The bloggers in Utah are a close community. We have a secret Facebook Page with over 300 members (you should too) to communicate and share information with each other. I’ve both hosted and attended several events. Recently I participated in a blog tour of The Shoppes at Riverwoods – an outdoor mall in Provo, Utah.

We stopped at a toy store, an ice cream shop, a gift store and a restaurant. We get to meet the owners of each and learn more about local businesses. You can forget that each shop was started by someone who is passionate about their business.

Good bloggers are also good storytellers who can tell people about you through pictures and words. Blog posts usually rank well in search engines meaning that people who search for your business may read a first hand account about the business from a blog post.

Unfortunately, a lot of bloggers don’t use keywords in their blog post titles or links (even if you ask them to).  If you search “Utah toy store” my blog post is the 3rd result in Google. I guarantee that my neighborhood blog does not get the most traffic or have a devoted following, but anytime someone wants to find a toy store in Utah, they could find my post and decide to go to Blinkenstaff’s (which I highly recommend doing).

Unless you’re a blog with a huge following you probably won’t see an immediate affect on sales or even traffic from getting a lot of blog posts written about your product. To me it’s really about the search benefit and of course the word of mouth. Many have strong Facebook followings and are posting to Facebook, Twitter and maybe even checking in on Facebook or Foursquare.

Another benefit is that the bloggers themselves often become loyal customers. I know I plan to head back to Blinkenstaff’s to do some Christmas shopping.

My favorite blogging event is hosting or attending restaurant tastings, but we’ve also attended movie openings. Bloggers love to get to know and network with other bloggers. In the best case, it’s a win for everyone. Have you hosted a blogger event or would you like to? How did it go? Tell me about it in the comments.

This is an interview with Jonathan, who built a web site to promote a local business. He is teaching his kids online marketing (if mine would only express even a hint of interest!) and earning a part time income by sending sales leads to a local lawn care company.

Setting up the web site and finding local businesses to work with takes the most work. However, it’s a lot easier to sell leads online than do the actual yard work.

I asked him to share some of his secrets.

Q: How did you get started doing online lead generation for a local business?

My kids and I have a yard care business we do in the summer.  We mow and trim yards for different people in our townhouse community. After doing this kind of work, I thought we might be able to bring it online. Now we have several different websites that target different lawn care keywords in Utah near where we live.  Our latest site is going after provo lawn care.  This is the biggest market in the county.

Instead of doing all the work, they found lawn care companies who would pay them to send new customers.

Q: What obstacles or lessons did you learn in the process?

I learned that Google Maps and SEO go hand in hand.  If you have a quality, optimized website with a lot of links, there is a good chance it is going to give a significant bump to your maps listing.

Please give us some tips to setting up a web site and driving traffic to it.

There are a few things you need to focus on for local SEO and Google Maps

- Make a Google Local Page with the correct information about your business.

- Put the name of the business, address, and phone number associated with that local listing in the footer of your website.

- Push citations in local directories to your website.  These essentially act as links for your local listing.

[Janet's note: At the bottom of your Google Places page you'll see a list of other websites which have mentioned your business. You cannot add these, Google adds them, but they get them from review web sites, articles, etc.]

- Have a quality, search engine optimized website

- Build links to your site using localized keywords as the anchor text.

After all of these efforts, you will have a maps listing and a website that rank fantastic for local keywords.  If you do a search for orem lawn care, you will see that my site, www.oremlawncare.com, has the top 3 spots in an organic Google search.  I got these results from following the pervious steps.

Q: How is the campaign performing for you?

The campaign is running fantastic.  We found a partner to sell all of the leads to so we don’t have to actually do the fulfillment.  We anticipate doing $1500 to $2000 next summer from just selling leads.

Q: Do you have any advice on finding or working with a local business?

Make sure you build your website on a quality platform.  I highly recommend using WordPress or Drupal.

