Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

After weeks of tough negotiations, I have secured world famous kickball coach Mallory for thinktank!

For those of you who have never played this game of kings here are the basics. By the time people play on the Saturday of thinktank, I don’t expect you be able to concentrate too much.

There will also be a little twist on the rules.

1. Team captains will be chosen. Then the team captains will choose their teams from those who want to play, leaving the last few people being chosen to feel unloved and rejected. I personally am still recovering when in 6th grade when teams were chosen for a school yard baseball game, a girl was chosen before me. Ever since I have had an unquashable thirst for success!

2. One team is outfield, and one is up. Just like baseball.

3. There is home plate, and first, second, and third bases.

4. Your own team pitches to you, to maximize the amount of massive slam you can get out of your kick. We will be experimenting with red rubber balls, and the super cheap but highly bouncy balls they sell at the grocery store. We will be kicking barefoot, you will see why in a second.

5. You yell to your pitcher what type of pitch you want. The permutations are as follows (clearly I think you guys are literate, otherwise I would not use words like permutation – “Mind flashes back to first comment on last blog, Where are the boobz);

Slow rollies – gives you plenty of time to aim and plan and time your kick.

Fast rollies – in the minds of many this gives you more potential power in your kick, Newtons second law of motion.

Slow bouncies – Never made sense to me, but the more random of kids thought this would give them the option of kicking it higher, but the timing is not for the meek or timid.

Fast bouncies – Now this one is just plain ridiculous and has no possible benefit. I think this was mostly used to show off your manliness and prowess to the other second graders.

(My mind now drifts to sitting in the outfield at Brett Hart Elementary school, back in the hood, on the mean streets of Burbank, when I sat their confused trying to reconcile what I had just been told getting to first base, second base, third base and a home run, and being utterly confused about why someone would want to get to third base? and getting kind of queezy just thinking about it!)

6. Once you kick the ball, provided it has landed within the angle formed by home and first, and home and second base, you then run like hell around the bases.

This is where we will switch it up a bit. The bases will all be in the sand, except for second base which will be in around 2 feet of water. In fact we will be recruiting someone from the thinktank, to BE second base. Perhaps this could be the last person picked for a team, thereby demoralizing them even further. I volunteer!

7. You are gotten “out”, if when you kick it the other team catches the ball before it hits the water, or the sand. On controversial, splashy, diving catches, coach Mallory will adjudicate if you were out, or still in the play!

8. Like baseball when a team is out three times, then places are switched. Play 3 innings then the game is over. Mallory will keep score, and remember you have been drinking, so when you argue about the score your opinion will not be taken very seriously.

9. This game is dangerous and will be played under international beach kickball rules. (considered by many to place you at risk of sand in your ears0 So please read your release form before participating!

As a final note, negotiations are currently under way to try to secure, Chris ” hedgehog “aka “follower whore” to play on one of the teams. Representatives from both sides have been up until the late hours of the night negotiating his appearance fee.

Coach Mallory has also agreed to stay around after the game for autographs and photos.

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!

Going to internet business events is nothing like it was even two years ago. With events like the TwistUp that took place last night, which was a writhing party of L.A. tech Prom excess, the thinktank, and Shoemoney’s Elite Retreats, the Azoogle event at the Playboy Mansion, you can fill your whole networking business calender with nothing but elite, private, over the top, well fed, open bar’d events filled with the best of the best.

Other than the Elite Retreat, stuff like this did not even exist two years ago.

I have been working the plans for the thinktank over and over, revising the schedule, checking the tides, arranging the delivery. Putting it all together is like writing an orchestra that will be performed for and by your closest friends. As Shoemoney or anyone running a super high end get together like this will tell you, it makes very little or no money in the end, but is truly a labor of love.

The fun thing for me is that I am not a fancy guy in the traditional respects. I don’t own a tie, or a sportcoat, let alone a suit. I grew up in a town on the outskirts of L.A. that was known as the auto wrecking capital of the world, where stabbings and shootings in my junior high school, along with heavy drugs and pregnancy, were bursting out way ahead of the rest of the country and the world.

Escaping the harshness of my area where I grew up brought me to repeated trips to the ocean, my sanctuary, and my first love.

On the flip side most of my adult life has been spent working along side of millionaires, and have even had the pleasure of getting to be friends with at least 4 billionaires that I know of.

The juxtaposition of these factors is where the thinktank comes from. It takes place next to one of the finest hotels on the California coast, in the only setting I have been able to find where you can have the most amazing food catered to the event, as well as allowing alcohol, (the sin of choice of my attendees).

As you probably saw on Shoemoney’s blog, Robert Drysdale, who fights jiu jitsu out of Las Vegas, will be training the crew in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu at the thinktank, the week before Robert, the 6 times world Brazillian Jiu Jitsu champion, will be having one of the most important matches of his life in Spain against Roger Gracie. If you ask those in the know, you will hear either one of their names as the greatest Jiu Jitsu fighter alive.

We are going to have a BBQ on Saturday night like nothing you have ever seen. The band playing turned down Willie Nelson to tour with him. Karl, the head of the band and lead singer, decided he liked his life too much in San Diego delivering water (no I’m not kidding) to go on tour. He also has turned down 7 figure deals to play in Vegas. Karl is going to have a stand in for the event, a close friend of his, who played guitar for one of the most famous country western stars to have ever walked the planet. We can’t tell you the name of the country western star because it would screw up all kinds of royalty agreements and record deals, but we can tell you it is going to be as good as it gets.

Those who have been lucky enough to have been invited (luck actually has nothing to do with it, as it is good, good, people, who are smart and have proven themselves online), are either going to have the time of their lives, or me and the staff are going to give up in exhaustion trying!

This event means a ton to me and the folks coming to this event mean even more.

The first official set of invites are about to go out.

So far, close friends, insiders, and those smart enough to dig for an invite before they were mailed have snuck in under the velvet rope.

Before we totally sell out, if you are reading this, and are a really good nice person, have proven yourself online with some nice big victories, and you would like an invite, ping me before the last slice of thinktank has been gobbled up!