[First Draft: Just bashing out the basic concept of the essay.]
I am sure this is a situation a lot of vendors in Second Life experience on a regular basis. In my case it’s rare for me not to wake up to at least one of these a day. (things changed to protect the not quite so innocent)
Hello there, my name is ********* ****** and I would personally like to invite you to come check out the new *******, ****** and **** sim called ******* that is opening on Saturday. Our entry point is a train station that forces all visitors to walk through the market into the city. There will be spaces starting at 10 prims up to 100 prims, depending on your needs. We will also have a SLX terminal in the hallway into the market. Please feel free to contact me or stop by and take a look around.
Now, don’t get me wrong I appreciate the thought. (Even if sometimes I know people are quite literally just spamming huge lists of people) As you can probably tell from that. This particular one is a start up. It is themed to one of the styles I cater for, so some thought has gone into the fact that it was me that was invited. I also appreciate that as a start up the owners will have put a lot of money into it already and are looking to recoup those cost as soon as possible.
However, this would be turned down by me, and if the owners are lucky then they would receive an IM explaining why.
When I receive something like this my first port of call is always the senders profile and if the sender isn’t the land owner then also the land owners. I will check through the profile looking for certain things.
- The age of the avatar, as they say “With age comes experience.”, this is not always strictly true. The avatar could be an Alt, the avatar could have a lot more play time than the age would suggest.
- The amount the profile has been filled out. Again this is just to get a feeling as to how long the av has been playing. The less there is the less likely I am to consider them. Again this is just something I take into consideration.
- Profile Picks; Now, until recently, this was just something I would use to see how proud the owners where of their Mall. If the mall was not in the profile picks then even the owner did not think that much of it. More recently how ever Profile picks has had much more importance as it is taking over from the role of traffic. So now, if the owner does not have the mall in their profile picks, then not only do they not think enough of it to add it, then also they do not follow current trends with SEO within Second life and therefore don’t really stand a chance of properly promoting the mall.
- Classifieds; Basically this boils down to, are they willing to put in a little extra money to promote their own mall? Do they actually worry about promotion of their mall at all?
Once I have checked out the people behind the mall I will do a search on the in-world search facility. Obviously not being able to find the area is a bad thing. Everything I can find to do with the mall is a + point in the malls favor.
- Finding the mall in the search, preferably on the first page.
- Seeing peoples names come up in association with the mall is a good thing. This means that people are finding the mall, liking it and thinking the mall is worthy of taking up a space in their profile pick. Besides showing that people besides the owners think the mall is good, this will also drive up the malls search ranking.
- Having a group associated with the mall is also a good thing but not essential.
- Events; again not critical, but a huge plus point if the mall is associated with something besides just being a mall. A mall has to be something incredibly special for someone to add it to their profile picks for being a mall. If they are adding the area for another reason besides the mall this works well for the mall. That reason could be many things; role play area, club nights, sports competitions, quiz’s, etc. This list is only limited by people imagination. However, if there is something like this associated with the mall then the mall should be themed to those people. For an extreme example, selling Sex beds in an age-play area, not only goes against the theme but probably will get both the vendor and the mall owner in trouble.
This search stage of checking out a potential mall location is critical. If I can’t find the mall when I am specifically looking for it, then how are potential customers going to find it when they are searching for it by something other than it’s actual name.
This last little bit takes me nicely into theme and specialization. Think how people find you mall mainly. Through the search feature within Second life, word of mouth, advertising and maybe if your lucky random chance.
First of the Search function. You have a limited number of keywords associated with you mall. So the more specialised themed malls can have more appropriate keywords to what their vendors sell. When people are shopping they generally are looking for something specific. I know personally I have never typed “mall” or “shopping” into the search function. The more precise you get with you keywords the more likely you are to drive appropriate traffic to your mall, and therefore have happy customers, vendors and owners.
You also need to make sure you vendors stick to the theme. Assume people have short attention spans and if they can’t find what they are looking for quickly then they will move on from your mall. (SEO terms this is called “Bounce”)
A lot of this will also apply to word of mouth. If people know your mall as somewhere that they can find what they are looking for quickly and easily, then they will tell their friends. Quality is another aspect to consider with word of mouth. Are people going to tell their friends about a mall they found with lots of reseller vendors, business in a box vendors and lesser quality items?
Large Sprawling malls with no specific theme, low quality items are the SEO equivalent to a “Link farm”. Google and many of the major search engines on the web have incorporated into their search algorithms the potential that these exist, and ignore them. Remember that Linden Labs use Google based search.
