Diary of a Suburban Startup (John Lyotier)

Did you know that within the last month alone, Google recorded more than 2 million searches for the keywords “Chiropractor” or “Chiropractic” and more than 4 million searches for “Dentist” or “Dentistry”?

In response, my incubation firm LaunchExperts launched a new business unit called “Marketing Clinics”. Marketing Clinics provides fully-managed, paid search marketing to chiropractors and dentists. We invite you to check us out over at www.MarketingClinics.com

The service was launched in response to questions from many chiropractors and dentists about the complexity of managing their own paid search marketing campaigns on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. I thought it would be good to productize the best practices that we have learned into a fully-managed search engine advertising solution, complete with auto campaign optimization, local and highly-converting keyword sets, and tested and proven landing pages.

We are so confident that we can drive leads, we have even included a 110% guarantee.

If you know of any chiropractors or dentists that need to drive new patient leads for their chiropractic clinic or dentistry clinic, I would appreciate an introduction.

I have been hard at work creating more than 1,000 pages of unique content for my golf reservations project over at TeeTimes.net. Most of this has involved creating unique descriptions for each of the golf courses within the system (a detailed list of golf courses and golf course regions can be found here).

Why have we done this? The present descriptions that we were using as part of our booking engine would be what the search engines call “duplicated content”. The content was not original and it was being fed onto sites all  across the web. By creating our own descriptions of the golf courses, our content should be treated as unique.

I will keep you posted if this makes a difference.

I am considering conducting some sort of paid search advertising clinic for small businesses here in Maple Ridge. My motivation for this is two fold:

First, I bought a few good domain names the other day that are highly relevant in MarketingClinics.com, AdvertisingClinics.com and BrandingClinics.com. And while I am focusing the Marketing Clinics website on a new venture focused on paid search marketing for chiropractors and dentists, it would be a shame to just sit on the AdvertisingClinics.com domain.

Secondly, I truly enjoy sharing knowledge about search marketing, paid search advertising, and some of the techniques that I am using. Am I a teacher? Well, I haven’t taught anything ‘officially’ since about 1995 when I was teaching some adult literacy courses. But I do sit and coach/mentor people one-on-one about these opportunities on a weekly basis.

What I am pondering aloud (and in the oh-so public forum that is this medium), is if there any interest in a hands-on course geared towards the small businesses owner/manager that would run for about 4 evenings over the course of a 4-week period? Is there a market for this? I figure that the course would entail some hands on campaign development so at the end of the session, you would have your advertising campaigns built out for your business? I would think I should be able to talk Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft out of some vouchers to sweeten the pot. Hmmm….

Let me know your thoughts and if there is any interest.

J.

I attended the Ridge Meadows Chamber of Commerce’s mini-tradeshow and networking event tonight. It was mostly a chance to get ou of the house after being headsdown busy for the past couple of days, but I have been trying to make a point on keeping connected within the business community (though normally I attend events that are in downtown… not out here in Maple Ridge).

Anyhow, one of the things that attracted me to the event tonight was to hear a speech by the President, Dean Barbour, on the Chamber’s current direction and mandate. While I won’t regurgitate, I did like what I heard. One of the key things that resonated with me was Dean’s vision and discussion of “The Golden Ears Gateway”. Basically, anything that is within site of the Golden Ears Mountains, should be within the marketing catchment of the Chamber and local businesses. And a big part of the growth will be in using the new website to promote the region and its businesses.

And then Dean announced, “The Chamber website will be re-branded under www.openforbusinessmrpm.com“

I don’t know if Dean or anyone else in the room saw me convulsively twitch when this was announced. Pardon? That was “Open For Business Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows .com” in case you missed it the first time. Part of me almost feels bad for going home and registering GoldenEarsGateway.com. I guess this now complements the other local domain I registered the other day: www.MyMapleRidge.com

Me thinks I am going to get involved with the Chamber and help them with their marketing.

Now here is a pondering… can your Meetup profile boost your search ranking?

I set myself up to generate a Google News Alert any time my name is mentioned [not from a vanity standpoint, but more from a reputation management standpoint]. I received an alert this morning that directed me to my profile on the Vancouver Entrepreneur’s Meetup group website. Incidentally, it was another good event last night. Cheers to everyone who attended…

Anyhow, in viewing the page I noticed that it had a PageRank of 5. And that was for just my profile on the site itself. Of course, I quickly modified my profile to insert links to a few of my recent ventures (e.g., my golf tee times site). After all, any site with a PR of 5 is good enough for me.

But then I got curious, The Vancouver Search Engine Optimization Meetup Group has a PR rank of 2. How about other groups… hmmm … International Internet Marketing Association Meetup they have a PR of 6. I think I will join this group, build out a few links on my profile. Now how about Vancouver Net Tuesday… a PR of 4… well my profile now has a link to my tee time golf reservation business as well.

Well it appears that not every group is equal. Some have a ranking, some do not. With a bit of time, I bet I could find a few groups that could provide me with good deep links to a number of my sites. I wonder if there are any SEOs out there who want to do a more in-depth experiment on this.

