Hyperlocal Online Media Acquisitions Heat Up
With the hyperlocal/community based approach to news that we have built on Missouri.me we have already started to witness the community involvment we had hoped for start to happen in various towns across the state. In those towns that either community leaders or community networkers have started to post we get additional content plus the goodwill that comes with the citizens no longer having to fight the battle to get their story out.
As many people have seen this push for hyperlocal news has caused a bit of a stir in the legacy media world as well as sites that focus on online media as they fight to determine the proper business model to approach this type of news model. As much as we love our citizen journalists on Missouri.me we also know that it does take time get these people involved on a community by community basis and as such we have not focused purely on them as our news source. And I think overall the model in the industry will be a mix of local people reporting what they consider news alongside legacy media writers doing true research journalism for indepth stories.
All that said, there have been some great stories come out this past week and month about this, here are a few stories you in the Geo domain space, or online media space in general may find interesting or useful.
I normally try not to do posts filled with links to tons of other stories but these were interesting so decided to loosen up for the day.
Hyperlocal News a $100 billion dollar market - FastCompany.com This is a great read, if you have any interest in localized/geo domains read this.
Everyblock.com Acquired by MSNBC.com - TechCrunch.com
Jeff Jarvis Creates Spreadsheet to Save Local News - TechCrunch.com
Local Yokels - Hyperlocal News Sites
AOL Buys Two Hyperlocal News Sites - AllthingsD.com
And one story about print media continuing to fall on its face (to put it bluntly): Readers Digest Goes Bankrupt
What To Do With All That Hyperlocal Online Advertising Traffic
Hanging out here with Patrick Ruddell from ChefPatrick.com and thought I would put a post out before we head out for a little fun this evening. Actually had typed this post on the plane but for some reason my Apple iPhone Wordpress app decided it did not want to save it after I typed it up flying down.
Anyway, on to the info, one of the great things we have had happen, and I have alluded to before, is that after the launch of Missouri.me we have had customers calling to tell us they have customers coming in or calling that found them online. Thats the best validation you could have as a business, what was even better was one business actually told the yellowpages sales person they would not be spending on an ad this year based on the success they were having with their marketing package we had created for them. All great news but lets get to the bad part, enough happy talk all the time. Well we will end up with happy...
We had one customer contact us stating they were concerned because we had sent traffic to them but they could not figure out how to convert it to customers. They basically were stating we had done our job now they had to do theirs. As much as I love the fact they were happy with what we were doing at the end of the day I want them to benefit from the clicks they were receiving from us. We sat down with them and discussed their site, etc. At the end of the day it was determined with the business they are in they really need some form of call to action. What I really like about this is the fact that a business that really focuses on offline type of services gets that they need to take advantage of their targeted traffic. They have made the determination they need to put real focus on building their web presence around more than an about us. Good for them.
We will be offering them services to help them with this working along side their in house marketing team. From a domainer perspective they also are now very interested in acquiring domain names in their niche since they are getting the targeted traffic concept, nice for a legacy marketing team to pick that up.
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
Second .ME Geo Domain Name Launch Moving Forward
Well our first sales meeting is behind us, we filled a room with our full time sales team and a few agents that will be working with us to bring us customers. One thing that we did a little different to make a point was we actually had 2 CUSTOMERS at our sales meeting. Thats right, normally an internal sales meeting has a bit of dirty laundry that gets aired, but we were so confident that having real customer feedback would be great we invited a couple customers. Talk about giving a sales team real feedback, real time and validating what will work and what will not.
Well we had a bit of a surprise acceleration in our launch plans for state #2, we had a couple people targeted in another state that we had previous experience with and due to various reasons we were able to bring them into our "world" a little faster than planned, they made plans at the last minute and made an 8 hour trek to come to our sales meeting to make sure all was as it seemed and then signed on to manage marketing and sales for another great Geo .ME domain name. I am not announcing the state yet but we expect the intial site to be up within a few weeks and their work to start right along with that. My experience with these two individuals is long and their abilities are as good as anyone you are going to find from both an operations and sales perspective (I hate to admit it but I may of learned a thing or two from him.....). Exciting stuff.
I have had many requests in the last week for various partnerships, domain offers, etc. I will say that I am interested in partnerships on quality geo names but we will be very selective as the last thing we want to do is get distracted by a partership that may not have the sales and marketing legs behind it on the other side. With our own names we control the sales and marketing efforts and have a plan in place. Many of the partnership requests are something quite different in that our platform is what is being used while the other side will be the sales and marketing leg, that only works if they truly have that experience.
