Big River Telephone Partners with Missouri.me and Localtek
Well, I can officially announce our first strategic partnership between Localtek/Missouri.me and a leading technology provider to rural communities throughout southeast Missouri.
Big River Telephone, based in Cape Girardeau, MO serves 10's of thousands of customers not only in Missouri but in several other states that we will be launching in. As part of the partnership Big River Telephone will be promoting the Localtek services along with the associated state portal, intially Missouri.me. Localtek will also be promoting Big River Telephones business Internet services to its customers.
With a long history supporting the communities they are in and with their place in the upcoming rural broadband stimulus and drive we could not of found a better partner to work with. They are targeting the exact same customers we are looking to support and help.
As part of the initial launch they have scheduled a seminar at the Career and Technology Center in Cape Girardeau for September 29th. I will be speaking to 2 groups of businesses (125 people per group) on how to help bring their businesses online and compete as broadband continues to penetrate deeper into America. In a nice twist Big River Telephone is promoting this event with TV commercials, Radio Ads, and Billboards as well as online advertising. The cost is only $20 if you are in Missouri and want to attend.
To hear the radio commercial click on this link web-advantage-radio-spot
WOW.
Moving forward with a mission
Congrats.
Have you thought about spending some money and upgrading to Missouri.com or trying to partner with State Ventures with their better domain name? Doesn’t seem to make sense to put a Rolls Royce engine in a VW Jetta?
Sounds like the beginning of an exciting new venture – congratulations Bruce.
Congrats Bruce, glad to see big things happening for you so quickly!
@Developer
I am breaking my rule by allowing an anonymous comment but a couple things.
1) I want to truly thank you for the compliment on the rolls royce engine, its only gonna get better too. I am not being sarcastic with a thanks, wanted to make that clear before #2.
2) I cannot find a reason to pay a million dollars for less type-in traffic than I can get for a minimal amount of marketing effort. I know that we as domainers do not like that but its the truth. I like to think bigger than the name , its not about the extension. We talk to businesses everyday, I can tell you not one has cared that their ad is on .ME, as a matter of fact most of them actually have said really good things about .ME . So we are building a business and not an extension. We actually have a customer that has specifically said that they are getting many more clicks from their ad than expected but their site is not built to convert them to customers, that tells you that an ad on a .ME is converting just as well from a click standpoint as it would of on a .com. So if i can market properly and get the traffic needed and not have to pay the million (24 million for 24 states) why would I do it?
I do not want to sound condescending, but it is possible to build a successful business with the right marketing plan without the .com. I appreciate what you are saying with your comment but with what it would cost to acquire we can do much better putting that money to something else, we have already proven that.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say a bit about that. One of these days I will actually do a post laying out exact numbers, just do not want to do it just yet.
@Xf @Frank @Michael
Thanks much for the support, this is just the beginning. I have a feeling there may be more announcements to come very soon:)
Bruce,
Proud of what you are doing dear!
It’s what’s in front of the extension that counts – always :}
As far as I know the MSA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_metropolitan_area doesn’t include extensions :}
Keep doing what your doing and if it ain’t broke ……….BREAK IT! congrats, Cate
You probably won’t post this but here goes…
1) I don’t see any unique content with Missouri.me. For what reason are visitors visiting your website, and if they can find the exact same content elsewhere, why would they return to your website? Why wouldn’t visitors just go to Topix instead?
2) A lot of your traffic presumably comes from your Twitter tweets, press releases, and blog posts. Is this good traffic
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3) With what was said above, are traffic and advertising dollars sustainable long term? What do you offer advertisers, and what do you offer visitors?
I’m all for entrepreneurship and not trying to bash but wondering how you are going to make this work.
@Developer
You do not know me well enough to say I would not post this, I am happy to answer easy questions anytime…….One thing anyone who knows me knows is I am just fine to step up to a challenge. I have stood in front of hundreds of people at a time waiting for challenging questions, had the courage to do it under my name too and not anonymously. That is the only part of your questions that bother me to be honest. The rest are actually easy and not even an issue but, and not to be a smart a** but really your questions are only being asked because you are coming from a view point that does not have all the details which in reality is not your fault since there is no way for you to know and there is alot I really do not give out even if I do post alot about what we are up too.
1) I don’t see any unique content with Missouri.me. For what reason are visitors visiting your website, and if they can find the exact same content elsewhere, why would they return to your website? Why wouldn’t visitors just go to Topix instead?
——> Its the only unique portal in the LARGE majority of the communities. The news is aggregated to them, and there is more than just Topix there. Free classifieds, free email which is being used more than I actually expected. Plus you have not looked at all communities in the network. There are plenty with unique stories. In reality the large majority of sites on the web aggregate news, how many people do you know that go to the ap or reuters site to get their news, I do not know of any, they go to other sites that use the AP or Reuters for their news. One thing you are not aware of is we actually spent much time with real users, non tech people, non domainers, in otherwords the actual users, before we did anything. As much as there is stuff we still want to add and make easier, in the end the large majority of this is based on feedback from real people before we even started.
2) A lot of your traffic presumably comes from your Twitter tweets, press releases, and blog posts. Is this good traffic
—-> This is VERY much wrong, nice guess though but our Twitter traffic is minimal, we did our first press release this week, and if you think my blog posts put any amount of traffic that matters to Missouri.me you would be sorely mistaken. We have real physical people that interact with real humans in real places talking about what we are doing and getting people involved in our efforts. BTW for reference, in Linn Missouri last month we had over 72,000 pageviews. Its a town of around 1,500 people. And we are just getting started. Our marketing efforts really have more to do with grassroots community efforts than twitter or blogging.
3) With what was said above, are traffic and advertising dollars sustainable long term? What do you offer advertisers, and what do you offer visitors?
—–> Yes the dollars are sustainable, I have been in business a long time, for several years I actually focused strictly on business development efforts working with startups building out next gen technology networks. I have seen the mistakes people make with one hit wonder deals and thats not what we are building. I have answered in previous posts/comments/etc what we offer and it has already been proven to work by real customers calling us and telling us it works, telling us they are getting calls from customers (that is NOT a joke, we have had a few in just the past week). To make the point even more we had a customer sit in our sales meeting to tell people why we are different and our value, we do MUCH more than just Missouri.me and that part alone is enough to build a business on.
Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about our value again:)
I am glad your second piece of the comment came in, I was initially a bit rougher in my response and edited it:)
I appreciate the support of entrepreneurship, and am glad you clarified that, but between my partner and myself we have A LONG history of successful items to work from (my partner is not interested in having his story out there but I can say he has a 100 percent track record of success building multiple businesses).
I will say it again, its about vision and not about the name.
I want to be clear, the only issue I have with your questions is that you do them anonymously, your questions are actually good even though you are asking them from an uninformed viewpoint which is not your fault at all. You should ask them with your name and not be afraid too.
Hi developer,
I like .com’s too, but I think I dont even need to check that its already taken or would need tens thousands to purchase, its not a feasible suggestion. Missouri.me sounds just fine to me. You have to be brave enough to brand your product. I can see lots of branding potential for missouri.me It could be branded like “My Missouri” where the .me extension would be ideal.
Ever heard of a site called craigslist.org Did they put a ferrari engine in that junker too? lol
Branding, word of mouth, and an excellent product has propelled it to one of the most valuable websites on the internet!