Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

The Mirage hotel has graciously allowed our gang of misfits to decend upon their lovely hotel and casino on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2009 at 8:00 P.M.

The poker tournament has grown so large, and brings with it such a moving party, with last year literally hundreds of people who either showed up to play or just to play

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Keep checking this blog as Pubcon 2009 approaches, but it looks like we are going to be setting up our own poker room for the event, as we can not longer fit inside their regular poker room.

Before this can actually be a charity poker tournament, I need to get approval from the Nevada Gaming Commission. As I am sure you would guess, having a poker tournament with real money flying around legally, has an enormous amount of regulations attached to it.

After doing some research I found a charity that if they will give us permission, I would like to get behind this upcoming holiday season. They are called the Blind Center of Nevada. One of the super cool things they do is run an online electronics business, which takes old electronics, computers and monitors, cameras and the like, makes sure they are working, and then sells them on e-bay to support their center. To date they have made around a million bucks this way. This supports the center which trains these guys and gals in skills so they can be out in the regular work force.

Historically blind people for the most part have had assembly jobs, or other repetitive jobs that were less intellectually demanding. Through their program they allow blind people to new technology that allows them to do things online, that previously was impossible.

Anyone who knows me well, gets that I like to support those who are busting their buts to help themselves and others. This group takes that path by teaching visually impaired people job skills, and then in their own institution allowing those individuals to apply those skills to make money to run the institution.

If you give a few thousand dollars to feed people, that money will be spent in a day. A group like this, since it is already making some money themselves, can leverage a donation to help many, many, more people in many ways for years to come.

The poker tournament should be a great time. EVERYONE IS INVITED! I would love you to blog about it, and put up a poker poster on your site, and make sure EVERYONE  who is part of pubcon knows it will be the best of the pubcon parties!

We are now accepting sponsors for the event also. The money is going to a good cause, so open up those pockets!! Contat me at dk (=at=) purposeinc.com if you are interested.

Feel free to grab a poker poster that is the correct size for your blog and use it on your site.

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!

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!

I do whitehat SEO through and through. I am a huge Matt Cutts fan (cuttlet) and have made a ton of money off of the graciousness of Google for sending me lots of very high quality traffic.

From the beginning Matt has said, develop good content, don’t even worry about the SEO too much, and google will reward you.

Lately I have had my eye on the term facebook advertising in google, and my site has been doing O.K. at it.

I totally cracked up today when I looked and saw that Shoemoney had taken the spot right after facebook themselves for a ton of matches.

If you read my blog I am sure you are aware of shoe and the fact that he really truly writes for the readers and not for the search engines.

I think the next two pics below tell the story.

Hope you laugh as hard as I did

the greatest seo of all

By the way, Google says there were 282 million matches on this one

Just scored the tickets. Unbelievably good tickets in fact. We will be 10 rows up over the floor, within a rocks throw of the octagon. Shawn Tompkins who a lot of my readers know personally will be there in the corner for Mark “the hammer” Coleman. Robert Drysdale, who is the 6x Brazillian Jiu Jitsu world champion will likely show up in someones corner, watch for him!

Shawn allready invited me and the wife to come by the Couture gym to watch the pros train and hang out. It will give me a chance to renew my connections, make new ones, and plan fun stuff for the future for you guys!

We will be staying at the Wynn, and get to have a little quality pool time.

Of course we will hit the wife’s favorite restaraunt, Red 8 for Dim Sum.

I will also be talking to some different casinos as to where we should have our charity poker tournament this year. Feel free to offer any early input on the subject.

The whole trip sounds like heaven.

I’ll try to get some fun pics and post them next week.

This should be quite a fight!

Think tank invites about to go out. This amazing traveling circus, traveling, band of brothers will be getting together in Del Mar California on September 17, 18 and 19th.

This aint a conference, please don’t even ask about sessions, speakers, or anything like that.

Some probably things on the planning table right now include,
The guys.
Surfing
MMA training, maybe Ju Jitsu this time?
Pretty girls. (That’s you Junise!)
Late night card games.
Beach chairs on the grass watching the waves roll in.
A schedule. HA!
Crepes.
BBQ’s
A country band you wouldn’t believe.
As much of everything as you could possibly want!
Only high end, positive, fun, energetic, and creative people.

I don’t know about you, but I am ALL IN!

Invites will be going out real soon.

There are way, way too many people who want to come, than we can accommodate.

I will send out invites and probably give a one week window that the invite is good, and then I will open up the spot to the next guy.

Just imagine the best moments you ever had on the road, hitting the conference circuit, cut out the sessions, cut out the booths, cut out the sales pitches, and what you have left is THE ThinkTank!

I love you guys, and look forward to seeing you here!

Much Love,
dk

Wow! My wife and I just got back from snowmobiling all day in yellowstone. Buffalo blocking the road, an eagles nest, elk, geysers, steaming hot pots, snow, just flying down the road! A private guide! One of the greatest days of my life.

Love you all! Happy New Years!

Now for dinner and fun in a one horse town!