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.

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).

MO.com Entrepreneur Blog Interviews Missouri.me Founder

Wow, now how is that for a domainer interview title, state code .COM owner interviews .ME state name founder, we thought it was neat.

Brian Null, a fellow Missouri resident and owner of MO.com reached out recently to talk about the launch of Missouri.me, MissouriWine.net, and other projects of mine like this blog.

I thought, heck, how fun would it be to have Missouri.me interviewed on MO.com , which for those who may not know, is the two letter state code for Missouri.

Thanks to Brian for taking the time, he actually did a great job asking me questions that I had not answered before around investment and social media.

Brian was a pleasure to talk to and I look forward to meeting him in person soon.

You can read the interview at Bruce Marler - Show Me The Entrepreneur

Missouri.me Gets A Facelift

When we launched our favorite Missouri website we knew the community pages really needed to have a much different look than the very front page of the site. The site is all about the communities and our front page really did not make it obvious how to get to those communities. It really was just a mix of community information.

We knew we wanted to do something different with the main Missouri.me page but we really were not sure what, keep it simple or make it a content rich page. After much discussion and talking with some customers that we have go to know well we decided the keep it simple rule would win and as of today we have that in place for the main page of our site now.

The community pages are all the same for now although we have many changes planned there as well (already have implemented a few performance enhancing changes).

We will be adding some content to the main page later but not until we know we can keep the same clean look we have now. Take a look at Missouri.me now.

On a side note take a look at the Local Search vs. White Pages story as well, the numbers behind the decline of White Page acceptance is mind boggling.

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

Building Brand Awareness Pays Off

One of the toughest things when starting any business is making sure people are aware that you even exist. In the domain investment industry that we are in we do tend to focus on the online part of our marketing efforts (SEO, search marketing, etc) but we sometimes forget that word of mouth is still one of the best ways to gain traction for getting real business done.

We have focused hard on making sure we have a mix of online and offline awareness campaigns and we are starting to see the results. Our account executives have been hearing more and more comments like "Oh yeah, so and so talked about the website you did for them." or "I just submitted a classified the other day on your site".  Those seem like small little comments, but when you are a new business that is gold. People are talking, it spreads and if you have  produced results it gets even better.

This week we have started to get unsolicited requests for various products that we offer. Once again, that comes from people hearing about us and passing our business cards around, etc. What really has made us feel good is that its not just in one community, it has been in places hundreds of miles apart.

What does this mean to my domain investor friends? It means do not overlook the the value of having offline ways to build awareness of your business. The Tour of Missouri work we did is paying off, the various seminars we have done are paying off, plus a myriad of other things that we do that we do not necessarily discuss are all coming together to help us grow our business that all started with one domain name but is now much more than just a name. The value is now the business and the brand.

Back And Inspired After First Media Event for Missouri.me

Well, yesterday I made it back from following the Tour of Missouri for the week, as mentioned in previous posts it was a large marketing event and press event for us. The results far exceeded our expectations and I could probably come up with blog topics for a month from the one week of travel and the experience we gained from it. Do not worry though, I will keep it to just a few.

One thing that was very nice to see was that in two different stops I had domain investors come visit our booth, we were working hard to cover the event but I made it a point to get some domain discussion time in, its not often we get out in public and meet in such an ad hoc manner as domainers so it was absolutely great to meet some the people that read my blog and talk with them about their perspective on domains and how they build their business from them. What I found most interesting about this was that new domain investors are still coming in. Even though the economy has shrunk many peoples budgets people are still looking at ways to get in. One thing that was great to hear from both individuals I ran into was the focus on quality rather than quantity. I think the recent comments by fellow domain bloggers and myself are starting to resonate with new people coming in. This is great news for all (although not necessarily for registrars...).

