SEO From a Mall Kiosk???

Recently I was at the West County Mall in St. Louis and ran into something that could only be described as amusing.

After leaving the Apple store I noticed a kiosk with a screen rotating the services the company offered, typically I do not pay much attention to these things but in this case as the screen switched from home computer setup, wireless networking, and other mundane services to something a bit more complex and something that was quite funny.

The company was asking if I wanted to be found on the first page of Google. Did you know you could buy local search engine optimization in a mall???

Since I like to instigate a bit I thought it would be fun to quiz the person in the booth about getting my business found on the first page of Google. My wife thought it best to walk away before it started for some reason...

After the person first did not even know about the sign that had just flashed that the company he was promoting offered such services and local SEO he then tried to sell me on coming to my house to setup my internet (I would of paid a million to hear him say interwebs). I then asked again as the slide flashed again, even after I had already explained my company did online advertising, web development, and we helped businesses get found online he asked if I needed a website.

I was done having fun at this point but he did then continue to tell me that "Josh" was good at this that or the other, literally everything on the board from anti-virus to local search was his "specialty".

So, next time you are in the mall beware of search engine optimization from a kiosk, but then again, maybe you can have your spyware removed at the same time.

I’m Still Alive!

Just read some comments over at MorganLinton.com asking where I had been and what was going on with myself and where I had went too. I use to post once or twice a day and I think my last post was in April so I can understand why people would be asking. I have been talking to many of my domain investor friends by phone and email in the background and they know what has been up but after reading the comments on Morgans site I thought I better put an update post out.

Well, I am still here. I just have not been blogging the past couple months based on a focused effort on getting our new staff up and moving and many things that been going on for our localsearch and online advertising business at Localtek. My blog posts would be lacking in quality if I had been posting the past few months so rather than put out daily posts that were not of quality I thought it better to not blog for a few months while getting people ramped up and moving.

At the same time I started focusing on getting myself back to the level of fitness I was at previous to starting the business. Previously I had been doing marathons, triathlons and other endurance events. After starting Localtek I changed drastically and had set a date directly after the Domainer Mardi Gras festivities to get myself back in shape.

We have had many great things happening for the company, we have our own radio show now (every other Wednesday on KREI 800 AM in the area I am in) and also have started to have articles in print media even. A local magazine (one of the few stable areas of print media is localized magazines) has started putting articles in monthly. We have been fortunate to have companies that would normally consider us competitors to realize that we can all work together to help each other.

Also, we recently moved offices, we are now at 119 E Columbia in Farmington, MO. The new space is over double what we had and is quite amazing actually and is in walking distance to my favorite coffee shop and restaurant (to anyone that is my friend on Facebook you would know those as 12 West or Bauhaus Kaffee).

As far as the fitness has went I have lost 42 lbs and have completed a triathlon and some running events since getting back into it and have another triathlon planned for July 18th. Anyone that knew me before starting Localtek knows how important biking and running and staying active is to me. It is nice to be back at it.

This week alone we have 5 seminars we are giving to local businesses, 4 in Kentucky which will be recorded and played on a local TV station as an actual show and then one in the local area we are at during a Chamber of Commerce meeting. These seminars really help to educate the masses on the importance of using technology to help their business now that the yellow pages and other legacy methods of business promotion are faltering while online becomes more important than ever.

Luckily the team that we have now has ramped up quite fast and I expect to be back to regular posting with even more info than before soon.

Our Own Radio Show And Growing Momentum

People like to say "Isn't it great when a plan comes together?", well in the past few weeks every time I feel like the momentum has hit a peak I continue to be proved wrong. Sometimes that really is not a bad thing.

Since we started bringing on more resources and starting making plans for the next set of hires we have really started to see what happens when we implement the plans we have laid out to investors (and to ourselves for that matter).

In the beginning of the Localtek and Missouri.me launch we had worked towards bringing on specific types of partners that could help us launch into regions where we currently did not have a presence. That plan is taking shape and after our seminars in Dexter, MO we have a new telecommunications partner who has 118,000 subscribers and multiple states where they are located. They are already planning additional seminars to help us push our services out to their business customers.

