• Enable frequency capping so you don’t waste inventory.
• Allow negation targeting or placement targets (maybe you don’t want to run inside a poker app, for example)
• Allow agencies to create multiple accounts for clients under a single domain (client1@blitzlocal.com, client2@blitzlocal.com), though there is potential for abuse here.
• Provide a desktop tool like Google AdWords Editor.
• Enable CPA bidding to allow for conversion optimization.
• Add more metrics to the Facebook Ads API.
• Reveal the ad Quality Score, like Google does.
• Better UI reporting– show trends as opposed to raw output data.

That’s right. They have 36,180 users out of the 1.3 billion people in China, 9.6 million users out of 1.2 billion people in India, and the list goes on. They do have 42% penetration in United States, where 126 million of their base of almost 500 million users reside. Facebook may appear to be the dominant player in social networking from a US perspective, but they are getting creamed by in other countries:

* In Russia, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte each have over 30 million users, while Facebook has 1.1 million.
* In Korea, Cyworld has 18 million users out of a population of 48 million, which is about the same dominant ratio Facebook has with US users.
* And don’t forget Qzone in China with 376 million users, just behind what Facebook has.
* And the list goes on.

So if you’re truly a global brand, you need to be on these other sites– many of which you may not have even heard of if you live in the United States. Even MySpace, which has lost 20% the last year, versus the 30% gain that Facebook has had, is still a force at 1/3rd the size of Facebook.  And that’s not even counting the formidable other properties owned within the Fox network.

The world is not accurately represented by Facebook.

Click here to see the country stats from last year.

Facebook Feeding Frenzy: Targeting Opportunities, Privacy Challenges
Facebook and other social media platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn) offer tremendous new segmentation and ad targeting opportunities to marketers. Ahead-of-the-curve marketers are already researching segments, evaluating strategies, testing ad creative, and getting into the weeds measuring performance in this unprecedented targeting playground where interconnected users are willing to openly share their interests and content.

But is it all too easy for marketers because Facebook et al. are cavalier about privacy and disclosure? Is a user backlash or a regulatory firestorm on the horizon? Canada is notorious in that its Privacy Commissioner openly challenged Facebook on its default settings and disclosure. Which way will the wind be blowing in a year’s time? Panelists explore both the opportunistic and paranoid perspectives on social media marketing. Take your pick.

• Moderator:
  Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & President, Page Zero Media
  
• Speakers:
  Mark Rosenberg, Of Counsel, Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.
  Dennis Yu, Chief Executive Officer, BlitzLocal

The My Kitchen Sucks campaign run by IKEA in Australia has set a cracking pace in the first two weeks. The brief that Thinq (digital agency) worked around was ‘Drive kitchen sales over a period of 2 months’. The target group was women who were in the market for a new kitchen. A restriction on the campaign was that the message should only be available in two Australian cities (franchise ruling).

What Thinq did was turn the tables on the campaign. They knew that buying a kitchen is not an instantaneous decision but they knew that they could influence that decision. Along the way they would pick up impulse shoppers, raise brand awareness and create buzz.

Brainstorming campaign ideas, it was decided instead of selling the virtues of IKEA kitchens that they would let IKEA kitchen buyers talk about themselves and their kitchens. Let them let it all hang out, the good the bad and the ugly. The problem was managing negative comments which are always a huge headache and worry for management, and this campaign had the potential to open IKEA to a lot of negativity.

The trick was to channel this negative feedback into something positive. What they came up with was a social competition that allowed people to show how bad their kitchen really is. The winner which would be voted upon would then win a new installed kitchen from IKEA. The clincher concept to the campaign was ‘don’t give people a chance to win, ask them to earn it’.

The voting mechanism setup was built along a points system which people earned as they shared their kitchen with their friends. As people share their terrible kitchen so they gathered points and the person with the most points wins a new installed kitchen. Points are earned for submissions that are shared across Twitter and Facebook.

Two weeks into the campaign:

• Facebook has become the number one referrer site.
• Customers have setup their own viral campaigns.
• The campaign is currently earning $60,000 a week for IKEA.
• Over 1,100 kitchens were submitted in the first week.
• Thousands of tagged kitchen images pointing back to the competition.
• The leading kitchen has received over 800 votes.

One of the great things about this campaign was the small budget. Beside production costs of the real estate only AU$4000 was spent in seeding the competition. This was done via two bought email lists, which received one blast each.