Oh yeah, a reminder, StilettoSandals.com will be on Bido auction next week:)
Domainers are a Great Group – What a Week
What a week, this past week was basically planned to be a week I focused on marketing more than anything else and things really worked out well. We made a major push to get our sales and marketing materials ready for our first company sales meeting next Tuesday and at the same time began prep work for the nationwide press release that will be going out next week. Although I tend not to give the nuts and bolts of what we are up to out to much we did start to talk more about the true focus of our efforts more than before.
The bido.com chat was great, that was the most I have typed in the shortest amount of time ever I believe, great questions from folks and I gotta say I was a bit nervous going in just simply because as much as I will never bash .com and know that .com "rules" at the end of the day I just as much believe there are times you can build something on a non-com that is just as valuable and successful. We are proving that everyday. I was expecting a bit of a bashing on Bido but it did not happen. I appreciate the open minds people had as it pertains to someone proving that with the proper extension and marketing you can do something unexpected by many.
Then, I also must thank Natasa from the marketing department at the .ME registry, she posted twice this week on their Facebook page about Missouri.me happenings and also posted a story on Exploretheworldof.me . Great stuff, 1800 .ME fans were able to see what we were up too on Facebook alone not even counting the blog post. On the Facebook page topic, we just recently launched the Missouri.me Facebook page and broke 100 fans rather easily and look to be going up daily. I expect to do some marketing just for the Facebook page soon as well. What I really like is that there are quite a few people joining from around Missouri that were not even connected to myself. That likely means they are joining from the Missouri.me site itself. Great!
We also completed our press release and worked with the team at Business Wire to get it ready. I had a very solid source put our release together (he has previous done marketing for companies worth hundreds of millions) and I must say it turned out nice. As much as I like to write in my blog it is still weird to see quotes in a press release from me, and even weirder to think I actually said them:) Its going nationwide Monday, look for it. I have done press releases in the past for some of my sites just for SEO reasons, this is the first time I have done it for any other reason than that. Based on that I spent the money on a top notch release service and distribution. It was more than I was used to doing at PRWeb but all indications from friends of mine that focus in that area are that this is the service to use, get what you pay for type of thing.
Another great note from last week was a partnership I hope to give more info on soon, the dates have been set for a launch of a partnership between ourselves and a technology partner that focuses on delivering Internet and phone service to a large swatch of Missouri and several other states that we are in. This will give us a market penetration that we did not expect to have for several months.
There are quite a few other things that got closer to final stages this week as far as marketing goes, we had great talks with the Tour of Missouri folks and I really am looking forward to combining business and pleasure with that event. We also are close to finalizing some TV commercial production agreements (through a surprising barter that is a blog post and story unto itself someday) to get our brand in front of people.
And then the biggie as far as the domain world is concerned, the DNJournal.com story. Special thanks to Ron Jackson at DNJournal.com for doing a great job of telling our story. I am still a bit in shock and humbled to say the least from the amount of emails and calls from domainer friends and more importantly people that did not know me before the story. It was quite awesome to say the least. I have been in or around the domain community for sometime but never really was to involved socially and actively until this year just due to time/focus on the "day job" but to see the support he community gives to new blood was a great thing. Its appreciated, wow is all I can say. Good people:)
Direct Selling Ads on Geo Domains
Had a hard time selecting a topic for a post the past several days because there is just so many good things happening its hard to focus on anyone. But thats not a bad thing, activity is good, and even better when results are coming from it. Thats one thing anyone in sales management will tell you, there are alot of people that like to talk about all their activity but at the end of the day if it does not turn into real dollars at the end of the day its still just activity. This is one of the hard things for people to realize, they think being busy means productive, but that is not necessarily the case. I know quite a few people that work alot less hours than others but have a higher close rate in the short time they work. Which is better???
Anyway, this post may ramble a bit, its really just some thoughts and notes from real world experience dealing with end users, not over the phone either, we are talking real face time with real businesses large and small. I cannot give all the secrets but I will give some thoughts, many of these are things that people that have been selling for years should know but things that you may need to teach more junior sales people:
1) When building something new there will likely be a validation phase, there are a couple ways to handle this a) you can soft sell for a period of time before actually positioning for a sell, this means passing out pamphlets to people or other such things or b) you can anticipate the types of questions you may get and when you go into talk you answer the questions before they even come up. Its important that you have confidence in what you are doing and WAY MORE IMPORTANT that you have examples to back it up. I personally go in with examples, I do not like to actually sell anything, no snake oil needed here, I like to show examples of results.
