Great Past Week For Localtek And Missouri.me – Just Getting Started

What a week, this is one of those weeks where I had a thousand ideas for blog posts then everything became a whirlwind and it became heads down and focus time.

First off we got confirmation on a top notch customer we had been working on and they actually purchased a multitude of services and advertising for several of their businesses, I love marketing packages versus pure advertising, it really helps pull everything together when you can do everything from the demand creation to landing page and conversion, especially when you can wrap it all up in a neat package for multiple businesses. Those deals excite me.

The other thing that made it an exciting deal is it is a multiple web property deal showing that value add properties can help win niche business along with a more traditional advertising approach on our key Missouri.me business.

Also, we confirmed (actually last week) that we will be attending the DNCruise, my wife is going although the first thing she said was "I don't have to listen to you speak do I?" Seems she gets tired of hearing me talk about domains, Localtek, SEO, local search and everything that is in my head everyday. Great job by Chef Patrick to create such a unique combination of business and pleasure.

It looks like I have another great trip to talk about in June as well, I look forward to sharing the details once I get all the details worked out.

We have a crazy next week ahead, we have two seminars to do along with a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce and economic development group in a fast growing area of Missouri who after seeing what we have done for local business has asked us to create their web site and marketing, this is the second community to do so. Great news.

On that note, I must say that I am loving partnerships with legacy marketing firms, earlier this week we had a call from a large legacy marketing firm who needed help promoting a project of theirs online. They had all the creatives worked out but really needed to understand how search and social could play a role. I see more of these types of partnerships in our future.

On a smaller note, the drop name God shown down this week and I managed to grab the few names I was after with little fight. I love those weeks, one of my employees comes from a seminar background so I can see good things for RetirementSeminars.com ahead.

We also made our latest hire this week, someone to help me on the marketing side, she comes to us with a great background coming from many years at AT&T and has great energy which is going to be very important as we move forward with our growth plans for the year. We needed a marketing coordinator but finding someone with the energy and drive can be tough to find. And why is this so important?

Well, even though I do not want to go into details, a few months back we had been contacted by some large investment firms about growing faster. Even though we did not go down that path for now we did find ways to keep things moving in the direction we would like and worked with a very solid group of investors who want to see us grow even faster in our current model. With the success we have had gaining customers and having success for our customers it was nice to see people have that faith in our plan to take it to the next level. Thanks to them, the first steps happened this past week with much more to happen in the near future. Great news yet again.

Now, on a personal note, 12 lbs gone! I got tired of making excuses and decided it was time to get myself back. The obsessiveness with being healthy, eating right, and exercising often is back.

Oh yeah, thanks to TheDomains.com , Fusible.com, ChefPatrick.com, DomainNameWire.com and MorganLinton.com for the link love this past week (if I missed anyone I am sorry).

Thanks To The Best Customers In The World

In the past two days I have had multiple deals come from multiple customer referrals. To me this is the best advertising you can possibly get, and I sell advertising. This also means as a business we continue to turn a corner into a phase of having both active feet on the street as well as having our base of customers doing selling for us as well.

One of the new customers is actually a website for a local community, always good to have the city governments or associations on board. To get the call that they have heard and seen our work and called us based on that helps a ton.

But the second story is even better, one of our customers actually had a long radio spot where he was being interviewed. During the interview the radio host actually made reference to the customers new website and ad. The customer, God bless him, actually said yes we have a new website and I want to say thanks to the team at Localtek for what they have done.

The announcer then asked for the website, instead of giving the address the customer said, well you can find us by searching for (insert several various related terms here) because after the work Localtek did we are number one on Google for all of them. Sure the radio host had said the businesses name so there is confidence that the audience will find the website anyway, but how is that for a customer that understands the value of local search.

On a side note there, I went and checked traffic to the customers site and it went up tonight and most of it was search traffic for the various terms he would want to be ranked for.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to my great customers. I know many of them read this blog and this is a public thanks for all the references we have been getting.

Few Website Visitors To Rural Newspaper Websites

Tonight I decided to do some competitive analysis comparing traffic to certain towns and areas in Missouri to the competing newspaper website in the area.