Some user generated viral things people are doing to earn their new kitchen are …

So you have a nice new Facebook Page for your business. But how can it make your cash register ring?

Here are a few steps to get started:

1. Place a Facebook “Become a Fan” button on your website, so your site visitors can find your Page.

2. Ask all of your Facebook friends, employees and family members to “Fan” your new business Page on Facebook. Post a link to your new page on your personal profile and ask your friends to post it on their profiles.

3. Tell your customers  “Fan us on Facebook!”  (Share news of your new page with your customer email list.)

4. Once you get 50 fans, ask Facebook for a “vanity” URL (or link to your page). Here’s why. When you first create your Facebook Page, its link is long and full of numbers and symbols.  A “vanity URL” that looks something like this — www.facebook.com/mybizname — is much easier to share and remember.

5. Offer some generous coupons on your Page so your fans will be motivated to share them with their friends. Theis can generate traffic and new customers.

6. Consider advertising on Facebook. This may be the fastest way to reach new customers. You can target Facebook users by the words they’re using with friends (“spa,” “facial,” “baggy eyes”), by their age, their interests and more, combined with very precise geographic terms — within 1, 2, or 5 miles of your store address, or where you know your best customers live. Steer them to your website to book some services, or to your Facebook Page to collect monthly special coupons.

7. Lather, rinse, repeat — cha-ching.

The summit’s 14 sessions are led by top industry experts, including Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder Future Now Inc., Frederick Vallaeys, product evangelist for Google, and Dennis Yu, CEO and co-founder of BlitzLocal.

As a bonus, BlitzLocal is offering free pay-per-click campaign templates for a few industry verticals for those who attend “AdWords for Local:  Sort Heads from Tails, Find Free Clicks and Calls,” which Yu is leading on March 16.

Yu will cover a number of topics including:

• how to build effective campaigns for businesses that have a local customer base
• why mobile ads are a hidden gem for lead gen on smartphones and non-smart phones alike.
• how to manage the difference between “Chicago restaurants” and “restaurants” searched from Chicago: find out how much traffic can you expect from geo-targeted search versus geo-multiplied keywords.

For more information and to save $200 by registering today, please follow the link here.

With meetings in nine world capitols this year, the eMetrics Summit attracts web analysts, business intelligence experts and marketing managers, who share wisdom on how to increase the return on online investment.

Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, and Gillian Muessig, co-founder and president of SEOMoz, will demonstrate how to adapt standard web methods to track form completions, shopping cart checkouts and phone calls to the Facebook environment.

Yu and Muessig will show how to use Facebook’s own Insights tool to add a social dimension to analytics. They will also address the pros and cons of using modifications of Google Analytics and tools from other providers.

With more than 150,000 members, SEOmoz is the world’s brand leader in search marketing software tools, education, resources and community. The company’s flagship product, Linkscape, powers SEO tools and applications such as OpenSiteExplorer.org, RavenTools, and many more.

Muessig has provided keynotes and sessions for conferences around the world on the state and future of search marketing as well as technical issues. This month she launches “Getting Down to Business,” a new program on Webmaster Radio.

In 2006, Yu co-founded BlitzLocal, a Denver area firm that provides local search solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Clients include J.C. Penney, Equifax and Yahoo!, as well as local professional service providers, national franchises and non-profit groups.

An entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing, Yu is an expert in search marketing technical analysis and pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign development and optimization. He has written widely on the industry, been featured on National Public Radio and has counseled the Federal Trade Commission on privacy issues for social networks.

The session, part of the March 2010 Entrepreneurs Forum, includes an overview of search engine optimization (SEO) terms, tactics, myths and facts. It covers how strategies for new and established sites differ. It explores such topics as site-building strategies, off-the-shelf platforms vs. built-from-scratch solutions, real-time search, social media, voice, mobile and social search and more.

Moderator is Graham Lawlor, founder of Ultralight Startups and CEO of BrightMap. Other guests include Seth Dotterer, senior director of marketing at Conductor Inc. and Christopher Hart, director of Eastern region operations for Bruce Clay Inc.

Yu is co-founder and CEO of BlitzLocal.com, a technology startup that provides cutting-edge local search solutions to local, regional, national and international enterprises. He has guided development of an ad-serving platform that integrates pay-per-click (PPC), search optimization, mail, and Facebook advertising campaigns to online and offline conversions via phone, lead generation, online ordering, and coupon redemption.

