OK...Your turn..."Honest" Solutions for Business Owners

Which one?

My consulting business is going well.

The mall I am building isn't open yet, as I have yet to have the time to knock out the last bits of it so it can open. Only in the last few months have I finally gotten all the land issues sorted out. However, once it is done and open, I expect it to be pretty popular. We'll see, though; there are no guarantees in life. I do have quite a waiting list of vendors, and no end of people who happen upon it and give rave accolades.



Not sure what that's got to do with anything. Whether I or any particular person has been to any particular venue doesn't mean a whole lot. Not everyone has been to even the "most popular" places.

Are you trying to say that your business is failing because you are trying to be an honest business owner, and it's not paying off like you think it should? If so, do you think that it has NO OTHER cause?

Assuming for the moment you are having issues:

1) Maybe your mall and/or the stores in it aren't distinctive enough to generate interest. There are an AWFUL LOT of malls out there and, to many people, "ho hum, another mall" is the default expectation. You have to really work hard to provide a unique and memorable experience for your patrons.
2) Maybe your advertising efforts haven't been focused or interesting enough (and by "interesting", I don't mean "overhyped".
3) Maybe your efforts at generating community interest and support haven't been significant or effective enough.

I don't know; I am only speculating here. Certainly, I wouldn't expect you to just point at "it is because I am honest and don't cheat" as a reason.

I really can't give you much in the way of effective suggestions without analyzing your case in more detail. Certainly, much of what has been posted so far by others I would also suggest, but as you point out, many of them you have already tried.

Fortunately, I have the luxury of doing whatever I want on that sim - my business doesn't support my sim....my sim supports my business. I live on the sim, as does my RL husband, so any money made through the rentals or the mall....simply help offset what is spent each month.

However, that said, I want my mall to succeed, especially now that I have other tenants in there, who would like some business out of it. I haven't finished setting it up after the remodel yet, and am acquiring new tenants now.

Yes, I've done many of the things already suggested...and probably the lack of a "niche" is the biggest failure. I don't want a sexually oriented mall. I don't want a combat weapons mall. I don't want a goth/vamp/Neko oriented mall - not that there is anything wrong with ANY of that...it's just not me.

But...one thing I do want to mention here.

I make...actually create myself, one of the few things that I do, windchimes. They aren't anything fancy, and the price on them is negligible to most - 50L.

I had these windchimes sitting at my mall for the past year and have sold *maybe* 10.

Phil graciously allowed me to put the very same windchimes up at his place - and now I'm selling 5-10 EACH DAY. Same product - different exposure. People are there buying furniture at a price they can afford, and see a windchime at a price they can afford, and they buy it.

So yes, I'm benefiting through Phil's administration of marketing of his business.
But without Phil's location...people wouldn't have the opportunity to see the product I make, no matter how hard I work at it.

It's a real dilemma.

I KNEW the forum members would be in an uproar because I decided that Sage Green was more popular in search than Avocado Green! Shame on me for taking the time to create a sage green set, just so I could game the system!

ROFL!

Of course, having now confessed to benefiting through the use of Phil's bots, I wonderful if my little bitty windchimes sales will decrease significantly.

Would it help that I actually hired someone to make some textures for me? Is that person now poison because she took money from me? Where does it stop?

Yeah, I understand. However, that's something all of us have to deal with in our planning. Like any business, you have to do something that stands out, that grabs attention, and find unique and creative ways of promoting it.

Just shooting in the dark here, but have you contacted any kind of advertising/promotion agency in SL? They might be able to make some suggestions that may turn it around for you.



I would estimate that you would sell even more if you spread them around to many other popular stores, maybe in a few popular malls. There's no denying that what Phil does makes his business "popular".. for the moment. However, there's still a lot of people that you're not reaching, not the least of which are people who are turned off by cheating (some 60%, if this poll is any measure of reality).

I'm paying rent at a very high traffic location (legitimate, honest to god traffic), selling couture dresses at a significantly reduced price. High rent, I might add, primarily as an experiment. I've had ONE sale of 125L.

The only conclusion I can come to...is it doesn't really matter what you do....the public is fickle

By providing products that people want.

That may sound facetious and I don't mean YOU personally. I have very rarely used the classifieds and when I did I was usually disappointed by the keyword spamming that rarely yields anything useful.

Yes, I can find "shoes" using classifieds but I can't tell their quality from the ad. I have found it a huge waste of time to TP from place to place in case a classified search comes up with something good. I no longer bother with search unless I am looking for a real name of a place or person.

ALL of my favourite shops were found by word of mouth or through blogs.
I don't care about traffic stats - what if the grid's best shop has JUST opened? - and the whole bot thing has messed those stats up, anyway.
When I see a lot of bots I go elsewhere. Campers (or paying people for pick selections) to me seems a cry of desperation. Whether or not that is true doesn't matter. I'm a fickle consumer

The best way to get me into a shop is for me to see someone wearing something wonderful and share where they got it. I'm there in a flash. The best way to get me to pick up an LM or return to your mall is to have a whole bunch of things as lovely as what I saw that person wear to begin with.

I spend a lot on clothes and I don't much care about price tags (well, except for certain shoes...) I do care about quality both in the merchandise and the way it's presented. Bots, keyword-spamming classifieds, campers, annoying ads are NOT quality.

One "camping" idea that I think is perfectly sounds is to attract people by giving them something to do. I don't mean zingo. I've seen amusement parks, art exhibits, puzzles, RP, interesting places to explore etc which keep people around for a while. (Tesla's place comes to mind) But of course, that takes work and prims.

B.

