Company name: Design Matters Home

Hometown: Louisville, Colo. (Old Town)

Website: Design Matters Home (http://www.designmattershome.com)

Years in business: We opened our office in Old Town Louisville in 2008.

Motto: “Your design matters, our expertise, results you want!”

Describe your business in 50 words or less: Design Matters believes that design is important, if not critical, to everything in the world, natural and manmade. We have broken design matters into six main components that we feel encompass all the pieces that are important to customers in interior design projects – Aesthetics, Functionality, Health, The Earth, Saving Money, and Future Investment.

What are your areas of specialty: Interior design, home staging for real estate

What’s your competitive advantage? We feel we have a very good ability to take a client’s vision, wants, and needs and use our expertise to come up with a solution that will work for their budget. Tim Gunn on Project Runway is famous for saying “make it happen!” We make it happen for our clients! We really want customers to embrace us as part of their project team. We are in it for them first and foremost and I think this vibe, and our attitude toward design, resonates with many people in our area.

We are the only full service Interior Design and Home Staging company in the Boulder, Broomfield, Longmont area providing services that enhance all the phases of home ownership: Kitchen and Bath Design, Real Estate Home Staging, Settle-In Design, Redesign and Interior Styling, Home Office Design, Home Entertainment Design, Outdoor Kitchen Design, Green Design, Universal Design, Color Consultations, Lighting Plans, Window Coverings, Project Management, Space Planning, Furniture Layout, Flooring, Upholstery, Feng Shui, Accessorizing, Built-in Design, Party and Holiday Styling.

What’s the most unusual thing that ever happened to you at your business? We are in a unique place as a business because when we go into a person’s home, we are seeing an aspect of their personal life that few people outside family and friend circles get to see. Sometimes we come across some real strange accessories and situations. One time we encountered a bunch of baby chicks in a bathtub while doing a consultation, and we love this kind of experience. We love to meet all kinds of people with all kinds of aesthetics and needs.

What’s the biggest misconception in interior design? There is no one-size-fits-all level of importance for any of  our six design principles, or any project. Different customers will rank each design matter differently and that is cool. We pride ourselves on our flexibility and true desire to make the client’s interior design or home staging project succeed no matter what design issue is most important to them.

People frequently apologize about the state of their home. It is all good from our perspective, we have seen it all, and we need to see it all to get the driving force behind the life of our clients. Well done interior design is as much about a person’s lifestyle as it is colors on a wall. This is the spice of life and the lifeblood of our business. People should be proud of their homes. When you are proud that means you are comfortable and at peace in your home. This is super important. We all have enough challenges and stressors in our lives and our home should be our retreat. It should function how we want and it should calm or excite our senses as we want. We really do take this to heart and give everything we can to help clients feel this way and be as happy as possible inside their homes

What do you do when not running your business? We are part of the community where we do business. We live very similar lives as our clients and are able to have a strong rapport with them. My husband and I are both athletes. He races bicycles and I run marathons. We have kids in the BVSD school system, we participate in many countywide activities, and we support many local causes and local businesses. We are out there engaging in our surroundings. We know the market very well. Every member of the Design Matters Home team loves being around people. We are one of the guys or gals. We are here for our clients and are dedicated to the success of every project we take on. We know that when you are going through an interior design project or need a home stage that you are going through a big change. We are there with you during that change to make it go as fast as possible ending up in the desired results.

Where can we get more information? We have a blog on our website where we share our thoughts on various interior design, home staging, and market topics. We also conduct monthly workshops to help educate and inspire you with design. Questions about interior design and staging are always welcome, and we offer a free initial design consultation. We can meet you, preview your space, and see how we can help you transform your space to suit you perfectly.

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.

Search Engine Market in China

China’s Internet population stood at 210 million at the end of 2007, up 53% from the same time in 2006 when there were 137 million. This figure puts China just 5 million users away from having the world’s largest wired population.

Search engine market share in China of Q4, 2007:

• Baidu.com – 60.1%
• Google – 25.9%
• Yahoo! China – 9.6%

China’s search engine market reached US$131.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2007, almost double from a year earlier.

In China, 74.8% of Internet users use search engines, lower than the U.S.’ 91%. However, mobile search is growing strong in China. iResearch estimated that 127 million people in China were to use mobile search in 2008.

