Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

It is 4 a.m., the party is finally over, I am exausted, but as good journalist I need to keep the public updated with what’s important right?

Azoogle, Alex Z. and Michael Sprouse pulled out all the stops for what was THE BEST PARTY I HAVE EVER BEEN TO.

On the bus ride home, I said to my wife, after this what is left? Seriously it was unbelievable. There will be a lot more shots that will show up my blog coming up, but a lot of them will never see the light of day.

It was cool, Michael Sprouse used to be high up in the playboy corporation doing marketing for them. When the girls saw him, they were genuinely happy to see him. It made me proud!

If you can imagine just how wild a party could get, the absolute wildest, and turned back the volume just a quarter of a click, that is what I just experienced.

I stayed out of trouble and played Donky Kong. Free video games, are you kidding me?

All the while the whole event was actually done tastefully, and with a lot of grace and beauty. The food in fact was off the hook, and a huge surprise.

My wife and I got to hang out with Hugh Hefners brother Keith. I noticed something amazing. He constantly complimented all of the girls, and was warm and friendly to everyone he met. Very, very nice guy. Feel free to invite us over for old movies whenever you want!

Come back soon to see more of the pics, once I have time to edit through them.

I went out on one of these stands to get my picture taken standing over the pool, and a few of the Azoogle staff were kind enough to give me a little push into joining their pool party.

I will let these 11 pictures tell the story, and you can fill in what is not being shown with your own imagination.

Ha Ha! I honestly can’t believe I am saying that. I grew up in the 70′s reading playboy as a kid. In fact as soon as I could read, I was reading it! Before Maxim, and all these other mags, and even before sports illustrated’s swim suit edition, there was Playboy. I even read it for the articles, and as a kid just adored the cartoons!

It was marketing genius.

I think of myself as being fairly enlightened, and yet I am still a sucker for a pretty girl. Pretty much still just stops me in my tracks. You want to brand yourself? What if you could create a brand that would forever be associated with georgeous, yet classy girls? That is what Playboy did.

I have begun to have fun with affiliate marketing lately, thanks to my good friends running these cool companies. It is the funnest of all of the internet worlds I have dropped into so far. It is a fun world because they are not afraid to be exactly who they are, a bunch of guys purely interested in making money and having fun. O.K., so some of them exagerate how much money they make in affiliate marketing, but I do know there are some big bucks rolling around in this area, and plenty of guys making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit, who never did a day of college.

I’ve learned you can lose a nice bucket of money really quickly in affiliate marketing also. It is not for the weak of stomach, that is for sure.

But the real deal companies are rolling through hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Azoogle is unquestionably a huge mega force in this area.

So tomorrow I get to go feed the bunnies!

This should be absolutely fantastic, hilarious, and a photo opportunity like no other!

The perks that go along with being involved in the internet business world just rock!

Michael Sprouse (Azoogle Marketing Director) rocks for putting this together.

By the way, in addition to the trip to the Mansion, Michael is putting us all up at the W hotel with pool parties, brunches and the whole works.

It is probably worth running some Azzogle ads if you are not already, just for the parties

And I will See You at the Mansion!

Almost in direct response to my last blog, Manhattan Supreme Court orders Google to unmask a nameless blogger who was talking smack about Liskula who is a New York model. The best/worst part about it? It turned out to be an acquaintance.

Liskula Cohen was written about on blogger.com where the guy called her a skank and other unflattering stuff, especially for a model.

This sets a huge precident for future court trials when someone writes negative things, especially untrue or inflamatory ones about you or your business. Most of the time when someone speaks really badly of someone else on the internet, I have found that they rarely leave their name or a way to reach them. It is like drive by vandalism, but can have far reaching effects financially and even worse on someones personal reputation, not to mention it is just plain mean and hurts their feelings

The guys I respect have their name all over their work online, and many of them even have their address.

I am writing about this to make it more known. The more people who know about the fact that at least one court decided you can not hide behind an anonomous blog, the more people will be transparent online. Congrats Liskula!

