Make Money Online

From the Chicago Sun Times to the Rocky Mountain News, newspapers across the board are struggling with dwindling ad revenues. And it’s not just the recession. Rather, newspapers are just having trouble adapting their revenue model to moder times. While Craigslist has cut into their classifieds business, the sheer volume of information on the internet writ large has eroded their subscription base. All the while, increasingly net-savvy advertisers are opting for online channels over print pages because online they can get hard analytics on eyeballs, impressions, click-through, and conversions.

So it’s not just the recession. Indeed, as far back as 2006, the Economic Policy Institute reported that the non-internet publishing industry lost 91,000 jobs in 2006 alone, “in part due to internet competition.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all is lost for the print media. Granted, they’ve taken a beating because they weren’t quick enough in adapting to changing economic, technological, and information landscape. And the industry will probably have to take a few more knocks on the chin (losing a few more publications) before the fights over.

But at the end of the day, newspapers are in the business of (1) providing authoritative information so that they can (2) sell subscriptions and ads, and online technologies can only help them do that . In a recent Revenews post, Upgrading the Newspaper Revenue Model, I explored some ways that newspapers could (1) make paid subscriptions more appeal, and bolster their ad revenues by (2) increasing unique visits, (3) increasing page-views per visit, and (4) diversify their ad space offerings so as to attract more advertiers. My suggestions included:

1. Localize Ads: use geo-targeting and LBS to open up their ad space to smaller businesses with lower ad budgets.
2. Social News Organization: both offer subscribers an added-value experience and leverage social media to drive traffic; but more importantly, gather comprehensive user-data in the process.
3. Hyper Target Ads: with the user-data they collect, newspapers could both better target their ads and show users relevant affiliate offers whenever an ad space isn’t already sold.
4. Go Mobile: through a comprehensive mobile service, newspapers could drive traffic through mobile updates, and further diversify their ad offerings and reach out to users via LBS/GPS.

There’s much more detail in the original post, but the point is that newspapers are so much more than mere content publishers. They play an important role in our democracy, so there is a lot more hinging on their survival than mere jobs and tradition. Through the strategic use of online technologies (both mobile and ad technologies), they can not only prop-up their revenue model, but continue to be the watchdog on government and business that they’re supposed to be.

In any case, here’s somewhat of a video obituary from the Rock Mountain News, which ran its last edition on February 27th, 2009. It’s an extremely well done video, and is so sad because, as one of their columnists put it, the “paper won four Pulitzers since 2000, but couldn’t weather economic storm.”

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Read the original post:
Reinventing the Newspaper Revenue Model

If you like customer service horror stories, then you’ll love this one.

The Story

In February of this year, our heroine, yours truly, called CapitalOne to pay off one of her 3 credit cards with this company and to change her address and phone as she had recently moved and her forwarded mail was coming to an end. There was a whopping $5 balance so digging deep into her financial reserves she paid the trolls $5 while still on the line. Apparently a few days, after the card was paid to zero balance, these mean people accessed a $29.75 late fee on the $0 balance. Business process=broken

Pretty sure that’s not legal, but where does she go to complain? Government process=broken

Of course, as luck would have it, the trolls changed the address/phone on 2 of the cards, but not on this particular card. Business process=broken?

6 months went by, and our heroine lived blissfully unaware that the illegitimate late fee of $29.75 remained on the card. She was not receiving statements, so she had no idea that the CapitalOne monster was about to strike.

After checking her credit report earlier today, the heroine found that CapitalOne had charged-off the account for, you guessed it, $29.75. Yep, she now has an illegitimate charge-off on her credit for $29.75!

After 4 hours on the phone with CapitalOne today, and after talking to many of the Troll’s minions, she learned that they would not reopen the account and that they would not address the negative credit reporting. 4 hours of her life wasted and credit damaged only because the Trolls at CapitalOne do not have their **** together…

The Rant

It’s a sad story, but one we’ve all lived through at some mega-business in the past. The CapitalOnes, Comcasts and other notorious offenders continue to victimize on a daily basis.

But, why does this happen? Do people really start companies with evil, nefarious aims? Do they think that they will increase their customer base by pissing off the people who are shoveling money in their coffers? No. These companies hire fancy, dancy consultants to come in and ‘help’ them piss off their customers in the form of cost-cutting. Throat-cutting would be more appropriate terminology.

Hey, big business… Cut the damn marketing budget before you cut customer care. All the new orders you bring in will eventually be lost due to your prime suckage.

If your customers are !screaming! to get help and all you can think about is how to cut costs, you are bound to lose money. These consultants rarely care for the longevity of your company. They were brought in to immediately lower costs, but they have no stake in the future of your company so they could care less what their cuts do to your future.