Everything you said is SO true! I never use the classifieds at all. Nearly everything I buy is from seeing ON someone else, seeing it on a blog, or randomly coming upon it while browsing by accident. I love places that have created interesting and dynamic settings that keep you around. One that comes to mind, that isn't a "mall" but is really amazing is Lemania's sim. Just wonderful eye candy, some fun things to do and she also does great hunts. Let alone the clothing is fantastic of course but the store and surrounding area really makes you want to come back. Or Bishware is another one which pops into my head. Stunning landscape, great for photography purposes so once there, it makes you want to take a stroll.

Brann is right, all of that does take a lot of work and prims but perhaps, there is something you could incorporate on a smaller scale there.

Oh, I use search.

I just don't start at the top of the results. And I skip over anything that looks like a mall (sorry Honey).

I buy from people I have learned of through word of mouth.

Also from another item that I have seen on the grid of theirs that gets me interested in their creations.

^^ Like Elora said.

i just popped over to your place ,prices are reasonable but it still looks brand new and dull,It needs to weather a bit IMHO before it takes off.

My method of finding products is very, very rarely the in-world search. If I know the name of a place, or am looking for a specific place but have forgotten the name, I'll use it, but otherwise I don't search for stores or products while in-world.

What I do, instead, is search XStreet, either with vague or specific parameters, and look for something I like. When I do, I find the store in-world if there is one, and go there, because maybe I'll like their other things, as well, and I prefer buying in-world to buying directly from XStreet.

I have yet to find any place full of bots using this method, and I always find the best quality items in my price ranges, this way. I find, also, that I generally save time, as I'm not hopping from store to store looking for something, it's all listed in one place.

It's my opinion that if someone doesn't have their products on XStreet, then they aren't taking advantage of an amazingly awesome tool, and so don't feel too guilty about missing them.

If the store isn't listed in the XStreet ad (They often are, though), then I can search people for the merchant, and check their picks. I almost always find some sort of store for things I want.

IMHO, *any* methods which attracts paying customers is fair game. To call bots "cheating" or to suggest they "game" the system baffles me.

You could argue that LL set up a flawed system, but we all live in it equally. Everybody is equally capable of using bots, or ads, or whatever else they can think up. If you believe that bots "harm" SL, then tell LL. Don't take it out on the poor small business owner who's just trying to stay afloat.

You all want "honest" marketing? I hope you all recognize an oxymoron when you see it...

I certainly appreciate that some of you have "enlightened" shopping skills, like avoiding the first page or two of search results. But looking at it another way, you are rewarding incompetence, or at least laziness, by supporting the business owners who can't even be bothered to market themselves effectively against their competition.

A lot of people think that, that's why there's laws about what you can say in an advertisement, where you can post bills, and so on. Advertisers are always pushing the limits, and *breaking* stuff, because they honestly don't understand that there's a line beyond which you shouldn't go... that the freedom to swing your fist ends when it hits someone's nose.

Laws... well, LL is the "law" here. Their policies combined with their technical solution.

Although this isn't quite what Desmond meant, it does tie in with his suggestion that having products of different types together is possibly better than a mall. Maybe if instead of malls we had retail parks, I think Xplorer Cannoli tried this, I'll have to poke him and ask him how it was going, he had a shopping region rather than a shopping mall.

Yeh, that's a problem with SL. In the real world there are mechanisms to change the law, if you get enough people wanting the law to change. It's not perfect, and you get abuses like spam that the laws don't seem to handle, but in theory there's ways to stop the bastards. In SL you can't do that, so advertisers get away with blatantly abusing the system for years.

I won't argue whether it's an "abuse" or not. That's subjective. But everybody has equal access, which I do think is fair. And anybody who turns their back on the available tools deserves to lose.

I fought the LLaw and the LLaw won.

But that's the most important point.
In a state of anarchy, we all have equal access to the blackjack and dagger, but that doesn't mean waylaying someone in the street is acceptable. Everyone has equal access to email, but that doesn't mean that spamming should be acceptable.
If the only way to "win" is to abuse the system, then the game isn't worth playing.

Thanks, Love, for making sense. Someone had to. There is marketing and there is false advertising. The latter is the only thing that needs to be punished in SL. If someone creates conditions (e.g., lag) under which it's unpleasant to shop by the stupid use of bots, then they will have less customers. But all the bots in the world can't force a sale if the products are crap.

People like to slam Phil's use of bots but that is a non-starter. Phil's stuff is good, and is why he pulls in real world money from his stuff. If it wasn't low prim at a decent price, it would not sell except to a few people. Worrying about bots is a waste of time and merely rewards the lazy or incompetent from a marketing standpoint.

Traffic sells, If you have a decent product and good traffic you will sell more.

Telling people who run traffic bots that you won't buy from them is all fine and dandy but economically, if 100 people go to a non botted place and buy that's nice, but the guy running the bots probably gets 1,000 people going to his place and even if 60% run off outraged he's still got 400 customers. This is why they do it.

*Nods* I've visited and shopped at so many places, new to me, that I found in the SL newspapers, Metaverse Messenger and such. I make a list of the ads there that attract me, and check them out, may take several days doing it.

What I do really matters, to me for sure. I would hope it matters to others, too, but even if it doesn't (which I don't believe), I can rest well knowing I came about my success with honesty and integrity, and a genuine concern for my fellow beings.

You're a huge scary dragon, geesh who isn't going to part with their money in your presence

However in all seriousness we all have our standards, I'll do paid picks because I see it as marketing, others see it as cheating. I won't do bots as I don't see what they add to the world as a whole, we all have our own moral code.