TechWag

: Image via Wikipedia

Noticed on the Seattle 2.0 list they have a book store in their startup listing, taking a look through the competitor’s web site, I decided that if I wanted to get on the Seattle 2.0 startup list, then it might be a good idea to refocus what the startup should be about, and how it is presented to the world.

Originally the web site was meant to be a blog that would support selling on Amazon. For a year it did ok, but never got much traction from people on the internet. At best it was getting 10 people a day on average, most of those via Google Image Search. Good for people searching for images that I had on the web site, but not so good for building out a brand identity. Over Christmas one of our suppliers decided that we needed to have our own shopping system before they would continue supplying us with great titles that we wanted to have. So we haphazardly built out a shopping cart just to make the supplier happy, with little to no work happening on it once the account was approved.

Taking a look at your competitors is sometimes a good thing, it allows you to see what they are doing, and if they are doing it better, work out a way to follow their advice, but keeping your own unique spin/branding involved with the web site redesign. You should keep your original spin, but if someone is doing it better than you are, you need to work through your processes and make sure that in an internet web site arms race you are at least in the herd if not leading it. Going off and doing your own thing is ok, but like many things, after a while if it is not resonating with the audience, it is time to do something else.

The internet makes market research far too easy; in that you can see what your competitors want you to see. Not that this is the best thing ever, but if your competitors have branded themselves in a certain way, and your current brand identifiers are not working, then maybe your competition has it right. Hence the complete site redesign for my startup Alternating Reality Books. Amazon still remains the critical sales channel, but I might be/have been passing up another just as critical sales channel, and that was being directly on the internet. Over the next couple of weeks we will be building out the inventory of comics and other stuff that is incredibly hard to find on the internet (tell me where else you can find a copy of red flannel squirrel) while the blog will take a secondary role at blog.alternatingreality.com. The big part now is building up traffic.

So why didn’t people come? Bad SEO is one reason; the other reason is that the site was never really marketed. Little to no advertising happened, in favor of the Amazon sales channel. While we use other sales channels as well, the performance of other sales channels pales in comparison to the traffic and sales we get on Amazon. The key to the new web site is going to be about comics and other books that we have the only copy of on the internet. Some of the titles we carry cannot be found online in any sales venue which provides me an opportunity to carve out a truly single niche when it comes to selling media products. If I am the only one there, and I am the first one there, I need to get momentum, and use all the available channels to me. While I would also like to use eBay, there are significant cost issues with using them over what I am paying for with the web site and other venues.

Let me know what you think of the site redesign as it is part of a master plan for developing out the market niche we have inhabited quite nicely on Amazon. We also need to expand into eBay, but for right now, we are focusing locally on the web site as the tier three sales site rather than eBay. EBay has to happen, but when and how that will happen will need to be determined later. For right now, it is more advantageous to get into the Seattle 2.0 startup list, and building out a specific brand identity on the internet independent of Amazon and other sales venues.