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.

I recently received an email from Google AdWords guru Perry Marshall. His message was a bit unsettling, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the point was very valid.

The subject line of the email was “The appearance of a business vs. a REAL business” and I quickly realized there were some gems of wisdom in the message that we could all learn from.

I’ve done a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects for clients and myself over the years and set up quite a few Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaigns as well, but I’d never seen the difference quite this way.

In the email, Perry tells a story of a “serial entrepreneur” who has built several huge online businesses.

He was looking to branch out into a new product line and looked at a few established websites that were for sale and that specialized in the product he wanted to sell.

He looked at one that was doing $3 million per year in sales with a small staff and strong profitability. It looked great on paper, but he turned down the deal for one very specific reason.

Almost all of this websites traffic was generated from the left side of Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Wait a minute! All of that traffic from free SEO traffic? Sounds like a dream come true, doesn’t it?

The problem was what would he do when the free traffic disappears.
To quote Perry:

“Notice that I said when it goes away not if it goes away. It’s an eventuality that there’ll be some Google Dance and one sad morning, the guy’s showing up on page 6 of Google instead of page 1.”

Uh, oh. That could be a disaster with a capital “D”

The website had no record of being able to build and sustain business predictably by using a method that remains constant, e.g. PPC. Once again, quoting Perry:

“That business, even though on paper it was worth several million
dollars, was not even a real business. It relied on the availability
of free customers – which is a foundation of sand. Temporary
success at best.

(As a matter of fact the owner was afraid to even TOUCH the
website, which was clearly out of date – because he was afraid
changing something might ruin his great SEO rankings.)

If your business is dependent on free customers, you do not
have a business. You do not have any kind of ‘real’ business
until you have the ability to buy advertising from a variety of
available sources and transform that traffic into sales and profits.”

I’ve always been a proponent of optimizing for free traffic. Experience has taught me that “free” traffic is like a “free” cat. The traffic might be free, but the expense of optimization to get that free traffic can cost as much or more than trackable, quantifiable PPC traffic. And you have to wait 3 to 6 months to learn what PPC can teach you in a week.

What keywords do your visitors use to find you?

Knowing what keywords your visitors used to find you offers a glimpse of which keywords you should optimize for and which keywords and phrases you should try in Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Prime “long tail” keywords¹ will often turn up in the list of keywords in your statistics. These keywords will often produce high placement for far less cost than broad-based keywords.

They also produce higher quality clicks through to your web page. Searchers tend to use longer, more specific keywords when they have done the research and are ready to take action (buy).

How do you find out which keywords your visitors used to find your web page?

If you have a stats package on your web server, it should supply you with that info. We use the Urchin stats program on all OrangeCat servers. If your hosting company doesn’t include a stats package, you can just use Google Analytics which will give you a ton of great information including keywords.

As Lord Kelvin said, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.”

Let me paraphrase Lord Kelvin to apply his wisdom to marketing:
“If you don’t measure it, you won’t be able to improve it.”

Jargonator

¹ “Long tail keywords” are actually multi-word phrases that you visitors might use to find you.

If you’ve been hearing the rumblings across the ‘Net about Google once again changing the way they rank your web pages, you’ve probably been wondering how it will effect you.

Google’s profitability stems in large part from being able to serve their search engine users with high quality results. Over the years Google has been in business, the parameters they use to judge the quality of a website for a given set of keywords has evolved.

Google is about to take another giant step in how they match a website’s relevance to a set of keywords… and it could have a profound effect on how your web pages rank.

The main criteria in use over the past few years has been Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank, the higher your web page would show on the Search Results Page (SERP).

Page Rank has served Google well, but inevitably, websites owners and developers have learned to exploit how Google sets Page Rank. Quite a few “black hat” techniques have been developed and used and Google feels, as always, that it is in their best interest to squash those using “black hat” methods.

At the same time, Google is trying to improve the experience of it’s users. These two goals are fully compatible from Google’s perspective. Those who resort to using “black hat” methods often do so because the quality of their content is not top notch.

So what is Googles latest strategy to improve user experience and the quality of their product?

If you are a user of, or are at least familiar with Google analytics, you know that Google is quite capable of logging an incredible amount of information about your website. This is accomplished through the cookies that are set in your web browser and follow every move you make on the Internet.

NOTE – Google Analytics is a free service that you can use to track all sorts of information and statistics about who visits your website, where they come from, what they do on your site, etc. It is a free service and all you have to do is sign up and place a snippet of code in the pages you’d like them to track.

Google can then use this information to try and determine the relative value of the information on your website by tracking how many visitors you have, but more importantly what those visitors do on your website, how many pages they visit, how long they stay on a page or the site, etc.

It’s a good bet that if your visitors view more pages on your website and stay longer on each one than those of a competing site, Google might consider that a sign that your content is more valuable to users and will probably rank you higher in the future.

So, what does this mean to you?

It means that content just graduated from “king” to “emperor.” It means you need more absorbing content, like audio and especially video, that holds visitors attention. It means that more than ever, having a large amount of high-quality content will serve you well.

The effects of this will kick in gradually through 2009 as Google tweaks the system to achieve their desired effects. It also means a rough time for those who have opted to use “black hat” SEO and other gimmicks to game the system. This has been called a “Google slap” and it is a pretty accurate description.

But if you provide your visitors with lots of high quality content, you’ll be just fine through this change and ones Google chooses to make in the future.

Now that WordPress 2.7 has been released, work on the 2.8 version has begun. The folks at WordPress.org have asked for input on what users would most like to see in the upcoming upgrade (you can participate in the survey here).

What do your customers really want? You can use polls and surveys to find out.

The folks at Automattic have created PollDaddy.com to help users create polls and surveys that you can then place on your blog, website or link to from an email. A simple interface walks you through the process of creating your poll or survey. There are 19 themes that you can use or you can use the built-in tool that helps you create a custom theme.

Once you have your poll set up, PollDaddy offers several ways for you to publish it. A simple JavaScript snippet can be placed on your web page by you or your web designer, and there’s a direct link method to include in emails. There’s a WordPress plugin for your blog and a MySpace app let’s you easily insert your survey into your MySpace profile.

In addition to the free version of PollDaddy, there are two premium versions for those who require more power and features.

We created the poll below using the free PollDaddy app. It’s a live poll so pick and click for an example of how PollDaddy works. You can then sign up for your free PollDaddy account.