The Apprentice 2014.......................

[Funk]

Just seen on LinkedIn he worked with several people I used to work with when I was at Yell. The SEO company he worked for is ReachLocal, they tried to tempt me a while back but it wasn't a route I wanted to go. I thought quite a lot of the sales schtick sounded familiar when watching the 'pitches'.

[Jasandjules]

North West Tom said:

I do find it bizarre how these candidates who are so passionate about their business and have put their lives into them don't even have a name? And the branding as well? This was just like any other task they have done. Has Lord Sugar really just splurged £250k (not much to him, I know) on someone whose name, branding, advertising, pricing strategy etc was all done in just two or three days?

This is what I was saying last night. Surely they have a name, logo etc all in mind ready to go.

And are there not already lots of tights places like her "unique" company? Google search seems to think so at least.

[KTF]

Its funny how the tight company was seen as such a winner where Roisin food thing was not. She didnt appear as one of the 'helpers' either.

Probably something to do with this.

said:

Roisin lost out because her business idea isn’t entirely unique. Let’s hope that Lord Sugar never switches on his Amstrad email machine and searches for SEO agencies. Otherwise Mark’s in hot water.

From: http://tv.bt.com/tv/tv-news/mark-wins-the-apprenti...

[GetCarter]

SEO's make me laugh.. I get e mails from them every week asking for money, and not one of them yet have reached the google position I have for my website. I should probably help them, not vice versa.

Still, I booked Mark as winner from the start. Probably the best waste of £250. With AMS1 he'll stand a chance.

[FourWheelDrift]

GetCarter said:

SEO's make me laugh.. I get e mails from them every week asking for money, and not one of them yet have reached the google position I have for my website. I should probably help them, not vice versa.

Still, I booked Mark as winner from the start. Probably the best waste of £250. With AMS1 he'll stand a chance.

The only one you should consider using is the one that can get their own business at the top of a google search for SEO.

[MGJohn]

I actually watched the whole final broadcast and found it entertaining. The female finalist despite losing was really impressive, rather moreso than when I saw her efforts in previous shows. Both finalists' concepts and business plans will struggle in their already overloaded chosen markets.

Both finalists were impressive in this final show although less so in those episodes I briefly dipped into previously. Whatever they chose to do, with that much motivation and good communication skills, both very good at thinking on their feet rather than from a script, they should succeed in whatever they chose to do with the rest of their lives.

Even if Mark "blows" that £250k, it's a drop in the ocean to the Sugar operation and the revenue and other positives the series will accrue.

[Countdown]

Is it actually Shuggs's own money? I assumed that it was some or all of the payment he received from the Production Company for appearing on the programme?

[MikeO996]

I didn't understand why no-one used Dragon's Den objection 101 to Bianca's proposal, which is that any of the major hosiery companies could blow her out of the water tomorrow if they chose to by launching their own competing product.
Which also raises the question of why they haven't chosen to do this themselves years ago if it's such a great idea: what do they know that we don't? I suspect it is the objection that was voiced, the range of product that would need to be stocked (which of course may justify the luxury price point, but which then wipes out demand).

[anonymous-user]

Jasandjules said:

North West Tom said:

I do find it bizarre how these candidates who are so passionate about their business and have put their lives into them don't even have a name? And the branding as well? This was just like any other task they have done. Has Lord Sugar really just splurged £250k (not much to him, I know) on someone whose name, branding, advertising, pricing strategy etc was all done in just two or three days?

This is what I was saying last night. Surely they have a name, logo etc all in mind ready to go.

Bianca lost it on not having the brand right, but previously Solomon had his brand pretty much sorted and was torn apart for it. The rest of his business plan was lacking, but Claude went after his "pretty pictures" specifically. Those "pretty pictures" make or break a product or service. The brand is almost the most important thing!

Bianca didn't have a pricing strategy apart from calling it premium and hiking the price, rather than actually explaining how her tights were premium. Not once did she say they cost me X amount to make so I need to sell at X.

[KTF]

MikeO996 said:

I didn't understand why no-one used Dragon's Den objection 101 to Bianca's proposal, which is that any of the major hosiery companies could blow her out of the water tomorrow if they chose to by launching their own competing product.

I wondered this as well. If there was such demand for this sort of thing then why haven't one of the big brands introduced something to cover the gap in the market.

[walm]

KTF said:

I wondered this as well. If there was such demand for this sort of thing then why haven't one of the big brands introduced something to cover the gap in the market.

I strongly suspect it is to do with scale and pricing relative to the range.

M&S for example will have spent literally decades working on the optimum number of shades of tight to have in their range.
For every extra shade they will need a significant pick up in volume to justify the extra inventory cost, design cost and lower volume pricing achieved on sourcing the previous shades.
They will tweak that range until they reach optimum.

So no doubt they will leave some customers dissatisfied who will either shop elsewhere or just not buy tights or some who begrudgingly buy the "wrong" shade since they don't have an option and MUST HAVE SOME TIGHTS.

So 50 shades say is too high since they will be out of stock all the time and they will have far higher COGS owing to the fact they are buying 5x fewer per shade than if they stocked just 10 shades.
Repeat until optimum profits.

For a niche product you can get away with the lower volumes and charge more.
However, again a guess, but having a bunch of tights at 2x the price on only a slightly different shade is going to give you ZERO volume.
Ladies will just buy the cheaper tights. They seriously don't care enough on what is already a massive fashion compromise (you're wearing tights love - this clearly means you are either just cold or couldn't be arsed to shave your legs).

You might get away with it in Agent Provocateur but then who goes to AP to buy tights!?

