Tim Alston of 1st Metropolitan Mortgage in Hoboken is one fired up business owner.  Tim is one of the true professionals left standing after a massive thinning of the herd. 

Tim is moving to Google to begin a new business development strategy.  If you search for a mortgage in Hoboken, or Jersey City, or Hudson County for that matter, he wants you to find 1st Metropolitan.  So, I said the same thing I always say, “Video, video, video.”  Tim is crazy enough to buy in and here we go.  Tim is doing a weekly video informational piece on a Youtube channel.  

We set up a landing page  and a YouTube channel for Tim to distribute his videos.  This embed will keep the content on his landing page fairly fresh.  We can give visitors the ability to subscribe to a weekly video column for mortgage or refinancing shoppers.  Pretty timely content frankly.  And Tim gets pretty decent production value out of an off the shelf webcam.

Video, video, video.

We recently began working with Jody Gonzales from Kesstek, Inc. on her ecommerce product marketing.  Kesstek is a authorized reseller of recording and dictation devices by Olympus, Philips, and other brand name manufacturers. 

Kesstek sells enough to be considered a premier dealer for these national brands.  Located in Hawthorne, NJ, the company stocks, ships, and services a national client base.  Jody says they have a very loyal following of professional business clients such as doctors and lawyers.  While their customer base is mostly B2B, they also have a growing base of consumer customers. (You have to love an increasingly diversified base, particularly in a down market)

Jody has developed a very solid ecommerce platform that she manages in house.  Starting online just a few years ago she has built a very solid business around providing these products:

• Dictation devices, voice recorders, and transcription kits.
• Voice recognition software
• Digital recorders
• Headsets
• Network security cameras
• Business phones by AT&T and Panasonic

Jody uses an x-cart PHP ecommerce solution with an SQL database. This is an extremely popular product with tens of thousands of live applications. Most all of her management and design is done in house.

Kesstek is a good company. I would refer anyone with a need for transcription or recording solutions to call them and ask a few questions.
-Tom

These sites are resources for a specific content segment. Law related blogging.
http://www.lawfirmblogging.com/category/blogging

http://kevin.lexblog.com (4 stars)

General blogging resources:

http://www.problogger.net

The value of RSS.
http://www.becomeablogger.com/video-9.html 

Spend some time trying to identify keyword searches  for your business.  Think “accountant blogging tips” or “rss feed accounting news”, or variations to see if you can get industry specific content for your  own business use.  The surge in content publishers has created very niche oriented channels.  These channels appeal across a slimmer marketplace, but there is a premium value transmitted to the audience.  This is the new publishing model that has longstanding media in it’s crosshairs.
 

Michele Petrillo has built a profitable business during the past 15 years.  From her offices in Dumont, NJ, Michele creates and distributes gift baskets to consumers and corporate accounts.  Baskets-n-beyond has gained success regionally and nationally by offering high quality custom gift baskets at a competitive price point.  Perhaps more importantly with personal items like gift baskets, the level of service provided is always referral worthy.

Recently Michele called upon G Street to enhance her online lead-gen with the goal of increased sales overall.  Michele has been advertising on Google, and Yahoo for years with some degree of success.  Unfortunately the only measurement of that advertising spend is predicated on questioning the caller about how they found Baskets-n-beyond. 

The goals for transitioning Baskets-n-beyond to managed Search Engine Marketing services by G Street are:

#1 Free Micheles time to focus on her core expertise. Creating and selling gift basket packages.

#2 Identify not only what works, but more importantly what does not work in her advertising.  This will allow G Street to “cut” the ineffective spendingand free up that budget for refocusing on the higher perforning elements of the ad-spend.  This is a key ingredient in the plan to grow her business along with her marketing budget over time.

#3 Focus on soft targets in her competitive market.  In other words do not spend money on keywords like “gift basket” at several dollars a click.  That 3-5 dollars is more effectively spent on garnering 6-10 clicks for keywords like “kosher gift basket” or “yankees gift basket” than it is to get one click on the very general “gift basket” keyword.  I would add that those clicks are not only less expensive, but offer a more highly qualified prospect.  The more specific the keyword phrase, the more specifically the prospect has defined the need they want to address.

#4 Transition some percentage of Michele’s sales to online.  Baskets-n-beyond is installing ecommerce shopping cart functionality on the site.  This will allow us to drive direct sales through the online technology versus traditional telephone.  This is like giving Michele an employee that can take calls and sell 24 hours a day.  Only this way is far less expensive then a human resource.

