Author: Dan Morris

No matter how many small businesses we meet with, not everyone will use our services. Some companies really just want the DIY Internet Marketing tools. Others want to hire us but really have a hard time expending any money whether it be marketing dollars or cash register receipt tape.

It’s these companies that we’ve decided to serve better.  We’re in the process of creating content for our newest venture http://onlinemarketingedge.com. OME, as we call it, will be a do it yourself site. The goal is to provide the tools to small businesses that they’ll need to turn the internet into a revenue center.

Since some companies are really DIY oriented, our products are going to be easy for them to navigate. For instance we just created a 30 page “how to dominate Google Places” report. It goes through everything from how to find out if a page already exists for your company to -once it is set-up- how to encourage customers to leave great reviews there.

Internet marketing is a whole new world to most small business owners. In fact, marketing for some of these small businesses is getting the fax from the Yellow Pages and initialing it for them to print it. That’s it. Sometimes you’ll find a company that regularly advertises in the local youth baseball stadium Program, or ValPak kit. But most just find everything in the internet world to be foreign and a bit scary.

But that brings us to the importance of what we’re doing, which is why we’re doing it. How many people come into your store, visit your website, call your 800 number, take a free sample, call and ask a question, or any other activity that doesn’t involve them buying something or “becoming a customer”?

And how many of those people do you ever see again?

The bottom line is this . . . those people have already raised their hand and have declared they’re interested in what you do. They might not be in the buying mood – but they’re interested. Some of them want what you’re offering but it just might be too expensive for their state of mind. Does that mean you should dismiss them?

We think not. Despite wanting to serve those customers in our traditional method, we’ve decided it better to be of service period, than nothing at all. So our DIY site is that. It’s our chance to be of service to those who just weren’t ready.

To some extent we do that now with Dan’s Notes, which you can subscribe to here. That’s a collection of internet marketing tips and ideas from my weekly meetings. But it’s not exactly a “how-to” guide. OME will be the how-to. It will be the step-by-step, screen shots, 1-2-3 how-to document that will get them from nothing to nothing less than famous.

In providing this kind of information, we hope the knowledge we provide our new DIY customers will be enough to move the nickel, someday. But if it isn’t – perhaps they’ll appreciate the help. Who doesn’t need prospective future clients who are already – appreciative? But most important of all – there’s no better way to get a prospective customer to come back than to give them what they need . . . now.

Guest Post By Susanne Myers

Daily Affiliate Tasks

Most of us learned how to take notes in high school and college. You write down the most important facts, dates etc. and then commit them to memory before the next test. The main focus is to listen and capture the most important points your professor or teacher made.

Taking notes at an Internet Marketing Conference like NAMS is very different. There’s no need to transcribe each lesson and note all the facts because:

1) There isn’t a test at the end (no matter what some instructors will tell you).

2) If you’re staying at the hotel, you’ll get recordings of all sessions.

3) It’s not the facts and figures that matter.

Continue reading “Don’t Take Notes At NAMS Like You’re Still In College”

Podcamp Nashville is one of the largest Podcamp events nationwide, did you know that? As a local resource for social marketing and all things internet, it’s almost like the Internet Knowledge Superbowl here in town. There really isn’t anything bigger or better (unless you count its sister event, Barcamp Nashville).

But have you heard of it?

In the same breath, we meet with local businesses all the time who need help growing their business. 99% of the ones we meet with weekly just don’t know anything about the power of the internet. I might as well be speaking Greek when I start talking about the utility of autoresponders, squeeze pages, e-mail parsing and WordPress. And amazingly, that goes for the students we spend time with at our local Universities, too.

This stuff just isn’t common knowledge yet.

And while the media’s advertising and marketing folks are learning how to use these tools to benefit their companies, the innovators or innovations of these tools rarely make ripples in our popular culture. You can almost credit Steve Jobs alone for getting iPad launch events into the news. Can you imagine if they had done that 20 years ago for every new PDA launch from Palm?

Unfortunately the only people who get hurt by the relative anonymity of Podcamp is the small business owners. From our seminars and presentations, we know small business owners are eating up every piece of content they can in hopes of learning how to increase their revenue. But their time is very limited. And its the stuff you learn at Podcamp that can really change the revenue model of small businesses.

With that I charge you this task. If you know a savvy small business owner (plumber, CPA, hair stylist, etc. . . ), drag them to Podcamp Nashville.  These are not easy economic times, yet in the span of one day you can open up to them a world they never knew existed.

Imagine if the local bird seed guy walks away from Podcamp Nashville having found a new way to drive customers into his store? What if that guy starts a podcast that garners 5,000 “bird feeding” enthusiasts over the next year and from that he hires two more people? Now we’re talking about changing lives with one afternoon.

If you serve local businesses, call all your prospects – the people whose business you’d like to earn. Give them the opportunity to enrich themselves with Podcamp’s information wealth. Perhaps it is only vision that they lack in moving forward with your company. Podcamp is about vision – it’s about hearing and seeing what is possible. Some people say “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats forever”.

I say “Give a man a blog and he’s thankful, take him to Podcamp Nashville and he’ll see what is possible.” That’s when business relationships change, too.

Podcamp Nashville is an untapped resource for local business owners in Nashville. If you know someone who’s hungry to help his business grow, bringing them to Podcamp may change that business’s future forever. Please, check out the Podcamp Nashville website, register, and read about the sessions. But don’t worry about finding the Check Out Page or the Session Pricing Page. Those pages aren’t there – Podcamp is free!

Tell me again why you couldn’t convince a small business owner to attend?