Next thing of note, I gained both major respect for some media organizations but also lost it for others. Excluding some of the top TV media organizations we had the same access as anyone else in the "media pits" as I liked to call them, also had access to the free food and gifts each city gave each day to the press (note to self, that does not mean its calorie free). But it was funny seeing legacy media teams feel entitled and not hustle for their position, it was the web centric folks that were smart about their access and made sure they got in position first. Seeing old-school newspaper photographers have to fight for position when it was obvious they normally had the upper hand was actually quite entertaining and became a nice discussion point between ourselves and some others.

We actually had the first videos and pictures up on some days at Tour.Missouri.Me, in a couple cases we had pictures and videos up within 10 minutes of the video being taken. We made it a point to be raw and uncut, that had been our plan initially (to put out pictures and videos as fast as possible)  but after discussing with a few other cyclists and one of the media representatives from one of the teams it became even more apparent that would be the smartest move. Well, it worked, one of the team press officers actually pulled the team owner over and said "Did you see what these guys are doing, its like an AP news feed except faster and its pictures and video."  We are new at this obviously, but to get compliments and kudos from these people who deal with the press everyday it was pretty cool stuff.  It was also nice to be in one of the team cars (Thanks Team Type 1) and be sending out tweets with pictures from the car real time.

Another nice thing was seeing the amount of links and comments we got from other websites, at the beginning of the week we had actually put together a Google Adwords budget to drive initial traffic, by mid week it was only 20 percent of our traffic/pageviews just based on links from other cycling sites and traffic from type-ins and search engines (another note, galleries of podium girls on sites do well in cycling events).

And for the biggie for us, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder of Missouri took a liking to us early and our story. During the Ste. Genevieve stage 2 start we had the opportunity to meet him and talk a bit, we discussed the fact we are cyclists and thanked him for supporting the continuation of the event (a whole other story). We informed him of the link we were adding to our site to directly contact the governor to petition for the event to be held next year. Well, the rest from there on was great, he pulled me aside on stage during a stage a couple days later and asked how traffic was, and indicated he had been telling everyone about Missouri.me and asked me to connect with his staff to discuss further what we were doing. Obviously something we are very excited about.

Back to media organizations, I read VeloNews.com daily, it was actually quite fun to sit in a Paneras in Rolla, MO and chat with them while they posted their pics and stories on their site (which is the de facto cycling news site on the web) while we were sitting right there with them posting on ours. The Internet has changed media, although we all realized it before, once you realize that the newspapers are still working on getting printed for the next day, and the TV organizations are trying to figure out what 30 seconds to show, we were posting 10 stories a day and getting traffic because of it. Velonews is the best of both, they have the top cycling news site but also have their print magazine. It was nice to see them working hard to get their stories up fast (although we did beat them a couple days on pics).

As a fan I gotta say that it was nice to get to actually spend some hang-out time with some of the guys I watch in the Tour De France yearly, that alone helped us get exclusive access on team buses during the event and get some video and pictures others did not. Not something we really expected but it turned out great.

After all the effort was put in to put out behind the scenes pictures and videos it was nice to see the reaction across the web, we could see links popping up on various high traffic cycling sites, some nice comments on a few actually stating that Missouri.me was the place to go for fast coverage which was interesting since we had never really covered an event before, looks like guerilla reporting may actually work..... What is even better is the more than 80 posts (and dozens of videos on YouTube.com) we made stay as content and the links created from other sites stick around as well, content is king.

As far as the marketing side of the event, we handed out THOUSANDS of brochures to people coming to our booth, had great reaction from people across Missouri and a ton of people asking about when we will be launching in their states. The water bottles we passed out went quick, probably could of had a thousand more or so but we exceeded expectations so no need to dwell on that.

Well enough rambling, just a lot of stuff in the head rolling around after the past week, and as luck would have it we just signed a new intern on today that graduated with a journalism degree from a top University, more reports to come.....

