Today's post is by guest blogger Markus Skupeika from Florida. What can an American of all people have to say to us in Thanet? Quite a lot as it turns out. Markus talks about local search engine marketting and how it can serve your business far more effectively than targetting global traffic (most of whom will not want to buy from you).

Local Search Engine Marketing To Improve Your Local Business

By Markus Skupeika

Do you run a local business and want to get only the local clients from your website?

Yes, it is possible. You can put the emphasis on local search engine marketing to provide you the required support.

For long this had been a great problem for websites of small business owners. A lot of them used to get more global visitors than the local. The conversion rate had been to poor and so was sale. You must remember that a website is not about a few pages. And if you want to run an eCommerce site, you need to invest a lot on providing backend support.

Even if you outsource your SEO and other promotional and backend support jobs to a third party for lesser amount, the wastage had always been huge. The best solution for optimum use of your money is to put emphasis on local search engine marketing.

...

» Continue Reading: Local Search Engine Marketing To Improve Your Local Business

For reasons that are rather uninteresting I found myself in Tesco Westwood. At the checkout I got chatting to a young man who was feeling a little disenfranchised with working for a fixed wage and wondering if there was a better line of work.

I suggested to him that if his people skills and ability to talk about stuff were up to the challenge then blogging might be a hobby that could bloom into a way of earning a living. I also gave him a postcard and suggested he visit the website for more information (here's a link to the contact form if you missed it).

So I'm going to briefly look at the topic of earning your bread through the art of blogging. The fellow in the picture is Jeremy Schoemaker and yes that's him holding a cheque for US$132,994.97 (roughly UK£77,679) earned from Google ads. Google pays out monthly.

...

» Continue Reading: Making Money in Thanet with Blogging

We are all familiar with the stereotypical street preacher standing in some public space haranguing every passer by with his message of doom and damnation while perhaps waving about a home made sign saying, "Repent, the end is near!"

The truth is, much like the crackpots that come out during disasters the same spirit of doom seems to have settled on us that write about Thanet, at least us independent writers without our heads in the sand anyway.

While a large slice of the grass roots media proclaim with a melancholy tone that "it's all ashes", the world goes on. Children go to school, farmers farm what's left of the farm land around here and the water continues to be largely drinkable. Despite the doom-speakers, Thanet will shake this China Gateway off like a bad cold. It has to if we are to remain an non laughable democracy.

...

» Continue Reading: Thanet's Water Will Be Fine. No, I'm Being Serious.

Having set myself the challenge of writing only positive posts for two weeks my output on this blog has dropped. This tells me that much of which I had to write about has been silly things the "unpaid" local "authorities" (also known as councillors or pocket people) have been saying and the dire things other money grabbers have been up to. I'm a little sad that I've not had more positive things to say.

Rather than wallow in self pity and ignorance of what we have going for us I've been trying to improve my grasp of local resources. It was in doing so that I discovered that the faceless body of work so often attributed to TDC is more likely funded and run from the shadows by KCC, businesses co-operatives and other interested parties with lots of cash. To be honest I've been hard pressed to see exactly what it is the council does at all (other than cost us money).

I have also discovered something else - a need. A need that any right thinking businessman with sufficient investment capital could easily convert into a profitable venture. Even TDC would be hard pressed to screw it up.

...

» Continue Reading: Filling A Thanet Need

I have always felt that Thanet has great potential if only we ourselves would support it. I have written a number of times about "supporting the little guy" and as part of this have been looking for ways to do this. One way was the Thanet Finder (search engine for Thanet) but I have been looking for other ways.

I have now found a way to add Thanet eBay listings to a site. On article pages below the comments there will now be a listing of products from Thanet based sellers (as well as strongly themed Thanet content).

...

» Continue Reading: Thanet Star: supporting local sellers

I want to follow up on some surprise results that Tony and myself have briefly discussed in the comments section. In "To get ahead in business - ask a blogger" I shared how the blogging community seemed to be ahead of the game when it comes to third party ranks and metrics that measure the traction of your website. I'm still not convinced that I did not miss something but I want to explain why it matters.

The numbers tell a story, they indicate how well you are playing "the game" and the game is different depending on your aims but the numbers remain the same. Whatever reason you have a website for it has to meet one of the 5 Goals of a Business Website. The numbers tell us how well we are meeting those aims.

