Taking a break to read and looking at Google Base and Squidoo...

Working on Friday evening? Yes and it doesnt feel so good! Well today I continued with my usual Facebook action. I have got some good feedback on designs on my Goldsmiths T-shirts (goldgrad) and I posted my links in two new groups one relevant to the Goldsmiths shop and one which was for people who were looking forward to graduating (they got the teesforgrads).

The reasons for me doing so much work promoting on Facebook early on are due to both how direct the contact is, and how targeted I can be. Firstly I can target in on students who are either affiliated with the Goldsmiths network (for the goldgrad shop) or at least students in general or those who have already graduated. This means that I'm immediately reaching my target audience and am doing so directly without them needing to start searching for T-shirts, graduate presents or anything else. Obviously in the long term this would be difficult to maintain but in the short term I hope to get honest feedback as well as generacting some interest and maybe even a couple of sales.

After sorting out the Facebook material I went on to promote my teesforgrads shop by starting a Squidoo lens. I came across Squidoo only very recently although I had noticed several search results for things in Google coming up with Squidoo. Although I still know very little about Squidoo I have found that it was started by Seth Godin - a marketer who has written some excellent books including Purple Cow - which I have read. You can see my Squidoo lens here.

I also referred to the community forums on cafepress and read about someone who had used Google Base. Not knowing what that was I went over to Google and had a look. It seems to offer a platform where one can present ones products where they can be incorporated into Froogle or search results. I opened my own Google Base account and downloaded Instant Cafe Feed program to create a feed of my teesforgrads shop.

Tomorrow I will delve deeper into Google Base and will be submitting my shops to search engines.