(Register for my meeting notes, and you’ll get all my Podcamp notes, new ninja tricks and insights the following week. Sign-up below)

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The 11.6 Hour Twitter virus is definitely something you want to avoid. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s in a tweet that says  “I have spent 11.6 hours on Twitter. How much have you? Find out here.”

There’s a link in the message that leads to an application called “Time on Tweeter”. This app asks for authorization to your Twitter information then starts sending out that message without your consent.

This is the kind of “prank” that seems to be popping up a lot lately on different social media sites and is a reason to be very careful about what you click on, and what you give access to your accounts.

From a business perspective, it’s much more than a prank. These “twitter viruses” send out tweets from your account annoying your customers, and harming your brand. That’s not the kind of company you want to be.

Solve this 11.6 Hour Twitter Virus problem:

If you’ve fallen victim to this scam, you should immediately revoke Twitter access to all suspicious applications. To do that, log into Twitter, click on “Settings” in the upper-right drop-down menu, choose “Connections” and click “Revoke Access” on suspicious apps — which, in this case, is the app named “Time on Tweeter.”

To prevent the problems that could arise with a Twitter account like:

• Not being able to log-in
• Not knowing who at Twitter to contact for support
• How to stop spammers

Check out my free Twitter Glitch Action Guide at http://twittrglitch.com

As a marketer of small businesses, I started using Foursquare with the sole purpose of learning how others were going to use it and make it successful. I checked-in to every place I was, places I wasn’t, got every badge I could find and every Mayorship.  I really wanted to see how business was going to use Foursquare’s tools.

Guess what? Marketers are now seeing the true power Foursquare has.

Pepsi and Von’s Grocery Stores are really moving the needle. When you register for a Von’s card and sync it with your Foursquare account, they’ll give you a free 2 litre of Pepsi.  So what? That’s nothing new, eh?

How about this then. . . when you swipe your Von’s card at check-out, you’ll automatically be checking in to Foursquare – which means all your online friends will see “Von’s”.  That’s some great advertising for Von’s. And to keep you “checking in” Von’s adds free stuff to your Von’s card based on your Mayorships, Badges and check-ins.

Imagine becoming the Mayor of your local Veterinary Clinic (which means you visit there often) and getting a dog food coupon from Von’s – automatically!  That kind of target marketing based on your social media preferences is surely changing the game.

The consumer gets rewarded over and over and over, Von’s gets publicity, Foursquare gets new users who check-in unconsciously, Pepsi gets word-of-mouth marketing like this and many times everyone gets a  plug on Twitter or Facebook. Win! Win!

Scoot on over to the Bellagio in Vegas.  The Bellagio has a team dedicated to monitoring social media sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter for mentions of their name.  Guests who check-in on Foursquare, tweet their location or rave on Facebook get upgrades and rewards from The Bellagio. Mayorships and badges to them aren’t nearly the value of rewarding the “word-of-mouth” marketing guests do on their own.

Different from those two is Radio Shack and their holiday promotion. Instead of taking advantage of existing customers, Radio Shack and Foursquare created a “badge” that Foursquare users can earn when they go to Radio Shack and check-in.  The incentive of the “badge” wasn’t enough to drive sales, so the badge itself gives users 20% merchandise during the holidays.

For Radio Shack, they not only get new customers into the door using the coupon, but have their name on a badge on all Foursquare user’s phones, the internet, every Foursquare related website, press releases and more. From a driving traffic perspective, Radio Shack’s promotion is much more traffic-centric.

The Pepsi / Von’s promotion is certainly the most cutting edge. Connecting your grocery card to social media as a means of getting the Von’s name out there hundreds of times per day is genius. But then rewarding users based on their Foursquare habits – that’s over the top cool.

Please. . . please tell me if you know of any cool Foursquare promotions. Leave a comment below. I love hearing how business is using these new social media tools.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on consultants in their quest to come up with product, service and company names.  Here in Nashville there are names like Laser Quest, Cheddar’s, Nissan and Maggiano’s that probably were the result of months of talks, tests and money.

But does the name itself create revenue for the company? Does that even make sense?

In a consumer world largely based on what you can find on Google, your name can significantly impact your bottom line. A marketing guy may tell you differently, but he’s likely to give you examples like Pepsi, Blockbuster and Disney. Dare them to give you an example of a start-up or small, local company.

Recently a company in town opened called Nashville Furniture and Interiors. The name isn’t sexy at all, but when you drive by you surely understand what’s inside. On the other hand there’s another new place called Kay’s.  The reflection on the window has prevented me from seeing it is a clothing store for women.

That same thinking applies to the web, but in a much more revenue generating manner. When a consumer chooses to go furniture shopping, the first thing they may search for is “furniture store nashville”.  If your business name happens to have Nashville and Furniture in the title, you’re much more likely to be found on the search engines.

Not only that, but whenever your business name is mentioned elsewhere on the net and people click it to go to your website, Google gives you extra “points” for having your main keywords directly in the link.Technically, a link that contains your keywords is called a “keyword rich anchor text” link.  Those are the sought after kind. That’s much easier to attain when your name is your keywords.

From a branding perspective, fancy names do have a place.  Pepsi, JC Penney, Best Buy and even eBay have excelled with little attention paid to their keyword-empty names. On the local level however, a good plumber is a good plumber. Whether you call Fast Pipe Guy or Nashville Plumber doesn’t matter when the toilet is overflowing.

The difference however, is whether you can find Fast Pipe Guy during those critical moments when you search for “Plumber in Nashville”.