I decided to write this post after having a very creative session with one of our clients. They are called Hereford furniture and below is the strategies we used to generate them an additional 2000 visitors in 3 months. All of these are very creative but also incredibly simple to replicate to any business, but more so in the furniture niche.

Tip 1 – Local Flyers

Very simple and very old school but something that works really well if you live in an upper/middle class area and you have a unique offering, such as furniture that is reclaimed. You want your flyers or leaflets to look professional but also not to look corporate. Talking about how you are a family run, local business is a good start and also distributing yourself whilst knocking doors and just talking to people will have the same effect too.

Tip 2 – Locally Targeted Ads

When people usually do facebook ads or use Google Adwords they spend a lot of money and don’t get a lot of clicks. This is mainly because they are targeting too many people. Instead you should try to stay very specific to your local area and niche and should only be paying for clicks that could potentially result in sales through your business. For example if you have a local store in a specific location then do not bother to bid on any keywords that aren’t in that exact location. You might be prompted by FB or Google that your target audience is too small, but that’s simply because they want to get more money from you. Just hold your ground and advertise to the relevant local parties only!

Tip 3 – Local Shops/Coffee Shops

People talk and people go out in their local area. If no one knows about your business then they are likely to not visit you (makes sense.) To find out about you they need to a.) Either see a piece of your marketing. Or b.) Hear it from a friend. The best way to get B to happen more regularly is to try to place your message throughout your local area. For example in local coffee shops, local mini store and anywhere that has a good reputation. You can also attend small business events, talk and network with other people and just generally get the word out about your business. This is a long term plan but one that does work well in the shorter term too.

It’s been a while since our last post on the Harry Ford blog and that’s mainly due to our new project. This is something we have been working on for a number of months now and has finally launched at the end of last year to a highly appreciative audience, not least individuals who like to get things done faster! This of course as the title suggests our driving test cancellations software. This is a piece of software that myself and a friend have created with a very unique and large target market – Individuals who are looking to pass their driving test quickly.

It revolves around looking for late cancellations in or near the specific area you are looking to do your test. The interesting thing about the software is it is fully automated from checking, notifications straight to booking the actual test. This is one of the reasons why I am so excited about this project as it is automated for both us (the creators) and the end user. It works by notifying the individuals who have signed up in a given area of late cancellations. Late cancellations are usually made when someone can’t go to their test at a specific timeslot, say 3.00 on a Tuesday for example.

This slot is then open to the public but there is no service that lets people know when this slot is available, unless you manually walk into the driving test centre everyday you will not know. As a result these slots usually go unused. Instead you can book quickly into this slot. This can mean passing your test in as little as 2 days! Slots come open all the time and people are always looking to pass quicker, hence the software’s purpose and reason for creating it. You can see a few screenshots below of how it works.

It really is that simple.

We hope that individuals will find it as simple as we have aimed to create it, although it wasn’t easy to create! If you have any questions about the software then feel free to go directly to the site and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for reading.

Amazon is one of the world’s largest retailers. Anything and everything is sold on Amazon, with the company itself even going into food and drink in the near future. Originally established as an online book store, Amazon now has thousands of businesses on their website selling products through FBA – Fulfilled by Amazon. This means the merchant sends all the items to an amazon warehouse, which then pack and deliver the items for the business. This frees up more time to focus on product design and quality as well as marketing. Generally this is seen as the future on business and why I am giving it a try too.

To get started is pretty easy, you simply have to have a product, build a listing for that product and send those products to amazon directly. The process has been outlined on a number of other websites, so I’m not going to talk about it today. Instead I am going to focus on the key element on how to actually rank a product in Amazon, as ranking high in the Amazon search engine itself, is the best way to make a large amount of sales. Generally this is referred to as amazon seo and although it is similar to Google SEO there are some key differences.

How to Rank in the Amazon Search Engine

Ranking in Amazon is kind of the same as ranking in Google, the primary difference is the key metric. So lets cover the basics first and then get onto the main difference.

As you probably know, including your keywords in your title, url and on your website is key to ranking for these keywords in Google. This is much the same in Amazon and On-page optimisation is basically the same thing. So if you already know the key element for on-page SEO then implement these into your amazon listing and that will give you a great start. Ensure your listing contains all of your keywords and the description is very long (over 500 words.) You also don’t need to worry about over-optimisation with Amazon.

Once the on-page optimisation is complete its time to get sales and reviews! Unlike with Google (which is all about backlinks) Amazon bases their primary metric on sales. Now a high number of sales will improve your rankings, and a high number of reviews will improve your conversion rate and click through rate as well. This all has an impact on how high you will rank on the amazon search engine itself. But primarily you want to focus on a.) Sales – Getting as many as possible and b.) Reviews-  Getting to 10 reviews as soon as possible!

For more information on the amazon ranking strategies you can watch the video below.