Business

LIFT ~ The Advertising Campaign

Posted by ngreene on Mar 22, 2010 in Business

GoDaddy gave me $75 in Google AdWords credit as part of my signing up for hosting. They also gave me $50 towards facebook advertising, but that will have to wait for another day because I simply haven’t taken the time to set it up. I thought I would throw together a simple campaign to see how it worked.

Here is my very first AdWords ad:

As of today, I have gotten 7,952 impressions based on my keywords and I’ve gotten 9 clicks. That doesn’t sound like much, but that means a 0.11% click-through rate, which is much higher than I expected.

All of my clicks have come from the Toronto search term. Honestly, I was really just going through the exercise to figure out exactly how to set up an AdWords account. I never thought anyone would actually click on one of my ads. It’s pretty cool.

I have $67 credit left so I guess I will see how far that goes. If you came here through a Google sponsored link, Welcome!

LIFT ~ The Logo

Posted by ngreene on Mar 16, 2010 in Business

I haven’t decided how far I want to go into the details of the “business idea that wasn’t”, but since I own the company name, I figure that I will use the company for something someday. As I mentioned previously, we jumped on the URL a little ahead of the game. Once I had the URL, I registered the company name and incorporated. The good news is that it’s possible to own a corporation that has no costs and no revenues for as long as you like. You even get to say that you’ve been in business for as long as you’ve had your corporation. Technically, I’ve been in business for years even though I haven’t done anything.

In any case, here is the logo for this future behemoth of a company:

A good friend of ours designed this logo for us. Chris Govias is really a very talented designer. I really like his design process and was thinking about it recently. We sat down and he asked us about the original concept and some of the elements of the brand image we wanted to portray through our logo. He made some notes over brunch and after maybe an hour or so he had enough thoughts to put together two different concepts for us.

Above is the concept that we felt best represented our brand. Here is his description and detail for this beautiful piece:

The first concept sketch for the LIFT visual identity references the Art Deco period. Famous examples of Art Deco include the interior and exterior of the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Plaza, and Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings.

The visual identity is based upon the traditional aesthetics of luxury and high-end exclusivity, while at the same time subtly referencing the look and feel of old elevator signage.

The variations in the line thickness speak to a sense of being tailor-made, hand-crafting, and uniqueness. The combination of the lettering with ornaments presents a sense of artisanal luxury and expense. By being enclosed within a unique shape, the logo also physically speaks to exclusivity.

I love it. He articulated the brand identity perfectly. Now we just need to figure out what to do with it! I hope he doesn’t mind that I’ve changed to a white colour because I knew it was going on a dark background!

What’s with the name?

Posted by ngreene on Mar 7, 2010 in Business

The first question that I would have in visiting this site would be: “Hey … What’s with the name?”

My wife and I came up with a cool business concept and the perfect name for that company was LIFT. We looked at what URLs were available and the best choice we could find was theliftfirm.com

I snapped it up planning to move forward with the business as a side project, but we very quickly found a fatal flaw in our business plan. One of the primary revenue streams we anticipated was not going to work the way we had planned and we hit an impass. The second tier could still be profitable, but we aren’t sure what the best model would be to take that idea to market.

I guess we could have held off on picking a URL, but it was cheap and we really do like the idea of the name.

Eventually, we will get around to pulling the concept together but, in the meantime, I figured I might as well use the URL to figure out a little more about web publishing and content management.