Yu, a veteran of web analytics and PPC, has helped Yahoo!, American Airlines, J.C. Penney and others maximize online leads and revenue.

Ultralight Startups, with branches in New York, Boston and London, hosts events for and by technology entrepreneurs to pitch, network and discuss ways to exploit the latest cost-effective, capital efficient practices.

The event takes place from 6:30-9 p.m. on Thursday, March 4 at event partner Sun Microsystems, 101 Park Ave., 4^th Floor, New York, N.Y. To register at this limited-space event see the http://ultralightstartups.eventbrite.com/.

Contact:

Dennis Yu
(888) 811-2448  ext. 1201
Email: dennis (at) blitzlocal.com

For ages, the battle between the world’s inhabitants has raged. Each race, species, and family has fought for survival. Each looking for a piece of earth to call home. Peace is established where clear boundaries and dominion exist. But where an insect’s home and a human’s home cross, territorial tribes frenzy. Few homeowners voluntarily co-inhabit and co-exsit with insects crawling freely within the walls of their home. Further, nuisance insects become invasive pests when they destroy a human’s food supply, contaminate living quarters.

There are benefits to having insects. Bugs play a valuable part in nature; they help break down decaying elements and debris. Pests are also a valuable food source for wildlife. But when these pest invade human structures family feuds ensue and a home’s peace is destroyed.

Pests are serious business for residential property owners. There are millions of homes each year that become infested with nuisance pests that can destroy property, spread disease, and permeate foul odors. Some species of spiders, ants, and wasps carry potent venom, being potentially lethal to humans and animals. Arachnids like brown recluses, scorpions, and black widows are real health risks.

To keep your family protected, Bulwark Exterminator recommends this strategy:

- Identify pest threats.

- Eliminate pest from within your home.

- Don’t let pests get back into your home.

How Do Pests Get In?

Pests will swarm at various times throughout the year depending on locations and weather conditions. Pests will also migrate. In the heat of the summer, as pests move about they and draw closer to your home the pest will feel the cool humid air escaping your structure and find openings to slide into. Openings as small as 1/16^th of an inch are unblocked doorways with ample space for these intruders. Cracks are found in brick mortar, concrete foundations, weep holes, j-rails, around wiring and around plumbing. During the winter the pests will feel the heat and comfort of your home spilling out of these cracks. Your home sends open invitations across the air waves during all four seasons. Insects, like ants, that work and live together will explorer these new surroundings and bring in new ants in mass. As these bio-masses crawl around within the walls of your home they are bound to explorer further moving out of the walls and into closets’, toy boxes, refrigerators, pantries, and laundry.

Signs of Pest Problems

Just because you don’t see bugs doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Your property isn’t safe from infestation without a proper defense. Some insect colonies will work 24 hours a day. A single insect colony can have up to a million pests in their population. Fire ant mounds are easily spotted in the latter stages of a colony. But mounds indicate not a beginning of an infestation, but an active and live infestation that is already spreading its borders. Seeing your first roach inside may be just the tip of the iceberg. Most pests don’t like to come out of their hiding spots. Most pests survive by staying invisible to mammals. That is why nocturnal activity works best for bugs. As soon as begin seeing pests, you know there is problem.

Preventive Measures

While total annihilation of pests is futile, homeowners can and should prevent potentially disease-carrying pests from infesting their properties.

Professional pest control companies use various methods to prevent pest from entering your home. Regular treatments to deal with the constant threat of pest invasion is the key to keeping your home secure. Bulwark uses a 3 layer treatment process and a method of baiting. This regular exterior barrier treatment serves as bulwark around your home. While total elimination from your property is not feasible, Bulwark also limits pest populations and the neighborhood biomass by treating key areas in the property. Bulwark’s philosophy is that the better we do on the outside the less you will see on the inside.

How do you protect my home from insects?

Call Bulwark today and speak to one of our professionals.

