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<< Back to Interviews Homepage PODCAST SHOW NOTES 12 minute interview with the owner and managing director of Solar Electronics John Sollars. John talks to GSINC's Gareth about setting up in ECommerce, the role pay per click (PPC) and traffic comparison sites played as well as the importance of organic search. The interview also covers the importance of ROI tracking and marketing for an online business. Download MP3 version of podcast Introduction: Gareth: Today I am speaking to John Sollars managing director
of Solar Electronics and the website Stinky
Ink. Over the last 3 years of trading John has managed to grow
his company from a one man business in his garage, into a successful
Ecommerce business with 7 full time staff. If you don't find John working at the Solar Electronics office then you'll probably find him speaking at business events, or occasionally enjoying a round of Golf - However today he's very kindly joined us to give us a "business owners perspective" on marketing an online business. Gareth: Welcome John! John: Thank you Gareth! It's good to be here!
John: Back at the end of the dot com boom I was working for an electronic components distributor and we were really frustrated that all these people seemed to be generating all this cash. We had got the infrastructure of delivering products all over the country and stock, stock management and all the rest of it, but we haven't really got an option for an Internet business. And people invented this term cash-burn, I mean like burn cash with the best of them - I wanted to get my hands on some of that! So I was really looking for an opportunity to get onto the Internet. Being a salesman most of my life (having got onto the Internet now) this is the best way there is that has ever been invented for selling products.
John: It was hell! I spent hours and hours building thise website and database and putting it up I think we started doing it in April and I think we put it to launch in June-July. I mean it is was like building a motorway service station and you're sat there and you can see all this traffic whizzing back and forwards and nobody has put the slip roads in so none of it is coming to see me, it was so frustrating. So after a while we start using pay per click, Adwords, Overture, Kelkoo and Price Runner on the price comparison sites and that started generating a level of traffic for us - a level of business for us. But it was very expensive.
John: Yes, this was back in 2002 when we first strated and I didn't really know what I was doing; I mean, we weren't particularily well optimized at that time so it was very little organic business it was really off the pay per click sites and trying to hold on to the customers that you've got. |
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