I've just done a serious makeover on my other main marketing blog. I've changed the name from "SEO Strategy" to "Local Business Marketing" where I'm going to be focusing on some of the strategies and programs we're developing for marketing local business on the web.

I've also changed the Wordpress theme. That refers to the "template" or design or "skin" of the blog. The typical blog design - with one post following after another- leaves something to be desired for many applications.

I'm looking for designs that can be used more effectively by local businesses - real estate agents, for example - and the simple linear blog design does not really do an adequate job.

The new theme I've adapted is called "Branford Magazine". It is a "magazine" style theme, which means it has different sections on the front page for different categories of posts. This seems much more adaptable for businesses who want to say things about a variety of general topics: different products, services, industry news, videos, etc.

Check it out, and leave a comment.

Local Business Marketing

The LBMK will be a complete kit for starting a business selling web building and lead generation products to local businesses like real estate agents, chiropractors, contractors, plumbers.

I am working on this project with my son Peter Hendershot, who is a relatively new real estate agent. Yesterday he said:

"Most real estate agents don't have a clue about web marketing. Their websites are useless because they don't know what they are trying to accomplish with them. They will buy almost any marketing program that walks through the door as long as it sounds convincing, isn't complicated, and doesn't involve a lot of work on their part.

This is exactly what we are trying to do with the Local Business Marketing Kit.

The series is here: Reaching Local Business. It focuses on providing specific strategies for reaching people within clearly defined geographic areas (cities, regions).

In other words, rather than taking the usual internet marketer's approach of trying to reach everyone within a narrow vertical niche, your target is everyone within a specific geographic area across a range of vertical niches.

Sorry for the gobbledegook. But I've always found it interesting how most internet marketers completely ignore the geographic location thing - what you might call "local marketing" (and what the search engines refer to as "local search").

The marketing shift that took place when people started marketing online is fairly obvious - go after anyone in the world within your "niche".

But it's also surprising that the geographic niche has been all but abandoned by web marketers. The one glaring exception to this is real estate. Real estate agents and other marketing local real estate services have demonstrated how important it can be to be visible to people who do local real estate searches. Today about 80% of people looking for real estate information start on the web - with the search engines of course. And having a web presence in a local real estate market can make a big difference to an agent or service provider.

Local search and the decline of traditional media like the Yellow Pages is making it important for other types of businesses to be there too (that is, to be visible on line). This change has been fairly long in coming (I first wrote about this in about 1999), but it is inevitable.

When the Yellow Pages and other local print media drop below a certain threshold of viability - as readership and advertisers drop off - they will simply cease to be an important option for most local businesses. These local businesses will then have to get serious about the alternatives. And online alternatives are the most obvious ones they will have to look at.

By "local businesses" I mean contractors, plumbers (including Joe), accountants, lawyers, real estate agents, restaurants. On and on the list goes. With the imminent fading away of the Yellow Pages as the "go to" resource for local business info, the internet is the obvious alternative.

In fact the internet passed the Yellow Pages last year as the first resource for information about local business.

We're introducing a series of products aimed directly at this market: offering promotional and advertising opportunities to local business.

If you want to develop more local business customers, check out our Affiliate Program. Especially our new product called "Blogs for Business". We're putting together a complete marketing package for this product, including web templates, descriptive text, graphics - so you can create web pages, blog posts, Squidoo pages, Hub pages, etc., etc. - even an email system where you'll be able to market directly to local businesses by email.

We're even working on some products that pay 100% commission. Yes, 100% commission.

Check it out at the Linknet Affiliate Program.

http://www.dpccars.com/car-videos-08/11-10-08page-Top-Gear-Corvette-ZR1-Cadillac-CTS-V-Dodge-Challenger.htm

Top Gear in America Season 12 ep 02 Part 1-2

Top Gear in America Season 12 ep 02 Part 2-2

The most popular list building strategy used by internet marketers is what we might call the "Freebie List" strategy. It goes like this:

There are two glaring problems with this approach.

First, it is a very slow way to build a list. People can't sign up unless you get traffic to your opt-in page, and most internet marketers don't have enough traffic to build a sizable list this way.

Second, this is only a half-strategy. It gives you what is known as a "freebie list", and you have no reason to believe that any of these people will ever buy anything from you. All experienced internet marketers will tell you that a list of buyers - people who have actually bought something from you - is at least 10x more valuable than a freebie list.

Read the rest of this post...

We will very soon be introducing a similar package for Real Estate Agents and have put our first working demo in place. It's called Waterloo Real Estate - a test site for my son Peter who is a relatively new (and so far quite successful) real estate agent in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

The Real Estate Agent service will include a turnkey blog plus a content subscription service. The content service will deliver daily articles, news items, and photos that can be used for blog posts - because coming up with relevant and interesting content for a blog is usually the most difficult part of maintaining one.

Watch for the launch of this new product, along with a very aggressive Affiliate program sometime in December.