What is best about this partner is they started working with us based not on us approaching them but on the recommendation from current customers and partners. As  a company that just launched last year we are very happy to have partners such as this coming on board and supporting us in our growth plans.

In another surprising but VERY exciting partnership we have starting working with a key regional player in the radio space. We are working with this group of stations to both increase their social media and search presence. It is very nice to see a company that would typically be considered a competitor to someone helping businesses be found online rather than offline work with us to prove out the holistic marketing plan we speak of. They really do get the need to tie their voice on the airwaves to their online presence and social media presence as well.

After much discussion it was decided that I will also have a voice on the airwaves, we will have 2 technology and online marketing tip spots daily along with 2 separate radio shows focused on the same subjects, this is all on different stations so we get a large market presence in a very key area of Missouri.

Very exciting and something I really look forward too. We will have the ability to replay the shows to I expect to have links to them on the blog here as they play. For our company this is really a great thing.

In other exciting news we have started working closely with the city we want to move to and have been spending quite a bit of time exploring new office space and also spaces that may built from scratch to suit our needs. The community we are moving to has been a big supporter of ours and due to this we want to move from the current city we are in and into a city that really understands how to support local business.

On that note the city we are moving too has even sponsored one of our largest seminars to date that will be given May 5th at their city hall. When a fast growing, very progressive community supports you and helps promote you to their businesses that is as good of a vote of confidence as you can get.

Now, on a personal note since I had so many emails after putting this in last time, I should be down 30 pounds by this time tomorrow, I started back on my old healthy lifestyle the day after Domainer Mardi Gras ended (Feb 15th). More than halfway there!

Localtek Hires As Legacy Media Declines

March 26, 2010, Desloge, MO - LocalTek, LLC, an innovator in local search and advertising solutions for businesses across America, announces plans to aggressively hire more sales staff and web developers to meet the growing needs of their rapidly expanding client list.

Traditional legacy media has come under fire during these difficult economic times with massive layoffs and corporate downsizing. With a consistently shrinking market share, newspapers and other forms of print media are closing their doors and causing their unemployed workers to seek jobs in an increasingly smaller job market. LocalTek aims to hire these former legacy media employees to expand the company’s thriving online presence.

“We feel that people who have experience in selling media would be a terrific asset to our company,” said Bruce Marler, founder of LocalTek. “The unprecedented growth we’ve had has led to an immediate need to add more employees to our line up.”

The surge in local search has grown significantly over the past year and with the current economic downturn many people are looking to their own community for their needs and services. LocalTek has developed a strategic business plan catering to these needs and has provided their clients with websites that have substantially increased local traffic and customers to their client’s business.

LocalTek has discovered an economic solution in its business practice by reaching out to small businesses that were previously untapped by larger marketing companies. By providing cost-effective web development, local search & SEO, social media promotion, and targeted location based services that virtually any business can afford, LocalTek is providing a variety of small businesses the opportunity to compete competitively with the same resources used by large corporations.

LocalTek’s business model has met large success and the company has been featured in international news with its innovative community portal, Missouri.me, which serves over 1,000 communities in Missouri. Missouri.me offers visitors local information about news, businesses, weather, and classifieds in their community.

About LocalTek

LocalTek provides cost effective, locally targeted, online advertising, and website solutions for a variety of business types throughout the United States. LocalTek solutions are targeted at specific geographic areas, which allow businesses to focus on the customers they find most valuable.

Headquartered in Desloge, Missouri, LocalTek is rapidly expanding its service offering in over 20 markets nationwide. For additional information, please visit us at www.localtek.com.

Localtek Launches Redesigned Corporate Site

One of the strange things about starting a company is that you soon find out that your own corporate site tends to take a back seat to customers and to direct revenue producing properties.

I must admit when we first launched Missouri.me and Localtek I had a "It won't happen to me" attitude about our own corporate site falling behind but it did, but we have fixed that now. Although I still have several content tweaks to make around local search and social media the overall redesign of our site is now complete.

