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February 2012 SearchFest Conference in Portland

December 27th, 2011

12/29/2011 Update: Attendees using the promo code MnSEARCH receive a 10% discount per the event below.

Over the years, search marketing and social media conferences have grown in both number and price. You want to make them whether it’s for learning or networking purposes, albeit hopefully for both.

There’s one in Portland, Oregon that has piqued my interest. If you’re in search, you may have heard of the February 2012 SearchFest conference by now. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I hope to for at least a couple reasons.

The first reason is price. For $299 (if you register by December 31) you can’t beat it.

And…

It’s a one-day conference, but it’s one, full, packed day with trusted in-the-field presenters including:

Rand Fishkin – SEOmoz
Marty Weintraub – aimClear
Rhea Drysdale – Outspoken Media
Greg Sterling – Sterling Market Intelligence
Countless others

Here’s the full agenda.

If you’re on even more of a budget, good news. Flights to Portland (from Minneapolis anyway) are currently inexpensive if you’re willing to have a layover.

Portland hotels are also reasonable, especially if you choose to stay near the airport. Why would you stay by the airport? The Max Light Rail can take you from the airport area right by the conference located at the Governor Hotel. If you have an Expedia account, check out “Flight + Hotel” options from 2/23/12 – 2/25/12. You may find a gem.

Here are a few inexpensive motels close to the Red Line and airport, all apparently includes Wifi and appear to have Expedia discounts:

Todd Mintz, David Mihm, Chris Lister, let me know if I’m incorrect in the above.

I’m a fan of mass transit, and all of this combined can probably be achieved at 1/4 of the price of other conferences.

The second reason I’m intrigued is because of the format. It looks like the presenters are mostly folks who get their hands dirty and implement what they preach.

This occurs at other conferences too, but there was a recent one that had a lot to do with big-box companies and how they sell their newer search marketing services. This is all fine and would be interested if I was in sales. However, I’ve personally seen the differences between big-box sales pitches vs. what they actually deliver.

I have a couple friends and acquaintances in PDX who will be attending this as a local event. How about you? Are you interested in making the trip to Portland? I’ve been there around five times and it’s a beautiful city.

Tags: "searchfest"
Posted in Search Marketing, Social Media | 6 Comments »

Localmn and Snap Communications Search and Social Seminars – Coming to You in 2012

December 20th, 2011

Jan 3 Update: We have a potential initial event venue at the Minneapolis Marriott West. We’ll also be contacting a few trusted people if case you want to side-volunteer with the return of promoting your niche local web/social business. If you receive a humble Twitter mention from us, that’s why. More on this below and the event date(s) are TBD.

————————————————————————-

Not new news, but over the past few years local and social search has made an overdue mainstream surge for local businesses. With that said, there’s still a void. At the very basic level we see lots of this:

And not always a lot of this:

Notice the difference?

Claiming your Google Places page is just one, free, tiny example of what local companies can do to boost their visibility and it’s also arguably the first things recommended.

So, in 2012 Barb from Snap Communications and myself will be offering local search seminars in the Minneapolis-St. Paul areas for interested companies, groups and industries.

We’re not just talking about Google Places. The seminars will include both local strategies and tactics for the following:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Local Listings (Google Places, etc.)
Web Analytics (Google Analytics)
Social Aspects (Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.)
Online Reputation Management

We intend for these seminars to be fairly similar to the wonderful and low-cost LocalU local search format, meaning they’re more for educational purposes and less about sales pitches. We also intend to customize these seminars to audience industry.

These could be anything from attorneys to restaurant owners to specific professional groups or associations. We’re seasoned (old) and have seen it all.

Interested? Great! Just contact us per the phone number up top or at pjahn @ localmn.com.

OK, back to the good stuff.

One thing we will be doing for each seminar is pre-selecting an attendee to come on up live to fill out and claim their full Google Places profile. It’s one thing to talk about how important this is, but showing and going through the exact process and hiccups (yep, there are a few) is something we really hope resonates with attendees.

