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.

Surprise Traffic To A Domain Name From An Unlikely Source

Recently we acquired a medium sized town / city .COM on drop, I think it slipped through since some people call the city one thing yet the official name is another. I chose to pick the name up because after doing some research (one of my employees used to live in an adjoining area) I determined the official city site plus other governmental sites all used the name of the city plus the word city in their domain names. As luck would have it though they developed the .ORG which makes sense for them.

Now, as you know I make my living from developing alternative extensions and have not had any issues doing so but the occurrence I found today was actually quite interesting, forget all the discussions about traffic leaking to the .COM if you develop something other than a .COM. That is something that will be a discussion for the years to come and really cannot be argued, the only thing that can be argued is how much.

But how about links being pointed to the wrong place, link leakage. Now, as I say that there is no way for me to know if that is what happened here but from what I can tell no major development happened on this domain name. I had it parked for a few months but never really checked where the traffic was coming from (yes it gets type in traffic)  but recently I put a small development on it, to be honest it was just a place holder site until we got ready for the next step but when I went to check if there were any terms ranking yet I noticed something. Several hits from the local police station website.

What happened? Well I went to the site and found the link is pointing to the .COM , I have no idea if the intention was to point it to the .ORG or not. But what I did find looking through Archive.org is that the site was registered back close to 2000 but was really just a link site with a few links to local businesses, looks like a local had it but then let it go and a domainer picked it up on drop along the way.

So it is possible that the link was meant to be to the .COM but I am thinking I am possibly getting link leakage rather than type in leakage this time around.

The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web

OK, so The Reason Newspapers Are Going On The Web has been something landing people on my blog lately, several times actually, but the post they were landing on did not really outline the reasons so I thought I would do a quick 5 bullet point list of why. By no means is this the full list but here are several, feel free to add more in the comments section:

• Their customers are using the web, since the mid 90s people have had an option for where to get their news and this shift is happening faster than ever. The Internet is not just for the tech-savvy crowd and as people look to cut costs why pay for news when there are 1000 different options online for free.
• People do not want to wait until tomorrow, there is no need too. Newspapers have to print stories  on physical paper and then deliver them, their deadlines are typically early in the morning that day which means that you are waiting at least a day before you get a news story to the doorstep. People are use to instant gratification these days. Real time news is here , no more need to wait and with Twitter and Facebook it is only getting worse for the legacy news industry.
• Based on the two reasons above it becomes about money, even though the newspapers, almost as a whole, have failed to find a way to be successful online it is where the money is. Online ad revenues, although weak and shrinking in some aspects, have been stronger than offline revenues during the downturn. The money is online, newspapers have to figure out how to work online. Most have not.
• The old model has a much higher cost then the new model, bandwidth and servers are cheap compared to printing newspapers and delivering them. The newspaper industry had to see this but kept holding on hoping it would not catch up with them. It has.
• People have more options now, when the only news sources were TV, Newspapers, and Radio there was not as much competition. You only had a few voices to choose from when it came to opinion or real news. Well with the Internet, love it or hate it, you have thousands, millions even. People want to find someone more like them. Community would be the word.

To my normal readers sorry for the repetitive post, I know I have hit on this before but I wanted to give people coming in from search something.

There are many thoughts on why the newspapers are dying as well. Feel free to give your opinion.

Yellowpages Marketing Ripoff

I am sure the Yellowpages has been doing this for years but I wanted to warn small business owners as they open their mail in the next few days as I had two other people mention this to me today unsolicited.

I have no idea if this is being done because they are desperate to sell paper print ads or if it is something they have always done or if it is something new they are trying for another reason  but as a person who sells advertising to companies I took major offense to the way that the Yellowpages sent their mailing asking for payment on an "order" I had made. Now keep in mind I have had the Yellowbook people visit but never the Yellowpages and have done posts about the Yellowbook visit. But in this case, and I threw it away or I would post it verbatim, the Yellowpages sent a mailing out too, as far as I can tell, all businesses in the area and I am sure a much larger area than that, asking for payment for an ad order I had placed....Ummm never placed.....

Well guess what, there was no order, by any of the other people I talked to either. Now from the marketing side I can see what they are trying accomplish, I am not naive and I do understand the value in positioning a letter to make it sound like the customer must sign and act. I get it!!!