I had done this for a few towns before but this time I did so on a larger scale, I cannot say I looked at every newspaper site but enough where I could spot trends in data enough where I felt comfortable making certain assumptions.

Well, a couple things were made real clear:

• Sites that had RSS feeds and were open to syndication had more traffic than those that did not, this makes sense to me but knowing how the media industry feels about that it does not surprise me that many do not offer RSS feeds.
• In the cases that it was evident they were doing other things to promote the site (i.e .promoting it in their own paper...) there was more traffic.

Without a doubt as rural broadband stimulus pushed broadband deeper into the rural areas these newspaper companies are going to falter fast, right now the rural papers are the only ones holding steady but from talking to small businesses the desperation is even starting to be felt in the small areas.

To give you an idea of how low the traffic stats are, a really large portion of the sites had Alexa rankings of 20 million to 10 million, the next larger amount was between 7 to 5 million. VERY few had Alexa rankings below 1 million. The ones that did were major cities.

To be honest I am not a fan of Alexa rankings since I have enough sites to see how the data can be skewed, but in a case like this where the user base is pretty non-tech savvy the rankings cannot be gamed, makes for a cleaner set of data, but still not perfect, but fine for this test.

Now, what may not be clear is that many of these newspapers cover more than one county, so it is not like the customer base is only 5 thousand people.

One thing I did find is the sites that have taken the time to form community/social interactions on the site are fairing much better.

If these sites cannot figure out how to bring more than a few visitors to their site a day they will not be able to keep advertisers, it is obvious they are fighting the battle to keep the status quo and if they do not figure something out quick they may be gone faster than we expected.

It may sound like I look forward to that, I do not, as much as I am building a business to take advantage of the shift it is actually a bit sad to see an industry fall apart because they refused to innovate and I do think their will be some quality journalism that suffers because of this.

One interesting note is I found one local newspaper in a town of less than 9000 that had an Alexa below 300K but then one in a town of over 30K that had an Alexa around 7 million. Seems if you have a plan and the community gets behind it you can get traction. Small town or not people are online and broadband is coming fast.

Missouri.me Gets A Facelift

When we launched our favorite Missouri website we knew the community pages really needed to have a much different look than the very front page of the site. The site is all about the communities and our front page really did not make it obvious how to get to those communities. It really was just a mix of community information.

We knew we wanted to do something different with the main Missouri.me page but we really were not sure what, keep it simple or make it a content rich page. After much discussion and talking with some customers that we have go to know well we decided the keep it simple rule would win and as of today we have that in place for the main page of our site now.

The community pages are all the same for now although we have many changes planned there as well (already have implemented a few performance enhancing changes).

We will be adding some content to the main page later but not until we know we can keep the same clean look we have now. Take a look at Missouri.me now.

On a side note take a look at the Local Search vs. White Pages story as well, the numbers behind the decline of White Page acceptance is mind boggling.

Yellow Pages 90 Percent Discount, Really?

Just a quick post to show you how the beginning of the year is going for the Yellow Page print business. So far in the first half of January I have had 3 customers tell me they have pulled their complete PRINT Yellow Page budget and a few more tell me that if they were in multiple Yellow Page (i.e. Yellowbook, etc) they have brought it down to one.

Well, today one of our really great customers came by to tell us something a bit interesting and I am sure if any of you have current Yellow Page spend and have not committed one way or the other for this years budget you will have happening soon, he got a call from his account manager stating they are offering a 90 PERCENT DISCOUNT for this year if he commits now.

He still said no.

I am not sure what different regions are being offered this type of discount or what level of customer, but WOW.  Aggressive.

Do you have any similar stories?

MissouriWine.net Next Up For Launch

One thing many people do not realize is how the Missouri wine industry is growing, Missouri has long been one of the top wine producing states in the US (at one point grapes from Missouri were used to seed some vineyards in France after a widespread die off of grapes in France) and as of late there have been some very large new wineries popping up.

One of the fastest growing new wineries is located about 20 miles from where I am located and based on that we tend to get a lot of information locally on wine tourism in Missouri, etc.