 Finally, it should be noted that we are starting this initiative in a targeted geography including NY Metro.  Once this effort has been proven one of the easiest modes of expanding the scope is to broaden the overall geographic targeting.     

G Street is looking at creating an integrated front end for our voice, web, and crm applications.  Currently our website lead generation technology will integrate with Salesforce.com CRM to pass data, leads, contacts, assignments and actions through to the appropriate personnel to take the next appropriate step in the sales or service process.

The very cool opportunity is to have an integrated front end technology environment in a small business.  By the integration of your voice services and your lead-generation and CRM tools you create one environment for processing, measuring, and analyzing the way contacts come in and are handled from first touch through the life of the client.

This is actually the very premise of G Street Media, LLC at it’s very core.  The idea that small business can now venture into enterprise level solutions at an appropriate price point is revolutionary.  It is not about the website, or the CRM.  Now it is about a single methodology of measurement and analysis across all your relevant front end technologies.

Maybe now we can get small businesses to adopt with less fear of being toasted on their investment.  5 years from now the most competitive markets will be dominated by first adopters of the integrated small business front end.  This is what we propose to all our clients. “A monkey can run PPC and bring you leads. G Street proposes to bring you leads, and over time implement a comprehensive technology ecosystem by which your small business manages and acts on those contacts.”

G Street is working to grow the online sales of a great company based out of North Jersey.  Kesstek sells electronics by Olympus, and Phillips, and others in the recording and dictation market.  They are in fact, according to owner Jody Gonzales, one of the premier volume dealers for these manufacturers. 

Jody is focused on enhancing SEO, and PPC exposure and conversions related to the targeted traffic.  It just so happens that we (G Street) have a great deal of experience with the particular ecommerce platform that is being employed by Jody.  This gives us a bit of a leg up in assisting her with landing page optimization and a significant comfort level for the client to boot.

Jody has elected to focus her initial campaign on a limited number of products with similar prospects.  She is starting with products that serve professionals such as doctors and lawyers.  These are products with a relatively high sales volume, and because Jody is one of the larger resellers her margin on these particular products is healthy enough to absorb a single digit hit from additional lead-generation costs. 

We are also recording all the calls that come in from Kessteks new advertising campaign.  This feature allows Jody to log into http://calls.gstreetweb.com and access high level reports, or individual call recordings.  This is a powerful business tool when the client chooses to use it.  Not only does it provide an idea as to where your prospects are coming from, but also how their phone calls are handled by your staff when the phone rings. 

In the next couple weeks we’ll be launching a broader campaign for Kesstek.com’s sister site Vipertel.com

Vipertel is a full service telecom hardware reseller.  Both new and refurbished business phone system components are available for sale and immediate shipping.    

I must admit to feeling like “The Mack” in front of a colleague when calling to have my car service pick me up for a business trip to St. Louis. 

“Yes, this is client 2711.  I need my car at 6:45pm.” 
(that is not an actual client number so dont bother making any crank calls)

The booking phone call was so quick, easy, and mac-daddy sounding that my search marketing manager turned to ask me “What the heck was that about?!?”   

“Our clients do not want to waste time and money.” says Mike Elshenaway, head of Downtown Car and Limo Services.  Sounds like an idea that would make sense to most business people and the tri-state clientelle that use Downtown for newark airport car service,  a night out, package delivery, and even regularly scheduled visits from out of town.

Downtown will allow people to have a client profile.  And it is very cool when you do!

Downtown clients never have to repeat their address, phone number, name, or method of payment.  The client can even set up a regular pick-up schedule if they would like to.  All this means that Downtown Car and Limo clients dont have to go back to Google, or the yellow pages to find and book a car service or delivery.

G Street Media is very excited to be running a couple of unique online advertising campaigns that are designed to bring in new clients for Mike and his business.  

We started with one client type:

Professionals who want to ramp up the convienience factor and savings when they book a car service or limo.

But after the conversation with my SEM guy we expanded the scope of the campaign to include:

Professionals who want to sound cool when they make their booking. 

Either of these prospects is perfect for Downtown.  I fall into the latter catagory.  I’ve never needed a car service in my cell phone before, but you can bet I do now.  And you can bet that I will be loyal as long as I get to sound cool when I book my pickups.  My Search Engine Marketing guy called and set up a profile too.  (I am positive he will use this primarily to try and impress the ladies by sounding like he has a car at his beck n’ call.

