Do a search for “hooked on phonics” and you’ll see 869,000 results on Google.  If you’re an affiliate pushing this program, you know how much it costs per click on paid search, plus what the payouts are if you promote via Commission Junction or Amazon.com (if you’re not in certain states)– generally 15% or around $20 a sale.  As an affiliate, you’re not allowed to bid on the term “hooked on phonics”, “hooked on fonics”, “hooked on phonix” or related terms– they’re branded terms reserved for the advertiser. So the most popular search is off limits to you if you are just a PPC affiliate.

Incidentally, I think it’s hilarious that so many people who want to learn how to read are misspelling the brand like crazy.  It’s like those people who bought time management books, but never had the time to get around to reading them.

Now consider my friend Keith Wilcox who bought Hooked on Phonics for his kids.  He’s been blogging for 3 weeks now– never blogged before– and his site is now Google PR2 and is starting to rank for commercial terms. The site gets only a few hundred hits a day– but not bad for a site only a month old and with less than 50 posts.

The key point here is that he’s blogging about what he likes and knows a lot about– how to home school kids.  You can see his video, where his 5 year old is reading at the 2nd grade level and is a month away from starting 3rd grade.  The post has 923 words and doesn’t use any formulas for keyword density, page title stuffing, hidden divs, cloaking, or any SEO tricks to get traffic.  Rather, he’s just writing passionately about homeschooling his two children.  I’ll bet you could come up with some ways that he could get more traffic and make more money here.  I’ll list a couple:

• Title his youtube video: “hooked on phonics: teaching my kids“ instead of “reading 06292009″.  Also add a description that says something like “Actual lesson with Hooked on Phonics. My 5 year old is reading at the second grade level. I am proud to home school my two boys.”  YouTube is the 4th largest search engine on the planet, based on a recent Google seminar we attended, but there are only 320 videos competing on “hooked on phonics”.
• Link to the Hooked on Phonics site with your affiliate code: No tracking code, no commission earned.  Name a product you like– odds are there’s an affiliate program for it.
• Mix up the keywords: Jam in too many reading related terms and it won’t sound natural.  Use Google Suggest and Wonder Wheel to see what the popular terms are.

All this to show that a person who is not an affiliate by any stretch can get traffic from just writing good content and getting a couple good links here and there.

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Update: He now has a top Daddy Bloggers list, with 115 sites carefully chosen and reviewed.  Already, he is building links from sites that are topically relevant and already trusted by Google.

I’m not talking acai, crush, or consumer scams. This post is about how to avoid the most common form of business failure. The moral of the story- “In God we trust… All others pay cash.”

A designer I know is a nice fellow. Great design skills, great intentions. Yet we paid him $6,000 cash up-front and he has yet to return a dime of it, despite promises over the last year. Initially, we paid him a few thousand dollars, against which he did decent work, but was slow in responding. Joel was busy trying to build a big company- hiring lots of people, big office, and big expenses. If you ever read the E-Myth, by Michael Gerber, you know of the girl who was an excellent baker, opened a bakery,  and was soon out of business. Great at baking cakes, but absolutely zero business sense.

This fellow was the same way. As a one person firm, he could easily keep track of his projects and he only had to worry about himself. But with no project management in place or any kind of structure, he soon found himself pursued by a number of angry clients- all wondering what when project deadlines came and went. He tried to hold them off by making assurances and then personally working harder on the weekends to catch up. But he was trying to do the work of a full team- and soon went out of business in the fall of 2008. He brought in new business partners and tried again- with the same results.

We worked with Joel on a payment plan, in the hopes that our investment in Pixel Envy wouldn’t be a total loss. I believe he paid us back about $200 of the $6,000 over the last 8 months. Since then, he has disappeared, ignoring our messages, in the hopes that this is one of many problems that would magically go away. Instead, that got him in more trouble, as it damages his personal credit, puts him in the hands of a collection agency, and tarnishes his reputation. He signed contracts that commit Pixel Envy to design projects with BlitzLocal and there is a paper trail where he acknowledges the debt.

What can you learn from his situation?

Just because you do what you love doesn’t guarantee success. If you want to grow beyond yourself- and form a team- then you need to know how to run a business. That skill has nothing to do with how well you know PhotoShop, Google Adwords, or PHP. It has everything to do with being able to organize projects for bulletproof delivery- making sure you have the right people in place and a system that has built in checks to prevent failure from happening. It means breaking down projects into concrete tasks that are assigned to people with due dates. We use basecamp for project management, but there are a dozen other tools that will track tasks and “whine” when someone is behind on something.

Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Rob Hayes of First Round Capital at the TechStars office. They invest in seed stage startups. He said that the CEO has just 2 responsibilities- hiring the right people and making sure the company doesn’t run out of money. Two weeks ago, we had dinner with Dwayne Nesmith, who founded Viant- a web agency back in the boom days that grew to $100 million in sales. He laid out 3 types of companies that work in the agency space:

• Consulting companies that follow a cookie-cutter process. They do it the exact same way every time- a more sophisticated and expensive form of McDonalds. Should one person get run over by a bus, the project should be able to recover by putting another person of that function in. Easy to scale- look at Accenture or PWC or Iprospect.

• The high end consultant- The McKinsey model. You have a team of ultra high IQ folks who can be green berets. Not easy to scale, since there aren’t enough of these sorts of people out there.

• Finally, the franchise model, where each region operates independently of one another, but share in the name. Look at the Virgin group of companies started by Richard Branson. He doesn’t run any of these companies. Rather, he licenses his Virgin name out to a company and gets a cut of whatever they make. It’s a win for everyone, since Branson is a master salesperson, not a detailed company operator.

So look at the example of this designer who loved design, but failed at business. He jumped into business with a great attitude and great individual design skills- yet ended up broke with a bunch of unhappy clients chasing him. He didn’t decide up front which of these 3 models he’d choose to scale on. The choice for you might not be to hire other people. I know a lot of folks who make a lot of money by themselves without having to deal with the hassle of managing other people, projects, and partners. Just look at Markus Frind, who built Plentyoffish.com into a top 100 web property single-handedly.

If you decide to hire others, make sure you budget enough money knowing that about half of the contractors you hire probably won’t work out- it’s just human nature. We have lost a few hundred thousand dollars over the last 2 years from these types of incidents- most all of them good, well-meaning people.

Best ways to increase your success rate? Ask your friends who they use. Have a friend who is already skilled in what you are looking for interview candidates- if you want heart surgery, ask another heart surgeon, not a patient. Find folks who already have something going on and who would have to take a risk to join you (have skin in the game)

Best ways to increase your chance of failing? Hire kids who are in high school or college still- they don’t have professional level experience and will often flake on you. School competes for their time, too. Look at folks who have been at a big company for a long time- odds are that their edge died years ago. Hire folks who you can’t physically meet- offshoring can work, but this post is not about what could work, but where you are least likely to fail.

In case you are wondering, all the examples given are real mistakes I have made. I hope you can benefit from our losses.

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Update: We have heard back from this designer and a year plus later, he’s agreed to start repaying back the money we advanced him.  This is an encouraging sign of how people can perhaps change for good.

We’ve been testing Google Template Center since November 2008.  As you would imagine, if you want to multiply clones off a master template, this is the tool for you.  You can create a master and then copy it over multiple times.  So let’s say that you have a Denver laser surgeon and based on the success there, are able to grab 20 more laser surgeons nationwide (word of mouth is powerful marketing).  With Google Template Center, you can just replicate your account 20 more times.  Easy!  And you can even enforce rules on keywords, bids, ad text, and other requirements.

But before you jump in, there are some key downsides.

• The templates don’t support local business ads, which are bread and butter to local search advertising.
• They don’t support mobile (not big yet, but will be huge in a year or two).
• You can’t automatically transfer billing information– a pain in the rear when you have many accounts.
• You can achieve the same or better functionality in AdWords Editor by just copying campaigns– it’s just as fast.
• If you don’t need new accounts, you should just duplicate campaigns within the same account.

The bottom line: Google Template Center is a great idea, but not ready for prime time.  If you want to use it, go into your My Client Center (which you use to manage multiple accounts) and hit the third link (next to Alerts).  Let me know if you are using templates and how it’s working out for you.  I don’t see many folks that are.

We’ve spent the last 4 months porting our Google campaigns over to Facebook.  Just like with AdWords, where you pay for clicks, but not impressions– one trick is to place your phone number in the ad.  Some proportion of folks will call the number right from the ad, which gives you a free lead.

What percentage of calls are free, we don’t know.  So we’ve begun testing by having a different phone number in the ad versus on the landing page.  When we have data across a range of clients, we’ll let you know.  If you have data on this already, please do share it.

This is one of many similarities between Google AdWords and Facebook self-serve that you can take advantage of in doing local lead gen!

We fire a lot of people in our company.  I’ve noticed that those who have risked to most to join us are the ones most likely to succeed.  Ironic, since you’d think that people who take the “safe” route– work part-time to hold their current job or not move out to Colorado– have less risk.

Or perhaps you’d say that folks who decided to quit their current job and move out here were folks already confident in their skills– thus, it’s not a fair comparison.  Well, turns out that the folks who did come here were not necessarily more skillful or even guaranteed anything.  Nor is it true that this self-selects for folks who are unemployed and have nothing to lose.

I think the explanation is as simple as– those who have something on the line know they have to commit. A few hundred years ago, British soldiers wore bright red and white uniforms.  You’d think that camouflage would be a smarter choice, since the British soldiers stood out like targets.  If you’re dressed so visibly, then you have to commit to fighting once you’re out there on the field.