I attended a session on local lead generation techniques at Affiliate Summit. There was a lot of focus on local businesses and there were some good tips and ideas. I heard @adhustler, and Amanda Orson @phillian in the session called, “Local Lead Generation — Heaven and Hell” and Angel Djambazov @djambazov on “Why Affiliates Should Dominate Local Marketing.”

Basically, you work with a local business to promote their products or services. Rather than joining an existing affiliate program, you work out a private deal where you make money by sending them sales leads. The advantage is the business gets your expertise in online marketing and they don’t have to manage an entire program, promote it, and pay the associated fees. It’s a form of outsourcing your internet marketing.

Given Google is favoring local businesses in search results, if you can work with a local business as an affiliate, you might be able to carve out a nice niche. That’s if you can handle the downsides (which I don’t know that I can). Wil Reynolds talked about how for searches which are local can take up 40% of the search results. Bruce Clay estimated that would move up to 70% in the next few years!

Google says over 20% of searches are local:

“More than 20 percent of the searches on Google today are related to location, that’s people looking for doctors, or museums or a park to take their kids,” Bavaro added in a telephone interview with AFP.
“It’s a really important area of investment for us.”

Google said Place Search results will appear automatically when Google’s search engine predicts a user is looking for local information.

Here are some examples of local lead gen (basically getting sales leads online):

• Setting up a web site to get lawn care leads for a company in your city or state.

• Setting up a page for a cosmetic surgeon and splitting a percentage or flat fee for everyone who asks for a consultation and/or becomes a client as a result of your web site.

• Driving traffic to a real estate agent who then pays you for every lead form who calls or emails to set up an appointment to see homes for sale.

• Creating a guide to buying a used car and a downloadable form to finding a list of cars under $12k.

To make a landing page, you need a simple, clean design on your web page, a call to action (preferably a button) and usually a phone number and video.

There are benefits and drawbacks to local lead gen.

Upside of local lead generation:
- low competition
- services offered usually fill a customer need
- service sells itself

Downsides of local lead generation:
- clients can be clueless how the internet or lead gen works
- clients can be high maintenance (calling you often when they don’t see their ad or click on their own ads, which costs you money)
- small businesses may not be able to close the sale. They might have bad phone manners or be rude to the people you send to them. You don’t get paid if they lose the customer.
- small businesses may lack capacity. Maybe you send the lawn care company so many new clients that they that can’t handle them.
- clients can be flaky. Even if you get them fantastic results they still think they can do better elsewhere or get it cheaper.
- clients can be extremely needy – as in they want you to do everything, and think that its all included in the original price quote.
- lack of scalability, can’t service call the leads.
- quick followup needed, may not always happen (lead spoilage)

Here are different ways you can get paid for driving local leads:

Pay per lead (set amount)
per sale (don’t recommend)
hybrid (they pay for ad, + % of sale or per lead)
management fee (20-30%)
use your imagination

For a real life example, I interviewed someone who has had good success with local lead gen and I’ll link to our interview as soon as it’s live.

Yesterday I wrote about Foursquare partnerships and promised to write today about the biggest potential deal — with search engines.

Recently Foursquare has been in talks with the big 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. They would index check-in data in search results (likely alongside news, videos and images relating to your search. Now you’ll also see check-ins). I can even imagine this being integrated with Google Maps.

Let’s say you’re in a new city. Maybe you don’t have a taxi and just want something close by that’s good. You can check reviews but what if you want to know what’s currently most popular (or where to go to possibly meet some singles or what a celebrity likes). You could get aggregate information about check-in popularity through a search engine.

This would take Foursquare into the mainstream because you wouldn’t have to use it to find it helpful. However, they would still rely on check-ins (which I’ve heard are at about a million a week). If it’s like most social networks there are a lot more lurkers than participants. For now Foursquare doesn’t have critical mass. But more exposure through search engines could help there too.

