Very Clever

This is such an astute use of SEO and the internet I've got to tell everyone about it! Huggalugs leg huggers are running a promotion where you get free leg warmers if you comment about them in a blog or forum. Now I only have a basic understanding of the net and marketing, but you've got several things happening here.

Firstly you have the direct impact of lots of Mums saying how wonderful these leg warmers are. Even if people know it is for a competition it has a psychological impact, plus if people think about it they know you wouldn't want something crap even if it was free (I hope!).

Secondly you have the word of mouth when they give the leg warmers out and people start wearing them, so they're seen by a wider community than just the web.

Third, you're going to swamp the search engines. While everyone is saying good things about huggalugs leg huggers in order to get them for free, every time someone googles "baby leg warmers" guess what is going to come up?

What a very clever marketing strategy. Now isn't it lucky that I really like Huggalugs leg huggers? I have several pairs that I use for my girls and they are brilliant. They are great to protect my crawler's knees, to throw in the change bag and they are soooo cute. And if you'd like to get some for free I'll let you know, unfortunately I need an email address. So PM Dash at either Nappycino or the ABA!

Oops

I did an interesting training session today on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). I'd heard about it a lot, but didn't realise how exactly search engines work. Afterwards I did a search for pocket nappy, because that's what I sell. Well 12 pages later and I still hadn't come up.

I've been checking, but for the wrong things. I've been looking for things like my brand and snappi, rather than the standard searches new customers who might be interested in my nappies but who didn't know me would use. While I have Pocket Nappies on my site, the button is an image, so not searched, and it's not used in my title descriptions. Ironically I've recently been making it worse, because I stopped doing detailed descriptions of each item. I thought that seeing there is a picture right there people didn't need me to tell them that it was green, or purple, or had flowers on it. And they don't. But Mr Google does.

Luckily the store manager has a quick way to change titles so all of my products have just been renamed to reflect what they are, not just the different fabric outers. It will be interesting to see how quickly, or if, it works.