Monthly Archive: March 2009

Mar
27
2009

TWEELIVERING (n.): The process of using Twitter to find Business for Local Businesses

March 27, 2009

Ahhhh, Twitter. You thought Google rose quickly and then MySpace what is pulling in 230,000 users a day. The man behind the Evolution of Dance displayed that YouTube has greater distribution power than NBC, CBC and Fox COMBINED!

For the first time in history, we as the average American can truly have a freedom of speech that is entirely uncensosed and broadcast to millions. I mean it, millions.

Twitter is yet another hugely successful Internet idea. It started as a concept for an internal solution at a corporation, now Barack Obama is following me, Scott Gallagher. I know that Lance Armstrong slept well last night because he told me this morning. My clients who follow me found out this morning that I’m visiting a large Internet Marketing conference this evening. They see updates that I’m on the hill snowboarding. Do they really care? Probably not, however perception is reality. They get value on occasion from resources that I tweet about however they also build a relationship with me, albeit virtual, that is unknown in the traditional business world.

People buy People. They don’t want to be sold, they want to buy. A Chiropractor, for argumentative sake, is not much different than the chiropractor down the street, in terms of their services. However their personality is likely very different. Their patients will buy from the first doctor because of their relationship with them.

Courier service, a not so complex service. You pick up a package and deliver it on time. There are 300 couriers in Chicago. Besides branding, there is very little distinguishing factors among couriers. Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and now Twitter allow you build those relationships online and take them offline.

If you don’t think this works, ask the Industry Guru from Hot Shot Delivery in Houston. Past president of the Texas Courier and Logistics Association, Eric Donaldson tweets from his blackberry in his car (at red lights of course), office and maybe sometimes or places in his home. He has followers and building a local audience to take relationships offline to make some money from a business that is one of the oldest industries ever.

The goal is to find locals that are talking about the products and services you offer. Once you find these people, start following them on Twitter. About half the people you follow, will follow you. Once someone is following you, you now have permission to tweet them, friend them, drive them offline and market to them.

I’ll use the example of Eric in Houston. Eric should go to Twitter and do a search for ‘houston’. This will bring up all the tweets where anyone has mentioned ‘Houston’. These might be locals, but at the least have an interest in Houston. He’ll look at each of the 100′s of profiles and determine whether he should follow them. If they are active, several hundred posts, and they appear to offer business dialect, a close to 50/50 split of followers and followings with more than 50 followers, Eric should friend him. Then wait three days.

After three days, if they have not followed you, stop following them. Unless you are really concerned about marketing to them, you don’t want too many people you follow who don’t follow you. Oh, follow Barack Obama, then he can spy on what you are saying… Check out this tool, Twitter Karma. Log into this with your Twitter username and you can easily see who is following you and compare it to whether you are following them. Then make batch updates. So simple!

There is awesome third party tool to help. It’s called Tweet Later. Click on the link to check it out. This program, which has a free no credit card trial for 3 weeks, allows you to set up auto-responders. This means that when someone follows you, this system will automatically send them a tweet from you welcoming them. You can also include a link to perhaps an article you wrote, a cool tool they might enjoy or your website.

With this program, you can set it up to send Tweets at a later time, or scheduled. It is very robust for the local business to market themselves through Twitter.

A final tool I’ll discuss that I use is called Tweet Deck. It’s a piece of software that you install on your computer that allows you manage your tweets from your desktop, rather than the web based Twitter system. I love it, except for the annoying tweet sound every 15 minutes!

So, use keywords that are relevant to your geographical location, your service and a combination of both. Start following. Tweet A LOT. Make it interesting, funny, slightly controversial. Retweet others. Unfollow those who aren’t following you. Add an auto-responder. Tweet to send people offline. To an email list. Do this for one month, 30 minutes a day. You will get results.

1 comment

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/tweelivering-n-the-process-of-using-twitter-to-find-business-for-delivery-companies/

Mar
25
2009

Local Internet Marketing is solved!

by Administrator

March 25, 2009

Well, after a year of grueling work, Marketing Local Business Online is completed, at least the book with step-by-step instructions. Local Internet Marketing in 2009 is huge!

I remember considering this project almost 12 months ago. I wanted to build a community of people that wanted to listen to me. I wanted to establish re-occuring revenue. I wanted to build a group of loyal readers and followers. I wanted to build something that I love to do and will support my lifestyle for the long term. I was tired of working during so called business hours and tired of having to wear a suit, because someone wanted me to.