Twitter is about what people are saying and Foursquare is about where people are going. Foursquare cofounder and CEO Dennis Crowley said,

“Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”

I see more integration with Twitter and other social networks like Facebook – if not officially at least unofficially. In other words, multi-platform promotions that integrate with Foursquare. Mom bloggers do this all the time with giveaways. You enter their contests by commenting on their post, following them on Twitter (or tweeting about the contest), becoming a fan on Facebook (or writing on their wall). They just need to add, checking in on Foursquare.

Here’s a small example of how McDonald’s integrated Twitter and Foursquare:

Watch for how search engines will get in on this game. First they tried to buy Foursquare, and when they were turned down now they want to work with them. Signing new partnerships with search engines would cement Foursquare’s leadership in the location based social network space. The deals wouldn’t be bad for investors either.

I have to comment on this bad PR move. Last night KSL – a TV station in Utah covered a lawsuit that was filed over – you got it – cupcake flavors. Mini’s Cupcakes in Salt Lake City is suing another cupcake store in Park City called LuAnn’s Cupcakes. Why? they say that the store copied their most famous cupcake.

Sounds like a cat fight.

Mini’s owner Leslie Fiet says, “She has several cupcakes that are completely different from my cupcakes, but this just happens to be our most popular and most distinctive cupcake that people associate with Mini’s.” Fiet’s cupcake is called “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and LuAnne’s is called “Tiffany’s Jewels.” I’m getting hungry writing this but I haven’t tried either.

In a lawsuit, Mini’s claims that LuAnn’s has “adopted a strategy and philosophy to intentionally and unlawfully trade off the goodwill that Mini’s has built by infringing Mini’s trade dress rights in the Breakfast at Tiffany’s cupcake.”

I commented on Mini’s Facebook Page that I thought the lawsuit was petty and a bad idea. Instead they could’ve said, we’re the original, here’s how the competition stacks up. Accuse them of stealing the idea if you want but let the people judge if they did a good job or not. Have people vote on who’s is the best and invite cupcake experts to vote. Hold an event, send out a press release. Talk about it on Facebook, invite their fans, invite the media. They could even let their fans make their version of the Tiffany cupcake and taste test each others. All of this gets people involved and exposes people to your name and cupcakes. You’d save the thousands you’re spending on attorneys and instead plow it into making a killer event and getting some great publicity from it.

Instead you’ve left a bad taste in our mouth. Enough that I’m writing about it.

I watched Rachel Ray judge the best Chicago hot dog on one of her episodes. They had a line of contestants who own restaurants that sell hot dogs. You should’ve seen the disappointment on some of faces on the guys who didn’t win. They were mad. I figure that hey, you got your hot dogs on national TV, who cares if you didn’t win, play it up. It’s publicity for you either way. The ones who didn’t get in are those who weren’t even in the contest.

It’s better to be sweet – especially if sweet is whatch ya selling. My impression of this brand now and the people who watched this on the news is that they are anything but sweet.

Here’s the video from KSL:

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

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• 2010 Saratoga Seen Cupcake Challenge (timesunion.com)
• Cupcake passion more than a trend (cnn.com)

I’m reading Referral Engine by John Jantsch (coming out next month) and the part that asks a lot of questions has me soul searching.

He asks if:

• you’re easy to communicate with
• your value/marketing messaging is easy to understand
• you’re easy to network with, trust, buy from, work with, etc.

It triggered a lot of self-evaluation for me. It talks about making it easy to do business with you. Businesses that get referrals do this well. The problem is making it easy is actually hard. At least it is for me.

Some people I know do not have a voicemail message or they don’t have a professional voicemail message. Sometimes the message is – I don’t answer voicemails so try another way to reach me. In other words, more work for the caller. I think it’s sort of a hoop to weed out people who aren’t determined to reach them.

There are many different ways to communicate and for people to reach you – it can be overwhelming. Messages can come from different phone lines (home work, cell), Facebook, LinkedIn, IM, Skype, text message, Twitter, various email addresses (personal, business, etc). It gets confusing to remember where they are coming from.

