Business Yorkshire 2009

I've spent the last two days at Doncaster racecourse at the Business Yorkshire conference and exhibition. I was there to speak at the Google University seminars as mentioned in earlier blog post. This is just a quick post to let you know how it all went.

The event itself saw around 3,000 people attend over the two days, with the mornings being more popular than the afternoons. I did my presentation four times in total and it all seemed to go down well. It's always interesting to chat to business owners after presenting and I've met businesses as diverse as make-up sales, canoe accessories, power tools and speed dating for over 50s. Plus a chef with a secret recipe Jamaican marinade!

All these businesses said they gained some extra knowledge from listening to how we do things and that it gave them something to think about applying to their business websites. Of particular interest is how we go about promoting 60,000 products and managing our extensive adwords campaign. People are relived to hear there are ways and means to automate the process.

I'm looking forward to doing more of the same and just to prove as was there there's a quick video below.

Online retail secrets

I had some great news this week, following on from my presentation at the Sheffield Google event the other week. I volenteered to do a similar thing at the Business Yorkshire exhibition and conference. I'm pleased to say Google thought it was a good idea and I'll be speaking alongside Satyan Joshi who is delivering the Introduction to Google AdWords at the event.

Google have asked if I could talk about some of the business challenges I've overcome using our website & online promotion. They don't want me to talk exclusively about my experiences of Google products in particular, but if they have contributed then obviously they would like me to explain how.

I see it as demonstrating the practical 'real world' use of Google Adwords after people have been introduced to the 'theory' from Google.

There are three main challenges I'll be talking about:

• Being successful in a very competitive market - there are hundreds of electrical retailers online.
• Promoting a huge range of 60,000 low margin products with a miniscule marketing budget.
• The limitations of being perceived as a 'computer' supplier and how we need to broaden our appeal.

Here’s a link to more information about the event
Brian Trevaskiss at Business Yorkshire
Be sure and say hello if you go along.

Here’s a link to a Sheffield Star newspaper story other day.
Online retailer set to share secrets

New Specification filter

The latest addition to the MoreComputers.com site is our new Specification filter. Now when you're browsing our site and you select a sub category, 'Notebooks' for example you have the option to look at just the notebooks with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. You could then pick just notebooks with a 15.4 inch screen. Get the idea?

Basically the new Specification filter lets you filter out the products you want to look at. It's not just on notebooks either, it works on all the sub categories that have specifications to select from.

Shopping for external hard drives is another good example. You can now just pick the disk capacity, say 1000GB and just look at the one you want to consider.

We're still labelling this new feature as 'Beta' because we know there will be improvements to make, so be sure and send us some feedback.