main street marketing – Micro Business Specialist

Announcing a New Blog and Personal Focus

As I mention in the short video below, I have started a new blog and personal focus working with main street businesses in the Minneapolis – St. Paul Twin cities metro area.

I will continue to post here about internet marketing topics, affiliate marketing opportunities and related topics. After all much of what I will be bringing to my home town business friends is merely the local adaptation of these very topics.

As I learned with my home stagers and others, most small business people are just too busy getting their day to day product out the door to spend time learning and implementing the internet marketing techniques we discuss here. I hope to be the vehicle whereby many of them will grow.

As I look at the market, it’s clear to me that there is a very real opportunity for many businesses to absolutely dominate their local markets. It will take three things. A quality offering in the first place, effective internet marketing and the ability to manage their own growth.

I am satisfied that I can bring the middle element to many, I just need to find the right firms that also have the other two characteristics as well.

My new blog is a bit thread bare so far, but it will develop and grow over time. Check it out at http://MinneapolisInternetMarketingConsultant.com

[tags]main street marketing, video, small business[/tags]

Affiliate Camo – A Great New Plug-in

I’ve been focused on main street marketing lately and will continue to be creating some more videos and pursuing other efforts as well. But I will definately be continuing my blogging.

I have had some recent success promoting the new street fighter program which is opening today. I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already.

But today I want to share a new free software tool I came across from Matt Callen called Affiliate Camo. It offers Link cloaking and conversion tracking as a plug in for wordpress blogs.

It is simple to set up and is a powerful tool that will protect you from commission thieves and provide you with great intelligence on which of your links are most effective.

There is a one time upgrade that I recommend you give serious thought to. I starts with a $7 day trial and has some significant viral advantages for early adapters.

[tags]affiliate camo, Matt Callen, Plug ins, Plugin, plug-ins, link cloaking, conversion tracking, street fighter, main street marketing, [/tags]

Plumbing Minneapolis – an SEO Study

I just completed the first in a series of studies I intend to do on local businesses in Minneapolis area.

In the study I look at the top 30 web sites on Google when searching for the term, “Plumbers Minneapolis.”

The objective for me is to develop clients for my SEO consulting services in the “real world” of day to day businesses. Each of the participants will get an email informing them that their web site was mentioned in the study and provided with a link to the study.

While the report focuses on their specific results, a lot of it is boiler plate that applies to the topic in general. Thus I expect to re-use the bulk of the report for additional industries.

It turns out that there are several pretty good web sites in the area, but most are shall we say “less than optimal.” Any experienced internet marketer should be able to assist any of those of page two or three of Google to win a first place showing.

Now of course that will vary keyword by keyword, but as the plumbing example seemed to show, the major term”plumbing” was better accounted for that was a second term I selected which had to do with one possible reason a person would call a plumber, ie Hot Water Heater Replacement Mineapolis.

For this term, the competition was very limited. This points out a basic error of many main street web pages. To the extent they are set up to rank for a term, at least in this case they were ranked for the term they may have wanted to appear under in the Yellow pages: ie Plumbing and Plumber.

This old way of thinking reflects the Yellow page tradition and not today’s likely web search that is more likely to be based on the issue on the mind of the searcher, in this case hot water heater problems.

The report I prepared can be viewed at http://microbusinessspecialist.com/IndustryStudies/Plumbing_Minneapolis.html

I expect to refine the report, and hopefully find a way of condensing it as I do repeats of the effort in the coming weeks and months. If you happen to see any errors in the report or have other suggestions, particularly on making it clearer and more readable, please let me know.

I note that a new training program aimed at reaching out to Main Street Businesses is in the offing Called Street Fighter. It will go into pre-launch next week, and are actively looking for affiliates to join them in the launch. I’ve signed up and you may want to as well.

As this little study shows, there is a lot of room for improvement in main street business web sites. If you aren’t making as much money as you would like online now, or better yet, if the people on your list aren’t you may want to steer them into this course and opportunity. There are many wide open opportunities in your community. Street Fighter

[tags]industry report, Street Fighter, off line marketing, main street marketing, affiliate programs,SEO, search engine optimization,[/tags]