Will Hanke

In St. Louis, every March and October the Yellow Pages (YP)  are delivered to the homes and businesses across the area.  These new phone books replace the ones delivered the year prior.  Delivery dates may be the same across the country, I’m not sure.

Many of you know that I do some web work on an Army contract several days a week in the Federal Center in downtown St. Louis.  Well, I make it a point to watch for the new phone books, which showed up around March 8th this year.  Because of the large amount of worker bees here (about 250), they wheel the phone books in on pallets and put them in the hallway.  Then the worker bees can just come by and grab a new book (and put their old one in a recycle bin).

This year, I kept tabs on the amount of phone books.  Over the period of 38 days, about 16 phone books were taken from the pallet of 200.

Sixteen books.

Just for giggles, I visited a few of the other floors in the building to see how many phone books were still sitting around.  Every floor (except for the IRS area) had about the same amount of books remaining on their pallets.

They finally wheeled them out yesterday. I hope they went to a recycling center somewhere.

Mr. Small Business owner, what does this tell you about the future of Yellow Page advertising?  Are you still spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on YP ads?  Your audience is shrinking, and your money is being wasted.

I have a few clients who are ahead of the curve when it comes to Internet Marketing.  They recognized the poor use of their marketing budgets with YP and have since scaled back their spending on these sources, and have put that money into building their online presence through blogging and link building.  They are reaping huge harvests on their well-placed seeds.

I’m not saying to drop your YP ad.  In fact, I think it’s still a viable source of traffic, particularly if your target audience is over the age of 50.  But I am saying don’t put so much money into it any more.  A simple ad with your company name, phone number and URL is all you need.

Shameless Plug: Quit wasting money on dying forms of marketing/advertising. Put that money into hiring someone (like me) that will help your business continue to grow and thrive. Create a presence and a following online, provide outstanding customer service, and the customers will come.

Will customer service, local marketing, small business, trending, yellow pages

Back when I first got out of the military, I got a job at a local copier repair shop.  We tore down used copiers to their frame and then rebuilt the entire thing from the ground up with new parts.  We had one entire 4-shelf setup for each copier, storing parts that were still good, along with every screw, roller and rubber grommet that went back in. A good sized machine could take three or four days to complete.

It was very important for the repairmen to have nice tools, including a magnetized Phillips screwdriver.  Without this tool, it was pretty much impossible to get into those little nooks and crannies to tighten screws.

From time to time, the magnetism in the screwdrivers would wear off, and we’d have to ‘tune them up’.  We did so by taking apart an old solenoid and putting the tip of the screwdriver in the middle of it, then plug that bad boy in.  The magnetic forces created by the coil would help the magnetic particles refocus and realign, and by morning we’d have a kick-ass screwdriver again.

The Two Versions of Marketing

For years and years, marketing has been all about outbound (or Interruption) marketing.  Companies would interrupt people through email blasts, radio or tv commercials, telemarketing and more to try to get their brand in front of potential customers.  That was the old way.  It’s no fun, not trackable, and most companies weren’t really thrilled with doing it.  A necessary evil.

As the Internet continues to mature, new communication paths and opportunities are coming to business owners, including a great new way to market to potential customers - inbound marketing.  Think of inbound marketing as a lot like a magnet; you create content that people are drawn to.  People want to read your blog because it is interesting and provides insight to an industry or product they have never had access to before.  Can you see where I’m going with this?

If you aren’t doing inbound marketing, well, shame on you.  The time is here (actually, it’s passing you by) to get involved.  Creating content should be something you all the time.  This new content will pull in visitors that are looking for just what you’re talking about.  Yeah, thanks to search engines, RSS feeds and social media, it pulls them in.  You don’t have to go stand on a corner with a megaphone and beg people to come into your store, they’ll come because they are simply interested with what you have to say/provide.

Inbound marketing methods

Blogging - if you aren’t blogging at least once a week for your business, you are missing out on some major traffic.  From ranking your site for ‘long tail links’ to providing your customers with info they need, blogging is by far the number one way to increase your website’s overall footprint on the Internet.

SEO / SEM - If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve already been exposed to SEO in some amount.  Search engine optimization is an awesome way to increase your rankings in the “big three” as well as all the thousands of other smaller search engines out there.  SEO also means you understand and watch what your website visitors are doing, and if they’re not buying, how to adjust accordingly to prod them along.

Social Media - Today its all about relationships and community.  From mySpace to Facebook to Twitter and beyond, people are creating their own inbound marketing channels through these websites and methods of communication.

