The MerchantCircle Business Development Blog

Hi Everyone:

As hard as it is to believe, next week marks the one-year anniversary of MerchantCircle’s launch.  In the past year we’ve grown from 5,000 registered merchants to over 125,000.  Nearly 25% of all new merchants have created content in recent months.  And our revenue per merchant continues to grow at a strong clip.  Exciting times!

In addition, our efforts to engage local merchant communities are also bearing fruit, as the attached Merry Maids quarterly newsletter demonstrates.  Sent in hardcopy to all Merry Maids professionals last week, the newsletter talks about the importance of online marketing in finding local customers (page 6) while page 7 provides top left placement to MerchantCircle as a service Merry Maids operations should be using.  We’re excited about this endorsement of our services, and will continue to find ways to leverage more merchant communities in the future.

Finally, in product news, please note the following:

Merchants are using and getting good value from our recently released tools . . .

1)             Our merchant-to-merchant discussion forums got over 12,000 pageviews in April (up 70% over Feb) from 6,700 unique visitors (up 65% over Feb)

a.     http://www.merchantcircle.com/forum (main page)

b.    http://www.merchantcircle.com/forum/thread/Promoting.Your.Business/Tie.Merchant.Circle.into.your.own.website./528

2)             Our widgets allow merchants to easily link from their website to MerchantCircle.  In May we received over 33,000 impressions for widgets on merchant website pages (21,000 for Member of MerchantCircle widgets / 12,000 for review widgets)

a.     http://www.pedlars.com/?gclid=CIbp5fCmoowCFSVKSgodJ0gT3w

b.    http://www.laretroboutique.com/page/lar/PROD/W-TW-Purple

3)             Talk to Me allows user comments on merchant pages – in May there were over 3,100 user posts on over 2,800 merchant pages.  Just over 2,200 user posts were from consumers (the remainder are from merchants that are already registered).

a.     http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/MerchantCircle.650-352-1336

And we just launched some great new features to help them find still more customers!

1)             Improved merchant profiles will allow merchants to add more web links and build better-looking merchant pages

2)             Better traffic reporting will include up to 6 months of data by mid-June for all registered merchants so they can see how much traffic their page is getting them

3)             Local+ will allow merchants to select additional cities as “service areas” where consumers can find them, which should help them find even more local customers than before.

Cheers,

Doug

P.S. The press response to our anniversary and progress has been very positive, so keep your eyes open for MerchantCircle news coverage in the weeks ahead!