Liskula, if you want to swing by thinktank to celebrate with us, just give me a ping!

There are some real scoundrels out there. People who have nothing better to do than talk badly about you or your company. Are you listening? Your customers are!

Up to this point, I have danced relatively well above these ne’er do wells,  bouncing from cloud to cloud with a pretty angelic reputation online. It isn’t because I haven’t pissed anybody off. It’s just that I haven’t pissed anybody off “enough” to write too badly about me online so far.

I was recently speaking to a business guy who was pooh pooing the effects of google. Believe it or not, some very successful companies, like my favorite Mexican food and Friday night caterer for thinktank, Tacos El Gordo de Tijuana, don’t even have a fricken website! This place literally serves over 5,000 people a day in their combined locations, actually has the best Mexican food I’ve ever had (tied with Chipotle) and has zero online presence.

Unfortunately, no matter what someone may “think” about the effect of google, googles got us all by the butt, even if you are friends with Matt Cutts. Having your own site rank well for your name, or your key terms is great for getting customers, but what about the next 30 sites down blabbing about you?

In my opinion, there are a few different categories of searches that people do.

1. Entertainment – These are people just cruising around because they don’t have anything more important to do.You might grab someones interest with an article or add, and then gently steer them in some direction. They will rarely notice the bad stuff written about you online unless by chance they come across it.

2. Know What they want, but not Who to buy it from – These are the ones who have made a decision to buy, and now they are looking for the best place. This is the sweet spot in SEO, and why you want your site to rank high for your keywords.

3. Researching a particular topic before they close. – Again, this is where good SEO will lead them to your site, or another site to educate them on your product.

4. Researching your company before they buy.

We are going to take a good look at this last one.

They are at that last step before they send you that e-mail, spend the money, or sign the contract.

Researching about your company before they buy in my experience is still a relatively new way to use search.

For those of us who can type faster than we can speak this is probably second nature. I hear a brand name, a website, a T.V. commercial or even an individual, and before I say a word, I google it. I even do this while talking to someone on the phone. I could give a flying piece of toast as to what they say about themselves if we are not already friends. I do care what others say about them.

A prefect example was yesterday. My right heel had gotten so dry and cracked it barely looked human. I’ve never had a pedicure in my life, but realized that this had gotten to a point where I needed professional help.

I know if I google pedicure San Diego that the top site is most likely going to be the one where the owner of the salon has a friend who does SEO, or the site designer bought a few links, or something of that nature. Honestly, the whole system is way too easy to game for me to trust my delicate heel to it.

So I went to Yelp and entered in pedicure – San Diego. The place that popped up is called LuLu’s. There is a reason they popped up as the best place to get a pedicure in San Diego. They ranked well in yelp because they had a ton of reviews, and overall the reviews were very positive. To earn this they do an amazing job, and are less than dinner for 4 at Mc Donalds. For this I got Leslie, a beautiful estitician, spend half an hour soaking, buffing, scrubbing and filing my cracked calloused feet into submission. She won. The place is adorable, in a cute older neighborhood, easy parking, offered us tea when we arrived and were warm, friendly and safe. It was also super clean.

The next thing I did just to be safe was googled LuLu’s salon San Diego. As you scroll down you see nothing but “best place in San Diego”, “love this place”, “what an amazing experience”, on and on and on down the page. Not a single whinning compaint!

I’ve been working for years on reputation management, and John Andrews recently really got me thinking about exactly what I was doing, and how it all worked.

I would wager a bet that if you took the group of all Americans.

Then you removed everyone who makes less than $100,000 per year.

The group you would have left are the movers and shakers of our economy. They for the most part make the decisions that effect everyone else, what they do, what they buy, and even what will be available to them.

I’ll bet over 90 percent of that group, when making a buying decision of any significance, google their final choice before they actually purchase. If they don’t, they will be once they figure out the power in this.

