Dominate Your Local Market!

Sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while…

I hate to complain, but today marks 2 days in 25 degree weather with no power, no heat, no Internet connection, etc. The ice storm that struck Danville, KY on Monday night into Tuesday has brought havoc in the lives of the people of our little town.

It has also put us temporarily out of business. Our cell phone service has been spotty as power to towers has come and gone. This morning Maureen and I awoke to a temperature in our house of 40 degrees. Brrrr.

I posted this from a friend’s office in Somerset, Kentucky where there are no outages. Thank you Phyllis Rasnick of Action Realty in Somerset for the use of your office.

If we don’t have power (heat) when we get back, we will need to abandon ship and move to our friends Brad and Cindy’s where there is at least heat from their woodstove.

Some folks around here won’t have power or heat for days… maybe weeks.

Right now, we have no idea when we might be back up, but I’ll try to keep you posted from this blog – or at least I’ll let you know when we are back.

Have you ever had to meet someone halfway between here and there?

If you have, you’ll be happy to know that there’s now a way to find a place to meet in the middle. Restaurant, coffee shop, golf course, bar, hotel, mall, theater and more. Just type in the addresses of the two starting points, pick what type of place you’d like to meet and click the “Find a Place to Meet” button.

The website is MeetInBetween.us and it lets you tweak the results if you aren’t satisfied with what the software comes up with. I tried a few different points of origin I was familiar with and it came up with some good possibilities although I had to tweak the results both times.

I put together a little video to show you how it works.

You can also use the website to find the halfway point of any trip you are taking. Just enter the starting point and the destination address and let the software do the work.

So, the next time you have to meet someone somewhere in between, give MeetInBetween.us a try. Like all things dependent on mapping technology, the results will get better and better over time until you won’t know what you did without it.

During the recently ended fat times, many companies – including many Fortune 500s – allowed customer service to go downhill faster than a bobsled. For many large companies, the front line of customer service was purposely made difficult and unhelpful with the expectation that if they made little effort, you’d just go away. They were right.

Many customers did go away – but they didn’t forget. But with a booming economy and globalization, it was easy to replace disgruntled customers with ones who were dissatisfied with someone else’s lousy service. And round and round it went.

I have had this experience with high-tech companies, utilities, and others. I’m sure you have, too. Way too many consumers and B-to-B customers have tales of service horror and war stories to be good for the economy as a whole.

Forget your customers and they will surely forget you.

Even some local businesses got in the act when they had more work than they could handle. No shows, no calls, shoddy or partially finished work just don’t sit well with paying customers.

And as the good times slowed, those terribly annoyed customers remembered the slip-shod businesses who had made their lives hell. And those businesses now had a lot less work than they could handle and needed some of those customers that they had previously blown-off without a second thought.

Several good companies have died over the past few months – and many more bad ones.

Business runs in cycles. Good times are as surely followed by bad times as bad times are followed by good. And customers are the lifeblood of it all. Providing great customer service seems like a “no brainer” in good times or in bad.

What I am wondering is if businesses that allowed their service procedures to become customer nightmares will wake up during this slowdown. As always, some will and some won’t. The some that will are very likely to be the big winners in the coming upturn.

Those who create top-notch customer service procedures will have a much better chance of surviving the downturn in order to prosper in the upturn. And if they maintain a high level of service, they will be much better placed to survive the next downturn.

Does that sound like a better recipe for success?

For local businesses, creating more from less is always a tightrope-walking experiment. Learnnig how to provide better service for less is an exercise in creative thinking on which your company’s survival may rest.

Now is as good a time as any to take stock of your customer service. Is it as good as it can be? Anything less courts eventual disaster. But on the positive side, great customer service is one of those “good will” assets that will more than pay for itself in increased business today and increased value if and when you decide to sell your business.

Today, I am at the Louisville Manufactured Housing Show. The Louisville Show is sponsored by the Midwest Manufactured Housing Federation and is one of the premier manufactured housing trade shows in the country.