But also, the goodwill that gets dimished by positioning like this, basically by either a) feeding on a customers lack of knowledge of marketing techniques, or b) a customers lack of time to read through what was sent, is just sickening to me.

The first person that mentioned this to me today is a very smart businessman, a long term restaurant owner who has seen it all and he almost signed it and sent it back, in effect agreeing to an order he never placed but he would of been held responsible for. Why, because he was busy and did not have the time to review it in detail, luckily he had sat it aside and decided to review it later.

After he read it he figured it out quickly that the letter was basically saying that buying send this you are agreeing, etc but in reality no order had been placed. Imagine how many people actually sign this and just send it back because they do not understand the way this scam is setup. And I do consider it just that, a scam. It preys on those that do not have the time or understanding of what is being pulled over on them. Sure I know these people should be responsible enough to watch the contracts and orders their business signs but when something like this is received from an authoritative company many small shops will sign and move on. It just is what it is.

Well, it sucks, it is wrong, and I can tell you as more people realize that the amount of print Yellowpages being actually used is dropping at a faster rate everyday people will stand for it less.

If you want to quit receiving the Yellowpages visit YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. I do not get paid for anything on that site but did help them with some of the marketing for it, to tell you the level of interest by people to know longer receive the print Yellowpages they had 165,000 sign ups in one year with ZERO paid advertising....

Domain Newbie Having A Taste Of Success

This past year I met a person who had been around domain investment enough to understand the value of it but had not really got to  the level of understanding that makes it a profitable enterprise for someone. He is one of the people I referred to in an earlier post about people new to domain investment.

After registering some names and asking for advice a few times and then having me push back several times saying keep reading, keep researching, do not buy another name until you do X,Y, and Z he now is starting to have some success, maybe not on the selling front but at least on the monetization front.

One of the first things he did was he stopped randomly hand registering names. He now uses Bido.com to watch for keyword rich .COM, .NET, and .ORG names and focuses on names that have some level of search relative to the size of the industry and focuses on keywords that generate high PPC.

One of the other ways he has had much success in picking up several VERY nice registrations is by using the Geo.Godaddy.com tool I discussed in an earlier post about using the Geo Domaining Tool. Using that tool right can be a gold mine, I may have to slow him down now though since I might want those names for myself:)

What is really nice is to see he is setting goals for himself now that he is understanding more about the industry, that shows focus, that is how you get where you want to be. Find success, focus on what made that success happen and grow it.

His next step is understanding how to position properly when cold calling or emailing end users. His first contact did not go well, he focused too much on "domain name" and not on the value to the end user. Without explaining why something is valuable it is an uphill battle trying to sell it. He knows this now and is focused on creating his end user email template for moving forward.

Just thought I would relate a potential success story, maybe not on a large scale, but at least on a small scale, of someone that is just starting to focus on generic domains and making progress even in this market.

10 Offline Ways To Promote Your New Website

Whether you are looking for ways to promote a new small business website or a major web development project it is important to find ways to promote the site, although search engines and targeted PPC advertising help drive traffic it is very important, especially for local small businesses to promote their sites on a  day to day basis as their storefront on the Internet.

Too many times I have sat with a business and they talk about having  a website but then talk about how it has never had any traffic, in other words it was a  neat thing to have but they never thought of it as a way to connect with customers or promote their business.

Here are a few ways to promote your online presence with offline methods:

Business Cards - Plain and simple, the standard business card is a standard in business, if you do not have your website listed on the business card you are missing one of the most effective ways to promote your site. I have seen this to many times, someone has a website but you look at their card and sure enough it is not there. Having your domain name in your email address is not enough, make it clear where to go to find your business online.

Take Out Menus - If you are a restaurant do not miss the chance to promote your website on your take home menus or even on your table menus. If you are a business in the area of a restaurant that has take home menus ask if you can buy space on their take home menus for your logo and website. It works, people take these home and stick them on their fridge and see it everyday.

T-Shirts - If you happen to have a business where a uniform is used or have had T-shirts printed up for various reasons make sure you stick your website on it, I have seen people have their phone numbers, addresses, hours, basically everything you can think of on it except for their domain name. A large portion of people focus on remembering the website name these days not the phone number. They can get the contact info from the website.

Billboards - Same as above, more people are looking for the website to go to more so than a phone number these days. A person I spoke to just tonight who is a very non-tech person said he even realized today that he realized it is now the FIRST thing he looks for and never pays attention to a phone number any more on a billboard. If you have a website and have bought billboard advertising do not miss the chance to promote your online billboard (website).