UPDATE: Funny little thing I just noticed, I was watching the Versus coverage of the first day of the race which I had recorded on DISH, the first couple minutes of the coverage has me in it next to the Team Type 1 team car with my Missouri.me shirt on, free logo branding:) Got lucky:)

Tour Of Missouri And Organizing Statewide Media Coverage and Marketing

Wow, what a day! This may of been the strangest day in my professional career, I am not sure ever in my life I have worked on such a diverse range of items. That said I gotta say I loved every minute of it and have appreciated the chance to learn new things as we prepare the logistics around covering an international sporting event such as the Tour of Missouri

After a slight snafu by the organizers of the event we were able to get back on track with our plans and are very (VERY) happy with the exposure we have on the Tour website, for an example of what we worked out with the sporting event organizers check out : Stage One Tour Of Missouri Details . We were able to get that on 4 stages that we are in the Health and Wellness expo that follows the Tour. The site received 330 million pageviews last year and indications are the stage detail pages are some of the highest trafficked pages. Great exposure!

The day started with a customer sales meeting, then a partner training session, then the day was more diverse by the minute, I had a great call with one of the people that was most inspiring as my interest in Geo domains developed, David Castello. If you ever have the chance to talk to him take it. Great insight and a good person to boot. I want to thank him publicly for taking the time today to discuss monetizing geo domains and domain investing in general. After that though the Missouri.me team did everything from shop at Lowes to get materials for the booth to having THOUSANDS of pamphlets printed up at Office Max, then separating our water bottles into groups for each of the stages we are in the expo handing them out at.

After all that was done we worked until 8:3o tonight working with the organizers of the press side of the Tour to prepare for the Press conference on Sunday that includes State Government officials and international cycling professionals, for those not familiar with the sport, the type of teams we are covering in this race are the same teams that race the Tour De France, half the team that Lance Armstrong rode with this year in the Tour will be racing. This is my first ever time managing the reporting of an event and to add coordinating a marketing event alongside it the stress has been a bit crazy but ever minute has put a smile on the face. To have the chance to do this is a great thing for any new website and especially one that is focused on a statewide portal such as ours.

The challenge is now making sure we have coverage during the stages, at the booth, in the press conferences post stage finish, and people doing interviews with the cyclists. Oh yeah, the stages normally start and finish 100 miles from each other going over back roads that you never see any other time.... And then it is quickly off to the next hotel and do it all over again the next day.

For us though its a chance to promote Missouri.me and create unique content that will help promote our community sites in the towns that the race goes through. We look forward to posting frequently on our Tour reporting site (to be launched tomorrow, late but still on time to do what is needed, and promoting the unique content to the cycling community that we also know well). We luckily were able to recruit some extra help and were able to get the press passes needed to give to a freelance writer that we will be working with that happen to know the sport.

I must say if a year ago you told me I would be getting ready to sit in a press conference REPORTING on an international event and covering cyclists that I watch year after year in events I would of said you were crazy. What a difference an idea and a year can make!

Press Passes, Free Water Bottles, and Offline Marketing for Missouri.me

The Missouri.me team are just about ready to go for our offline marketing promotions at the  Tour Of Missouri international cycling event. Although this post may not be specifically domaining related it should help those of you that are launching geo domain related sites think creatively when looking at ways to target offline marketing efforts.

If you are not a cycling fan or really your experience with road biking is Lance Armstrong its pretty likely you are not familiar with the Tour of Missouri, the race is the second largest stage race in the USA only behind the Tour of California. Last year it drew somewhere around 400,000 fans and onlookers and many went on to attend the Health and Wellness Expo held at the end of each stage which allows sponsors to promote their business with a booth and free giveaways, etc just like any other tradeshow.

Well, with Missouri.me being a statewide community focused site we had been trying to determining what the best event would be to do a statewide "feet on the street" effort for offline marketing. With my operations manager and myself both being cyclists it did not take us long to figure out how to take advantage of the Tour of Missouri event. This event draws teams from around the world, these are not your average everyday cyclists you are griping at as you drive down the road, these are the same riders that ride the Tour De France. This event draws viewers from all over the world.