I decided I wanted an info-product and figured I really could only teach people something that I’ve been financially successful at. I could teach people to sales in a B2B environment, or I could teach people how to market their business over the Internet. I already own a company that serves companies servicing a local market. When asked about cannibalizing sales from the agency with an info product, I thought….

Businesses need either time or money to grow. You need to work on and in your business or pay people to do that. My agency charges over $800 a month with a minimum 6 month contract for SEO. That’s expensive man for a company generating a $1M in sales at 10% EBIT. So, what about those dentists, chiropractors and attorneys that have young web saavy employees, those interns and contractors that are paid $15 per hour. I could teach anyone how to do this, with the right framework. The local plumber can’t afford my agency, but I could teach them how to do it!

So I tested myself. I found several companies who would pay me $800 a month to teach them how to do this. I did this on my own time and learned with several successes that I not only can do this for others, I can teach people how to do this and now they’re making money. How cool.

There are 23M small businesses in America. Imagine if I could have 50,000 of those businesses reading my material, even if it were for free. I know I could monetize loyal readers and move towards what my passion has been…speaking on stage. The difference is, people now seek me out and pay me to talk. How cool!

So, there is a brief history of MLBO. It’s my third live business venture. They all work together and MLBO is my biggest passion. I just love teaching.

Now I’m just slowly promoting downloads and come September I’ll have the official launch of the video course, workbook and files, along with a member site and private and semi private coaching. Of course that won’t be free, but I assure you will be much, much less than the price paid SEO agencies and affordable even for the one man show local operations.

Exciting times!

2 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/local-internet-marketing-is-solved/

Mar
09
2009

Google’s Algorithm places heavy emphasis on Branding – Huge Update named VINCE

by Administrator

March 9, 2009

Recently there has been buzz about the largest Google update, ever. This is larger in my opinion than the Florida update in 2003 where people lost their #1 ranking – overnight.

See, many of us know how Google and other search engines use an algorithm to evaluate how pages are ranked in their search engine. This algorithm is a mathematical equation. The only human influence in the ranking is the creation of the algorithm. Google is consistently tweaking their algorithm to provide the most natural, relevant results possible.

The Florida Update 2003

Since 1998 Google won market share because of their ability to provide the most relevant results to searchers. It was the power of their algorithm where they (Brin and Page) realized that a web page’s popularity can be measured by the endorsements received from other pages, in the form of an inbound link. The more links, the more ‘friends’ that site had, the more popular that site and in turn, Google’s computers would give ranking to that site.

I’m sure daily the algorithm is being tweaked and occasionally they’ll launch an update so significant that major businesses are affected and in fact, the entire GDP of the ecommerce transacted on the Internet is influenced by this. Google holds tremendous power, perhaps more than our president in regards to influencing commerce.

November 14^th, 2003 Google’s algorithm update was named ‘Florida’. Many pages simply disappeared from their index. It appear pages that had repetitive inbound links with the same anchor text were among the culprits. Other pages that disappeared were pages with heavy repetition of the keyword in the page title and pages that served up heavy keyword density.

Pages that were properly optimized for a user, were not affected. Go figure. Point is, that update cleared Google’s index of clearly spammy pages and Google made it more difficult for the black hat guys, fortunately made my position easier!

Typical updates are just this, Google’s attempt to provide relevant results and not spammy results.

For anyone who knows my philosophies on SEO, I’m not an SEOer! I’m a marketer. Old fashion marketer who provides the democratic state we call the Internet exactly what it wants, effective quality content and solid ethical online promotion. By doing this, my clients and my sites easily outrank others. I know you know this.

The Vince Update January 18th, 2009

Did you notice a change in your rankings? Probally note too much. Check this out.

Taken from RankPulse.com, a site that monitors search rankings for 1000 keywords. When searching for the keyword [car], on January 17, 2009 Toyota, Honda and Ford were not on the front page. The morning of January 18, 2009 they we’re on the front page, all of them!

Now check out the rankings for [airline tickets]

The sites that made the jump are carriers!

Do you notice a trend yet? BRAND NAMES. Do some homework for yourselves. Google is favoring brand names.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt gave some insight into this late in 2008 where he states “The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

Another thing Schmidt hinted on was word relationships. He states “Wouldn’t it be nice of Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

Vince Update

This is a scary update. What defines a brand? How do you earn the right in Google’s eyes to define a brand? How does this affect Universal Search? How does one influence what Google thinks is a word relationship?