The biggest thing I see in internet marketing that makes me not buy after a recommendation or a search engine refers me to you is your web site makes it hard to do business with you. It’s tough to see what you’re selling. I want to buy something from you but I can’t figure out if it’s worth the price you’re asking. There’s not much of a description or I cannot see sample content. When you write articles or press releases I think, that’s nice and move on. You don’t tell me what you want me to do next. You don’t offer to take me further into your sales process. So I never go.

On my own sites I struggle with this too. So I guess I’m saying that I realize the problem, but the solution? not so much. This book has made me realize that if making a referable business is important to me I have a lot of work to do.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Referral Engine (800ceoread.com)
• Are You an Active Business Blogger? (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Weekend Reading: The Referral Engine, by John Jantsch (Preview) (readwriteweb.com)
• Start Your Voicemail Messages Without a Gasp [Voicemail] (lifehacker.com)
• Twit2Tel – now receive voicemails on Twitter (twi5.com)

Just because it’s not as in vogue to blog as it once was, doesn’t mean that blogging is dead or dying. In fact, it’s as important as ever. Here are some recent studies that clearly show that blogging is still an important marketing tool.

If you don’t blog, pitch stories good and relevant stories to bloggers (who often need content).

3 studies about blogging to consider:

1. Companies who blog get more traffic, links and pages indexed by search engines

Out of 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses) 795 of the businesses blog, 736 don’t.

Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:
• 55% more visitors
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

To extend the benefit add these elements – a recipe for an effective small business blog.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/Study-Shows-Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Get-55-More-Website-Visitors.aspx

2. Bloggers get more followers on Twitter

A new study of 2,100 HubSpot customers reveals that companies that blog have 79% more Twitter followers than those that don’t.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5459/Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Have-102-More-Twitter-Followers.aspx

3. Blogs trusted and consulted more often than traditional media. Shift away from traditional media to blogs/social networks continues

This survey is from tech savvy women (who blog) but is useful. Women use social networks and blogs to interact, be entertained and find information about brands. Study finds they are twice as likely to use blogs over social networking sites as a trusted source of information.

45% of survey respondents stated that they decided to purchase an item after reading about it on a blog.

Source: http://www.blogher.com/blogher-finds-women-online-twice-likely-use-blogs-over-social-networking-sites-trusted-source-inform

Blogging should be a part of your pr/online marketing plans.

So I signed up to get a gift certificate for a local restaurant (Smokehouse Pizza and BBQ in Orem, Utah). This is nothing more than a marketing ploy and not even a good one. I pay $5 for the $25 gift certificate so I can save about $7 and follow all their rules. Get this:

• You have to use it for dinner (shoot, I wanted to go with my coworkers because I live over an hour away — too far to drive for a night out with my family).
• You cannot do takeout.
• You must pay both 18% gratuity and a tip on top of that.
• You have to spend $50.

“Valid with a min food purchase of $50. Dine in only. Dinner only. Tax and tip excluded. 18% gratuity added to full check. Please tip on full bill.”

Let’s say that I spent exactly $50. Tip of 20% is $10. Then gratuity is $18. So my total now with the cost of the gift certificate means I “save” $17.  However, without the gift certificate I save more than that ($18) because with 2 people I wouldn’t pay gratuity AND tip. I could also eat any time I wanted to.

This is bad marketing! It leaves a bad taste in my mouth even before I’ve eaten there, after learning about then following all the rules. In fact, I’m avoiding going to Smokehouse because I feel like they had so much fine print that I have to wade through. So I will eat the $5 and not go.

This past weekend my husband and I were invited to stay at the Encore hotel in Las Vegas. Now because we got it free I can’t complain, but if I’d paid, I’d take issue with paying for so many things ON TOP of the room rate.

