Are You Newsworthy? / PRWeb Sold for $28M

PRWeb, an asset to any new venture on the Internet has been sold to a company called Vocus for a whopping $28 million. Although said to be a bargian that is obviously a vast sum of money, congrats to the employees of PRWeb who all deserve a nice bonus.

Sending a press release is a common thing for t-shirt company start ups. Providing you remember to convey its news worthiness you can really benefit from the coverage you get from a press release.

The usual benefits of sending a press release apply to the t-shirt industry. Press releases offer the following benefits:

• low cost
• increased visibility for your company
• added credibility for your organization
• new customers
• new investors
• free publicity

Using a service like PRWeb is great value for money and relatively low cost. If landed in the right hands your press release could generate a surge of viral marketing. It could be picked up by the media, printed in a newspaper, featured on tv, or blogged about across the blogosphere.

Remembering to be newsworthy is the key to a successful press release. Remembering these factors can help you achieve that:

Proximity, Impact, Human Interest

Making sure that your item is newsworthy is made easier if what you have to say is up to date and relevant. If it happened last week, it’s old news and the journalist won’t want to write about it and no one will want to read it. So making sure your item is unique and bang up to date is key.

Proximity is often an important factor. Reporters have an audience to consider so any news that is local to them will be of interest. It could be as simple as so and so is making a great living selling t-shirts out of her garage in your home town. The local interest is there and would be newsworthy.

Thinking about the impact your story could have on someones life can make your press release newsworthy. Remember a press release doesn’t have to include all these factors, your impact might be minimal but your local appeal could give you the edge.

Having a human interest element will appeal to the reader. Most of us are interested in hearing about other people’s business. Your press release can be weak without any of the above two factors so unless you are someone that sparks a lot of human interest, like a celebrity, then you will want to consider impact and proximity as well.

CafePress Connect Tickets Arrived!

This morning the Royal Mail delivered my ticket to CafePress Connect, a user conference to be held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. The user conference is the first of its type to be held by CafePress. CafePress have in the past held Meet and Greets, of which I have attended, but nothing of this magnitude.

I’m a guest speaker on a panel about power tools for CafePress. In October I will be taking along Instant Cafe. Instant Cafe, www.instant-cafe.com, is a power tool to create affiliate web pages to promote the millions of products CafePress has to offer. If you are going to CafePress Connect be sure to tap me on the shoulder for a free demo version of the software.

The conference is a 2-day event to be held at Fort Mason on 14th and 15th October. Lunch is to be provided and CafePress say they have a few surprise installed for us.

I’ve been told there are still some places left but they are going super FAST! If you book your place now you will secure your place at CafePress’ first 2-day user conference – oh and you’ll also get to meet me

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Increasing T-Shirt Site Conversions

I recently helped out a forum member at T-ShirtForums.com who despite having had two websites up for a month hadn’t had a single sale yet.

The first months are always the toughest but having the right site from start can save you hours and make you more money.

Here are ten tips I gave the original poster in order to increase their conversion rates.

Tips:

1. Your biggest problem is you have no ZOOM image. The customer needs to see the design much larger.

2. The PayPal shopping cart sucks. I use PayPal but just to checkout.. you have ZERO control on your conversion rate here. The cart is the biggest factor that affects conversions. DON’T open in a new browser window. If the person has added something to the cart you want them to continue to pay not be distracted elsewhere on your site. If you had your own shopping cart software you could upsell in the cart to cross promote products. Not always a good thing to do but a possibility.

3. Customer Confidence.
* Who are you?
* Where in the world are you?
* Where do you ship to?
* What’s your return / privacy policy.
* How much does shipping cost?
* How can I get hold of you if something goes wrong? Phone number / email/ contact forms.
* I have questions, I need help where’s your FAQs.

All these questions need to be easily answerable from the cart.

Limit the links in your cart – just the important ones. If you end up with a side menu throughout your side don’t include that in your cart template it will only make people click around and not buy.

4. Ditch the PayPal Add To Cart buttons, they are white, boring and bland and do not draw me to them. Visit buttongenerator.com and make some that stand out. Red, orange works well.

Try changing the placement of them. Put them on the right hand side.

5. Your t-shirts lack descriptions about the design. Who do they appeal to? What market.. if I flaming skull t-shirt appeals to a biker say that. It’s good search engine food nonetheless.

6. If you haven’t got traffic, pay for it. It’s the quickest way to learn why you are not converting. Target individual t-shirts as they all have different markets. Then WATCH your stats carefully. If they are coming and going ask yourself why, or ask me.

7. Add more t-shirts. You don’t have to go crazy with your stock but you need variety. It increases sales not because you have more products but because people are more confident and can chose the best t-shirt of the bunch.

What happens when you walk in an empty shop?

8. What measurements are your sizes in? Inches, MMs, CMs, or elephants?

9. It’s taken me this long to find your FAQs.. make them stand out. Put your menu bar above the fold.

10. You put your phone number on your about us page.. try putting it on the top right of every page. An 0800 number would be better but it’s a start.

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