Things have been crazy for me. Work is going well and I have been really busy, which is good.
Some big news has happened for some friends of mine. A few nights ago my son Sami and his gf Maria had a sweet baby boy. They have yet to name him, which is a common thing in Finland (so they say??). Little Werty is quite cute. I am convinced if if keep calling him that it may stick.
I talked to Maria today and she and the baby are doing just perfect. You can see a pic on Maria’s Blog.
In other news I gave birth to a new site for my dad;Naper Valley Masonry – A Naperville Bricklayer. I talked about it in the past. I added some real content to it, actually put some info on my pages that were full of lorem ipsum and launched that bitch with a trose style PPC account. 2 days latter a lead was born. I am pretty impressed with they way it launched. Google Adwords had a bunch of pretty cool local features and I am driving targeted traffic for pretty cheap…
I was a little worried about how much traffic I could get, because I launched with MSN first… still yet to get a click from them. I think do to the geo targeting I have in place. Google went way smoother and I was actually able to do some radius targeting as well as a city name based one. Also they are throwing maps up for a bunch of the local searches and getting placed on the maps is pretty easy. I also shocked how much traffic is coming from the maps… I am tracking it separately.
This is the first time I promoted a brick and mortar in a while and Google makes it pretty simple to set up an effective ad campaign. The downside is you need a pretty decent site to convert your visitors into leads or customers.
I think there is lots of opportunity for small business site design and marketing… most of the competitors in this are broke ass landing pages from service master or something similar, but I think some important detail is unclear to most of the people that try to sell stuff to the small businesses…they do not give a shit about the internet. Sure they want more business, sure they want to lower their cost per lead/etc…but they want no involvement with the site… I dealt with this in the past when dealing with small companies like my dads. My dad gave me like 20 words of content total for his site… I had to hire writers to put the thing together and I came up with all the content for the rest of it. If my dad was a client and not my dad I would have told him to fuck off numerous times and gone to a client who was willing to put effort in… if there are any.
So based on this and my experience in the past, there is definitely a market for advertising and marketing services for the small business, but dealing with them is a pain in the ass, they do not have much money to spend, not willing to put any effort into their site, and do not know how to track the results… I do not think landing pages are the answer because I do not think they have enough info to sell the user/visitor, and they have only slightly more value than a phone book listing.
For around $1000 investment and a hundred dollars a month I am guessing a savvy bussiness man could whoop the competition in 60% + of the local markets (non large city) and maintain that position for a long time. Good luck trying to sell that them though.
What have you noticed if you ever tried working with tiny businesses?
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Working with tiny businesses is more pain than joy. nice, when their needs are well-defined, and they are able to pay their bills. I spent the first half of my career doing a LOT of this and I don’t miss it one bit.
Then again, working with large businesses is no better. They pay your bills, but they’ll screw you with scope creep.
working for clients really sucks (though I’ll have to change that tune if I ever go back to freelancing)