Social Media + Mobile Search + Local Search = Success

If you have not read all the news about social networking sites being the future of how we access information instead of search engines then you must not be reading what is happening in the online world around you. I will help you with the relevant news articles in just a minute.

One thing I think people are missing sometimes is how the BLEND of mobile and local search along with the easy access to Facebook and Twitter on a mobile phone is making it an absolute must to have a plan on how to integrate all of these technologies together when you plan on promoting a product or service. The future is now and if you are not using all methods available then you are doing an injustice to your business promotion online.

For those that may be social media doubters and who do not realize that many people use search on their mobile phone before typing in a name (and I have not even mentioned visual search and verbal search) suddenly search is all that matters at times, be very careful basing everything you have on type-in traffic. Facebook has 350 million users and bypassed Google for traffic during the Christmas holiday, do you think Facebook is going somewhere? Yes they are, UP!

The people using Facebook (and even Twitter) are not typing in domain names, they are taking a friends recommendation without even looking at the site name. Sure the domain name is important for branding and I would never discount that, and for search an exact match name helps, but when all you are is a link hidden behind a URL shortening service that is not quite as important.

If you are still hiding in the dark and believing this change is not coming here are a few great articles to read:

Why Facebook PPC is Crucial

Why Is Google Afraid Of Facebook

How Social Media Helps Website Marketing - My own example of usage.

Social Media Impact

If the stories do not show you what is happening then I cannot help you. This does not mean that you should not have a website with a great name, but the people growing up with the Internet today do not use it like those of us who had it come to be during the midst of our lives.

If your only plan is to buy a great domain name and wait for the type-in traffic to come you may be surprised at your competitor coming up behind you and using the power of social media to drive more traffic that has been recommended by a trusted peer network that converts even better.

Use all the tools together and success can be yours, ignore the holistic marketing approach at your own peril.

2+2=5

How Social Media Helps Website Marketing

One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.

With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.

In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.

Well, I was wrong, WAY wrong.

Here is the number of visits per day:

Jan 18th (launch day, partial day) - 239

Jan 19th - 246

Jan 20th (partial, data as of 6:30 or so CST) - 155

Do you think that could of happened without the power of social media, and in this case I can see that Twitter was the larger portion of that?

The answer is no, to launch a new site in such a competitive niche as local search would of been a long process. I cannot wait to see what happens as new writers come on board.  A special thanks to George Pickering again for his commitment to contributing to the site, just wait until the blog gets put into the mix at TargetAudience.com which will have real small business owners reading it daily in their feed, nice name George is working with there, cannot wait to see how that goes!

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?

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....

Local Search Review From 2009

As someone who spends the majority of his time thinking about local search and all things that pertain to small businesses taking advantage of all that the web has to offer I was absolutely overwhelmed by all the information linked to and provided in this great 2009 year in review post at SearchEngineLand.com:

SearchEngineLand.com Local Search Review

There is so much information linked to in that one article you could spend a week reading and analyzing it. We all know that geo domains are primed for success after the failure of newspapers and legacy media and Google is becoming the default "Yellow Pages" of today. 2009 will go down as the year the shift started full bore.

I highly recommend reading the story in the link and taking your time to read a good portion of the links within it.

New Website Advertising Fail

One of the themes that seems to come up fairly frequently when we talk to customers about their current website or plans for their new one is the lack of a plan for promoting it.

So many times we have spoke to customers and they indicate that they have never really thought about promoting their website, they buy it with no idea of what they are really going to do with it or how they can promote it to bring people into to see their message. This really came to mind today when we passed a billboard for a customer of ours who we had done a re-branding effort with and created a great looking new logo, a really nice e-commerce site and some other items that would help them move from their old image to new.

The customer had asked us to do this work for them so they could move forward on some other promotion initiatives they were working on that involved some offline marketing (billboards and also signs around their office complex). We did not have our hands in that part but I wish we had now.

My wife saw the billboard today, now keep in mind my wife is not a tech person, at all... But the first thing she said was "Why do they have their phone number but not their website on that new billboard?".

Good question.

We actually send out promotion tips to customers and give tips and advice but at times there is work done that we are not involved in, as mentioned above this is a case of that. As I mentioned in previous posts, more and more I hear people tell me that they do not even look for phone numbers on billboards or signs but they look for websites (DOMAIN NAMES).

Why?

Well, it is because they can go get the info they need from the site. Sure you need the phone number on there, but you also need your website on the billboard, driving people to the website allows a small business to promote more of their companies products. I would venture to guess most people can not remember 7 or 10 digits but most will remember a few words (I wish I could remember the book I read this in, but it was tested and proven).

Anyway, we will be reaching out to this customer just to let them know that they should also include their new website in any new marketing push that they do.

