Yellowbook Disposal Ideas Anyone?

Well, it is that time of the year, and I am not talking about Christmas. It is the time of the year I receive lots of useless paper colored yellow and filled with local business ads. Although I know there are still many people that use the legacy yellow pages people are rapidly moving away from using the yellow pages and have moved to using mobile phones and the web in general to access information on local businesses.

Recently the government even gave permission to telecommunication companies to no longer have to print the white pages. Why? Because of the use of mobile phones and the internet. Phone numbers are either unlisted or people are simply doing a quick search of online directories and finding the business or person they are looking for that way.

I came back to the office today to find no less than 5 yellowbook's on my desk. I can honestly say I cannot remember the last time I opened a paper phone book to find a business. That is a common theme when speaking to people about local business marketing these days. I understand that the yellow page companies have to continue to distribute as many as possible to keep their circulation numbers looking good, that does NOT mean people are actually using them though.

Any thoughts from anyone on what they think would be a great way to dispose or use them? Lets see how creative you are, leave your response in the comments if you think you have a creative way to use these or dispose of them.

Facebook Deals Coupon Simple To Launch

Although our LocalTek team has spent much time taking a look at various ways our local business customers could use Facebook Places and Deals it was not until today that we decided what promotion we would offer once we claimed our Facebook Places page.

If you are a local business owner Facebook now makes it easier to claim your Places page by adding an email associated with your domain name to your Facebook personal account, submitting your information, and then they review it and approve (or not). Once this is setup you can submit Facebook Deals for review and inclusion in your page.

As Facebook Deals usage is free it was a no brainer to offer our potential customers a special if they checked into the LocalTek office, since much of the talk with customers these days is around mobile and social we decided to offer something that combined both as a special, we offer a free mobile website with the purchase of a new small business website if the customer checks-in to our Facebook Places page on their mobile phone.

After your submit your listing you have to wait for approval, but it took less than 4 hours for us to be approved for our deal after a quick setup.

Although there are mixed opinions on merging your Facebook business page with your Places page (one of the main things you lose when doing this is any landing page you may of built separate from your business page wall) for our local business we have determined that we would like to merge our Facebook page with our Places page. We have over 660 "likes" on our page and having those combined with our Places page makes sense for us as we would like to have our Deals available to see for all of our fans.

Whether you need a company like LocalTek to help you setup your Facebook Places  and Facebook Deals or if you have someone in house to do this it only makes sense to take advantage of this free service Facebook is offering. With more than 500 million users spending an average of 55 minutes a day on the site take advantage of this marketing opportunity instead of delaying.

Go like our Facebook page now to see what deals we offer in the future, you can see our Facebook page here, feel free to Like it : Facebook.com/LocalTek

You can see our Places page here: LocalTek Places Page

As mentioned, soon they will be one and the same, the Facebook Deal we setup is on the Places page for those looking.

Target High Conversion SEO Rankings

One of the things I see come up over and over (and over) again when people are discussing various domains and developments is that websiteA.com does not rank well in Google for the keyword websiteA, I thought I would explain a bit about why this is not a good way to judge rankings, because in reality 99 percent of the time you do not know what someone is trying to rank for unless it is a very small site with a single keyword targeted.

This typically shows me that someone is not familiar with the targeted marketing that is possible with SEO, and specifically how important that targeting is now that local search is growing faster than ever and will continue to become more important with the growth of smartphones and location based services.

Legacy advertising methods were not targeted, based completely on the number of eyes balls that may look at an ad in a newspaper or magazine during any given time frame. With search marketing this model is no longer the proper way to look at advertising, or traffic.

Twice lately I have witnessed people saying that Missouri.me does not rank for the term Missouri. Well you may be surprised but I could really care less. What I care about is ranking for very targeted terms in regions we are focused in promoting our services. We work to rank for terms that bring targeted visitors that will convert better for our customers.

We are not a Missouri tourism portal, if we were I would focus on Missouri and terms surrounding Missouri tourism. This post is not about Missouri.me but it gives me an example to work from that came up a few times lately.

Its not about the broadest term to bring the highest amount of traffic at all times, in many cases its about ranking for the terms that bring the BEST traffic that provides the most value for website advertisers.

With local search growing at a better than 50 percent clip local targeting is more important than ever. This means SEO for localized terms becomes more important than ever so those local businesses are found when customers are looking for them, or in the case of portals, that the highest value customers are finding the website when looking for a particular thing.

This post is not meant to be a knock on people that questioned rankings, etc but really to help people understand a bit more of how they should approach site developments and the targeting of the SEO around it.

Foursquare.com and Why Local Business Should Pay Attention

I have been using Foursquare for sometime now and have recently started to see quite a few more people start to join the fast growing social/location based game/app/service. With most of my attention being focused on local search for local businesses and local online advertising on Missouri.me, apps like Foursquare pique my interest and I like to watch their evolution and the way people use them as they evolve.