[jammy_basturd]

walm said:

Ladies will just buy the cheaper tights. They seriously don't care enough on what is already a massive fashion compromise (you're wearing tights love - this clearly means you are either just cold or couldn't be arsed to shave your legs).

This is what I assume too. Fair enough call them "premium" tights if you're going to make them into something fancy - but Bianca's product were just everyday tights, surely the majority of women will expect an 'everyday' price to go with them.

walm said:

You might get away with it in Agent Provocateur but then who goes to AP to buy tights!?

I don't, I go to AP for my brakes.

[rpguk]

I didn't get around to seeing the final yet but have been following it here. I can't believe they are actually going with the climbonline name! The .net wasn't even registered last week and I'm amazed they don't even have a holding page up somewhere to take email addresses. It seems such a waste of exposure.

For someone in digital marketing of all disciplines it's just astonishing.

Edited by rpguk on Tuesday 23 December 16:29

[Evangelion]

FourWheelDrift said:

GetCarter said:

SEO's make me laugh.. I get e mails from them every week asking for money, and not one of them yet have reached the google position I have for my website. I should probably help them, not vice versa.

Still, I booked Mark as winner from the start. Probably the best waste of £250. With AMS1 he'll stand a chance.

The only one you should consider using is the one that can get their own business at the top of a google search for SEO.

... which according to me is www.click.co.uk

And can anyone explain exactly HOW these people get you 'up the pecking order'?

[KTF]

Years ago, you used to put key words in the HTML at the top of the page that would be picked up by the search engines robots.

I imagine they do something similar.

From their site it appears to be done using a plugin:

click said:

<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.5.3.3 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ -->
<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir"/>
<meta name="description" content="Click Consult is a Digital Award Winning Search Engine Marketing Agency with a Focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) &amp; Paid Search (PPC) Let’s Work Together to Create Something Brilliant, Contact us Today"/>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.click.co.uk/" />
<link rel="publisher" href="https://plus.google.com/102472046014219425800/about"/>
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) &amp; Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Agency" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Click Consult is a Digital Award Winning Search Engine Marketing Agency with a Focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) &amp; Paid Search (PPC) Let’s Work Together to Create Something Brilliant, Contact us Today" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.click.co.uk/" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Click Consult" />
<meta property="articleublisher" content="https://www.facebook.com/ClickConsult" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="100002522266847" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.click.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cc_og_logo.png" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/>
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@ClickConsultLtd"/>
<meta name="twitter:domain" content="Click Consult"/>
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@ClickConsultLtd"/>
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="41FC097AFD6E06774C838AC3D486664F" />
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="Ul6ibbZxLihWpOdgX3VAQFFspc28-D_oPGDmrqN0RPs" />
<!-- / Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. -->

https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ = Free

Edited by KTF on Tuesday 23 December 16:50

[rpguk]

Evangelion said:

... which according to me is www.click.co.uk

And can anyone explain exactly HOW these people get you 'up the pecking order'?

Two ways, for the organic results or paid adverts.

For organic i.e Search Engine Optimisation -

Google* aims to rank sites based on relevance to your search and more recently 'you' (i,e your location, device and history). So the actual rankings are starting to vary from person to person and will only get more personalised.

How they rank the sites is a bit of a secret but you can roughly look at it as relevance of site to search time. They also give each webpage a ranking of importance which is kind of used as a multiplier and is based on how many links a site gets and the importance of those pages which link to it.

So to get to the top you need to have content which is relevant to the terms you expect people to search for and pages which are seen as important and get links in.

There are various 'tricks' used and what works or doesn't changes constantly. People pay for links to their site from already established sites, put keywords in page titles, links etc. Things which worked last year might get you blacklisted today as Google is constantly evolving the algorithm to thwart these tricks. It can take time for techniques to work and in short it's a market saturated with snakeoil salesmen and even if you find someone good past results are no indication of whether a company will be any good going forward.

Saying that a well structured site with well written, fresh and recent content won't do any harm.

The other way to get to the top is PPC or Pay per click adwords, this is where Google makes the bulk of it's money and those adverts at the top and side of results are auctioned off (they are also ranked by relevance, click through rate and some other stuff) but broadly speaking each click is going to cost anywhere from pennies to pounds depending on how much competition there is for the phrase. There is some skill in getting the best bang for your buck with these adverts.

I didn't see the final but I'd hope it's not just going to be another company cold calling me up with vague promises. If he's smart he'll be more broad on the 'digital marketing' front which really is well beyond just SEO/PPC now although his constant droning about getting you up the rankings suggests not.

• other search engines are available but for now no one really seems to care.

Edited by rpguk on Tuesday 23 December 17:14

[spikeyhead]

What really put me off Mark is that he spent almost as much time slagging off other ideas as he did emphasizing the positives of his own.

[The Moose]

GetCarter said:

Still, I booked Mark as winner from the start. Probably the best waste of £250. With AMS1 he'll stand a chance.

It won't have cost him anywhere near £250k. Using investment vehicles it'll cost him a good chunk less.

[GetCarter]

The Moose said:

GetCarter said:

Still, I booked Mark as winner from the start. Probably the best waste of £250. With AMS1 he'll stand a chance.

It won't have cost him anywhere near £250k. Using investment vehicles it'll cost him a good chunk less.

...and he'll make several million from the BBC prog. No wonder he wants to do year 11!

(Just before the BBC assassins turn up, it's sold worldwide, so makes all of us in UK PLC a big profit).

[Jasandjules]

GetCarter said:

...and he'll make several million from the BBC prog. No wonder he wants to do year 11!

I read somewhere that he can write a cheque to cash for over 100m, I don't think he does it for the money, but for the fame. Might be wrong though!