That is why they matter so much. When you goal is money the biggest indicator is how much but when the goal is attention they is rarely money as a good measure. So these other numbers start to mater. A lot.

Matt Bacak (another Matt B) explains more:

I was interested to see how Thanet and Kent's business websites stacked up so I took a few well known sites as control subjects and then added in local business websites that have all recently been recommended to me or known to me in some way. What I found was quite surprising.

To make things far I used as many metrics as possible to measure the success of the websites in terms of traction and penetration. the metrics I used were Alexa Rank, Google Page Rank, Google Back Links, Yahoo Back Links, Technorati (reactions, authority and rank) and Compete Rank. Each of these scores works differently for example with most of the rank based scores lower is better but a 0 is a total fail.

I chose Thanet Star (obviously) along with the TDC website, the Thanet Blog List and the website of a local photographer.  These would be my control entries against which we could measure the success of the websites in question.  What I did not expect was to have these sites dominate the results quite utterly.

I only wanted to use a smallish number of sites so I chose custwin.co.uk a business promotion business along with webdandy.co.uk and the first client they linked to afritrans.co.uk to compare with this I added webz4biz.biz who created the Thanet Business Network website. So I had two web designers and a client each. I added to this mix Boys and Maughan (local solicitors) and the Sure Start Millmead website (local non profit).

The resultant tables might surprise you.

...

» Continue Reading: To get ahead in business - ask a blogger!

The business world has changed. The only thing keeping Thanet's present Jurassic form going is that it is yet to notice. "Marketing and Sales" are, like the beheaded chicken, dead yet still moving.

"We are immune to advertising. Just forget it."
Article 74, 95 Theses, Clue Train Manifesto

What I hope to outline in today's post very few of Thanet's businesses are ready to grasp. Some are already aware of this but for the large part these are businesses that are small enough to still be nimble. There is no reason why the small and alert business can not take over quite completely from the large entities that need such artificial things as WestWood Cross, full page adverts and sales scripts.

Are you ready to learn the secret of Thanet's new market place?

...

» Continue Reading: Thanet's Business World has Changed

A Case Study

What is the single biggest failure of the entire market place today? The thing that is so pandemic in places like Thanet that wealth has no chance of being developed. The thing that keeps Thanet poor?

Undervaluing the intellectual and human resources of the company - the workers themselves. This is so common today that entire market sectors and niches are filled with businesses that could be doing ten or twenty times better then they already are but have opted instead to grind what they have to nothing. As a result customers are being forced to pay extra to maintain growth while employees are paid a fraction of their true value.

The result is poverty. Poverty for the company and poverty for the people too. Lets take a look at a couple of examples: Tony Flaig and a friend of mine that we will call Tim Smith. I believe that at an average both are worth a minimum of £30 to £40 an hour to their industry plus a range of fairly hefty bonuses; if only their employers would realise.

...

» Continue Reading: Do you know what keeps Thanet poor?

I want to outline here an introduction to an idea that I hope to expand much more extensively over the coming weeks. I am going to be addressing the business attitude and market environment of Thanet in general terms. I am aware there may be exceptions.

We are no living in the 21st Century and the technology readily at our disposal allows instantaneous communication with the entire market sector. It allows our records and our data to be analysed in minuets to a level that might take a team of experts a year or more. We can have meetings where attendees are in Rome, New York, London, Paris and Berlin (for example). Why, then, in Thanet are we finding it so difficult to engage in even the simplest ecommerce?

In theory we have the manufacturing power already operational in the area to be a world player. We have plastics, aerospace, electronics and dozens of other key industries right here in Thanet, more in Kent and the surrounding area. We have access via road and air to the rest of the world. What, then, is it that keeps us poor?

What keeps Thanet unproductive and weak is fear. In this article I will be looking at what this fear is and how we can overcome it. This answer is not for everyone.

Many business leaders are comfortable with the lack of forward motion. They would rather engage in practices of unproductive "manager masturbation" where lots of paperwork is completed and talking done but no actual profit is made. It's like a Jurassic Paralysis that is trying to suck us back through time.

Only those business men willing to evolve their business thinking are going to see their businesses flourish where others fail.

...

» Continue Reading: The Business Stone Age - An Introduction