As a business owner it is pain in the butt keeping track of what people are saying online about you, and correcting the damage when they do. It can also down right hurt ones feelings when the people writing are mean, and inaccurate. An unhappy customer obviously should come to you first, give you a chance to resolve it, then if you don’t resolve it, they can write about their unhappy car buying experience later.

As John Andrews suggested in his blog, the time to get positive reputation management is now, before the world gets the idea of the damage they can do you online. On the other hand, if you are aggressively getting your name in place properly before hand, it will take a pretty powerful internet marketer to knock you down online.

As consumers understand the internet and especially rating sites and blogs, I predict it will eventually be considered stupidity unless you google the name first to see what it is.

I am a twitter user as purposeinc, occasionaly tweet, am proud of my 454 followers vs. the 221 people I am following, but haven’t used it to try to really make money yet. For me, like most internet marketing it is a big game, and fun, sometimes the good money rolls in, but mostly I like making big changes and helping people and companies out.

I was over at David Brim’s internet business blog, catching up on what he is up to, and came across his article on twitter 101 guide for business. It made for a good read.

Once of the concepts he brought up, and I have heard this from some of the huge companies that I have consulted for, is simply the concepts of watching for your industry or company to be mentioned. I looooove, doing reputation management on the internet, otherwise known as squashing a$$h:)les, and after watching some of Shoe’s tricks on reputation management have become a huge fan of it, and quite skillful, inventing many of my own highly effective tricks (Ping me if you need some high end help on this!)

So, as many of you know I crack a lot of backs each day, and am constantly testing different online marketing for my chiropractic office. I’ve even had patients now, with no training, get hired to become full time twitter users for companies. To top it off, this week I got a call from Jeremy Hermanns, internet marketer to the stars,  needing a little assistance with a project for one of his A-list celeb clients that involved twitter. Now this really got me thinking about twitter!

I know people are getting a ton of followers, but what can the blue whale do for a chiropractic office? So I went to search.twitter.com and searched for chiropractic to find the thousands of tweets per day that would involve chiropractic. Of course the first thing I find is Michaels account @chiropractic so I scrolled down to see what else I could see.

During the past day, in all of twitterland, there were only a few mentions I could find of chiropractic that seemed natural by people discussing it. The majority of them were twitter spam of the kind that I would imediately unfollow the guy.

When we heard Gary V. of wine library spoke at the Elite Retreat we watched him create content like a madman. No kidding, minutes after his talk, he was answering e-mails, twittering, and online with his masses. He told us that quantity of content, and truth in content to him were far, far more important than making sure each post was perfect before letting it loose.

In fact when I read some of the celebs twitters, you can tell they are written by someone else. On the other hand, I love seeing someone twitter where you can tell it is the real person, with all of their quirks, flaws and opinions. Can that make a small business money? Let’s see what we can cook up. Can a local chiropractic office, scan twitter for all the tweets of locals with back pain looking for a chiropractor these days? Not yet. But blink our eyes and the world will change again!

GUEST POST BY DENNIS YU
Dennis runs Blitz Local, a company dedicated to helping local businesses get real customers in through their doors. Yeh, Dennis is competing directly against some of my projects. Why would I let him guest post? He’s a good friend, a helpful guy, and that’s how we roll.

The cynics would add a 4th C for “charlatan”, given how poorly companies selling local Internet advertising are performing. However, that overlooks how hard it is to deliver new business to local service firms and how new this market is– more on that in a bit.

I recently met the CEO as well as the founder of yodle.com, a fellow company in the local space– stand up guys, I must say. They have 6,000 clients– way more than BlitzLocal.com, but not as many as ReachLocal.com or WebVisible. There are 6 million small businesses in the US that are at least a quarter million dollars in revenue, so 6,000 is only 1/10th of a percent of the market. Nobody has even a percent of market share.

Recently, Yodle has been hit with some criticism for aggressive sales techniques. They have 110 full-time sales folks who call lawyers and doctors repeatedly. Though perhaps irritating to some prospects, the model is quite effective in generating sales. And Court Cunningham, their CEO, tells me that they are 2 weeks away from hitting profitability.

