It’s been three months now since we killed all advertising for the company which everyone seems to think is either a very brave or very foolhardy thing to do. The truth is, most of our advertising budget was being frittered away on generating absolutely no sales whatsoever (the painful truth is that the vast majority of advertising does not work. At all. But we’re made to believe that if we don’t advertise we die – wonder which particular market segment came up with that ‘research’?) 
So, we killed our advertising at the start of the year. No print adverts (sorry Scouting Magazine but we will probably be back next year), No Google Adwords. No nothing. And has it has an effect? No idea! As we had never really measured our advertising before other than looking at the mounting costs, it’s hard to say what effect not doing it has had. With three months gone I have decided to see where we are in terms of keywords and phrases on the major search engines as, let’s be honest, that’s how most people find things these days.
What a revelation that has been.
I was reasonably aware of where we sat in terms of page placement for most of our keywords and I was expecting that we would have dropped a bit for some of them as they’re highly competitive e.g. bell tents, but some of the results are strange to say the least. Overall, with the exception of one specific area, we appear to have either held our own or even gone up in terms of page ranking despite doing no advertising. I had always been under the impression, and even been told, that using ads on Google, Yahoo or Bing would raise your page rank. And maybe it does. All I can say for certain is that ceasing to advertise doesn’t necessarily decrease your page rank once you’ve gotten it. This would explain why articles and stuff from 3/4 years or more ago still rank highly even though they are pretty irrelevant now.
The difference in how you’re placed between the search engines is another revelation and just goes to show that what you consider relevant is not necessarily what the search engine considers relevant e.g. Google indexes our blog entries and notes our tags but Bing appears not to.
I am going to attribute not falling down the page rank to the blog articles I keep writing (despite Bing ignoring them) which means that you’re going to get more of them; less blogging and more article perhaps, but still more waffling, wittering and frothing from me about tents and tent related stuff.
If nothing else, the few hours I’ve spent doing searches and noting rankings has made me aware of where we’re not promoting ourselves properly so at least I have areas to concentrate on for the next few weeks/months. I suppose the mantra now had to be; Content, Content, Content. And photo’s. And tea.
I’m going to try and chart the progress of our main keywords every month so it’ll be interesting to see if specific articles cause a shift in placement.
Time to start writing.
we’re starting to think so as every other company with a large range makes to order rather than holds stock on shelves) some people always ask for something a little bit different. So we provide it.
of last year when we announced we’d managed to get our grubby little mitts of some 
hit and supply a new tent while the original is shipped back, microscopically examined, met over several times, tested and re-tested to find exactly which molecule caused the offense and finally repaired. One such tent was a 
top-notch quality). We have the Basic 1 and the Basic 2 (okay, high quality products, not so high quality names. I do apologise – but only for the names!). Both these tents have the ability to be opened up on all sides and either rolling them up out of the way or using them as awnings – so ably demonstrated in the picture by our lovely model, the Basic 2. Made from a lighter modern cotton than most contemporaries these don’t require a huge truck and a team of body-building sherpas to move about and erect. They also have the option of matching groundsheets or even an inner tent allowing you to partition off some of the tent to create a more private area (in case you want to segregate your minions or have a separate kitchen/storage/sleeping area).