And yes… it is not only about having sites with a good page rank link to you, but it can’t hurt.

Thinking of calling Reliable Flagging of Maple Ridge for your flagging and traffic control needs? Then please read this post first.

Back in July, I wrote about the weekly wrong numbers that we were receiving for Maple Ridge’s Reliable Flagging (see the post here). I wrote the post to seed the search engines with the right phone number. Well the calls stopped for a while, but they started up again a few weeks ago [I was bumped out of the top position for the keywords "reliable flagging" by an Industry Canada profile]. And then the calls started again. For the calls we’ve been answering, it works out to be 2 to 3 calls per week. From an SEO perspective, this shows the power of being in the top slot as opposed to being number 2.

And every time someone calls, we’ve been dutiful in trying to help out and pass their actual phone number along (it is now written on a permanent sticky-note next to the phone and I have it memorized 604.466.3524… 604.466.3524 …604.466.3524 … 604.466.FLAG). And every time we get a phone call, we ask the caller to “say hi from John” when you call the right number.

But not any more. No way. No how.

Here’s why. I had another phone call today from someone looking for flagging services. I told him the correct number without a beat, and he mentioned that I must get a lot of phone calls for them as this is the number that I got from the Internet. I said “I did”, and “please say hi to Jane for me.” After hanging up, I did a quick search on Google revealed that we are no longer ranked number 1 for reliable flagging. Hmmm… I pondered. Let me call Jane directly again as last time when I tried to find a solution, she wanted to know why I didn’t call her and let her know about the problem.

The response that I got from her today was appalling in my opinion. She is saying that she only gets business from the Yellow Pages and never from the Internet [hands up if you simply recycle your Yellow Pages when it arrives on your doorstep]. And she certainly has never had anyone say that they got her phone number from me. She kept on insisting that it is an issue between me and Telus if we are getting those phone calls [think about that one for a while].

Then I tried to interject the berating and threats that she is “going to sue my ass off” with a creative solution. I offered to get her a website built through some of the contractors that I use overseas at cost … as in I am not going to be making money… and for a basic brochureware site, you are talking $100-$200 max. But at least as a website owner she could control her own name and her own business. But I forgot… she doesn’t get any business from the Internet.

I cannot comment on her business skills, customer service abilities, professional  demeanor, traffic control skills, or anything else in that regard. I do hope that for whichever customers do choose Reliable Flagging over other great businesses offering flagging services, your experience in dealing with Jane has been better than mine (please post a comment below if you agree or disagree). I hate to admit it, but I actually hung up on her. I never hang up on anyone. I am even polite to telemarketers.

So for the last time, Reliable Flagging’s phone number is 604.466.3524. And this time, when you speak to Jane, please say “Hi from John”. And do tell her that you got her number from my blog and the Internet.

Oh… and for those looking for flagging services in Maple Ridge or the Vancouver area, these websites look interesting:

Ansan Traffic Control

Valley Traffic Systems

I launched a LinkBait SEO experiment today for a client, Urban Presentations Home Staging. We have created a small application called a Home Staging Price Calculator that allows people to copy-and-paste a code snippet onto their own websites. First and foremost, the application is useful to those who want to know more about the price of staging a home for real estate sales.

The little applet is published under Creative Commons with the restriction that any websites that use the calculator must do so with a link back to the Urban Presentations website. The thought being, that if Realtors use this home staging calculator, it will likely be on a page dedicated to the concept of Home Staging. And hopefully, they would pass back a bit of link love in the process. We will see if it works.

This past week the TRAFFIC Domain Conference in New York held several auctions. And while I wasn’t in attendance, I do think that some of those who were, grabbed themselves some good domains at very reasonable prices. A few that jumped out to me were:

RentalCondos.com ($11.5k) – Big business and big sales here with a clear consumer intent in an activity that is happening more and more online

Wines.net ($13k) – It is not as good a deal as beef.net, but it is a very big industry with a lot of search traffic. Good opportunity for consumer site, product referrals, community building, simple service brokering the import/export B2B of products. Focus on recommendation engine for wine matching, etc.

CatFood.com ($15k) – Niche category-owning domain. Clear intent of what the browser is looking for. Can be an ecommerce play using outsourced fulfillment. Whoops… this one didn’t sell. The reserve was north of $75k

MufflerRepairs.com ($2.25k) – Yellow Pages category name. Large local play component

Rent.me ($6k) — A different extension, but could be a very brandable classifieds-type site facilitating apartment, equipment, etc rentals. It wouldn’t take many Hawaiian condo rentals to pay for this investment.

Men.org ($12.5k) – Yes it is a .org, but this should still be able to develop a loyal audience with content, heath issues. It kind of defines the audience. I can see a marketing campaign in Cosmo targeted at women who don’t understand Men. A steal at that price.

Decorators.tv ($200) – I’m including this one as this already exists as a category for cable TV, and I know that you could put a pre-existing social media YouTube type package up on it quickly… and I have a client who is considering building out a TV program focused on this niche.

