Under Pressure

I’ve been half-heartedly working on a revamp for our personal finance site. And therein lies the problem – I haven’t finished it. Now cardtart has been a great site for us over the last 3 and a half years but the layout is, to put it bluntly, a right old dogs dinner. It was my first attempt at a website and because I managed to rank in the search engines for some popular, personal finance phrases I never dared change the layout. But now, I’m confident enough that I can change the presentation, improve the content and not adversely affect my rankings. Fingers crossed.

The pressure?

I’ve set a self-imposed deadline of 20th December to have a revamped site live. Otherwise I’ll let it drift. I’ve roped in Sarah (my wife and business partner) and my children to add to the pressure by telling them to keep asking me if I’ve been working on it. I’m starting afresh and I think I’ve chosen my design template and I’ll source the graphics over the next couple of days. Then, I’ll have to just get on with it suppose?

Affiliate Marketing cardtart

Branding The Obvious

I guess that there’s a lot to be gained from associating your brand with the requirement that your product fulfills. So I read with interest a blog post about the Proctor & Gamble brand, Charmin tissue paper.

The PR goes like this…

Charmin are operating a 20-stall restroom (public toilet for us UK’ers) in the heart of Times Square at 1540 Broadway, between 45th and 46th Streets, from November 20th to January 1st, calling the service ‘Charmin’s holiday gift to New York’. The restrooms will be open from 8 AM to 11 PM, so that people leaving evening Broadway shows can use the facilities.Charmin Restrooms will offer clean, deluxe bathrooms, baby changing stations, stroller parking, seating areas, and of course lots of luxury toilet paper. Cleanliness will be guaranteed by the presence of one bathroom attendant for every two stalls, cleaning after each use. Charmin is expecting more than 300,000 people to visit the restrooms.

10 staff and cleaned after each use….they must be one of the cleanest public conveniences in the World!

This is a simple but obvious branding exercise as it clearly makes the connection between using a toilet and Charmin tissue paper.

Simple but clever.

Branding Charmin

Last.fm and Social Networking

Its been a little while since I last logged in to to last.fm and its interesting to see how your musical profile builds. Recently, I’m big on Lloyd Cole it would seem. And The Killers too. But then I’ve just bought their new albums and enjoy listening to them both.

I’m going to make the effort to log in more and use more of the facilities. Part of my problem is that stacks of my music isnt on cd – its on tape. Years ago I’d spend a small fortune on tapes and I really must get around to getting all those old gems digitised. Anyone remember The Buzzcocks, Sade, Special Beat, En Vogue?? God, there’s loads. And I also need to rip all my cds too.

From a business point of view I’ve dabbled a little in commercial social networking but I need to get committed to it to see what benefits it may bring. I’m registered at soflow and vox and plan to use squidoo too. I messed about in myspace the other day – there’s an awful lot of guff in there, even on corporate pages. Oh, I blog of course for both my personal and commercial interests – that counts too of course.

Part of my interest in social networking is because of an idea I’ve had for a year or more that is entirely going to use social networking as the business model. 2007 is going to be the start of it. I’ll forever kick myself for not trying if I don’t give it a go.

Google Overtakes Channel 4

Google’s advertising revenues in the UK are expected to surpass Channel 4’s this year, the broadcasters chief exec has said.

Andy Duncan forecast that Google will take about £900m in ad revenue from traditional British media. Estimates indicate that Channel 4’s annual ad revenues are around £800m.

Traditional media – watch out. Google’s going to get you.

Advertising Google Channel4