Since we have quite a few contacts in that industry we decided it was time to start development on a site focused on winery reviews, directory information, and other content related to the Missouri wine industry. One of our writers has been working diligently putting together 80 plus articles to cover each of the wineries and we have people lined up to add content weekly in the near future, all in all the site will turn into quite the resource for people looking to plan a wine tour in Missouri.

Yes, this all works quite well with Missouri.me and really augments packages that we offer to certain types of customers.

There are a few areas of the site we are still need to finish before actual launch (the layout of the main content area of the site is NOT the final version by any means) but one of the things I am finding interesting is that we are already starting to get relatively decent traffic based on ranking high for quite a few terms. Quite a surprise based on where we are in the site development cycle.

You can take a look at MissouriWine.net, we still need to lighten up the internal site links that are there (the plugin is being very aggressive right now) and finish up the front page main content area and then finish adding the rest of the directory but so far so good while it is "soaking in".

I am looking forward to finishing this up, and sampling some of the products:)

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

Creative Link Building And A Pleasant Surprise

As a late Christmas gift I noticed today that we were getting traffic to a new site we are launching plus one of the Missouri.me city sites from a .GOV site.

We all know that .GOV links hold very high regard with Google for SEO purposes, to have one of the first backlinks to a site we have not even launched yet come from a .GOV site is a great way to get ranked well in Google from the start. We have had several links pop up from local libraries and city government sites but had yet to have one of them be from a .GOV (or at least one we have noticed traffic from).

During one of  my recent seminars their were several local government officials, afterwards I had spoke to them a bit and they had show much interest in supporting our work and push to help small businesses. Well thanks to them for showing the love with two VERY well placed banners on their site to us. It may seem like a lot of work for a couple links, but we have seen this happen time and time again and even more so than SEO benefits it goes a long way with local businesses.

Now that I think about my comment about a lot of work for a couple quality links, we did close a few deals from the seminar so I guess the links would be considered a side benefit.

Anyway, just thought I would point out creative link building techniques:)

One Year Milestone For The Brainstorming Session That Started It All

Today I was talking to my business partner when we both realized it was one year to the day since the initial conversations that lead to the forming of Localtek and Missouri.me. At the time we did not realize where we were headed but the conversations we had were around geo domains, local search, and all things related.

Yes that means we were having these conversations at a Christmas Eve party while our spouses told us to quit talking business but it lead us in a great direction.

There will be a few milestone posts I do over the next couple months and will take sometime to review some thoughts on our results and where things have headed compared to the initial concept (which is remarkably close to the original idea).

I guess this means my best Christmas gift from 2008 was a business conversation and brainstorming session that changed my life more than a bit.

I look forward to getting back to longer more informative posts after the Christmas holiday. In the mean time enjoy the holidays!!!

Speaking Today To Farmington Business Leaders

Today is going to be booked from start to finish with the morning kicking off with a seminar speaking to the business leaders of Farmington, MO. Farmington is one of, if not the (depending who you ask) fastest growing areas in Missouri. Our partner Big River Telephone worked tirelessly in promoting the seminar and once again went offline to promote to businesses that need to start thinking about how to promote online.

I must say that spending time with medium and small business leaders in a group setting like this is about as good as it gets, I enjoy every minute and some of the questions and discussions are very insightful  as they can help me (and others) understand what the people not focused on the online world are really thinking about technology.

One of the things that really amazes me is the number of people using Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I always ask for a raise of hands before I start speaking to find out how many people use each of the services. Facebook always leads, Twitter is always second, and Linkedin third. No real surprise but what I do find interesting is that the crowd is typically not real tech savvy but a rough estimate would be 70 percent of most rooms have Facebook accounts.

As I type that I also realize more and more I am seeing people not even put their website in their commercials on TV, they just go straight to their Facebook page. What a coup for Facebook....

Now, I do spend a portion of the presentation talking about proper domain name selection and after seeing the acceptance of social networking there are very few people who even understand what  a domain name is. I am happy to help do that education.

Farmington is a very progressive area and I expect todays presentation to be a bit different than others and since I know some of the people in the room this time it should make for good back and forth.

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