Category: rentoid

How to blog about your business

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

We all know it’s good practice to blog about our business or start up. We want to be authentic, transparent and build a relationship. But often we struggle with what to write about. 

What we’ve done at www.rentoid.com is try to make sure it’s a dialogue and not a monologue.

 

You can check out the rentoid blog here.

 

So here’s a super list of ideas on how to blog about your business:

Don’t just blog about your business

Blog about other things your people may be interested in

Comment on other blogs similar to yours

Ask for feedback

Act on feedback

Answer comments on your blog

Put pictures on your blog

Tell your people about cool stuff your business is doing

Tell your people about mistakes you’ve made

Tell your people about delays in product releases

Ask your people what they want to hear about

Find other blogs / business geographically close to you and connect

Blog about your company values & beliefs

Blog about other cool businesses with similar ‘values’

Put a blogroll on your sidebar of similar businesses

(sounds counter intuitive, but keeps you honest and frames where you belong)

Put what your blog is about in the sidebar

Give your people a reason to come back

If it’s relevant link to another story or blog

Blog about your launch

Give a sneak preview

Blog about something funny that happened in the office

Blog about your people

Blog about your media coverage

Blog about why you’re better than the competition

Blog about why you’re worse, and what you’re doing about it

Show pictures of product / design / your retail outlet

Post your advertising

Run a sampling campaign via your blog

Focus on the theology of your site & business

Add comments to this blog entry to add more ideas….

Simple permission marketing – ‘In Action’ UPDATE

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

An MP3 will be uploaded shortly for those who missed it. 

 

Today I am being interviewed on ABC radio (Australia) to discuss www.rentoid.com

 

The interesting thing is that I didn’t pitch for the interview, they called me. This is great news because it means that we’re starting to get some real traction with rentoid. It also means that the general populous believe as much as we do in the community and environmental benefits of the service. So they’re helping us spread the word.

 

The interview is at 5.10pm – Melbourne / Sydney time Australia.

 

You can listen live on line by clicking here. You can convert to your local time by using this link.

radio.jpg

Happy listening.

How to run a consumer promotion

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

There’s no shortage of really crappy consumer promotions out there. I blogged recently about budget airline Jetstar’s poor attempt here.

 

Win a car. Win a holiday. Conditions apply. Buy 3 years worth of our product to enter… need I continue?

 

Here’s some tips on running an effective consumer promotion:

 

Make it simple to enter

Make it free to enter

Make it a race

Make the prize unique

Make the prize the ‘users’ choice

Make it benefit your brand & the entrants

Don’t ruin it with terms & conditions

 

And here’s an example of the above which we have done for rentoid.

 

Feel free to enter.

Permission marketing in action

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I recently spoke about newspapers being a good forum for simple permission marketing.

We’ve just done exactly this for our start up rentoid. We approached the local western district newspaper called “the Leader” and discussed the community and environmental benefits of the rentoid service.

It worked and the article can be seen here.

The other reasons we started with a small newspaper is it’s in line with our clustering strategy and it gives us experience before we approach larger circulation media.

Keeping promises

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

We’ve recently challenged ourselves at rentoid as part of our clustering strategy. We promised our members in ‘Melbourne Australia’ that rentoid has ‘anything’ they could possibly want to rent. Especially given our moniker for Rentoid is “the place to rent anything”. The promise can be seen here.

 

Some may think this is crazy. The fact is we couldn’t possibly have everything available for rent. But that’s where the depth of idea is:

 

Here are the possible outcomes:

  • People search Melbourne and see the depth of items for rent.

  • They may find what they need, or not.

  • If they don’t, we have promised to find what they need.

(unless they ask for something like elephant tusks!)

 

We’ll find what they need by asking other members if they have it, or we’ll find it through other means. In short we’ll keep our promise. We’ll find them what they need. 

 

The idea ensures we stretch ourselves to serve our customers and it gives us an authentic way to create a positive customer experience. Which we hope they’ll talk about.

 

If you’re in Melbourne, test us!

Spreading the ‘Green’ word

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

This is where I request the assistance of my loyal readers….

 

I’ve blogged about the recent launch of rentoid.

Rentoid is very green. The basic concept is to encourage people to rent items from each other, rather than buy them. Net result being same lifestyle with less consumption. The climate crisis is really a symptom, not the problem. Hence, I’d really appreciate a little help in spreading the green word on rentoid

The request is simply to help us get it on the eco radar / blogisphere / community. Sure there’s, something in it for rentoid – but there’s something in it for the community and the environement. Be sure to let us know or comment below on any ideas / actions taken.

Of course the acid test is how many start up blog readers believe it deserves the exposure. This will help us determine if we’ve got it right.

Clustering

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a live example of niche marketing in action.

 

At rentoid we are currently implementing a niche strategy by ‘clustering’.

 

As blogged about, rentoid is the place to rent anything. To make this true, we need people to have a great user experience. Therefore we are focusing our global website on one town. The town rentoid was founded in.

 

We think it makes sense for these reasons:

  • We have many items for rent in this town

  • We can implement old school awareness campaigns like letter box drops, and hand outs at the local train station

  • We can leverage local contacts & friends

  • When people first visit the rentoid, they’ll see many items in ‘their’ suburb

  • People want to rent things locally where possible

  • We can rent items off new members and provide a great user experience

  • It leverages a growing sense of ‘community’ in small suburbs

  • It has a higher chance of users telling their friends – who also live there

  • Membership will grow geographically to the next suburb, and so on – virally

  • We can test what works on a micro level before investing on a larger scale 

You get the picture.

 

So our niche plan is to cluster geographically, and grow from their. I’ll let you know how it goes.