2) On the marketing side of things you need to pay attention to what is going on in the communities around you, if you do not have feet on the street in those areas this can be a challenge. Especially for something statewide, in my case since I happen to be a cyclist I understand the value of the only statewide event in Missouri, the Tour of Missouri. Without going into all the details around the race I will say that 400,000 people attended some aspect of the event last year. We have plans to use our knowledge of the sport and do something interesting. More details will come later on that.
3) Think strategically, its smart to have various ad types on your site so you can help all businesses no matter what the budget but for those customers that can get the most value from high quality ad spots make sure you keep them available. Its important for both your visitors and the advertisers that you put the right types of advertisers in the right spots. Unlike shotgun advertising in other media formats, target Geo ads are actually a valuable service when done right.
4) Price your product right and don't get greedy. This is a problem most companies will have as they start to see success, they will want to raise the price to high. Thats a mistake. Offer something at a fair price that provides something that is useful and everyone wins.
5) Its ok to be friends with the people you sell too, but you still need payment. This is a business, unless there is something bartered then you need to be paid. Nuff said.
6) On the bartering topic, starting a business requires a lot of stuff (technical word) and when a lot of the work is grassroots theres a lot of value in bartering for grass roots access to people. We are doing this in many different cases, make it fair though, people can see if you are not providing equal value.
7) Train your people, every startup thinks they are too busy to take a day out of the field to hide in a room and lock everyone in. Well, lets see, if you can get 5 more sales a day because you took the time to train your people properly I think that one day was worth it. We have our first sales meeting scheduled in a couple weeks, a full training session, catered, the people will leave with all the materials they need. This is good for the customers and the people because now the customers will be able to understand the full value of all the products offered.
Partnerships are probably the most valuable component of it all, if you can find the right partnership that can accelerate your growth without cause issues with delivery make it happen. We have one in process that is going to ramp us up faster than we could of imagined, its a complete joint marketing effort. But you cannot just pick any partner, they must be synergistic with your needs. We have that in ours, we could not of found a better partner (my past life allows access to several large companies that fit right in what we need, sometimes stars align). They already have us scheduled to speak to 2 very large groups of business owners in a conference center, they are paying for commercials, billboards, radio ads, and other offline media to drive people to an event about why targeted online advertising is the most effective way to advertise now. More details to come on that as well.
Anyway, thats probably enough for tonight, and before you think this is specific to something like we are doing here you would be wrong, most of the tips above relate in someway to any sales and marketing effort for a startup.
Please don't yell at me for being disorganized or off topic:) I was in the mood to write and needed to get a post moving before my focus shifted to a new topic, special thanks to Tia Wood for moving me forward:)
Making Partners out of Customers and Upselling Value
It has been a great couple weeks since making the decision to focus full time on my online projects and specifically my Geo projects. One of the problems many businesses have when initially launching is focusing on quick, small deals to get money in the bank and losing out on what can be larger opportunities to either create a partner out of your customer or in some cases not go after the quick deal and create a larger opportunity by focusing on ways to bring additional value to your customer.
This is the type of thing that keeps me up at night while bringing new people into the business that is my focus today and I am sure this is what keeps many small business owners awake, will the feet on the street be able to recognize opportunities for what they could be and not go for the quick buck on a smaller deal.
We recently had a customer that we went and presented too, the original opportunity had been for a single ad on a single page but when researching the business it became evident that they would benefit from a larger regional ad and we could ad even more value by creating a network of sites that added even more value for the potential advertiser. Based on this we created a proposal that was several times the original deal but the impact on the customers business was even larger. Based on this we won the deal. So what was a small deal was now a large deal.
Based on us spending the time to create something specific for this customer (that is repeatable for other customers) they perceived enough value and goodwill that they are now bringing us into their customers to present our solution, they are now a true partner and will help us grow our business and really become extra "feet on the street", thats the best reference from a customer you could ever get.
The point of all this, if you are selling advertising on your website make sure you think of the larger picture and create real value for your customers, at the end of the day they may become your best partner and the most cost effective sales team you could ever imagine.