If you are looking for ways to promote a website offline check out my post called 10 Offline Ways To Promote Your New Website.

iSupportServices.com Launches NorthCarolina.me and Business Support Services

Localtek is proud to announce a partnership with iSupportServices.com, the company owns several state .ME names and after the success of Missouri.me had interest in using our state Geo development platform for the launch of their state names and also extend the partnership into other areas where we provide rural small business services.

NorthCarolina.me is the first of the states to launch, over the coming months iSupportServices will be working directly with small business customers to support their technical and marketing needs and we are proud to be a piece of that solution.

Here is the press release that went out today:

iSupport Services, LLC
Chris Poer, 877-228-9002
cpoer@isupportservices.com
www.isupportservices.com

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.

Final Thoughts On The Affiliate Convention

Today was the closing day of the Affiliate Convention and I must say it was an absolutely great experience. Sitting with some of the top affiliate marketing people on the web the past few days along with some of the top SEO experts was absolutely great. And if you ever want to hear a person that is passionate about their business listen to the President of SEOmoz talk.

I am wore out so this post will be a bit random but here are some thoughts:

First off thanks to Victor Pitts from Moniker for interviewing both Morgan Linton from Domainvestors.tv and myself for future shows on WebmasterRadio.fm , the interview with Victor today hits on alot of the topics I have discussed on my blog lately so I hope you find it interesting.

One thing that was said over and over again as we talked to some of the convention promoters here and some of the top affiliates was how close our two industries are and how little we interact at this level. There is a lot both industries can learn from each other and the past couple days of interaction showed it over and over. If you want to learn more about monetizing your domains I would suggest going to the Affiliate Convention in Denver next year.

Today I spoke in the AM on a panel with Jamal Haque from Though Convergence, Victor Pitts from Moniker/Oversee, Jon Waterman of Findology (moderator), David Duckwitz from Citizen Hawk (and also a founder of CJ.com) the topic was New TLDs and Domain Asset Management.  There were some good conversation with the audience after the talk as well.

There was an absolutely incredible discussion about Whitehat vs Blackhat SEO that was just simply amazing (have I emphasized that enough?). Listening to the discussion around what Google can and cannot do compared to they actually say was pretty nifty. And hearing someone that plays the pure Whitehat game go back an forth with people that are willing to go a bit more towards black or grey was very entertaining. One of the best lines ever was from Patrick Sexton of SEOish.com who said "I am a drunk lazy ba***** who just wants to wake up in the morning have more money." Basically he was explaining how doing SEO right will help drive continuous traffic to your site. I also saw him speak the day before concerning other examples of what he was done, he is absolutely great to watch and listen too.

I really think the free concept around the show was great, the sponsors want people there so it makes sense to offer the show to free for attendees to the sponsors get their value. Daron Babin who is Co-Founder of WebmasterRadio.FM said it best when he said that someone should not have to pay to get the information they need in a convention like this. Very cool.

I also want to give a shout out to Kevin McKim of DnUrls.com and Bob Olea who owns Oceanside.com , we all hung out and had a great time. Bob really led a lot of the questions in the last session of the show. He was asking what a lot of people were afraid too.

In the next couple days I will be posting some videos and pics of the Affiliate Bash after party where Morgan, Jason, Victor and I got to watch Digital Underground do the Humpty Dance. Awesome party!

Do You Still Read Print Magazines and Newspapers?

Sunday afternoon I was spending a lazy day around the house (we all deserve one) when I realized I was holding the devil in my hands, I was actually reading a print media magazine. One of those old school things that we had before this Internet thingy.

Obviously there is a major shift happening in the news and print media world that everybody could see coming except for the people actually in the middle of it. That shift is the accelerating move of people reading news, opinions, and everything else online. As much as we that live in the online world would like to believe that everyone reads online the major move did not happen until the last couple years and it is accelerating every quarter, and this is not just due to the economy. The shift is here to stay.

Well, in reality I have only ever subscribed to the print newspaper for maybe a total of 6 months, this was around 1995 or so. Pretty much directly after that my news world started to come from media sites online. But I always continued to subscribe to several (ok probably 10) print magazines because for some reason I found them more useful than print newspapers. News is real time, much of the articles in magazines were more story and research based so real time did not matter as much.

Over the years though I have continued to shift until I got to the point where I subscribe to only 2 print publications, those are Wired and Fast Company.

Those 2 magazines are my 2 favorites and I think they still have very good, interesting, and forward thinking articles. I really wish Business 2.0 was still around since that was #2 only to Wired for me.

Anyway, I am sure over the next year or two I will likely quit subscribing to those as well and move completely online.

As the majority of my readers are from a pretty tech savvy online crowd, do you still subscribe to any print magazines or newspapers? How much longer and if you care to share what are they and why?

NOTE: After I wrote this Cate sent me a link to a great story that has about every link you would ever need to understand the shift and what it means. Thanks Cate!!!! I have reading material (online) for awhile.

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