Top Search Terms in China (2007)

Search Engine Market in Japan

• 87.5 million Internet users
• 68% penetration rate
• 50% + on broadband
• Japanese is the 4^th most popular language on the Internet

About Baidu.com

Baidu was founded in January, 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. It’s the leading Chinese search engine and the world’s third largest search engine with 3.3 billion searches per month, according to ComScore. Baidu is also the largest search engine in the Asian market, following by NHN which is largest search engine in Korea and fifth largest search engine in the world.

Baidu now operates in both China and Japan (http://www.baidu.jp/).

Chinese Search Engines

Location of paid and non-paid results on a Baidu page

SEO on Baidu.com

Baidu uses the similar ranking algorithm as Google and Yahoo!. However, because of the language differences and specialness of Chinese, it does need to take extra care on the following elements when optimizing websites for Baidu.

URLs – There is no need to use Chinese characters in URLs, because Baidu does not support Chinese character URLs. It transfers characters into UTF-8 code when use in URLs. But writing URLs in pinyin is recommended, unless it’s your English brand name or targeting the English word specifically. (Pinyin is the most common standard Mandarin Romanization system in use). Baidu does understand pinyin most times, and Chinese people enter pinyin in the search bar occasionally. For example, the pinyin for “student” is “xuesheng”. If your web page is talking about students in Chinese, then use “example.cn/xuesheng” as the URL rather than “example.cn/student”.

Domain – It would be better to use a Chinese domain, like .com.cn and .cn, or/and host the site in China.

Copyrighting – Write everything in Chinese, not only visible page elements (title, headings, page copy, link anchor text etc.), but also invisible elements, including Meta keywords, Meta description and ALT text.

Title – Within 30 characters will be the best.

Content – Baidu is very sensitive to some information, so totally avoid mentioning or writing adult content, pornography or Chinese government forbidden keywords.

Robots.txt – The robot name of Baidu is Baiduspider.

Sitemap – Adjust your XML sitemap to fit Baidu’s News Protocol and submit it to http://news.baidu.com/newsop.html

Asian Languages, Word Separation and Search

In English, the words in a phrase or sentence are separated by spaces. In most Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, there are no spaces between words in a phrase. This difference means Asian search engines have the difficult task of understanding and separating words before interpreting the meaning of sentences and web pages.  Google uses the word segmentation technology from Basis Technology (http://www.basistech.com/) and Baidu uses its own technology. The quality and speed of word segmentation affects the quality of search results and has implications for SEO. Currently Baidu is still better on word segmentation technology than Google.

Japanese Optimization Issues

• 4 different sets of letters and characters
• No spaces segmenting the words
• Spelling variation
• Must find the best (most popular) word/phrase combinations used in Japan for SEO, for example:

Indicating Language and Region

Use lang attribute in a meta tag, or inside an enclosing span or div tag in HTML, to provide additional geographical and language information to search engines. For example, use <meta lang=”ja”> in the header section of the page to indicate Japanese of the entire page.

Asian language codes:

You can find a complete list at http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/language-identifiers.html

Keyword Research

As for English sites, SEO keyword research is equally important when optimizing Asian language sites. Both Baidu and Google provide basic keyword research tools for free. Baidu’s Keyword Tool is for Chinese only. But Google’s Keyword Tool can be used on many languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Baidu Keyword Tool – http://d.baidu.com/rs.php

Google Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Keyword Density Tools

For calculating keyword density on Chinese websites:

http://tool.chinaz.com/SEO/Key_Density.asp

Chinese Search Engine Submission

You can submit your sites to Chinese search engines at the following addresses:

Baidu – http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html

Google China – http://www.google.cn/intl/zh-CN/add_url.html

Yahoo! China – http://search.help.cn.yahoo.com/h4_4.html

Sogou – http://db.sohu.com/regurl/regform.asp?step=regform&class=

iAsk – http://www.iask.com/guest/add_url.php

Yodou – http://tellbot.yodao.com/report?keyFrom=help

Chinese Web Directories

Sogou Directory – http://www.sogou.com/dir/

NetEase Directory – http://dir.so.163.com/index.php

iAsk Directory – http://dir.iask.com/

Beijixiang Directory – http://www.beijixing.com.cn/

Hao123 Directory – http://www.hao123.com/login.htm

9991 Directory – http://bbs.9991.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=27

Chinese Social Media Sites

Video sharing – http://www.tudou.com/

Photo sharing – http://www.yupoo.com/

Market Research

Similar to Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) which also works for Asian languages, we can use the following services to do basic market research for Chinese sites:

Google’s popular searches – http://www.google.cn/rebang/home

Yahoo! Buzz – http://cn.buzz.yahoo.com/

Baidu Top Searches – http://top.baidu.com/

Baidu Index – http://index.baidu.com/ (similar to Google Trends)

Chinese Domain Info

Domain info – http://www.cnnic.cn/en/index/index.htm

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.

