Mall Time!

A customer came by my store the other day and convinced me to set up a secondary shop location in his mall. He says he gets lots of traffic (verified by Linden Lab stats) so it should be a good deal for me. Even better, he's giving me a few weeks at no charge so that I can see how it goes. How can I say no to a fellow Canadian?

So I've set up this new shop in Monowai, and it's basically a miniature replica of my main shop. I've put in a small selection of the most popular products, and built a single custom demonstrator unit to show them off. Also, the demonstrator automatically triggers a brief random demonstration every five minutes to attract passers-by.

But now a question comes to mind: should I purchase special advertising for the secondary shop? In the end, I decided that is NOT a good idea. Here's my reasoning:

• Advertising is used by consumers in a very simple way: search -> results -> select one of them -> TP to shop location. There is no need to have more than one shop location if you can instantly TP to any location from a search hit. Why spread your advertising L$ budget over several ads when you can concentrate that money on one ad that would get higher search ranking?
• On the other hand, the mall may have existing traffic, and if someone is already at the mall they may notice your shop and drop in for purchases. But again, this doesn't require me to advertise

My bottom line on mall advertising: if you already have an advertised main location outside of the mall don't bother advertising the mall location. Spend it on your main advertisement instead.

So, I now have a second shop in a second location and I am depending on existing mall traffic to drive results. Apparently there is a busy club nearby so I am hoping to grab some customers from that traffic. We'll see what happens.

One Hundred and Seventeen

One Hundred and Seventeen is no longer my favorite number. My measly 512sm parcel is now full – all 117 prims have been used by my products and very rudimentary shop structure.

I tried really hard to make this work by using these low-prim strategies:

• No personal items (e.g. Mansion, Bowling alley, Battlestar Galactica replica, Rideable pet elephant, etc.) using up scarce prims are allowed on the property. If it doesn't contribute to the sales process, it isn't on the site!
• Ultra-simplified building technique. Yes, this means no roof, using ramps instead of prim stairs, plain walls w/o prim-riddled adornments, etc.
• Embedded gadgetry. Need a notecard giver? Or a visitor counter? Put the script in the floor or walls, not a separate object – and for god's sake don't ever use more than one prim for something like that!
• Building work takes place in public sandboxes, not on the property

In spite of the “advanced” or “efficient” (or just plain cheap) techniques above, I am STILL running out of prims. Maybe I have too many products? Hah! I must figure out another way to expand my business.

Romance in the Atmosphere

I wrote earlier about addressing products towards specific genres, and now I believe I've found another one: Romance. Sure, we all hear about the incredible dramas taking place between people (and non-people – it's SL after all!) It turns out that these situations do require products. Romance in SL, like RL, requires not only time and a great personality, but also items that help establish the mood. Things such as shape, skin, hair, clothing, smell (well, not smell!) and particle effects!


I've created two items that seem to be quite popular with the Romantics: a hearts poofer that gently blows away in the wind, and a fogger that produces pink and white colored fog. I call it “ValentineFog”. These are obviously not for everyone, but some people are really turned on by them – well, rather they are affected by how the effects alter the mood of the situation.

It's kind of like art: it's not what it looks like, it's how it makes you feel. That's what is going on in SL: people are trying to achieve meaningful alternate situations. Particle effects, clothes, music and other factors can dramatically affect the situation's mood. There is clearly a market for these items.

Come and try them out via live demonstration at my shop in Caso Milo!

Maybe I am a Particle Artist, instead of a Particle Engineer?

Listening to Customers

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I discovered how to listen to customers. As I described before, I simply spend time in my shop and chat with prospective customers to find out their needs. It's most important to speak with customers who don't buy anything. You see, they want products You Don't Make. Actually, it's products You Don't Make Yet!

By now I can say that perhaps half of all my products were created as a result of requests from prospective customers! These are people who would otherwise have TP'd out of my shop without having purchased anything. Even better, the products that tend to sell the most are usually those that were originally special requests. This makes sense – somebody wanted it, and therefore it is likely others may want it as well.

Listening is most definitely a successful strategy.

Wearable or Installable?

The first particle effects I created were all “wearable”. They are simply small objects containing the script that emits the particles. After I started selling these wearable items, I began to get requests for “floor models” of my fogs.

No problem – I just needed to extract the script from the tiny wearable object and reinstall into a larger object with some modifications to control the device. Voila - “Installable” versions.

But then I realized something... by listening to your customers you can easily find out what they need. This sounds so completely obvious, but it surprised me anyway. They will simply tell you what to build!

One customer told me that she liked my store because “You are actually AT your store and I can talk to you! I've never EVER seen the owner of other stores”. Because of that and my personal experience of never encountering a shop owner while shopping, I have to conclude that very few builders are soliciting opinions in this way.

From now on I am going to try to spend some time at my shop talking to customers every week. Actually they are prospective customers, and I am going to find out their needs. This should be an easy way to determine ideas for new salable products.

Scary Effects!

I've noticed that in SL there is quite a variety of species and cultures. Two of my friends are in the Vampire/Goth/Demon category, and I have been exposed to a little bit of their SL lifestyle. I got thinking about this, and realized that it might be reasonable to offer products specific to genre.

But what kind of products would be desireable to creatures of the night? I am not really into that genre, so I can't really know for sure. Nevertheless, I thought I would try something anyway. I took some of my existing particle effects products and re-made them into “Vampire” versions by adjusting the color, timing, product boxing and of course the names. Then, they went up for sale.

They seem to sell lightly, although occasionally someone comes in and buys several at once. While this may be a disappointment, I realized that this particular genre makes up only a small fraction of the entire SL population – and therefore sales of products to that genre should be only a fraction of my total sales. This is in fact the case, and so I am not disappointed at all.

Really, I am quite thrilled, because this means that it is possible to target products to specific genres. And as we all know, there are plenty of genres in SL. Just like some people make reasonable money from operating twenty or fifty low revenue Blogs, it should be possible to make reasonable money by selling products to twenty of fifty low revenue genres. Well, I'd better get building...

Classifieds!

Nobody is coming to my store.

Well, that's not exactly true ... there are a few passersby who seem to drop in. One of my pals, Emerist Begonia, runs a successful store selling articles for your SL home, so I asked her what to do. She suggested I post a classified ad - and she paid "more" to make it appear higher on the list. More means paying more than the default L$50.

Here's what I learned of how classifieds really work:

• You create a classified advert and submit it
• You are asked to specify how much to pay - the default being L$50
• You are cheap and take the L$50 default
• A user seeking your products types in some keywords in an attempt to find them
• ALL classifieds containing those keywords (actually, ANY of them) are found in Linden Lab's classified database
• The found ads are sorted - guess how? By the amount paid by the advertiser (that's you, remember?)
• The highest paying ads are shown first
• The user, impatient and desperate to find what ever they are looking for, selects a few ads FROM THE FIRST PAGE SHOWN
• The user inevitably fulfills their needs from the first page of search hits
• Meanwhile, your measly L$50 advert is positioned on page 26... AND IS NEVER SEEN

What's the lesson here?

• Pay an amount sufficient to get your ad onto the first page of listings, or for more popular keywords, at least the second page
• Pick good keywords! (More on this in a future post)

Wait a minute! How does one know the correct amount to pay? This is pretty easy... just do this:

• Search for the keywords you are focusing on
• Examine the results page and see where the price is at the page end
• Add a little bit to the page end price to "insert" your classified just before the end of the page
• If the prices are close, add a bit more to ensure you stay on the first page

Once I did this, visitors started arriving. Not lots, but some - and they were buying items. It's a start.