Here’s just a partial image of the Localmn Google Places page:

Regarding the seminars, we highly encourage attendees to bring a laptop and/or tablet. We want you to take notes for things you can do on your own. Smartphones are also encouraged as we’ll be having Twitter hashtags, plus we encourage attendees to take pictures of slides or anything else they see interesting.

Another thing we’ll be doing is showing real-life examples of how local companies are using social media to help boost their brands, and eventually, sales.

The half-day seminars would include our 2-ish hour seminar of local online marketing concepts you can do on your own. For the next two hours, we’re planning for us and other niche consultants to hang around to help your online presence on-the-spot. Niche consultants could provide information about:

Foursquare
Websites built on WordPress
Responsive web design
More to come

We have a few people in mind for the above niches and will be contacting them soon. With that said, if you’re a expert in a particular niche and would like to volunteer, just let us know.

There will be nominal attendance prices TBD as we plan to keep these more educational oriented and less of sales pitches. We will be giving our awesome niche volunteers subtle pitches as they would be helping out of the goodness of their own hearts.

Are you part of an industry that would like to learn more about all of the above? Just let us know.

Are you a local venue that would like us to pay you money to host these events? Just let us know. If you have free wifi and enough AC outlets or extension cords for attendees to bring their laptops to plug in, especially let us know!

We haven’t come up with a creative Twitter hashtag for these events yet. Have one for us? Again, just let us know. We’ll give you all the credit in the world.

More to come and locally yours,

Barb and Paul

Tags: "barb prindle" "paul jahn"
Posted in Local Search, Minnesota Business, Search Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

New Localmn Site Coming Soon

November 11th, 2010

It’s been two + years of thought and we’re now getting close to a new Localmn.com relaunch. We optimistically hope to launch and replace the current 2005 version before the 2010 calendar ends.

The new site will have a brand new look with more transparency and social features. The core of the site will remain the same. Let’s get people away from their computers and to your business door. Here is our new logo.

More on Dave below, he’s customizing some cool rotating imagery for the home page. Here’s a dummy pic. Funny, Dave.

We’ll be offering the same local search marketing as always, plus a few new features like local online reputation management, content strategy consulting (Barb), front-end design (Dave) and more.

Several have mentioned to make the new site more engaging. Personally, I’m not a social media guru/ninja/sovereign but I am a user. I’m transparent, too. So, there will be access to what’s up on Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, YouTube and of course this blog which will be finally integrated in the site (bye WordPress-hosted blog).

There will be serious talent behind the site as well. I’ve been lucky enough to have years of projects with Barb Prindle, writer extraordinaire and all-around very nice and organized person. There’s also a front-end developer/designer available for clients who need it. Dave Dechant and his site Face Your Design is a pretty dang good resume. He’s got mad skills making sites tick in both form and function.

Check out their sites. Maybe you just need writing or front-end developing needs.

A photo shoot for us three may happen next Saturday (site TBD – possibly the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden). We’ll have a couple somewhat regular poses to put on the site. We’ll also have a Flickr set and are planning for some creative fun! There may or may not be a field goal attempt using a yellow pages book. I have complete confidence this can be achieved.

Want to be creative and have fun next Saturday? Let us know!

More to come…

Tags: localmn
Posted in Local Search, Search Marketing, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Bro-Sis Photography Marketing Update – Getting Close to Presentation Time

March 14th, 2009

Time has been flying by. For those of you who have been following our project, thank you! For those who haven’t, my sis and I will soon be giving presentations to professional photographers on how to use search marketing and social media to help their photography studios.

Our first speaking engagement is set for May 18 at the West Madison (Middleton) Holiday Inn & Suites. I chuckle a bit about it because Holiday Inn events are known for the “make money online” crowds. We’re probably the opposite as we’re going out of our way to demystify SEO and social media. There are some things you can do yourself.

