Hi all

Sorry I've been stretched so thin lately, this just seems to be a high-viscosity time in general!

Well, the Co-op is off to a slow start, but the good news is that we have had at least a little trickle of orders through, which tells me that our basic concept is sound ... so all we have to do now is widen that little trickle into a flowing stream (we'll save gushing river for later! )

Much as "marketing" may sound like a bad word to some of us geared toward spiritual community, it's actually the necessary ingredient for making it all work ... and all it really means is letting people know we exist, in a way that will make them want to come visit. That's the critical "phase 2" of the Co-op project that is needed for its success!

Now, being as how we're not a big company (actually we're not a company at all ) and we don't have a marketing budget, that lets out TV commercials and brass bands! But it still leaves us with quite a number of things we can do, including the one activity that is the best possible marketing for any product or organization, regardless of size: simple word-of-mouth!

It's true, and any marketing executive will confirm it, that good word of mouth is the most effective kind of promotion ... and also one of the hardest to get for commercial enterprises. But for us it's a natural, because we are all passionate about what we are doing, and we all have like minded friends. If everyone in the Co-op simply starts making it a habit to tell everyone you know that you have a booth here, and inviting them to visit, we will have LOTS of traffic in very short order.

How can you do this? Lots of ways: you can simply bring it up in conversation, you can email or snail-mail "announcements" to your friends, co-workers, fellow students or other contacts, telling them about the opening of your booth and inviting them to visit. You can put the basic information about your booth (including your booth name, the URL and what you offer) on little cards or slips of paper that you can give to people you run into, so they'll have it for ready reference later when they are logged in. One of the best - and easiest - things you can do is to create a simple email "signature" to go at the bottom of every email you send. Most email programs will let you create such a signature, and it can be as simple as "Please visit my Moon Rocks booth at the Conscious Evolution Community Co-op" with the URL. (The URL of your booth is just "http://consciousevolution.com/co-op/shopping/booth.php?id=X," where X is the ID number of your booth.)

If each of us does just this one last item, you will be amazed at the amount of traffic it will generate!

And of course there is more active promotion as well, like requesting reciprocal links from other websites we visit, and mentioning our booths on discussion forums and chat rooms that we participate in. Such mentions don't have to be like "ads," but just as interesting information about something we're involved in. (And needless to say we should always respect the policies of other sites, if they have any standards or restrictions about posting external URL's.)

Other ideas?

Love,
Greg

Hi Greg,

That's great about the orders!!!

A good idea is to send an e-mail advertising the Co-op to every contact on our accounts.
It is one of the fastest way to make it go around the globe...especially if it has a good joke attached to it...

Tish

Hi Tish

Yes, I agree ... just be sure that we are only emailing those we have some kind of personal connection with, who will be happy to receive our messages -- we don't want to "SPAM" folks!

Here's one other thing I've been working on: I've set up a Froogle feed account for us, which will allow us to submit a complete listing of every product in the co-op, and update it every week. This will guarantee us listing by product category and full-text search in Froogle (Google's "product search" engine) AND listing in the regular Google search engine.

There is a specific format we have to follow for these submislsions, and I've written a short utility program that will pick out the required information from our database, so this can be an automated weekly task (that way it won't fall through the cracks when yours trul is busy on other things! ) Here's the listing format required by Froogle:

• product_url
• name
• description
• price
• image_url
• category

The only thing that you as a booth owner need to do about this is to make sure that your product information is up to date (but of course you want to do that anyway ), and to make sure that the product description for each of your booth items actually describes the product, preferably in an interesting way that will make people want to take a look. (This is the short description field, the one that is listed next to the thumbnail of each item in your booth, not the long description that is on the product page itself.

I think most of the descriptions in the co-op are in pretty good shape already, but everyone should take a look and make sure that each decription "stands alone" to describe the product even if it is out of the context of the booth. It would also be good where possible to make the product "thumbnail" be a picture of the actual product, rather than a generic picture or logo, as this is what Froogle will display as "your product." Unfortunately it isn't possible to have a different description for the Froogle listing, as Froogle will verify the feed I send them and will not list any product whose name, description and picture does not match what is actually displayed on the co-op.

So, I will give everyone a couple of days to check your products and make sure they are pictured and described as you want them, then I will submit our first feed on Sunday night (day after tomorrow)!