What am I doing here?

Well, in addition to my business as an Internet Marketing Consultant, I hold a Manufactured Housing Installer Manager’s license in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and act as the staff Installer Manager for Affordable Home Sales in Danville and Campbellsville, KY.

We attend this show to keep up with the latest developments in the manufactured housing industry.

What does all this have to do with marketing on the Internet?

One of the problems faced by the manufactured housing industry is a perception if their product as a “mobile home.” The term “mobile home” actually only applies to what are known as “pre HUD Code” homes, those manufactured prior to 1974. In 1974, the first HUD Code was introduced. As a performance code, it greatly improved the quality of the homes, which now meet or exceed the quality of site built homes.

Manufactured housing is the most affordable high quality housing available in America today. But to reach it’s potential, the industry needs to shake off it’s old “mobile home” image.

And there is no better place to do that than the Internet. The Internet provides the opportunity for the industry to tell it’s side of the story. I’ve bought, owned and sold manufactured homes, both single- and multi-section. I know their side of the story and it is worth telling.

I’ve been present at the installation of many of these homes and have managed repairs and rehabilitation of several older ones. These homes are sturdy and built to last. And they cost much less than comparable site-built homes.

Despite the tireless efforts of loyal boosters, in my opinion the manufactured housing industry hasn’t done enough to get the word out. They need to use every tool in the new media toolbox. Social sites, video and more. Pull out all the Web 2.0 stops. And don’t give up until they dominate the affordable housing market.

Markets can be localized by more than just geography. But this product’s marketing can be localized by both geography and the niche it occupies in America’s housing market.

The manufactured housing product fits the dream of of America as a nation of homeowners like a glove. Homes people can afford without resorting to toxic mortgage packages.

As Americans scale back their expectations to meet the realities of the new real estate marketplace, manufactured housing will be there to provide quality housing at an affordable price. They just have to get the word out.

And that’s why I’m at the Louisville Show.

Resources:

Kentucky Manufactured Housing Institute

Manufactured Housing Institute

HUD Manufactured Home Consumer Guide

Manufactured Housing Global Network

For many people the terms “Google” and “Search Engine” are synonymous. And with good reason. According to a report dated January 5, 2009 at hitslink.com, Google now accounts for 81.26% of all searches. Wow!

Yahoo distantly follows with 10.43%, MSN with 2.96% and AOL with 1.96%. Microsoft Live, Ask, Altavista, Excite, Lycos and All the Web round out the Top 10 (see the chart below).

Interestingly, on several of my websites MSN provides disproportionately more traffic than the hitslink stats would indicate, while Yahoo provides significantly less. Let’s analyze…

It’s important to remember that for the most part, what’s works for Google SEO also works for Yahoo, MSN and others. But there may also be differences in the way the various search engines rank websites.

For instance, for the keywords “web design danville ky” I hold the #4 and #5 positions on page 1 in a Google search and #4 on MSN, but I don’t appear until #91 in Yahoo despite getting several mentions in rankings for websites in which “web design by OrangeCat.net” appears in the footer.

It seems that Yahoo currently gives links more weight than content when determining relevancy.

The major point here is that there are inconsistencies in how the SEs use available information to rank web pages. I could probably spend a lot of time and money to optimize for Yahoo, but would that mess up my Google and MSN rankings?

The best bet might be to leave my SEO alone and buy some Yahoo Marketing ads. For my keywords, it would probably be very inexpensive, would surely be more effective and could be placed overnight instead of optimizing, then waiting weeks or months for my Yahoo rankings to improve.

By appearing on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN, I’ll have page one exposure on SEs representing 88.73% of searches. A quick check of rankings on other SEs shows satisfactory results.

So by all means prioritize Google when doing SEO, but don’t forget that a significant amount of traffic cans still come from Yahoo, MSN and others.