• David Monterroso of RichFX

The video runs some 50 minutes but as a group we cover a number of themes including new technologies and services that can help increase your conversion rates, thoughts on what turns buyers when purchasing online as well as time for a question and answer session from the audience.

Last week I was lucky enough to be interviewed by the blog eBay, eCommerce, Life where I gave my views on the future of videos for selling online and how vzaar will fits in to the industry picture. You can read the interview here.

The rather excellent eBay, eCommerce, Life is written by eBay stalwart Trevor Ginn. As well as blogging, Trevor runs an eCommerce consultancy and also an online baby shop.

After reading an interesting post, about the recent news of YouTube reaching 100M viewers, from The Video Commerce Consortium blog, I decided to echo some of our views on the topic of online video, as it pertains to ecommerce. It’s also a good opportunity for me to compare our service with that of YouTube when using video for ecommerce. YouTube are the forefathers of online video and have paved the way for other online video hosting services such as ourselves. It’s hard to believe they are only 3 1/2 years old. It feels like they’ve been around for ages. Let me first though, before I provide the differences, say that we are technically similar. We both encode most video formats to flash and we both host and deliver video content on the internet.

The core difference is rooted in our business models. YouTube don’t charge their users to use the service and at vzaar we do. Remember though, nothing is ever really free.

vzaar’s founding principle is to provide ecommerce merchants with a service that enables them to use video to merchandise their product or service. We are not a destination site for people to come and watch video, we are a tool for businesses to use to power video on their site.

vzaar users own their video and their video player. They have control over who sees it and where its published. They also have an unbranded video player so it looks smart and a seamless part of their site. We have some other neat features but in the interest of keeping this succinct I won’t digress.

The principle behind YouTube is sharing video and as I said before the difference between vzaar and YouTube is the business model. YouTube sell advertising space on their site and video player, so viewers will be exposed to anything YouTube decide to display and the “owner” of that video has no control. Not ideal if you are selling let’s say a vacuum cleaner from Hoover and YouTube sell advertising to Dyson the viewer will be exposed to both products. One which is yours and the other which isn’t.

YouTube don’t charge their users for the service and instead charge advertisers which means they need to keep driving traffic to their site keeping the traffic up to warrant the ad spend. They are a destination site, a video sharing site. As a result YouTube users don’t actually own the video player or have control over what is published in that player. So if you have a video that you want to share with the world then YouTube is perfect. If on the other hand you want to embed a video into your business website then think again. For me this is the clincher: ownership and control. When using video to aid in the sale of a product or service that video in itself is an advert and the lasting impression should be of that product or service not someone else’s. To that point let me quote a piece from the blog I for mentioned as it hits the nail on the head for me.

“YouTube isn’t thinking of e-commerce in the way you or I might. They’re thinking of advertising….. How excited are you about having your video running with a competitor’s text ad overlaid on top?”

We love YouTube but if I would not embed YouTube videos on my business site simply because that’s not what its designed for. It’s the wrong tool for that job.

Last night team vzaar popped along to the Business Centre at the rather wonderful British Library to attend for the secone time a 3Cs meeting. Last time, we were presenting, so it was nice to sit back and relax this time round as three more entrepreneurs shared with us their business stories.

The mission of the 3Cs Community is to create an environment for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to become successful and to grow and so each month at 3Cs members’ meetings, three budding start ups are given the chance to make presentations to the audience. It allows them to test-run the “pitches” that they will make to potential investors and partners and it acts as an invitation to those in the audience who can help, to step forward and offer that help. In other words, free advice and support. Valuable stuff in today’s environment.

As I mentioned, vzaar were lucky enough to be invited to present at the last event in January of this year. Whilst we’ve done several investment meetings to date, this was the first that was more of a one to many style (think Dragons Den if you must) and I have to say its a great opportunity to refine how you pitch your business successfully and succinctly. Given a strict 15 minutes, the onus is on clear, easy to digest information and I think where possible a full, but quick product demonstration.

When it comes to online technologies you’re always entering the lap of the gods when it comes to live demos but last month they were smiling on vzaar and we were able to demonstrate in under two minutes how quick and easy it is to shoot, upload and stream video. On the night, I think that made a real difference, as people can quickly get what you are about. More than that though is the value in being heard, in having the chance to bounce ideas off experienced investors and businessmen and in generating new and enthused interest in what you do. You can’t put a value on that.

The two Colins that run this fun and engaging of evenings are very quick to drag you along to the pub which is where, as you’d expect, the real networking begins and so if you are interested the next 3Cs meeting is planned for the 20th May 2009.

So you have developed this great online shop that you are really excited about and you have identified your market. All you need now is to connect the two. Google ad words, paid advertising, blogging are all common practices to create awareness. Many business's rely on search to acquire customers, be it natural or paid. So it is important that you are getting the most out of search and this is where video comes in.

Blended search has now become a common practice by some search engines including Google by expanding the results beyond text to show different types of content such as maps and video. This shift in search is providing forward thinking companies an advantage in today's search engine game. For instance, let's say your product or service makes the first result page but its way down towards the bottom. Many searchers won't click through as you are not near the top three and don't stand out. If however you had a video thumbnail next to your result you would certainly be standing out, and the chances of a click through are now more favourable.

Furthermore, Nate Elliot at Forrester published a blog post titled, "The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google." In his post Nate comments on the results of an experiment they did with video and concluded...

"Not only are video results increasingly common in Google's search results, but your videos stand a much better chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page."

So if you are bought into this idea let me try and take it a step further. If you use Youtube or another video sharing site, the searcher will be taken to the location of the video on the video sharing site. Not ideal, as you the merchant want that referral. This is where vzaar can help.

If you use vzaar the searcher will be taken to the url (which you provide) of where that video appears on your site. vzaar redirects searches to this URL, as we are not looking to drive your business to our site but to yours.

vzaar offers this feature to all of its paid subscribers. So videos not only keeps customers on your site longer (which increases conversion) but can now actually help you be more effective attracting users to your site from natural search too.

If you have a spare 30 seconds we’d love to know your thoughts on all things vzaar and just how you intend to use video to support your online business in the year ahead.

Many thanks

One of the most asked questions at vzaar HQ from users is “how long should my video be?”

Now that’s a really hard question to answer. Someone selling a diamond ring might be able to do it in a few seconds, whereas a seller talking about his business and how he plies his trade probably needs more than 15 seconds in which to do that. So, in short there is no one, perfect answer. Sorry!

What we have learnt is that attention span’s of those watching video are limited and that anything over a minute will generally start to lose viewers. Our completion rates confirm that against shorter, punchier videos. So where possible do try to be brief, to the point or snappy as one might say!

Some interesting data to back this up has just come to light from tubemogul who
sampled over 180,000 videos and have found that for anything under 30 seconds you’ll capture the full attention of an impressive 66% of your audience.

Worryingly, anything over 2 minutes and over three quarters of your audience (or potential buyers) switch off. So try to keep it short and to the point.