Business Example

I recently had a discussion with a friend at a large company. Friend and company will remain nameless, of course. He was explaining to me why their customer service sucks. While his team begged to keep their customer focus, the execs told them that they had to cut $40k from the budget immediately (thanks consultants!). This was, of course, to pay for the companies large social networking experiment. Don’t even get me started on that one…

6 months later my friend was able to show measurable losses of revenue after the significant cuts in customer care and had the foresight to forecast future losses. Because his team did this work, and showed that the $70K cut had put them on track to lose $900K by year’s end, they were unleashed to again serve their customers with excellence. But, how much impact was done in those 6 months? To have him tell it, the impact was substantial. In fact, months after, they are forced to adopt a new, costly customer retention program that will add additional losses to the big savings that the consultant brought them. The sad thing is that before they mucked with their current setup, they were retaining customers just fine and were one of the top 5 *****s in their field.

Sadly, as consumers we have no way to educate big business on this truth. One would think execs would have learned this in their obligatory MBA education from a top school… (I know, now I’m just being snarky).

We have no real way to speak out against these retarded cousins of the business world and I’m tired of just giving up. The Better Business Bureau is useless. Yelp is about the best way to get any attention when you are railroaded by companies, but that really doesn’t work well unless it’s a local business. Any suggestions on how we take back our time, energy and buying power? GetSatisfaction?Anyone else have a customer service nightmare they want to share?

The rest is here:

This is not the most professional post I’ve ever written, I know, and it’s full of, erm, colorful language and rants are usually very difficult to read, but I felt that I had to let people know the horrible experience I had with Comcast (Paypal, you’re next). If you have a similar Comcast story, please let me know so I can link to your rant in this post.

/begin rant

If you’ve followed my recent tweets, you’ve seen my griping about my Comcast service, or lack thereof.

My complaints:

HD Reception
I pay extra for HD channels, and since we moved to this house in October I’ve had 8 bit-like HD service. By that I mean the HD channels hiccup, lose audio and pixelate as if they cannot ‘come in’ clearly over this connection. Comcast has come out several times and each time they tell me it’s fixed, only to see the same errors days later. If you’ve ever tried to get a cable guy/gal to visit your home, you understand they *if they show up at all*, they are rarely on time, and you have to take off the entire day of work anyway since their appointments usually span 4 or more hours.

Lost Equipment
When we moved to this house, Comcast in Oakland made us turn in our equipment so we could get new equipment here in our new hometown. Apparently the local Comcast is a franchise so they own their equipment and it can’t fraternize with real Comcast equipment. This, of course, meant our cable was out for weeks as we attempted to get new equipment and new installs, and then ended with getting billed for equipment that we turned in and our new equipment. We literally got billed twice, by two different Comcast offices, for equipment that they held in their possession. Again, imagine the joy of working that out over the first several months in our new home.

Wii Promotion
The first good thing they’ve done, other than their internet service, which is unbeatable, is begin giving away Wiis to new TriplePlay customers. You can imagine how angry I was when I learned that there is no way to give an existing customer who upgrades to this service a Wii. So, they are saying, “we appreciate new customers so much that we’ll give them a game console, but if you’ve been paying us $300+ per month for 3 years, then we absolutely could care less about showing you appreciation.” Yeah, that and their, erm, *service*, is really winning me over!

New Service
Three weeks ago we decided that we needed a few more cable outlets in our home. I called Comcast, and they upsold me to their TriplePlay (yes, I’m a sucker for the up-sell). I set an appointment and took off work. They never showed up. I got no call that day nor the next day. A few days later, I called to complain and set up another appointment. For my annoyance they gave me a $20 credit. Yes, that makes up for an entire day’s lost work… They couldn’t get to me for the next ten days, so I set up another appointment for two weeks later, on a Tuesday morning. Well, as you can guess, no one showed up on Tuesday. What fun!

The odd part is that on Wednesday, we got a call that they were sitting at our house. They were only a day late… I called back to reschedule for a third time and found out it was going to again take 10 days to see a technician. By this time, I freely admit, I was off my rocker. I pretty much told the agent to, well, I probably shouldn’t say what I told her, but it wasn’t nice.

Cable is still virtually a monopoly. Other than DirecTV, which has crappy internet service and is therefore not an option, Comcast is the only game in town for us. And, remember, we live in the heart of Silicon Valley, so if it’s a virtual monopoly here, imagine what it’s like in the rest of the country. Because of this we are expected to put up with less than adequate service, customer service that’s polite but ineffective and technicians who do what they damn well please.