First off for the marketing and awareness side, we have purchased a booth at the expo at the end of the stages in:

St. Louis, MO

Cape Girardeau, MO

Jefferson City, MO

Kansas City, MO

If you are going to be in state you should come visit!!!

We purchased these specifically to give us statewide coverage so all of our efforts did not just hit one piece of the state. Now for the fun part, we ordered hundreds of water bottles with our logo on them to handout to fans and attendees. This is a brand awareness campaign for us and knowing how athletes like runners and cyclists use water bottles we know these will be in their bottle cages for a year to come, we like our free reusable water bottles. We also have some other handouts planned as well and will also be in the booth to discuss various cycling rides throughout the state in the communities we are in.

What is even better is that our logo will be on the Tour of Missouri website which had 330,000,000 pageviews last year based on the exposure the event gets. Thats right, you read it right. Plus our logo will be in the Tour guide which is distributed for the week prior to the event and also it will show up in a few other media kits that will be handed out. All in all, considering what we put together to do this its quite a value.

Now for the next fun part, based on the fact we are an online media company we also have obtained press/media passes to cover the event like any other media or news company would. We are in the process, it's not quite ready yet, of launching Tour.Missouri.Me where we will be posting videos from the stage route, providing interviews, and posting general stats, etc as we report on the event. For us this also allows us to promote our community sites with links from the cycling posts to our community sites. Once again, tying it all together is key. Having people actually in the press tents and press conferences will allow us to network with other media companies and grow awareness as well.

There is plenty more going on but as you can imagine there is still much work to do to pull it all together, exciting times and the work is well worth it to be able to go state wide with one event.

If you happen to be in Missouri during the race feel free to contact me and we could meet up during one of the stages at our booth or somewhere along the way. Now I am heading out for a ride, albeit at a much slower pace than these pros will be doing.

LocalTek Launches Innovative Internet-based Advertising Solutions for Rural America

First Market Launched Serving Over 1,000 Communities in Missouri

August 03, 2009, Desloge, MO - LocalTek, LLC, an innovator in targeted advertising solutions, announces the launch of a new, internet-based advertising medium focused on small and mid-sized businesses throughout rural America.

LocalTek was created to provide targeted marketing solutions to businesses throughout the United States and also provide a local online resource for rural communities. LocalTek provides cost effective web development, advertising, and targeted online marketing packages that virtually any business can afford.  Targeted marketing solutions that normally come from three different companies can now be provided by one single source vendor, LocalTek.  LocalTek brings services to rural America to let businesses compete with large corporations who have strong search marketing resources that would preempt small local businesses from competing effectively online.

LocalTek's online resource web portals will utilize the state name and the newly released ".Me" domain name extension for various markets in America. The first portal recently launched by LocalTek, Missouri.me, is currently serving over 1,000 communities in Missouri.  For more information about the new .Me phenomenon, please visit www.domain.me.

"LocalTek's new approach to on-line advertising will transform the way businesses are able to cost effectively market themselves and attract new customers," said Bruce Marler, president and founder of LocalTek. "After working in corporate America for the past 15 years but still living in rural America, it became obvious that local businesses were not being offered the chance to compete fairly online. We created LocalTek and the Missouri.me concept to level the playing field. Missouri.me allows each and every community in the state to have their own online presence while LocalTek's web development and targeted marketing services provide value that cannot be matched by traditional advertising only firms, newspaper, and even radio".

Additionally, LocalTek has plans to launch service in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

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.

About Missouri.me

Missouri.me provides a local, online resource web portal that contains news, weather, free e-mail, classifieds and business information for most communities in Missouri. Headquartered in Desloge, Missouri, Missouri.me is a LocalTek company currently serving over 1,000 communities in Missouri with sales and marketing operations in over 114 counties.  For additional information, please visit us at www.missouri.me.

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