An article by Trevor Merz, Analyst of BlitzLocal

I had the pleasure of using several tools from Raven, and spent more time playing with and using the features than writing this article.  Raven created a series of tools that research, analyze, and report based on links, paid search data, and ranking. Raven Tools also has a very nice social reputation management package that gives you complete control over your brand name through the dashboard.  Here are a few of my favorite features

• Keyword and Competitor Tools: Track brand related keywords, and those of your competitor.  Tracking data is relevant to AdWords  volume, ranking, and links.
• Research Assistant: One can easily research a domain, keyword, and page analysis using Raven’s research assistant.  There are also tools such as a keyword researcher and analyzer, an AdWords researcher, quality and design analyzer, Wordtracker, and SEMrush.
• Link Manager: Manage your links, organize leads, and make a directory of websites to better  keep track of important information.
• Content Manager: Measure the readability and density of links and keywords on the content you post to your website.  This tool can help anybody build meaningful content for their website.

Reporting:

User Manager: Similar to Google products, one can add accounts to share with whoever they want.  This is great for agency users in a company, so access can be shared across the board.

Brand Templating: Welcome to complete freedom reporting. For agencies, Raven Tools allows you to place your own logo on the front page, making it customizable and open for reporting.  For a test report I used a BlitzLocal logo to replace the Raven Tools logo.

Report Template: Even more in-depth than a brand template, Raven Tools has reporting templates where one can choose what metrics to include in the report.  Raven Tools has 360 degree coverage on AdWords, Analytics, Social Media, and Search Engine research.  Take a look at the options listed below. I will cover the basics of this reporting.

• Analytics: Raven Tools reporting pulls analytics data and organizes it by priority of visitor information, site referrals, search referrals, and top search engines, providing you with analyzed data in regards to each.
• Keyword Reporting: Know your top searched keywords that triggered your ad or website
• Summary Insertion: Have something to say about the metrics being reported? Raven Tools allows you to input your own summary via rich text box insertion. Any information you type will be inserted into the report.

Social Media Monitor: Raven Tools offers a simple yet complex data pull from a variety of different channels.

• Persona Manager: Log in to any of the 75 social media sites there are directly from the raven tools dashboard. Add in your information, and data will be pulled in regards to your persona. Here is an example of reporting for Twitter.
  

• Social Monitor: Similar to Google alerts, Raven Tools searches any or all sources you provide for mention of a brand or phrase.  Within the options one can mark sentiment, whether good or bad, or add the website to the link manager. Take a look at the buzz of the sites listed below.
  

• KnowEm – KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, username or vanity URL on 300+ popular Social Media websites. This is built into the social tools that Raven has to offer, and great for brand name identity theft.
• Forum Searching – Find out what people are saying with a forum search powered by Omgili. Find all reputation management easy with a click of a button.
  

Raven Tools reporting simplifies and centralizes everything you need to know for your brand, and can truly give an advantage to anyone measuring web success. The best thing about Raven Tools is that everything is connected.  Without Raven Tools you could be spending too much time viewing many pages for one brand, but with Raven you have every vital reporting feature and it’s all through the one dashboard.

To view a full list of Raven’s features check out their Features page. If you are interested Raven offers a free 30 day trial, with no credit card required.  Raven Tools offers two tiers of services, pro and agency.   Pro services start at $79 a month, limiting two users and the agency services start at $199 a month capping at 6 users.  Take a free trial today, explore the excitement of simplified internet marketing tools.

SMX Sydney 2010 will be attended by BlitzLocal CEO, Dennis Yu.  Dennis attended and presented at SMX Sydney 2009, and will be speaking again at the 2010 conference. Dennis will be speaking about Facebook Advertising, which has been the topic of popular articles featured in Time, Laptop Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine.