We met today at the Jahn Haus near Wabasha at 10:00 soon after Heather tweeted me to not tweet and drive (guilty). From there, we had seven hours of very productive work. We’re putting together our PowerPoint and here’s an outline:

Briefly talk about traditional marketing and continue doing what works
Explain the push (traditional marketing) and pull (search marketing and social media) concept

To break it down further:

Search Marketing

SEO – Demystifying how it works (taking the BS out of it)
PPC – Breaking it down to multiple campaigns and ad groups
Local Search – Getting your business listed properly and accurately
Analytics – measuring analyitcs instead of rankings – key factor

Social Media

Listen
Then engage in conversation
Explain Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and how they can all work in concert with search marketing

This is pretty important. There are so many different social media outlets. We’ll be focusing on LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. Listening to potential clients is more important than touting your services.

We’re trying to tie all of this is to funnel into photographer Web sites which includes:

Images
Call to Action
Copyright
Fresh Information
Ease of navigation
Contact Us page
Analytics – this is so important in too many ways. See Google Analytics. We’ll be spending some time talking about this.

Next step is to put the PowerPoint presentation together. Our audience (professional photographers) are very good at what they do. They may not fully understand search marketing or social media, but they are definitely smart. Any thoughts to the above bullets? We’d love to hear from you.

In the meantime, feel free to follow Heather on Twitter and check out her work.

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Tags: heather jahn, photography
Posted in Bro-Sis Project, Search Marketing | 1 Comment »

Customized Google Search Results by Location

August 14th, 2008

It was almost two years ago when Google launched personalized and custom search. The premise was to help users obtain more relevant and personalized results upon typing in a search query. I haven’t seen this in all searches, but it looks like Google is displaying customized searches by location.

Customized by Location

When looking at the natural results, there were a few Minneapolis-area results, although plenty of results still appear that aren’t local to Minneapolis.

When you click on the “more details” link, you get some more insight to this. It tracks the location by IP address.

More Details

Clint Danks from ThinkSEM originally found this and it correctly showed his location of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. He sent me the images above on it early this morning when I was in Rochester. When I performed the search, it recognized my location as Mankato which is about 90 miles west. However, it does look like you can click to correct your location.

This customization message seems to be appearing only in select searches. It’s probably too soon to see if this really does customize results by location and if they show the customization message more often.

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Tags: clintdanks, Google, thinksem
Posted in Google, Search Marketing | No Comments »

Bro-Sis Collaboration Update – Getting Ready for First Meeting

August 9th, 2008

A week and a half ago, I mentioned that my sis and I are starting a new collaborative project regarding photography and traditional marketing, along with search marketing, local search, and social media.

In short, this project is to offer both customized private consulting to professional photographers along with numerous public speaking engagements.

We’re welcoming people to view or progress in various formats – good, bad, and ugly. More sites to come, but currently, they are…

This Blog
My Facebook Profile
My Twitter

Heather’s Blog
Heather’s Facebook Profile
Heather’s Tin Shed Studio Facebook Page

Our first meeting is this Monday at our ‘rents place in Reads Landing, MN and we’ve got about five hours to brainstorm. The first hour will be confirming our overall strategy. Our Dad reads this blog occasionally, and if you read this Dad, get your pontoon ready. The first hour is on the Mississippi.

My sis is new to social marketing, and I already think she “gets it” more than I do. It’s going to be fun collaborating with each other.

More to come… much more.

:: :: :: :: ::

Tags: Local Search, photography, Search Marketing, Social Media
Posted in Bro-Sis Project, Local Search, Minnesota Business, Search Marketing, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Google PPC Keywords Tool Now Shows Search Volume Data

July 10th, 2008

Thanks to BuyOnlineNow.com co-workers and fellow twitterers @jackpotjewell and @jeremynelson, I was able to see that Google has now added search volumes to their PPC keyword tool.

This probably isn’t an SEO keyword research substitute for something like Keyword Discovery, but I can see this as a great helping tool for building PPC campaigns. Tomorrow, I’m starting a new PPC campaign for a client who provides billing solutions for law firms and other professional services and can see this playing a decent roll.