Newspaper and Radio Ads - Lets face it print media is dying a slow (but quickly turning to fast) death so why miss the chance to promote your online presence if you are still advertising in print media. You know people are heading online, make sure they know where to find you there. If you are advertising on radio same thing goes, people are tuning out ads more and more on radio, make sure you get in your website name so they know where to find your online presence, they are more likely to remember that than just about anything else that you may say.

Magnets - Want to keep your logo and site name in front of people hand out refrigerator magnets in your place of business. People use these to hold up pictures, menus, etc so it is a constant reminder when they go to the fridge.

Letterhead - Many small businesses still use letterhead to send business letters or promotional letters on a daily basis. Take advantage of this to get your website in front of the customers or partners you are promoting your message to with your offline paper mailings.

Car Stickers -Window stickers are a great way to get a site and logo in front of people, I see these daily and they are very cost effective to get printed up. Why not get your site name in front of everyone while you are running to get groceries are heading out on a sales call.

Banners - This is something I have used personally, I see many small businesses on a day to day basis that have banners in front of their place of business or in targeted highly visible locations in their area. Most are missing this chance to promote the place people can go to find out more about them, their website.

Team Sponsorships - For years one of the ways local businesses have shown their support for a community has been to sponsor a little league team or maybe the all star soccer team in their area. Think of the value you can get if you give more than just your business name on the jersey and instead put your site name. People are watching their children run around the field for hours at a time, why not keep your site name in front of them.

I am sure there are many others but these are some top ones I have seen used and in many cases not used enough. If you have other creative ways let us know in the comments section.

Personalized promotional items with your company logo and contact information is a great way to promote offline, especially when you give away a products that is useful to people.

Newspaper Circulation Continues To Fall

No surprise here, but it was reported today that newspaper circulations continue to decline and in the latest report they were shown to have accelerated their pace of eyeball loss even faster. The overall drop was 10.6 percent in the April to September period, even when the economy comes back full force these numbers will not be made up. Print is done.

As a geo domain owner and developer this is something I work with customers on and help them understand the marketing implications to them. Although in many cases there may still be a need to use the newspaper for a piece of their marketing, if small businesses does not start to make the move to a combined marketing strategy taking advantage of what they know and what they do not know (online advertising) then they will be left behind and talking about how the Internet is responsible for causing their failure when in reality it was their failure to change the way they market their business to match the times.

A bit of interesting news in the report was that the Wall Street Journal actually grew slightly and has surpassed USA Today as the widest circulated print newspaper in the USA.

For a list of the top 25 newspapers and the rate of their circulation drop check out Top 25 Daily Newspapers.

Find Geo Domains With Geo.Godaddy.Com Is Addicting, Useful, Expensive

As everyone was putting out stories on the impending launch and functions of the GeoDomainMap search that Godaddy.com was putting together at Geo.Godaddy.com I held off saying much although I had several people email since they know I have an affinity for geo domains.

After spending some time with the tool I must say, I personally think Godaddy did a great job pulling together a tool that both mades it easy for them to sell more names and for users to search more easily for niche geo targeted names. We all know local search is growing, with that it only makes sense that locally targeted names will become used more frequently by smart business owners.

My initial thought after digging around a but was this is addicting, I would pick a state and then pick and area then zoom in and out on different niche markets and was amazed at individual neighborhood names popping up. Knowing some of the areas I was searching it was impressive knowing just how small some of these neighborhoods actually are. I know it is just a geo targeted database but with all the talk of hyperlocal this or that, this takes it one step further when searching for domains that target at the hyperlocal level. I could sit here for hours if I did not watch myself.

Which takes me to the next comment, if you are not disciplined this could get very expensive really quick. 50 states multiplied by X amount of cities, then go down to an even more local level and then pick any niche and you get my point. My advice, if you are going to use this tool pick a niche and do not start buying names in every known niche around every city and every state. I am going to have to really watch myself on this one. As I have worked to get my portfolio to the quality over quantity structure I want this would make it easy to go back in the other direction. In other words it probably does not make sense to buy a CityNameLawyer.com if the town has 50 people but the name just happens to be available.

All in all though I think this is a great tool by Godaddy. As much as domainers like to bash Godaddy at times I think they got it right this time. Although us geo owners might be cringing just a bit....

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