Put all your eggs in one basket– and watch that basket! The safety of stock market diversification is that you can spread your investments across many stocks.  Safer, right?  But what if you’re really done your research and you know what companies are going to succeed?  Diversification is for unquantified risk.  In the start-up world, would you rather own one company that just kills it or 10 companies that almost made it?

So don’t go the “safe” route– go for it!  Stand in the middle of the road and you’ll get run over.

Are you frittering your time away on something “safe” or perhaps spreading your time thin over 10 different things?

So much talk about Bing, but not much on their Local Listing Center.  It’s much like Google Local Business Center, but a few key differences:

• Way less volume: Like organic results, we get about 1 click from Bing local results for every 20 Google local results.
• Not as sophisticated: You have to wait for the postcard to get the PIN– they don’t offer the option to call your phone.  You can’t bulk submit listings, which is a bummer if you have many locations– hire an intern.  You have 45 days to put that PIN in before they cancel the listing. The help section has only 5 articles.
• You can say less about yourself: You can post up to 10 pictures, but there’s no space for videos, services offered, and other fields.
• But you can game it easier: You can list your business name with your keywords.  So instead of Colorado Skincare, you could say “Denver Liposuction Center“.  If you try this on Google, they will flag and disapprove you.
• It’s still Live Search: Even some of the urls still say Live (they haven’t switched them all over.  The Bing branding is just that– not a significant change to functionality, at least from the local side of things.

What’s been your experience with Bing Local Listing Center?

The folks at Webmaster Radio put on the first Affiliate Convention, ending just a few hours ago.  Billed as “free for affiliates”, many said that the event wouldn’t happen, wouldn’t attract high quality affiliates, and couldn’t secure a sponsor.  Even Larby Amirouche was considering whether or not he was going to come. But when 10 of us from BlitzLocal went to the Mile High Affiliate Party on Wednesday night– held at a Denver strip club, we saw a packed club of 300+ people. The show had 1,200+ folks registered and over 900 folks badged. The Thursday session I moderated on Alternative Search Engines (mostly Facebook) was standing room only.  And today’s session on lead generation strategies was packed, too.

What did I learn?

• A conference where affiliates get in free draws a different crowd: The usual suspects– Shoemoney, GetAds, Scott Richter, Wes Mahler, etc— were there.  Yet folks such as Mark Brooks, (the pre-eminient expert in online dating), Gillian Muessig (president of SEOmoz.org) and Mark Nelson (Director of IT at Quiznos)– who are not part of the typical affiliate scene– provide expertise in online marketing that you otherwise wouldn’t get.   There are a ton of folks who are part-time affiliates and are quite skilled in their day jobs– usually more well-rounded than full-time affiliates that have just one trick.

Lunch with Wesley Mahler, Mark Nelson, and Mark Brooks

• New perspectives from non-affiliates: For example– if you are a dating affiliate and didn’t attend, you’ve really missed out– dating is HOT.  The downturn in the economy has driven out the folks who aren’t serious, leaving the remaining traffic converting better. Folks in this space are killing it in a market that’s still growing– yet those who are making money will want to tell you that you should stay out of dating, since “it’s not doing too well.”  You would have learned what techniques super affiliates are using, what niches are working, how to tweak landing pages, how to SEO those pages, and so forth.

Super affiliate panel providing tips and advice

• Local and social are the future: I spoke about local lead gen in one of the panels.  Yet a number of other speakers noted the opportunity for affiliates to reach out to the millions of local businesses and sell them on a pay per call basis.  Instead of competing against hundreds of other affiliates on the same offer, you can have the exclusive for roofing contractors in your neighborhood.  Sure, each one might only earn you $300 a month, but what if you could duplicate your PPC templates and landing page templates to 100 of them– and earn $30,000 a month?  That’s steady income for you. Call tracking software, whether offered by BlitzLocal or other vendors, is now easy to use and cheap.  The Facebook and twitter land grab is on, just like domains 10 years ago.  Use that to fuel the fire.

Dennis Yu speaking on advanced local lead generation

• Drunk people tell you their secrets: There has been a party each night and it was in those personal meetings that I’ve learned more than I ever could in a session that’s being filmed and recorded in front of hundreds of people.  If you want to really move up your learning and earning curve, you need to reach out.  The drunker, the better.

Packed house and open bar at Platinum 84

The Mile High Affiliate Party included beer pong action too

3 million users took their names last Friday in Facebook’s vanity url rush.

But even bigger than that is grabbing the vanity urls for your fan page(s), which opens up June 28th. If you have at least 1,000 fans by May 31st, then you can grab them now.  Likewise, if you’re a journalist or a name brand, you can request their team to do it for you.  We took that liberty for a few of our casual dining clients. It might even help us rank on pest control eventually.