RSS - I had a hard time grasping RSS when it first came out.  It’s a tough one to explain, but once you understand it, you’ll never believe you could have made it through a week without it.  Good thing is, if you’re blogging, you’ve probably already got RSS capabilities, you just need to promote them a bit more.

Viral Media - YouTube used to be something that people visited because they were bored or just wanted to see themselves online.  However, when it sold to Google for 1.6 billion dollars, businesses soon figured out that there is huge potential in video.  Creating videos that people want to share can result in literally thousands of visitors to your website.  Be creative, think it out, and watch it grow.

Tools - As you start to grow your website, you’ll probably start to see some recurring themes.  People will be using search terms that push them to your website, and the information they seek you have.  Smart businesses are creating tools for these visitors, and thus cornering a part of a market that their competitors don’t have.  Examples? Sure.

• An online mortgage calculator on a real estate agent’s website
• A wine grading worksheet for wannabe connoisseurs
• A downloadable town reference guide on a bed and breakfast owners’ website

So how’s your magnet working for you?

Is it focused and aligned, pulling in those customers (and dollars), or is it too weak (or non-existant) to hold onto your goal at all?  Your inbound marketing magnet should be on full blast, and if it isn’t, now is the time to get it tuned.

Will Marketing, SEO, beginner sem, business blogging, content, free stuff, small business, social media, traffic, trending, twitter, videos

Well, by far the biggest year in Internet Marketing is drawing to a close.  How did you do this year? Did you surpass your goals? Did you have any goals? Did your business do well online? Did you see growth? ROI? Has your business taken a ‘new direction’ when it comes to your online marketing?

If I helped your business grow in 2008, I can’t wait to make it even bigger in 2009.  If not, that’s ok too.  I hope that this blog has shown you ways to create new revenue streams and programming shortcuts that will take your business to a new level.

Now, what are you going to do in 2009? Add video or perhaps a blog? Start a link building campaign? Did you just test the SEO surface waters and realize the potential?  The economy isn’t going to stay in the dumps forever, are you positioning your company to be way ahead of the bigger players in your industry when money once again flourishes?

Have you looked at your 2008 data and researched what worked and what didn’t? Where can you apply Pareto’s Law to reduce and refine?  What areas of your business can be trimmed and/or removed?  Should you expand or simply reroute?

What new marketing ideas do you have in store for 2009?  Giveaways? Video? PPC? New domains and websites? Expansion into new areas? Leveraging your newfound Internet traffic for better vendor pricing?  Will you pursue an affiliate program? Can other local businesses help yours grow? Can you join a group that will promote your business? Could you hold an event that will get you media exposure? Can you advertise in local papers or websites cheaply? Will social networking be a part of your plan?

And of course, money. What are your goals for next year? How about monthly? Can you compare to the past and forecast? How much can you make? How much can you save? How much will you have to put into untapped (and potentially lucrative) revenue streams?

And lastly, what would you like to be forecasting for 2010? If this were December 30, 2009, what would you like to be thinking about? What goals will you be setting then?

Make it happen.

Will Marketing, SEO, small business, trending

Today Google released a new tool called SearchWiki, which allows users to modify the organic results they see for some phrases. The users, when logged in, can now ‘vote up’ or ‘vote down’ results when they do a search on the popular search engine’s website.

How will this affect SEO?

Personally I think it’ll have a bigger effect on very large and high-volume websites such as travel sites, news sites, etc. Smaller-trafficked websites probably won’t see much of a change IMO.

Look at it this way. If you are creating quality content for your customers, and you are doing it all honestly, not spamming, not keyword stuffing, not cloaking, etc, you’ll probably be fine. People will come to your website, see what they were looking for, and have no reason to vote you down.

If, on the other hand, you’re running an affiliate poker or viagra website, be prepared to see your rankings tumble for these custom users. That is, unless you’re providing quality content. Have I mentioned quality content yet?

Keep in mind that at this time, Google is not using these modifications for their ‘normal’ search that John Doe off the street would use. This only changes the results if you are logged into your Google account, and you do a search. Voting up your favorite websites won’t affect the overall organic results (at this time, according to G), so don’t waste time voting up your own website to the top of every possible keyword. You’ll just have skewed results that you can then fool yourself into believing are really organic.

While some people are saying this will have a major impact on search overall, I don’t see it happening yet. Now, will Google at some point take this data and use it towards their algorithm? Very possible. We’ll have to wait and see.

Will Google updates, content, site ranking, trending