Although the core of what we do as a company has not changed since we launched our message has became more clear and as such we wanted to start moving towards offering a corporate site that allows people easier access to information. I expect to have considerable more content over the next few weeks going deeper into our areas of service now that the redesign is complete.

Check out the redesigned site at Localtek.com

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).

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

Internet Marketing Seminar In Bonne Terre – Thanks Small Business Leaders!

Thanks to the small business owners from Bonne Terre, MO and surrounding communities for taking the time to come to our local search and online marketing seminar held at Mario's Italian Grill. I know that you are all extremely busy and taking 2 hours of your time after hours is asking a lot, especially when it is concerning a topic that is new to many and before the presentation was probably something you thought a business in rural Missouri may not need to be concerned with.

As you know now, it is very important to take advantage of all online avenues to create a holistic online marketing plan, from your Domain Name selection to your use of Facebook and Twitter, it all needs to work together to make sure you customers remember your brand and know where to go to find out what you are doing next, what specials you have or new products you are introducing. As I mentioned, finding targeted visitors for your website is key, understanding what customers are searching for when looking for a service or product you sell is how you focus on turning browsers into buyers. As I mentioned, no longer is having a website something you do simply because you can, now with the shift of newspaper readers and local business search moving online faster than ever you have to think about how your customers use the web even if you do not.

As I mentioned a portion of the content on this blog is targeted at helping my small business customers, as such I thought I would point out a few posts that I have done that you may find useful:

Why Small Business Should Advertise Online - Open Letter

Why Small Business Should Advertise During Down Times

Offline Ways To Promote Your Website

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page

Once again, thank you for my time and let me know how I can help!

Speaking At The Affiliate Convention in LA December 4th

I have been invited and accepted the opportunity to speak at the Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles, CA which is being held December 3rd and 4th. I really look forward to this and if you are in LA or plan on attending the convention let me know, it would be great to meet up.

The topic I will be discussing will be "New TLDs".  This is something that should be fun and interesting to put together after the experience launching a business on an alternative extension like .ME.

For more information check out AffiliateConvention.com

For detailed agenda information check the Affiliate Convention Agenda

Also, here are a few tidbits from the site:

Affiliate Convention bases its conference and tradeshow series on the idea that actionable information, business building and networking opportunities should be freely available to everyone in the affiliate marketing industry, especially to working affiliate marketers. Sporting a growing line-up of thought leaders in the affiliate and search engine marketing sectors, Affiliate Convention LA is a unique opportunity to meet and share ideas with the brightest business people in the affiliate marketing industry. Affiliate Convention is the only event in the affiliate marketing industry which gives affiliate marketers free access to the movers and shakers in the sector.

Localtek Upgrades Office Space – Moving On Up

The past two days we at Localtek have been moving into our much more spacious office space. After the past several months in our startup (translation: low cost) office we had grown out of our space and were in major need of an upgrade. We were lucky enough to find space less than a half mile away from our current location that quadrupled or pretty close to quadrupled our space. Unfortunately last night as soon as we started the rain started pouring down, still managed to get it all moved but it made it more interesting than it needed to be.

Now its time to go buy "stuff" to fill it up. Foosball table seems to be an option for the new break area....

In all seriousness this was a great problem to have, anytime you outgrow your space it is a good problem to have, it caused a bit of a distraction for the past week but that is business. Sometimes opportunities present themselves and you have to take it while you can. On another note, I had to be talked into getting office space when we first started the company, after working from home for 10 years I did not feel the need for it, I must admit I was wrong (that hurts, don't tell anyone I said that....).

We look forward to putting our big Missouri.me and Localtek Logos on the window and the big sign out front, whats great is it is right next to the interstate and very visible. After some of the things that happened today not related to the move that visibility is getting even more important, will post about that this weekend.

It was a bit tough to show the actual size difference of the office and the rooms, but to give you some idea of scale we determined we could fit our complete office space from before 1 and 3/4 times into our new reception and cube area alone before you even get to the offices and other space, and no that is not an interrogation room but I thought that would be funny until we go get the new cubes and desks to fill it up next week:) Te first few pics are the the old office, the last few of the new.

Here are a few pics:

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