Love,
Greg

hey Greg this is great news! I was just catching up on the posts so excuse my late response time please...:)
Great Job!
Foxtip

Hey what do you think about a Co-op flyer that we could print off the site and hand out in our areas at places like coffee shops etc. ?
I'm not the most computer lit person so I have no idea if this would work but...
I'd be glad to help however possible
don't know unless you ask

Foxtip
Trying to put on her thinking cap

Woo hoo, I love the banner/link on Lindaland

juniperb

Hi Greg! I've just sent an e mail to your e mail address-I did'nt realise this forum existed. We have a website www.orgonegeneration.com ,we make, sell, and spread Orgone Generators, and we would love to be part of the co-op. We're happy to put a link to conscious evolution on our links page and spread the word about the co-op through newsletters. Love, Evy.

Hi all!

I've been M.I.A. again the past week was a total zoo, including two days with no power, phone or water and 80 mph winds knocking down trees like toothpicks all around us! All is calm now, however (except for my backlog of work to do!)

Evy, I forwarded your email to the co-op panel and we'll definitely get back to you soon about your booth ... sounds like a natural fit to me. Orgone energy is very much in the same league as the psycho-physical energies Linda Goodman wrote about, and are embodied in the purple plates mentioned in Star Signs. Cool!

By way of update on the Froogle feed, I've been back and forth several times with them ... had to make a few changes in our formatting to work properly with their system. For one thing they won't accept descriptions with line breaks in them: they must be a single paragraph without breaks. That was pretty easy to fix in code, so I think we're all set at this point and should be appearing in Froogle today or tomorrow!

They did strongly recommend (though they do not enforce it) that we remove product numbers, prices and other extraneous information from the product NAME, saying that those things tend to lower the viewer response rate. Since it isn't mandatory, I didn't make any of those changes on members' booths, but you might want to change them yourself if your product names have them.

And again, the best descriptions are ones that describe your item as completely (and attractively!) as possible in a short space. I will update the Froogle feed at least once a week, but if you make changes to your booth that you want to be sure are reflected asap, let me know and I can update it any time (as often as once a day).

Dawn, your idea for a printable flyer of some kind that folks could download and pass out or tack up on local bulletin boards and so on is a great one! I'll be glad to handle the mechanics of that, anybody interested in working on the design? Or maybe it could be a collaborative design!

I have some more news and questions about co-op functionality, but I'll start a new thread for that to keep this one focused on promotional ideas.

Love,
Greg

Hi Greg,

I'm glad things are back to normal, having no electricity is terrible.

I was wondering if you recieve my e-mail with the things I wrote for the booth...

Love,

Tish

Hi Tish ... I did receive them, and they look great! Just haven't had a chance to do anything with them yet.

Soon!

Love,
Greg

Hi Greg,

It's OK, just wanted to know.

They are asking for you on Star Chat, in case you haven't read...

Tish

Hi guys!

LOVE the flyer idea!!! I've been trying to get a little more involved with the "real-world" metaphysical community (for lack of a better description) here in this town - apparently we've landed in something of a new age / alternative hot spot...which is great, as the only real reason we picked this town was the cheap rents, and its turning out to be so much more than that! Anyway, there about a half dozen new agre type stores, markets, coffee shops etc locally that all have community bulliten boards. I'd love to post something about the co-op there. There's also a weekly market at this place called Cafe Aquarius that people keep telling me to go to - apparently its a real life version of our co-op. I'm going to check it out this weekend and may take a table there in the new year to try and drum up some astrology clients for me, and if I do that, I'd love to have flyers about this place to hand out too!

Now I just have to get my own booth up!

Love,
Terri

How's this for a first draft?

Love,
Terri

Very cool, Terri.

Here it is with color!

Flyer Draft #2

Now get your booth up!

Love,
Greg

Great idea, Foxtip! And the flyer is groovy, Terri and Greg. I would start printing and hanging them right away, but I'd rather have the typo corrected first.

Second to the last paragraph gives the url with a missing u:
www.consciousevoltion.com/co-op. Tuck the u in between the l and the t and we're in business.

Love,
Maria

So what's wrong with Evoltion?

Okay, okay, here's the corrected version:

Corrected Flyer



Love,
Greg

Great idea, hahah misspelling!! Well Maria make a great english correction. She does mine. She knows that with my hearing, I am behind with my english. So shes a big help!! HEHEHEH!!

LOL - Maria, you're the BEST!

Looks good!!! Glad you put the "proper" banner on the bottem Greg - I tried copying it off of the main page, but the DNA wouldn't come along. It was naked without them!

Love,
Terri