So let’s talk about how to actually get these businesses to become your clients, starting first by what NOT to do:

• Cold calling– Going door-to-door and walking into someone’s business is NOT cool. You are a stranger, they’re busy running their office– and most of the time you won’t even be able to get to the decision maker. The receptionist will stop you. Might as well sell magazines and charity chocolate bars, since you’re just going to get rejected. Rejection sucks– you want THEM to come to you. That allows you to set the price and puts you in a great spot. More on that in a sec.
• Spending money on PPC– Yeah, I know it’s hypocritical. You are selling PPC, but don’t do it to promote yourself. The reason you don’t is the same as cold calling– selling SUCKS. You spend money, waste your time, and have to deal with rejection. And that’s just more marketing cost you have to pass on to the clients.
• Building the most awesome, informative website about your services– Let me tell you something. You don’t even need to have a website! “But what if they want to see my website?”
  you ask. Tell them that you’re so busy serving clients first that your site is still in progress. Clients first, see?
• Giving away services for cheap or free: Someone probably told you that if you’re just getting started and don’t have a client list, then you need to do the first few for cheap to build up a portfolio. That’s complete nonsense. Most prospects won’t ask you, for example, about other Italian restaurants or veterinarians that you’ve done. Discounting your services devalues you in the client’s eyes, plus will make you unmotivated to work hard for so little money.
• Talking about how well you know PPC, SEO, social media, etc: Seems counter-intuitive, right? They’re a business owner, not another affiliate. The more you sprinkle acronyms into your language, the more you’re losing them. You’re not speaking their language. I almost never mention the word PPC to clients. Instead, I say “I couldn’t find your name on Google. But we can get you to show up if you let us advertise on Google for you.”

So those are the 5 most common ways to fail at selling and getting new clients. There are a few companies in the local space– VC-funded monsters that have tens or hundreds of millions of funding to blow on these techniques. But if we’re talking about YOUR money, then focus on what actually works.

And now the secret to how to sell local clients….

You ready?

…
…
…

The secret is that you don’t sell– you let others sell for you because of your reputation. So you get clients by building up your reputation.

Put on a seminar at the local chamber of commerce or networking event– if you can charge $15 each, even better. Not because you need the money, but because it makes folks who attend take you seriously. Every one of the 5 mistakes mentioned above degrades and devalues your offering– it turns you into a panderer instead of a highly sought after expert.

In the course of every day life, you will run into people who are small business owners. There’s 20 million of them– how can you not? And when you’re talking to friends about how Google works– which we do all the time to folks who don’t understand what we do– you’re equipping others to sell your services.

And each friend of yours has perhaps 100 friends that they talk to and will mention that you’re an expert on getting people on Google. So you should almost never take on a project from a friend– but you should definitely consider taking on a project from a friend of a friend. A friend will expect a “good friend” discount, while a “weak tie” (friend of a friend) will not. Plus the number of people that you are connected to 2 steps away is 100 times larger than those just 1 step away.

And when those people come knocking, because a friend told them that you’re a Google expert, then you run them through this process:

• What do you want to show up on Google for?
• Let’s do a search and see who is there now.
• It’s going to cost between $1,000 and $5,000 a month to advertise on Google– depending on how much market share you want. Shall we start with $1,000 a month for a couple months to see how we do?
• We can track exactly how our ads are doing- how many visitors click on the ads and then how many calls result from that. That allows us to calculate the cost per call. You’ll probably be between $40 and $100 a call, depending on the competition. We’ll have to test.
• And from there, we can adjust the ads based on what kinds of clients you want (more laser hair removal, and less botox? Sure).
• We will place a phone number on the website that is only on the web, just for tracking, which bounces to your regular number.
• No website? We can make a minisite for you.
• Sign here and gimme your credit card.

If they don’t get that, whine about cost, or complain, then don’t push the issue. You have a number of other interested clients that you have to get back to. You don’t want bad clients. There are so many local businesses out there that you can have your pick– and that includes the competitors of the guys who aren’t really interested in your online advertising service.

So there you have it. No need to deal with rejection. Don’t have to spend a lot of money or build a site. Just have to casually talk about getting onto Google with your friends, who then spread the word for you. And then you walk those friends of friends via the process I’ve just laid out.

The hardest part is the first few weeks to build your reputation. You might feel like an imposter if you haven’t done it before. Take heart that local PPC is not the hard part, nor is listing clients with Google and BING Local Business Center. Just remember that you’re competing against the other local dentists and massage therapists- not thousands of affiliates worldwide.

And once you have a few of them down, then these clients tell their friends— and soon you have a thriving business of people who are seeking you out. You just have to sit back, take the calls, and decide which of them you want. Doesn’t sound like selling does it?

Now managing clients, building sites, setting up call tracking, billing credit cards automatically, and so forth is a whole different set of issues– I’ll write another post on that if people want to hear it. But as for selling, it’s easy when you let others sell for you.