You are charged fees for

• using the fridge
• high speed internet (per computer)
• snacks that charge you if you pick them up for more than 60 seconds
• $30 to use the workout room (per day)
• $10 to go to the Ferrari dealership. I’ve never seen a fee to look at cars before (it’s not a museum).
  
• You’re not allowed to bring in outside food and beverage to your room. Again, this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
  

I’d rather they charged a resort fee that included these expenses (some bottled water, internet, work out access, Ferrari dealership access).

As a marketer I’m learning the lines. I want to let people know about my business (my book in this case) but I don’t want to annoy them. I don’t want to overdo it so I lose trust. In both of these cases I believe a different approach would be better, but then again I’m not Steve Wynn and therefore I’m not a billionaire. I hope that if I were I’d make the price all-inclusive and be as generous as possible. After all, his clientele should be able to afford it.

But for local businesses I suggest NOT using Restaurant.com “gift certificates” to ring money from your customers. You might just lose them for good.

A Bountiful, Utah steak restaurant called Mo’ Bettah Steaks has a simple web page but it has a lot of personality. Their web site is not fancy and it’s not search engine optimized. But front and center they invite you to become their friend on Facebook. And they encourage it at the restaurant too. This has paid off at a time when a lot of restaurants are hurting. They attribute 20-30% of their business to their Facebook presence. They’re planning to expand soon.

They have over 1,300 friends on Facebook which for a local business is great. They held a photo contest and gave away free food to the winners. That gave them a lot of photos to post. They also have two videos.

Another local restaurant Blue Lemon in Alpine made a group (don’t like the look as much) that has over 100 members. Local restaurants are natural fits for social media. Guru’s Cafe is on Twitter and Facebook but they don’t promote either on the home page of their web site. I haven’t been in for a while but it wasn’t mentioned at their restaurant that I could see.

When you do social media you need to integrate it into all of your marketing – and inside your store. The most successful marketing often is blending of many online and offline resources. There are so many tools (email, Twitter, Facebook, web site, blog, events, press releases, etc) to get the word out.

If you want to learn more about this, I’m part of Smart Media 2009 conference June 18-19 in Lindon, Utah. We’re looking for a Utah restaurant who wants to sponsor lunch for about 100 people. In return we’ll weave your restaurant into the training. That means we’ll create a Facebook Page for you (or a Twitter account) and show you how to market it. Contact me at grocerybike@gmail.com or the contact form on this blog if you’re interested.

It’s Christmas time and people are in the mood to give gifts and tips. Money is likely tight this year. Why not ask them to leave a review of your business online instead? Rather than a 1-time thing, this can create leads for your business for years to come!

This applies to the place you get your hair cut (be sure to leave your favorite stylist’s name), where you take your car in to be repaired, and many other local businesses you patronize.

This works even if the business doesn’t have a web site. You can help them get at the top of the list when someone goes to Google searching for a business like theirs. Research shows that people are using search engines sooner and more often than they use the Yellow Pages to find a local business.

First, their local business should be on Google Local. Google Local lists small businesses and is connected with Google Maps. My friend Matt says: “This almost guarantees a first page ranking for your most targeted local keyword.” That means a keyword with a location attached such as “Palaski, New York auto repair shop”.

If you add your business to Google Local it will show up in the list of results for auto repair shops that are close to Palaski New York. It will list your address and phone number and show reviews. You can click, “add review” next to the reviews, and leave your review of the business.

Google Local pulls reviews from other sites. Consider offering an incentive such as $5 off for anyone who completes a review for your business and emails you the link. You can email customers, thanking them for their business and asking them to leave a review. You can also leave reviews on some of the sites I’ve listed below.

Places to leave reviews (these are sites that Google Local pulls reviews from)
TripAdvisor.com
Judysbook.com
InsiderPages.com
Citysearch.com
Virtual Tourist.com
http://wcities.com
Outside.in
Fodors.com
Zagat.com
Goyot.com
Fommers.com