For example, if you’re looking for Send Out Cards, you don’t have to go to some crazy url anymore.  And the Facebook team has smartly 301 redirected the old url to this new one.  The new url is only on the 3rd page of Google organic results, but will climb over time.

Want to SEO your Facebook fan page? I was chatting with one of the Facebook executives, who described how anything you do in traditional SEO applies towards SEO for your Facebook page.

• Get more friends to fan your page– the link juice will flow. Put up a ton of good content to attract links from inside Facebook and from external sites. Facebook will likely already rank for your name as well as your organization’s name– so link to it from other sites you control.
• Create a ton of content– Facebook has widgets for music, videos, WordPress blogging, twitter, and everything else imaginable. Tie all these social sites together– not just for SEO reasons, but so that users can connect with you via their favorite method. I don’t use FriendFeed and Plaxo, but there are enough friends that do that I automatically update status there anyway.

Even if you’re not interested in being a social media expert, at least you can have a placeholder to avoid reputation management problems such as that of North Dakota State University Admissions. And don’t just grab your Facebook url, tie it in with stuff like your FriendFeed for Dennis Yu.

Golf-ball sized hail is coming down right now in Boulder- our yard looks like a driving range littered with hail chunks. As an internet marketer, instead of hearing hail pelting our windows, I hear clicks from people typing in “Denver hail damage”, as they need new roofs and car repairs.

Shall we say there is a silver lining to this cloud? BlitzLocal finds ways to profit from bad things happening– whether it be funeral advice,  Denver veterinary care, or even cosmetic surgery.  In fact, most of our client base is medical and legal clients– companies that customers see when there is a problem. Find out where there is pain and you’ll make profit.

Last month, our roofing client had the best month ever– and if the weather keeps up– this month will be the same. We even set up a roofing contractor site– and got 3 new roofing clients in the last two weeks.  It already ranks on “roofing contractor marketing”, which only gets one hit a day. We get 3 visits a day from “roofing marketing” and a whole lot more from Facebook self-serve advertising, which is only 20 cents a click for geo and age targeted traffic (and it’s the best kept secret for small business advertising).

So while other people are freaking out when bad stuff happens, what are you doing to take advantage of the opportunity?

The Space Needle is flooded in Orange light tonight, the color of Bing. A giant searchlight, reminding me of the Luxor, shone straight up the air for which the Microsoft spokesperson told me that they had to get a FAA permit to do.  We saw helicopters circling the Space Needle to capture the epic moment from all angles.  There were mimes posing as shopping carts, cyclists, nurse and patient, and searchers.  The open bar was fully stocked with premium liquor– even Patron.  Dozens of waiters whisked out salmon, chocolate cupcakes with BING printed on them, and delicious goodies.  I estimate 400 people in attendance and close to $100k spent on just this event– facilities, catering, security, entertainment, alcohol, giveaways, and professional staff. What’s the measurable ROI on this?

According to AdAge, Microsoft has $80 million to $100 million budgeted for this launch, so this is only a tenth of one percent of their budget.  More appropriate would have been to bathe the Space Needle in green– the color of deep pockets that will invest heavily to market this new search engine– codenamed for the sound of “discovery”.  I personally think that they should have bought ad.com, when it was up for auction last month. But “BING” is a four letter word– and you can tell folks to “Go BING Yourself!”, which is better than “Go Google Yourself!”

Do you remember when ValueJet went out of business because one of their jets blew up and killed all 105 passengers in 1997?  The day after the company went bankrupt, a new company named AirTran started.  Same staff, same planes, same everything– just repainted the jets to another color and gave it a new name.  Is this an apt analogy for Microsoft rebranding their search engine?  I gotta admit that BING is better than Kumo.

Microsoft is not ValueJet– not because operating systems can just reboot after crashing, but because Microsoft has deep talent in large scale programmatic search.  That’s what the PR lady told me when I asked her. Their tools are coming along and are, unfortunately, being compared to Google at every turn.  Even if the technology is just as good, people will still pre

fer Google.

Thus, they are differentiating in LOCAL search - we are looking forward to working with the BING folks to offer a great solution to those 20 million small businesses in the US (not to mention the international opportunity).  It’s a market that Google and Yahoo! have not figured out.  Personally, when I was at Yahoo!, I was sad to see the company unable to grasp the opportunity that our internal market research was hitting us on the head with.

Mime station evidentally depicting “local” searches

E-commerce mimes?

The entertainment director said he was on a “need to know basis” when we
asked what areas of search these other mimes actually represented.

Entering the venue at sunset

A shot outside as the crowd started to roll in

Row of terminals to test out the latest Bing technology. Rumor is porn
videos can be previewed from the search results page.

Mini-cupcakes topped with Bing covered chocolates