SeafoodRestaurant.com ($3.5k) – One should be able to make your money back on this focused on local search and OpenTable affiliate programs.

Beef.net ($2.75k) – wow… A low price on this one. Beef import/export is big, big business.

A note to any of the successful bidders… if you want assistance in building out any of these projects, let me know.

Edit: DomainNameNews has a good run-down of the complete list that sold here

This is more of an open pondering on my recent TeeTimes.net project, you know… the one that enables golfers to book golf course reservations from the golf course down their street, or around the world.

I am now in the midst of optimizing the site for search engines. I have submitted to Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, Best of the Web, eLib.org, Lii.org, and a few others. I have been StumbledUpon and ’slurped’ by Delicious. I have even retained an SEO rep to help me source some highly-relevant links … the white hat way.

But here is my question. I have just received a link from a legitimate site that has a PR8 ranking (It is a very well known and respectable site and the content that was created for me on this site is keyword rich). The thing is, given the very nature of the site and the products that I am offering, I am confident that I could get multiple links from this same site (let’s say… 1 per week). Each link is on its own page whereby the only external link goes to the TeeTimes.net website. So does the math for the search engines and page rank work like this:

“1 site, 1 page, PR8 rank, 1 link”

equals…

“1 site, 2-10 pages, PR8 rank for each, 2-10 links”

In other words, is 1 equal to 10? And will it help book golf tee times for those who are looking for the golf course down the street?

John

[EDIT: And before you comment on it... yes I know that having 10 sites, each of which has a PR8 link is better.]

I launched another new venture today. This one is called Direct Voter (www.DirectVoter.com). Direct Voter provides search engine advertising for election campaigns.

Right now, there is a near perfect storm for elections in North America. The US elections are set for November 4. Canada votes 3 weeks earlier in its Federal Election being held on October 14. The media and the blogosphere is abuzz (here, here, and here) with the Obama campaign and its ability to use social media and the internet to control the message as no candidate has ever done before [I think someday there would be a great university paper comparing Obama's use of Internet marketing with JFK's use of television marketing, but I digress].

Much like that described here by Joshua Stylman at The Huffington Post, Direct Voter equips a candidate seeking public office with fully-managed paid search campaigns. The search campaigns encompass all major search engines and use keyword sets that are built around opponents, political issues, geographic profiling, and local/election keyword combinations. The end result is that the candidate receives great brand exposure on his or her name as well as engaged clicks through to the election website.

Search engine advertising for election campaigns comes at a price point that provides a far greater return on investment than most traditional forms of marketing (including direct mail, lawn signs, postcard drops, and most assuredly TV and newspapers). With search engine advertising, you also get brand exposure for free. This is because with the millions of searches that occur in your community, your ad will appear. But you only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement.

I must have been focused too closely on the economic impact of search marketing as I didn’t see what may be the greatest benefit of this medium (until my wife pointed it out). Unlike direct mail or postcard campaigns, advertising your candidacy on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. has zero environmental impact. What better way to show the voters that you are concerned about the environment than with environmentally-friendly marketing.

Anyhow, if you know anyone who is presently running for office (or is considering a challenge in the not too distant future), direct them my way… or at least… send them over to DirectVoter.com. It sure would be appreciated.

It really is amazing how quickly the summer goes. Between trips to the waterslides, barbeques, and launching new web ventures, time just flies.

In July, an opportunity came up for me to acquire the TeeTimes.net domain name and build a new web business around it. It took me less than a month to pull some deals together, negotiate the purchase of the domain, and build out a fully-functioning web business. The end result can be seen over at www.teetimes.net.

TeeTimes.net is a prototype on two fronts:

1. First, it is the first known example of using Calgoo Software’s In-Calendar Marketing in a live environment. In-Calendar Marketing is a new marketing medium that allows for the delivery of marketing messages right into the electronic calendars of your most passionate adopters. For TeeTimes.net, an avid golfer can select their favorite golf course and have that course’s available tee times deposited right into their calendar. In this way, they are only one click away from booking a tee time, providing us with transactional revenues with every booking. Our goal is to facilitate one booking per golf course per week (we can presently integrate with more than 1000 golf courses).
2. Secondly, it is a prototype of my philosophy that you can quickly deploy functioning businesses that are fully self-sustaining enterprises. Will TeeTimes.net ever grow into that $10M company that people are always trying to create? Probably not. But by using marketing automation, outsourcing, and 100% profit-assured marketing tactics (without employees), it can grow enough. After all, if I can book one round of golf for 1000 courses every week, and the typical golf course pays out upwards of 10 to 15% commission for referred bookings, the returns can be substantial.

If you are interested in booking a round of golf, I invite you to use the TeeTimes.net website. If you want to chat more about my philosophy for launching web businesses like this (or if you have a quality generic domain name that you want to partner with me on developing), drop me a line.

BTW… To see how TeeTimes.net uses in-calendar marketing, watch this screencast here:

http://www.screencast.com/t/tDGpL17x