At the end of December 2006 my husband and our launched our first company. My husband is an IT guru and my background is marketing, so using our combined skills we decided in May 2006 to develop a website. We chose on an auction website as our first company, as we thought this would be fun, engaging and challenging. We recognised the obvious dominance of other sites in thisspace, but didn’t let that deter us, as we felt we could offer an alternative. We put together a business plan and decided on a January launch date, with the aim of targeting people who wanted to swap or sell unwanted Christmas presents. From this spurred the name of our site www.unwantd.com – which we purchased through network solutions.

I did lots of research and found a PR site, on which to post a statement about the site's launch. I found a template for guidance on how to write a PR document and set about writing my very first company Press Release. (I’ve posted an example of our press release for unwantd.com for Cyberneur members in the tools & services/resources area click here to see. ) I’d recommend any new website owner write a press release as it gets syndicated on lots of sites on the web and you end up with lots of inbound links.

The financial part of our business plan highlighted that our budget was tight – we didn’t have hundreds of thousands to spend on google ads or any other form of advertising. This meant I had to get my head around google ads (and I’m still learning!) and rely on word of mouth through friends and family, we accepted that the volume of traffic would be slow and increase over time.

We decided to offer all listings on the site for free and only charge for additional features such as highlighting an item or using the mobile phone text service (so users can be notified via their mobile of a sale). The look and feel of the site is very friendly using colour and small cartoon type characters. We decided on “Simply Swap or Sell it” as our tag line – as it is a great call to action. The site is aimed at a worldwide audience and I’m glad to say we have lots of faithful users to date.

Unwant'd - Swap or Sell unwanted gifts, music, sports, travel, electronics, movies, toys and more