Speaking of Farms, a quick side note about camping and bot farms. If I go to an area with camping in I will instantly turn it down. Traffic is no longer important to search ranking. Even when it was, I would still turn down malls with camping chairs. Traffic gained by camping is not paying traffic. They are “there” to get money for free. They very rarely actually buy items from the vendors around them. They waste server resources for skewed traffic results. The quotation marks around “there” was intentional because when I say “there” their avatar is there but the user is invariably away from the keyboard, and how is an avatar that does not have someone controlling them make purchases? Likewise same goes for bot farms. All of these sneaky tricks will drain your server resources, screw up your vendors machines and thanks to the lag created by them, drastically increase the bounce rate of legitimate paying customers.
I speak from experience on this. I have a store in one of the top ten featured locations within Second Life. It sells only items that go with the theme of the Sim, the advertising budget on the sim is huge, I am the only vendor on that sim, the store doesn’t cost me anything to rent as it is in return for some custom work I did them, the traffic on that sim is an average of around hundred times what I have on my sim. I make more money including the rent on my sim from mine than I do from theirs.
In my humble opinion it is far better to spend any monies you would have spent on camping on advertising. Now I will admit that advertising is not one of my strong points. I know what there is available out there, I know the relative costs of it. I don’t have many facts and figures to back up any thoughts here. I personally use classifieds. These are the only advertising that I pay for. In my experience they pay for themselves. In terms of advertising on external sites. I personally won’t click on any advert on any web page. There are many ways to advertise without paying actual money. Due to the nature of the average Second Life citizen being active on the various social networking sites is a huge advantage, and will get you a lot of publicity on external searches. If I can find your mall in an external Google search this will score you + points in my considerations to renting with you and as I have mentioned, this can quite easily be done for free.
The last aspect I use to judge a prospective mall by and going on the notecards I recieve would seem the most important, is rental costs.
A set cost in the initial notecard is an instant - point in my opinion. My reasoning here, this price is based on where the mall is now. The price is usualy based upon current costs. It doesn’t allow for expansion. Landowners are usually aprehensive to increase their costs to the vendors. Therefore, the mall will stagnant. A set start cost also tends to say to me that the owner has done all that they will for the mall and are looking for a monthly income that will be pretty much guaranteed without much additional work on their part. This is great for the mall owner but for the vendors is not such a good thing. I would personally rather start paying a larger amount than the mall space is worth to me and for the owner to have a road map of where things will go. For the most part this is not the case. For the most part a set rental cost says that the mall owner has done what they are going to do and are happy to send out notecards for new vendors and rest on their laurels in terms of promoting their mall.
The other main payment scheme here would be percentage sales. This is a lot more appealing to the vendors in my opinion and has the potential to make the mall owner more money that a set weekly payment. However, this does mean more work on the mall owners part. If sales are not good for the vendors then the owner will not get rent, and of course, if sales are good, then the owner stands to make more money than what would be expected with the set rent scheme. This is a win win situation for both mall owner and vendors. If there is not an option for % sales I really won’t believe that owner of the mall is going to try promote things more than things are and that they don’t have faith in their mall and their ability to promote it for the vendors.
Lastly some things I have yet to see but would certainly give me good reason for investigating a place beyond what I have previously mentioned.
Testimonials from other vendors; I can find “testimonials” from customers and vendors in the form of profile picks, but I have yet to see a notecard with actual testimonials from other vendors.
Associated website; I have yet to be sent a notecard for a mall with an associated website. For example, my place, although not strictly a mall, I do sell stuff for other people. I have two associated websites. My personal blog which I have updates about my area for, and a Ning community for it, for the regulars to discuss comings and goings around the area.
Facts and figures beyond l$/prim, store areas and stuff like that. I would really like to see a request that shows some actual thought has gone into asking specifically me. For example.. I mainly sell jewelry.. it would be nice to have a notecard saying something like “… for the keyword jewelry our mall comes in the first 10 results for search…” or “we are advertising with X number of ads in Y and Z jewelry specific magazines…”.
References as to where my name was found to receive the notecard. The rules in the TOS are quite specific over spam. I have never added my name to a list saying “Send me notecards asking me to rent at your mall location.”. Without a specific reference, you may as well be trying to sell me Viagra.
There are many aspects I have not covered in this, I won’t say this is the definitive “do’s and don’t’s of mall ownership”, this is not a sure fire way of making money as a retail landowner in Second life. This is just some of the things I look at/for when I receive a notecard asking me to display my items in what ever mall. I have written them all down for several reasons. Firstly so that I can post a link in IM rather than the usual apology and short (by the standards of what I have just written) explanation as to why. I link in my profile may even cut down the number of “those” notecards I recieve in the first place. Hopefully some startup and even currently active mall owners may read this and pick up a few things to make their malls a more profitable venture. I won’t say I am an expert in anything here, I just have some experience, and if it helps even one person then it was worth writing down…