I want to break potential possibilities into a few categories; search volume, match type, and specifically, negative keywords. Measuring this with analytics is key as well.

Legal Billing

First, the search volume. Before this, the search volume didn’t have a number and just had a green bar level like you see with the “advertiser competition” tab. It’s too early to tell how accurate these numbers are, and there has already been online discussions regarding this, but my gut feeling says that it’s pretty accurate. In more detail, I can see this as a good tool to determine how much I want to bid for longer-tail terms.

Next, the match type options you see in the upper right corner of the above image. You can view the search volumes by broad, phrase, exact, and negative match categories. I always like to use as many “exact match” phrases as possible, and can see the search volume totals playing a decent role in this. A longer-tail example of this may be “legal billing services”. Not many are searching for this, but there doesn’t seem to be any “exact match” competition for this either.

I’ve always been big on “negative keywords”. You don’t want people viewing your PPC ad if someone types in the word “free” or any other word that wouldn’t convert to your campaign. Whenever I do PPC campaigns, I try to regularly add negative keywords monthly. Now you can view the search volume data by negative keywords as well. Looking at the image below, I can already see some initial negative match opportunities.

Negative Keywords

Finally, analytics. Whether you use Google Analytics or a more rubust paid solution, you can see how users are coming to your site from your PPC campaigns. Measuring this is key, but if you’re a search marketer you already know this.

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Tags: adwords, Google, keywords tool, ppc
Posted in Google, Search Marketing | 2 Comments »

40 Presenters at the SMX Local and Mobile Conference, That's Quite Impressive

June 14th, 2008

Search Engine Land provides the original post.

40 presenters is really impressive for a local search field that is still (arguably) relatively new.

It’s cool to see that the SMX Conference targets ad agencies just as much or even more than search marketers and marketing managers.

It was just a few years ago that there was quite a debate between search marketers and ad agencies. Search marketers offered a cheaper and more of a “pull marketing” alternative to mainstream marketing and advertising, and ad agencies blew search marketing off as a fad or something useless. Now, both large and small agencies hire search marketers on a regular basis to broaden their services.

The SMX conference looks like they’re taking this a step further by offering local search strategies to these agencies. It does make sense. We often hear about the large, national agencies such as Fallon and Campbell Mithun, but there are plenty of small agencies around too that primarily have a local client base.

Tags: Ad Agencies, Local Search, Search Marketing, smx local
Posted in Ad Agencies, Events, Local Search, Search Marketing | 2 Comments »

Local Search and Dominating the Results

May 22nd, 2008

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve received a few different inquiries regarding Google and local search. One was how to show up in Google Maps results, one was how to show up in the natural results for local searches, and one was how to appear above the fold for localized Google AdWords campaigns.

Why not achieve all three of them, plus some “piggy back” SEO?

The last SES conference I’ve been to was in San Jose close to two years ago, but Atlanta-based Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement gave a great example on how a local company can dominate results. To this day, it holds true.

There’s some dominance!

To many search marketers, this isn’t anything new. To local business owners, this may be. Google separates their natural, local, and paid listings. There’s no reason a local business can’t do the same.

Regarding “piggy back” SEO, this comes down to both local (Maps) and natural listings. By having profiles in places like SuperPages.com and CitySearch.com can only help. Google Local helps legitimize your profile and Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) results often appear toward the top in the natural results.

Tags: Internet Yellow Pages, Local Search, minneapolis, minnesota
Posted in Citysearch, Google, Internet Yellow Pages, Local Search, Minnesota Business, Search Marketing, Small Business Marketing | 2 Comments »

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612 - 208 - 6584

New Localmn Site Coming Soon

Bro-Sis Photography Marketing Update – Getting Close to Presentation Time

Customized Google Search Results by Location

Google PPC Keywords Tool Now Shows Search Volume Data

40 Presenters at the SMX Local and Mobile Conference, That's Quite Impressive

Local Search and Dominating the Results

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