I Own Almost 50 Percent of the United States
OK, so funny title I know. As many of you know I am a big believer in the Geo domain space and have been continuing to make investments there, this week I have increased the square mileage owned signficantly. I now am owner of 23 US States in the .ME extension with several being picked up this week in the .ME auction. There is a plan behind this that I will be releasing some information on soon, here is the list of states I currently own:
Ohio.me
Illinois.me
Arizona.me
Michigan.me
Arkansas.me
Louisiana.me
Mississippi.me
Alabama.me
Kentucky.me
Tennessee.me
Virginia.me
Delaware.me
Connecticut.me
Pennsylvania.me
Utah.me
Idaho.me
Wyoming.me
Kansas.me
Nebraska.me
Iowa.me
Wisconsin.me
With the fall of old school newspapers I believe Geo domain owners are sitting on the opportunity of a lifetime. Its time to develop and turn Geo properties into real thriving online businesses. I look forward to sharing my plan for this in detail (with examples) in the very near future.
Yahoo Search Results Matter For My Minisites
I very seldom focus on checking my Yahoo search results for my various minisites and developed domains and spend the majority of my time verifying Google search results. I have found that recently Yahoo has been showing certain minsites of mine in the first page of their listings causing a measurable increase in traffic and revenue.
One example of this is my site PensacolaBeach.me . Pensacola Beach is a popular tourist destination in the Florida panhandle. I knew the SEO for anything related to it would be tough up front but have had some success with certain targeted terms but did not expect to rise to the front page of Google (or Yahoo for that matter) for quite some time for the term Pensacola Beach.
I had noticed that mid last week the traffic had went up and that revenue from Google Adsense was also increasing. I took a look through my Statpress statistics and also my Awstats details and figured out that the term Pensacola Beach had increased in the common keywords driving traffic. Looking at referrers Yahoo was now referring a solid amount of traffic. I then went to Yahoo (really cannot remember the last time I used Yahoo for a search) and found that indeed I was in the first page of listings for the term Pensacola Beach.
This is good news for a few reasons, the obvious is that the SEO work that has been done for long tail terms has also paid off for the primary term I expected to wait longer for results on (I just started the development in January). Also, for you .ME fans, with the results I have had so far I cannot complain about developing this on the .ME extension (more details coming on .ME and SEO in the interview I am posting Monday).
I know that it comes to no surprise to anyone that Yahoo matters, but as much time as I spend focusing on Google search results and placement I really found the amount of revenue and traffic increase I received interesting and actually worth spending sometime researching in future developments. For those that fall into the same camp as I have in checking Google only, you may find it worth the time to spend a portion of your effort verifying placement in Yahoo results as well.
On a side note, I am now only 2 sites away from having all my minisites moved over to my HostGator account. After much pain at my previous hosting provider (outages, changed configurations, DNS issues) all while paying for a VPS I have successfully moved to a HostGator reseller account and have had better performance and the support has been great.
Yes, anything ad you see on this site for HostGator is an affiliate but when it comes to hosting its gotta be right. If you are looking for a good provider or just starting from scratch you really cannot go wrong with them.
Geo Domains Locked and Loaded – Watch Your Keywords
One thing I have always found interesting is watching what people are searching for that landed them on my site. My minisites are very keyword targeted and usually are pretty predictable but many times I have found that my sites have been "selected" by google to rank high for certain terms I did not necassarily expect and by using this data I can sometimes find solid hand registered domains that I may not of found otherwise.
With the recent launch of this blog I have found a very interesting search that has started to send traffic my way. Recently I posted about Newspapers Closing. I have been a fan of Geo domains for sometime but with the recent fall of old school media I really think the time is now for Geo domain owners to fully develop and take advantage of the opportunity at hand. One thing that really drove this point home has been a term that has been driving many visitors a day to this blog.
That term is Newspapers Closing, at first I did not think much of it but then started thinking, the public has changed mindset enough that they are searching online frequently enough that it would show up in my keyword results. A quick check of the google keyword tool shows small results for this term but in the past 3 days I have had more visitors for this term than the big G shows for average search volume on this term for a month.
As more and more newspapers close their doors people will be looking for alternatives online. If you own a Geo domain it would be a smart move to be that portal. I will be posting in the near future on content that is freely available to develop your Geo domain to provide the content that people are looking for each morning when they sip their coffee.
So, even though this post is focused on why I think a specific term is valuable for Geo domains, the point is to pay attention for trends in the data that you have in your keyword stats. It could be valuable....