Also presenting at SMX Sydney 2010 is Gillian Muessig, Gillian is President of world renown SEO resource SEOmoz. Gillian has presented two years in a row at SMX Singapore, and will be presenting in 2010 in Sydney.

SMX 2010 Conference:
April 22nd 9:00am – 6:30pm
April 23rd 9:00am – 5:30pm
Located at the Sydney Hilton

Event Links:
Satisfaction Guaranteed
Why SMX Sydney?
Testimonials
Great Networking

If you would like to attend SMX Sydney, tickets are 40% off before next week! Click this link for a direct discounted purchase

]]> http://www.blitzlocal.com/smx-sydney-2010-dennis-yu-speaks/feed/ 0 http://www.blitzlocal.com/how-to-sell-local-clients/ http://www.blitzlocal.com/how-to-sell-local-clients/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:21:56 +0000 Dennis http://www.blitzlocal.com/?p=1296 If you’re an affiliate, you’ve heard a lot about local. Drive down the street and look at all those businesses– 40% of them don’t have websites, and of the ones that do, only 8% are doing PPC. Of those that are doing PPC, it’s highly unlikely they’re as good as you. But while setting up a PPC campaign for a Denver liposuction surgeon might be easy– you just choose a few keywords, make a couple ads, and send them to a landing page– getting the clients is where most local marketing companies fail. We’ll get to the secret in a bit– keep reading…

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.

Event information here.

Covered Co. has assembled a group of top experts on Facebook for their next event in a continuing series on social media marketing, “Social Media Matters”. The event will teach how any company can leverage Facebook to grow their brand and feature talks from Involver, SocialMedia.com, RockYou, and Facebook.

At over 300 million users, Facebook has become a new and influential way to reach consumers and build your brand. Facebook fan pages, social ads, applications, events, and notifications. Facebook has a whole collection of tools you can use to build your brand, but what’s the best way to use them? The two hour event will host talks from experts on marketing on Facebook with a mixer following after the event. Come mingle and learn!

Who are the gurus?

Julia French is the Founder and Managing Director of Covered Communications. A seasoned marketing and business development strategist, Julia has a track record of success in business development, event strategy, marketing, and public relations.

Before starting Covered Communications, Julia was the Director of Marketing at Blue Lithium (now acquired by Yahoo), where she managed media relations and site messaging for a social networking site, MingleNow. Previously, Julia worked at Socialtext, bringing together product management, engineering and sales teams to collaboratively execute strategic projects including the acquisition of WikiCalc and the launch and release of Socialtext Open. Before joining Socialtext, Julia held management and individual contributor positions at LEWIS PR, Trainer Communications, Amazon, and IBD Network (now Deal Maker Media).

Julia is a member of the leading blogger group within enterprise/Office 2.0 “The Enterprise Irregulars.” She was one of the creators of the Office 2.0 conference, the first conference to seriously assess web-based office applications. Julia is a founding member of “She’s Geeky,” an organization that encourages collaboration among women in technology, and she sits on the marketing and communications board for Entrepreneurs Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing corporate giving into technology start-ups.

She earned a BA in International Business from the University of Puget Sound. Julia has lived in the US, UK, and Germany and speaks fluent English and German and conversational French.

Nick Gonzalez is a partner at Covered Co., a marketing consultancy helping technology companies with product and promotional strategies.Nick has spent the last half-decade at the center of silicon valley. As a blogger, marketer, and programmer, Nick brings an editorial eye and technological understanding to all of his work.

Prior to Covered Co. Nick managed publisher relations and marketing for advertising startup SocialMedia.com. During his tenure, Nick built the publisher network to its highest profitability in the companies 2 years or operation. While at SocialMedia.com, Nick gained insight into the latest tools companies were using to market and brand themselves online. In fact he literally wrote the book on running social media campaigns for the company.

Nick was the first hire and right hand man at the valley’s information hub, TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, Nick broke news covering hundreds of startups ranging from mobile to web applications and was instrumental in uncovering the new wave of small capital startups from incubators such as Y Combinator. His commitment to getting stories first and writing posts that got Dugg, helped grow the RSS subscriptions from 20,000 to well over 3 million subscribers today.

Nick is heavily involved in the valley as a guest writer and speaker at industry events including Web 2.0, PRSA T3, and Graphing Social Patterns. He is also an advisor to the FB Rev fund and several of its companies.