It is important to not necessarily watch how the early adopters use them since they tend to be power users and their day to day usage will be much different than the mass of users that come in later and are less techie. When I see my wife using Foursquare everyday I start to see how people will really use the service and the power that small businesses will have if they use the service to help draw people into their doors.

The past month (with one of the examples happening today) I have witnessed a couple examples of what will start to happen as the general consumer starts to come online with apps such as this. There is no need to go through all the hype around Foursquare and all the huge projections since all of that has been reported on virtually every tech site in existence so I would prefer to talk real world examples of how it draws people in.

First example is a restaurant in the town Localtek is based in, Spokes is the name of the restaurant, this is a place that I visit on occasion when friends are there. Recently while I was checking into locations on Foursquare I noticed there was a "Special Here" banner at the top of the Foursquare iPhone app. If you click it you could see that Spokes was offering half price burgers to the person that is the Foursquare mayor of Spokes (Foursquare has the concept of Mayor for the person who checks into a location most frequently plus a few other requirements).

So what happens? I start to go to Spokes now because it is a competition to try to get the mayorship, it should be noted I do not even necassarily eat burgers when I go there but based on the competitive factor I start to go so I can check-in. I am sure the special will change at times so why not go for the mayorship so I get future specials.

A little special like that and I show up, and I am sure others have as well. And when people show up to eat at a restaurant they typically bring more people. It all starts to add up. This is a simple example, but this is in a town of less than 20 thousand people. This is not a large city with a huge base of technology focused people. This is rural Missouri and people are taking advantage of this. There is a base of right around 2 million users on Foursquare and I am already having to fight for mayorships.

Now you start to think about local coffee shops offering half price coffees or other specials for mayors, or maybe a restaurant offering something to people who are mayors elsewhere to try to get them to come to their restaurant instead of the other and you start to see some of the power.

Another example is something that happened just today, my wife, daughter and I were in a mall and they were running into "chick" stores so I was browsing a bit. I happened to notice another "Special" banner and it was for a small watch kiosk. You could unlock the special by checking in.

So what happens, I go check out the watch kiosk and since I checked in I got a free watch cleaning. Small stuff but now my wife and daughter start browsing. As you can imagine other consumers will do this same thing and this will drive additional purchases since people show up for the free watch cleaning. What an easy and great way to drive people to stop at a kiosk most people would just walk on by.

These are just a couple examples but as you can see this is something local businesses will have to watch and pay attention too. With apps on both the iPhone and Google Android based phones based on location launching everyday and those with disposable income being the ones most likely to have them it is no longer possible for a business that has been around for dozens of years to ignore the shift happening to local online and in the mobile world.

Foursquare is just one example. Watch as many more come to market as people figure out new and unique ways to tap this new technology. For those of us in the tech world it may not seem new but until recently there was not a true way for local businesses to be able to tap into this marketing channel.

Addicted To Foursquare

I have to admit, I have an addiction. No it is nothing that will cause me to drive drunk or have to go to rehab. But instead it is a game that ties together two of my favorite things that fit right into my businesses forte', social networking and location based services.

The game is Foursquare.

I first have to say I am not much of a game player, it is not that I do no like games, I just do not have much time to play them. But Foursquare is different, it goes to the core of what I do everyday, I interact with people on social networks and I travel place to place, oh yeah and I get to compete with my friends and others to see who can do all that the most. Did I mention competition? Yeah that is what got me hooked, I hate to lose, people say I am overly obsessed with winning. I am pretty sure I have an addiction to checking my score to make sure I am ahead of the people I work with daily.

Now, as fun as it is there is always a business angle. As someone who spends time thinking daily about what is happening next as far as social media and local search and how this all plays together for revenue opportunities I have seen the future and it is tying location based services that are inherently mobile into revenue through various advertising mediums. Add social media, stir and you have success. Exact recipe and mix yet to be put on paper:)

I had been keeping an eye on Foursquare since it really started gaining momentum last year but had not jumped in until a couple months back, it did not take me long to get why it is taking off. Other than the competitive nature of it as more people come online it is nice to walk into an area, check-in and see what friends are there.

What is really strange is I can remember working on various location based services while at Lucent back in the early 00's and thinking of the potential but at the time the infrastructure was just not there to take it to a level that was usable. It is amazing how much the iPhone along with ubiquitous mobile broadband (ok so there are so gaps but in the whole scheme of things coverage is ok) has done as far as taking us to the next steps of how we use the internet.  Wait until the iPad embeds itself in our daily life.

OK, time to go check-in somewhere and become mayor. You can sign up and play at Foursquare.com

BTW, to see a smart idea to get people moving on Foursquare check out the Foursquare Day Facebook page.