Creative Idea Powerhouse

SmugMug is not your typical Web 2.0 photo sharing site. It’s not free, there are no ads, the company is self funded, and has been profitable for over three years. SmugMug is geared more towards professional photographers with features such as watermarking, selling downloads and prints, and creating galleries of photos. Users can even use their own domain names for these galleries. SmugMug still has the more typical Web 2.0 photo sharing features like RSS feeds, tags, and a public API. More recently, SmugMug has added functionality to automatically scale the size of photos to the viewing size of the browser. Smug also supports HD quality video uploading.

Watch the CEO Don Macaskill sell his company in 60 seconds elevator pitch.

This is the case analysis I did for Zlio.com to further understand its social-marketing and social commerce journey. The company’s attempt to be the largest emporium, furnished with more than 3millions product types sounds interesting. The unique business model has position to company in a new competitive edge for online retailing industry, and yeah, I love his model of business.

This presentation gives a great overview of the company’s overall strategy and the reasons it has become what it is today. The slide address all the questions about Google that you truely deeply wanted to know always. Enjoyz.

Search Engine rankings are a serious topic in today internet & e-Business world!

Finding ways to attract more visitors to your Shops is the basis for your success as a Shopkeeper. Let us therefore talk to you about ways to make your e-Shop’s product pages (or any other webpage, for that matter) more attractive for search engines.

1. An optimized page should contain at least 100 words. Don’t hesitate to let your imagination run wild when it comes to the description of your products, thus creating quality content. Keep in mind that the first 30 to 50 words of a page are essential for that page’s rankings.

2. Strategic keywords should be placed at the beginning of the page, preferably within the first paragraph. For even better results, it is also recommended to use the feminine and plural versions of these keywords.

3. Keywords are more effective when they are emphasized in the following ways :

- put the keywords in bold script

- create a hyperlink on important keyword

- create a bold hyperlink, in order to achieve maximal efficiency

4. Repeat the most strategic keyword three times in the product description page. The perfect keyword density index score (that’s the number of occurrences of the keyword divided by the number of words in the page) is about 3 %. Try to reach a density of 2 % to 5 % with your important keywords.

5. Use the right words for your links. The word used for your link must be highly relevant to the content of the website it links to. It is totally ineffective to use words such as “read more” or “click here” for your links. Furthermore, you should always choose words (i.e. text) for your links, instead of an image.

6. Aim at quality of content instead of quantity. The more interesting and original the content of your product pages on your e-Shop, the more people will point “naturally” to your website, without you having to create partnerships or link exchanges with those other sites. The more quality links point towards your shop, the better your shop’s ranking in the Search Engines. If you want to participate in link exchanges, you should choose content-oriented partnerships that will offer real added value for your visitors.

Enjoy and happy e-shopping..

For the young entreprenuer, elevator pitch seems challenge, especially you need to sell your idea in less than 1 minutes. Just imagine you are the guy who going to pitch the investor who going to invest in your company for millions, and you have this golden opportunity of less than 1 minute (about the time for elevator to go from Ground Zero till you walk out from the elevator with smiling face). Every phrase and word you use will decide the chances of you winning the interest of your big investor to further look at your BIG PLAN.

Paris-based Zlio.com is a white-label online store for anyone, working with partners including Tesco, Apple, Littlewoods and Play to allow people to set up their own shopfronts.

The site launched in France in 2006 and in the US recently. The site deals with the complexities of the online payment system, and members take a share of the products sold through their site. One average, members make around $300 per month but the biggest users have been earning $3,000.

Zlio has 18 full-time staff and has had funding from two German business angels and from Mangrove Capital.

Founder Jeremie Berrebi explains how it works.

• Explain your business to my Mum.
“With Zlio you can open your own store even if you have nothing of your own to sell. You pick from products offered by our name brand merchants to populate your store, and sell anything you’re interested in online.”

• How do you make money?
“We generate sales for our merchant partners and take a percentage of these sales.”

• What’s your background?
“I’ve been in the internet industry since 1994, when I started working with Compuserve. After that I worked in a number of internet-related companies including managing an online forum for the Tour de France and acting as online manager of EMME. For about a year and a half I wrote for ZDNet France and then, founded a first company called Net2one, a news search engine which sold to TNS in 2004, and started focusing on the concept of Zlio in July 2005.”

• How many users do you have now, and what’s your target within 12 months?
“Right now there are more than 200,000 stores on Zlio.com and we work with 350 merchants worldwide. By the end of the year I hope that has increased to 1m Zlio shops.”

• What’s your biggest challenge?
“Our biggest challenge right now is transforming Zlio into a global business. Currently 75% of our users are in France and we’re starting to see a lot of interest from other markets, including the US and UK, but we’d like to see our worldwide distribution grow as quickly as possible.”

• Name your competitors.
“Amazon aStore is really the only other company out there offering something close to what we do.”

• What’s the weirdest business experience you’ve had so far?
“In my last company I was trying to motivate the team and told them that one day we would take a company trip to Euro Disneyland. A few months went by and I had almost forgotten about this promise, but one day I had 20 upset employees storm into my office and demand the trip. They were ready for the rides!”

• If you had £10m to invest in another web business, what would you invest in?
“I would invest in Stardoll. I like that they sell virtual goods for real money and have proven it can be a successful business.”

• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
“I don’t think we’re seeing the same environment that we did in 2000. The difference is companies have now figured out how to make money with online businesses. However, I do think certain industries are seeing a heightened level of activity like the photo-sharing and social network categories. This is the natural result when a new industry is forming; you always have a lot of people trying to do the same thing in hopes of being one of the few winners.”

• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
“Our vision is to create the largest digital sales force in the world. We want people to be able to sell products all over the world from online catalogues.”

• Are you the next big thing?
“We haven’t seen any real revolution in the e-commerce area since Amazon and eBay. While it seems a little over-eager to say that we’re the only next big thing, I do think that Zlio is the company that will drastically change the e-commerce landscape for the first time in a decade.”