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.

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.
 

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.

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.

Situation:
Many small businesses are cutting back on marketing and lead generation or waiting for the economy to pick up before they invest in websites and Google advertising.

This blows me away!  Now is the time to stake a claim online.  Much like real estate, in this economy online advertising presents a buyers market.  There is no better time to assign a budget to developing a plan for growing your business online. 

There are 2 types of businesses that we are having success with right now:

#1
Small businesses that are thriving. Real estate agencies, title agencies, lawyers, mortgage brokers, and other organizations that in many instances are actually doing more volume than a year ago.  These clients are calling us to capitalize on this momentum and expand upon their ability to pull in and sell new prospects.

#2
Businesses that are hurting and need to make adjustments to accomodate a slowdown in their market.  Many small companies are concerned about a drop in activity.  A great percentage of these companies never had an online marketing/business development agenda to begin with. 

The slowdown has prompted such businesses to finally take a look at how the internet is the primary hub for sustainable and affordable business development.  Website development, and search engine marketing (Pay Per Click advertising) are the primary methods these businesses are using to stop the bleeding and develop an online initiative.

If you are kicking butt, it is a great time to figure out a way to capitalize and generate some tremendous growth potential for the coming upturn in the economy.
OR
If you are concerned about a big slowdown, it is a great time to make the adjustments you need to “recession proof” your business.

Good luck!

Client:  Hoboken Electrolysis and Skin Therapy by Carla 

We recently took on a website project right here in Hoboken. 
Carla’s Electrolysis and Skin Therapy is a small service business catering to a specific geographic area in Hudson County, NJ. 

Unfortunately, Carla fit the profile shared by many small business owners:
Her website had absolutely no measureable affect on her bottom line.

Carla wanted to develop new business using the web.  The internet, especially in a HIGH traffic area like Hoboken seemed like a valuable resource worth another marketing try. She needed to build a website that was both aesthetically pleasing and structured for Search Engine Optimization.

G Street Worked with Carla to create the message and content of the site while simultaneously managing the SEO tasks to affect performance.

When prospects search for her services the website now performs far more effectively. 

See:
Google Results for query “Hoboken Electrolysis“  
Google Results for query “Hoboken Skin Therapy”

Carla launched her new site in January of 2008.  She is now able to leverage the web as a primary source of new business development. 

Waxing!

G Street Media, LLC is proud to release our GStreetWeb.com website, version 2.0.

We have redesigned the site architecture and optimized for search engine performance and a clean, clear presentation. Please feel free to contact us with any feedback regarding ease of navigation, or how we can offer you a more robust online resource.