They want to be the #1 brand and you can’t hit that growth curve by word of mouth. In 2-5 years, small business owners will go with the recognized brand– and Yodle wants to be that brand.

Some challenges:

• Internet searches are low, but growing– You face a chicken and egg problem. People aren’t going to search online for services unless they know such services exist online. Rural areas or geos with low broadband penetration will often have no businesses online for a given category (“cosmetic surgeons in Enid Oklahoma”, perhaps). The concept of search requires that people know it exist to ask for it. Thus, advertising dollars and consumer sophistication go hand in hand. The market is early.
• Clients want new business generated, not clicks– Don’t tell me how many hits my site got. I want to know how many referrals my site generates. Calls generated is a better measure than clicks, but not as good as confirmed clients. Advertising companies such as ours cannot control whether a prospect will no show for an appointment, but we can try to target what search terms are more indicative of a good lead.
• The market is not educated– “Sales” alone won’t work, since you have to educate the client about how to operate their site, to answer the phone quickly and effectively, to use email marketing to drive retention, and to set realistic expectations on what Internet marketing is capable of. How much do I need to spend and what I can truly expect to generate in new business– not clicks or calls?
• nascent technology platforms– The beauty of search is that based on the search term, you already know what the searcher wants and where they are in the process. If they are looking for “denver liposuction“, then you better show them exactly that– content on Denver Liposuction. If they want to know the side effects of liposuction or the pricing for such procedures, you better show them a different set of information. Most of the local internet advertising companies send users to the same page, no matter what they search on. At up to $10 a click, that’s a lot of waste.

BlitzLocal doesn’t believe in first mover advantage, which is the “winner take all” philosophy. This type of thinking is that whoever reaches critical mass first in a market will win. Yet Yahoo! pre-dated Google in search, Friendster pre-dated Facebook in social networking, and the list goes on…

We don’t see the other players as “competitors”, since nobody has a dominant position or has even developed a bulletproof platform. Rather, we are together trailblazing in this developing market– working to educate clients about what is realistic about Internet marketing and that it’s not turnkey. Clients have to put forth effort to reflect their unique selling proposition on the web– and that must come from them, not us. And together, our group of companies must develop best practices on generating quality referrals for our clients. Judging by the churn rates in our industry– up to 90% in 6 months, according to the recent Borrell Research report, nobody has it figured out yet.

It’s easy to decry the “end of the yellow pages“, but the reality is this is years away and a slow death. It may be a few years before consumers are getting smarter about seaching online for local services and doing so in sufficient volume. The question for companies such as ours is when to really step on the gas for marketing and to what extent we can rely on aggressive outbound sales versus working towards an awesome product.

Back to clicks, calls, and clients– it’s easy to do the first part, medium difficulty to generate calls, and very hard to generate clients. If local Internet marketing companies are having trouble doing it for themselves, then caveat emptor on whether they can do it for you.

There’s no denying the potential of the opportunity in local.

If you want to get in touch with Dennis, you can reach him at: dennis@blitzlocal.com.

This is going to be amazing.

You guys rock. I am honored and humbled that you will be coming from all over the world to join us to spend 3 days sharing ideas, learning how to be better fighters, having fun, eating extremely well, surfing, and having the times of our lives.

I salute you with the thinktank fist of approval!

I am just beginning the process of  creating the non disclosure agreement for thinktank. Last year we had a nice offer from a sponsor to videotape the thinktank, and this year from someone who wanted to “report” on what he found. They said they would love to come, but would not be willing to sign the non-disclosure agreement so they could “report” on what was overheard at the thinktank.

With the kind of things I have planned in terms of group discussions, planning, and exchange, it would be poison if someone were to come and then disclose what happened. Any extra money offered to cut open this precious trust is laughable.

In the internet world where inequality of information creates the voltage differential that drives profit, it would remove all the luscious decadent substance of conversation that flows at the thinktank if we were not all protected by the cone of silence.

So know you speak under non disclosure agreements signed by all attendees, speak freely, and stay thirsty my friends!