While there will be 1000′s of SEOers scambling and posting junk on these questions and how to fool Google into believing you’re site is a brand, I have been enjoying an increase in rankings. I have made a brand for myself. I have branded our agency and our clients for our most competitive keywords. Word relationships are the obvious.

People go on to say Google’s Matt Cutts covers their [Google's] algorithim weakness by suggesting Cutts only focuses on the obvious. To increase rankings, provide quality content. I couldn’t agree more! Whether in the form of audio, video, podcasts, Squidoo Lens, articles, blogs, references, testimonials, reviews or web 2.0 properties, quality content comes in many forms. The greater a website’s exposure and less transparency that is involved with increasing content, better relationships with the users and simply a goal to enhance a user’s experience, you will rank.

I don’t care about updates. I never will. I try to take every SEO strategy I’ve ever heard and ask…would this work in the traditional world if I were to promote my business?

Leave comment

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/googles-algorithm-places-heavy-emphasis-on-branding-huge-update-named-vince/

Mar
09
2009

6 Paths to Website Success

by Administrator

March 9, 2009

It’s been a while since web designers thought all they needed to do was design the website and just by its existence the work of successful marketing was done. Everyone involved in the online world knows differently today. There are as many different ways to help a website climb to the top of the page rankings for their individual niches as there are types of templates out there today—each one claims to be the best at a different specialty that ensures marketing superiority.

But all the sites are as different as the businesses that they represent, and you need to be careful as the business owner to ensure that your specific needs are met and that your website will be seen by as many of the right prospects as possible. To that end there are certain tried-and-true ways to optimize your design.

Remember to keep things simple. There are many different ways to optimize a website and a myriad of features that you can choose from, but here’s a interesting statistic on what people surfing the net really look at. Most of the experts suggest that web surfers look at about 20% of the features on your site and that you’ve got about nine seconds to hook them so they want to read on. So, suggestions one and two at don’t overdo it and get the content written by a professional are essential. You don’t need a lot of fancy stuff to make your point but you do need it to be well written.

The next piece of advice is about putting yourself in the perspective customer’s shoes. Ask yourself what the customer might want and then put that ahead of what it is you’d like for the site. Remember that you’re trying to attract people to the site to buy things—a good way to find out what they’d look for on a site is to ask a sample.

Be specific and make all the call to actions very clear. You don’t want people clicking all over the site to get to the products. Make it easy for them to click on and buy what you’ve got to sell. Confusion can drive them right into the hands of the competition. Remember the small things can make a big difference so you’ll want to carefully select the font sizes and colors you use. By selecting all these things carefully, a strong message a usually given.

Of course you’ll also want to optimize you search engine performance by placing keywords and phrases at strategic locations throughout the text and perhaps even placing a marker for your site on a B2B directory which is essentially a business directory that will give you exposure in your niche and increase your page ranking at the same time.

Leave comment

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/6-paths-to-website-success/

Mar
09
2009

The Happiness Club – Kids teaching kids positive values

by Administrator

March 9, 2009

Life is amazing, what drives us and what each of our passions are. Every reader I have on this blog knows my life passion is Internet Marketing for Local Businesses. This is my passion that I chose to do so I can fund my real passion, educating and helping people. One day I’ll leave the IM game to travel the world and spread wealth to those who need it more than me.

Right now my business does give a lot back to the community, however I’m about to share something that is the closest to my heart, and that’s my family. They are everything to me, and the two most important people in my life is my daughter Madison (11) and Ashtyn Patrick (3). Now, my daughter Madison is going to change the world, mark my words. Whether its her business, Algonquin Animal Patrol that hires kids to help out neighborhood animals, or volunteering at the Animal Shelter, she’s an entrepreneur who isn’t phased by society. I think a lot of her morals and values are being taught to her by The Happiness Club.

The Happiness Club is a group of Chicago kids who sing, dance, rap, and create original material for their sensational musical show designed to teach kids positive values. Diverse in age, race, and socioeconomic background, The Happiness Club kids sing out against violence, smoking, drugs, and racism and say “YES” to education, racial harmony, high self-esteem, global humanity and helping the enviroment. Through an aggressive performance schedule and outreach programs the Happiness Club is reaching thousands of children each year.

Please take a moment to watch some of the videos of the kids.

This is a documentary made about the club.