Time to get back to work on some techie-geek-nerd-speak-stuff.  But anybody in Hoboken should put this number in their celly and get ready to look like a cool guy next time they go to Newark Airport, JFK International, LaGuardia, Philly and especially Atlantic City or Foxwoods. 

Click on the “Book Online” button to go to the Downtown website and contact Mike to set up your profile. 

Mack-Daddy, out.

M5 Networks offers some of the slickest, most manageable communications solutions for small and mid-sized organizations.  By offering “voice as a service” M5 Networks sets itself apart from most every system provider. 

The point is that there are tons of really cool features to allow you to do better business, but you dont use them.  The reason you dont employ these features is because nobody in your organization has the time or incentive to sit in a closet and manage your communication technology all day.  M5 has the time and expertise to do just this very thing. No system in your closet. Just the latest in features and technology on demand.

The mantra of the small business marketer could well be:  “It’s not worth doing if you don’t collect data.” 

Most small businesses are going to learn this the hard way when the owner attempts to cash out, or when it is time to change direction. No data.

For businesses that are ready to take marketing seriously there is a hosted application from StructuredWeb that answers many needs for small businesses who need to invest in their future success. 

The StrucuredWeb platform is a marketing database tool integrated with website management, email marketing, CRM, and ecommerce tools.  We have this web based platform in place with 2 of our clients: Castle Point Realty, and TDNYC.com.

The CRM is comparable to most other solutions in the small & midsize space.  The really cool advantage is the integration with your website and emarketing solutions via the same management interface.  This allows you to manage and access data collected from your website, email campaigns, and through your CRM all in a single tool.  This single tool gives StructuredWeb a great pitch to small businesses who need to establish a marketing effort in house. 

The drawbacks to StructuredWeb are obsolete technology (not including custom solutions for the apparel industry), non-existant SEO/SEM capability, and an ecommerce platform that could only be intended for use by office supply dealers.  Of these shortcomings the only one that gets annoying is the lack of SEO/SEM capabilities.  It actually requires custom work to plug in a Google Analytics or AdWords tracking script.  SEO is simply not a priority for SW.  They seek to drive existing contacts to the web through email marketing.  PPC is another option, but better for a less capable client to use SW to run the whole campaign.  Definately not for the savvy SEM professional who wants to run their own campaigns. 

I definately recommend a closer look for any small business that is ready to get started with a marketing effort.  The technology is web based with an annual licensing fee.  To implement the technology, design a site, and deploy 10 CRM licenses will run you about 10-15k to do it right.  Any small business should expect to invest another 20K in services during the following year to make it worthwhile. 

If you cannot afford to invest in a marketing strategy there will be in trouble if you ever need to change direction or face an economic slowdown.

To learn more or to see a StructuredWeb demo click here.

Use social networking tools to enhance search performance at no cost.

You have most likely heard of MySpace and Facebook. (if you have not, then we cant be friends anymore)  

LinkedIn.com offers professionals a place to manage an interactive resume and professional contact network.  Click here for an example profile page: Tom Ritter

To better understand the actual benefits of this free platform consider the keyword phrase “Tom Ritter”.  This particular keyword phrase has some stiff competition in the first page results of Google. (Click here to see Google results for ”Tom Ritter”)  I am competing with a nationally reknowned dentist, and a famous actor for visibility in the results. 

I do not have a website or blog to compete with these other results. I am on the first page of Google simply because I created a LinkedIn profile.  At the time of this post my LinkedIn profile ranked #6 on the first page of Google results. 

I will concede that there are only about 575,000 websites related to the search “Tom Ritter”.  If my name was “Brad Pitt” the competition would consist of about 25 million competitive results.  But still, I am beating out over half a million websites without having spent a dime to do so. 

For those of you with some real Search Engine Optimization savvy, my LinkedIn page boasts a Google PR of 3.  This means that any links I create on my LinkedIn page actually improve the search performance of the sites I link to. 

So set yourself up on LinkedIn, and get all your employees to do the same. Then, create website links to your company website from all of your respective profiles.  The Search Engine Optimization benefits will be measureable, and you cannot beat the price.

Make no mistake about it, my LinkedIn profile performs because I update it at least once a month and I have developed a decent network of 150 contacts and growing.  But even that is very little effort to maintain. 

And make no mistake about this……………….Mr. Furley was the man.