1) How often should Boot camp be held in a year? If at all?
I agree with Linda. One month before industries highest retail sale days.
2) Do you like having assignments every day or should they be on Monday, Wednesday and Friday over 4 weeks.
I prefer to have the assignments scheduled 3 times per week. I like to have time to think about it and decide what and how to use from the assignment. Benefit – yes/no? Now or try at a future time?
3) Which marketing activities did you like doing the best? Ones that you disliked?
I like information from the marketing articles and resources made available on the message board. I like websites like Kaboodle that bring in window shoppers and shoppers with pocket money ready to spend. Not comfortable with tweeting and blogging, I noticed others are much better at this and they do increase visits to my store. Talking and socializing with strangers is very stressful.
4) Which marketing ideas were the most effective in increasing your views?
The soft sell approaches fits my personality. I rather have my products speak for themselves. I feel 25% of my potential consumers are interested in the making of my product (people with needlework knowledge and experience), the majority, 75% are just interested in the end result. So, I think my best marketing approach is to concentrate on visualization marketing strategies to get the 75% of the potential customers interested. Constantly improving my exhibit and individual product descriptions with vivid photos are good marketing tools for me because most of my visitors view at least 2 products. Also using keywords and tags for search engines. I do realize benefits of twitter and social networking— people have to know that my products exist, before they can see it.
Having the Google analytics information is a definite asset.
5)Would you rather focus on learning one form of marketing as we did this time with Twitter or would you rather have more of a mix like first Boot camp where we touched on blogging, kaboodling, store clean-ups, etc
I prefer the mix. Then schedule Boot camps for specific topics – twitter, blogging, etc. So vendors decide what works for them and their products. Then collect all the information for each topic, and then divide the topics into sections to general a list from the assignments to have a category for twitter, how to use, applications, etc. Then another category for Blogging, who and what are discussing? another category for .....Etc. It eliminates repetition of information and all lessons, articles and websites are collected in one area for boot camp graduates.
6) How can we keep boot campers more involved right through to the end?
Yes, we all have busy lives, but if you truly want to make sales, learn new methods and improve your strategies then you would invest the time to boot camp, even if it is just a glance or postponing an assignment for another time.
7) How can we encourage more sellers to sign up for Boot camp?
This is a tough question. Some people need incentives to do things. If you truly want to learn about selling, then it is a person’s own self-discipline that will complete the boot camp. Self-motivated and self-discipline are the only skills needed to finish boot camp. If you don’t have those qualities, then I am completely clueless on ways to motivate or encourage someone to join. This one needs to go into a big think tank
How can we encourage more sellers to sign up with icraft?
I was very hesitant to join a membership online selling forum. The influential factor for me to join icraft was the free one year membership offer because I think an e-commerce website and a membership on sellers’ forum would relatively have same expense and no major beneficial differences. Now, I feel it is valuable to be a icraft member because of the low membership cost, available resources and the easy access of information. The information from the message boards is literally in front of you with a few simple clicks. It is like having your own library and other people are pulling out the books that will help you in your business. Can it get any easier?
9) What else can we as sellers or icraft do to make Boot camp a more productive experience for you?
To simplify it, by using forms for the assignments which only requires, a couple of phrases or words for answer.
For example in company’s they use progress reports and some of them are very detail and long, but within every progress report there are always mandatory key points summarizes that summaries the progress (or topic in our case).
Put 3 days assignment for that week on one sheet of paper.
For example Week 1
Topic 1
Read Article ABC
Response
Yes/No
Thoughts: I read it but, it doesn’t apply to my particular product because......but I thought of an idea from reading the article that might be useful. My answer might be a bit wordy, but I think most people prefer to use a couple of phrases to answer the question
Topic 2
Tweeting
Response:
Yes/No
Yes about what ________, how many times this week? Are you planning to tweet this week?
Topic 3
Joining Directories
Yes/No
Yes, which ones from the (above) list
This method might not get allot of information from vendors’ results, but at least it simplify the participation and it is a time flexible method for busy schedules. The complexity for this method requires technician to make it available on the message board. Forms are easy and quick.
10) On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being useless and 10 being extremely valuable, please rate your Boot camp experience.
I rate it as a 10 because although not all the information applies to all vendors, at least sellers can sift throw information that best benefits them. Allot of information is compile into one website.
Any other comments?
I must stop commenting. I have to save some brain power and creativity for my icraft store (lol).
Thank you
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