Solution
Today I decided that I’d finally had enough. I went through DirecTV’s site and have almost signed up for service there (sitting on the confirm page in another tab). Yeah, it’s an out-of-pocket expense of $300 because we need 6 receivers (3 were free), but it was such a freeing exercise! I’ve called Comcast, and the lady has all these great plans of wooing me back. She’s getting all of her ducks in a row and is going to call me back in a few minutes to wow me. Needless to say, I fully expect to finalize my DirecTV order in the next half-hour. I’ll, of course, keep internet through Comcast, as there really is no other option (DSL blows), but at least I’ll have some satisfaction in voting with my pocketbook.

Comcast… You Suck!

/end rant

UPDATE: Comcast lady never called back. What a surprise!

View post:
Comcast Cancellation – Almost

For small businesses and retail establishments, local search can have a favorable impact. Marketing to customers in your neighborhood used to be as easy as putting up a sign or advertising in the local newspaper. But today’s web-savvy consumers shop for products and services locally on the Internet using local search.

Using a local search engine, marketers can target customers in a specific area while maximizing their marketing investment. They can use specific targeting, using the right keywords and search phrases to pull customers to their site and front door.

Local search offers low cost, relevant advertising dynamics, an audit trail to measure results and opportunities to increase revenues and profit. The key is partnering with a local search company that provides relevant search results, so your customers can find you easily. They should provide high-quality location data, geo-targeted advertising and efficient search algorithms.

Here are five reasons you should use local search:

It is on the rise The local search marketplace is expanding. Local search is estimated to grow to a $6.2 billion market opportunity by 2010. (Kelsey Group). According to Com­Score, 47% of local searchers contacted or visited a local merchant as a result of their online search.

There’s money to be made It’s been proven that “local” searchers convert into buyers.

According to industry analysts, approximately 80% of an indi­vidual’s income is spent within about 50 miles of their home. With 95% of the potential local search advertising market today remaining untouched, this is a huge opportunity for businesses.

Online advertising just makes (dollars and) sense

In today’s economy, more local companies are turning to online advertising as a new way to capture greater local customer revenue. At the same time, many Internet players are refocusing on local search as a method of increasing revenue and profit. (Mike Dobson, president of TeleMapics).

Local search costs less and delivers more

One of the reasons that local search attracts new advertising customers is that it offers relatively precise targeting capabilities, at one of the lowest costs per lead offered by any advertising medium (29 cents,according to Piper Jaffray & Co.). It also offers an audit trail.

Your customers can find you faster

Traffic has declined for traditional print publishers, as it is easier and quicker to research a buying opportunity online than to search print media. In the Yellow Pages arena, the market has fragmented because of increased competition between publishers, diluting the effective­ness of Yellow Pages advertising that many small businesses once relied upon.

If you haven’t considered local search as an important part of your marketing program, now is the time to do so. You’d be surprised at what an impact you can make!

See the rest here:
Local Search: What You Need to Know

Now promoting the complete package, higher payouts. Enhanced sales page with video = more click to sale.

Excerpt from:
Instant And Rapid Hypnosis.

Marketing Tools and resources for your online business, make money with our eBook Paks!

Read more:
Ezwebgroup.

Sell of the software CleanDrive.

Credit:
CleanDrive.

Send Friends unique email pranks!

See original here:
Joke E-Greeting Cards.

Learn How To Use Google and Become A Google Expert.

View original here:
Become A Google Expert.

The rest is here:
Any better way than the local search engines!!

In Seconds, Your Keyword Search Turns Into A Treasure-Trove Of Websites, eBooks, Articles, Mp3s, Videos, Guides, And More.

Read the rest here:
Search Automator.

Trademark Lookup.

Read more:
Pedigroup Inc.

Many brick and mortar companies that are catering to their local clientel find it hard to optimize their website for local markets despite targeting the best keywords. Quite naturally this is not a surprising matter as many of them, although efficient in running their off line businesses, typically stumble over two critical blocks.

5. Don’t leave out general SEO techniques because you want to SEO for local markets which the power of link building which can be done globally as there might not be enough local sites to beat you competition.

6. Get on the local maps of Google, Yahoo, as this generally puts you on front of the local search engines.

7. Exchange links and banners with local businesses as the local traffic exchange will bring you new business. Avoid changing banners or links with competitors but exchange them with businesses that will complement you. Verify their traffic so it’s an almost even exchange.

Dominating local SEO can be done fairly easily, you just have to either hire a professional with a proven track record or take time to learn local SEO. The main concern is to be patient as it takes at least 3 months to start seeing results.

About the Author: Michael S. Francis the author is a seasoned local SEO expert. Michael S. Francis is the owner of www.seovida.com a Local Business SEO company.

See the original post:
Search Engine Optimization Goes Local