After about a year and a half of molasses-like business, all of a sudden in December, we took off again like the old days. We have been extremely busy on corporate reposition projects, new websites, branding and design projects. Whew! From wondering where my next meal was coming from (figuratively) to being booked pretty solid until April, the year looks like it will turn into a good one. But why?

I spent a while trying to figure that out – the economy is still very slow and the recover very shallow. The best conclusion I can draw is that companies pulled back waiting for an economic recovery, but none was at hand. After more than a year of waiting and watching, they decided to take things into their own hands. The smart ones have made the decision to invest in a fresh look, a new direction, find new marketing ideas and plans. They just couldn’t wait any longer.

So by the sheer desire to get things moving again, companies one by one are starting to spend. As more and more do the same, that money they invest is passed through to my suppliers and vendors and in turn passed through to theirs. THAT is how a recover happens.

I also believe it has nothing to do with a stimulus package, but everything to do with the sprit of American business to grow and succeed. Watch the coming quarter’s growth figures and I think you will find that the economy is starting to percolate with new business activity, inventory purchases and a renewed trust in the economic engine of this country. small businesses.

From what was a dire circumstance last year, this year looks rather rosy indeed. I’m not sure who stepped on the accelerator, but I can already feel the wind in my hair (please no bald jokes).

After being involved with pet rescue for almost 3 years now, trying to save one dog at a time and watching all of the rescues and shelters try their best to get the attention of the public about spay/neuter, adoption and animal abuse, it became clear that trying to save one at a time was a noble but fruitless long-term strategy to solve the problem. Yes, it saves some great dogs, but how long can a few people save a few dogs and get anywhere close to solving the problems we have brought on ourselves?

Enter the idea of Media to the Rescue, a combined effort of the Tampa Bay television stations, radio stations, outdoor companies and print media to do a joint marketing campaign to all the populations with a consistent message over a longer period of time than ever done before. We had our first meeting on October 15th and received support for our effort moving forward. Today we got confirmation that one of the television stations and a bunch of radio stations are working to move the idea forward.

The campaign will be called, Let’s Lick This, and will focus on pet overpopulation, with messages about spay/neuter and adoption, and pet abuse. The billboard campaign has already been developed as has much of the messaging for the campaign.

Media to the Rescue is looking for partners in broadcast creative, broadcast production and a website development to assist in developing additional materials for the campaign.

We are also looking for additional media partners who might be interested in seeing what the plans are, and how they can participate in the program.

Finally, we are looking for animal-based companies, companies run by animals lovers and advertisers that just want to provide a great community service by assisting in the rollout of this campaign.

For more information, contact us at info@mediatotherescue.com

My business, and the business of most of my friends and colleagues, seems to be turning around. Everyone in my circle has become more optimistic and encouraged as business picks up in websites, marketing, publishing, advertising and similar fields. But why?

The economy is stagnant, the stimulus by all accounts but Joe Biden’s has not done anything but waste a lot of our money, unemployment is still rising, the stock market appears to be in a wait and see mode, and yet, companies are spending again.

As we all probably know, recessions are in large measure psychological. Yes, there are other economic factors, but when the media says there is a recession coming, businesses stop employing and slow manufacturing – and that in turn leads to the recession. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And this recession is largely no different. Business has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to turn around, but there is no turnaround coming. But when a business, one that needs to grow to survive, sits idle, management gets antsy to get things moving again. And that, in my opinion is what is happening right now.

Businesses cannot wait any longer for a government program to work, and most now know it won’t. So all across America businesses are starting to tick up their spending in order to get their businesses growing again. You see dollars being spent in marketing and related fields, Internet services like SEO and optimistic entrepreneurs plowing ahead with the better mousetrap, spending on services and products. And that in turn starts the money flowing through the economy again.

And as the money starts flowing, more people become optimistic and start to spend as well, and the upward spiral of economic grow begins.

This is a true capitalistic movement, one not borne from government bailouts, one-time spends like cash for clunkers or multi-million dollar government stimulus grants for the migration habits of wilderness ants. Nope, this is a capitalist resurgence. Businesses need to grow to survive and can no longer sit on the sidelines waiting for things to happen. So they are making things happen themselves.

That that resurgence is a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. Only this time the media is no where to be found. Until the election draws near…

As we approach the 2010 elections and businesses have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and the economy beings to bloom again, the party in power will take all the credit. “See, we told you the stimulus worked.” Or “See, we told you the tax cuts would work.” But the reality is, it’s capitalism that works. The drive and desire to make money, lots of money is what pulls us out of recessions.

Now, as the economy turns, it is incumbent on the government to get out of the way and let capitalism do its thing. And when it does, it’s a beautiful thing, and we again become the envy of the world.

I bit the bullet today and bought TampaWebDesigner.com and TampaAdAgency.com. I am trying a Google experiment to see if I can get the keyword domain to show up higher than IDEAS4 does for certain keywords, like Tampa web design. Right now, IDEAS4 ranks pretty high – first page for all of my major keywords – so this will be interesting to see if this works.

I have a client who owns a name that shows up as the number 2 listing in his category – considering there are 10,000 competitors, this is pretty good! His website has only 4 pages of very strategically written content. His site has proven that it’s not the number of pages, but how well they are written and to a large extent, how old the domain is. There are excellent lessons to be learned here.

Anyway, back to TampaWebDesigner.com. I built the site with just a few pages, a minimalist site for someone who likes to share his knowledge with everyone. I kept it to about 4 pages with keywords kept below 3% of the total words – with mostly galleries of web design sites we have done and many of the unique branding we have done as well. As soon as I complete the site map, I will submit the site to Google, and see what happens. Stay tuned.

IDEAS4 launched a new site today, Critiki.net, designed to provide do it yourself marketers and advertisers critique and feedback for their creative ideas, marketing plans, advertising, websites and other communications tools.

I get feedback all the time from small businesses who want me to take a look at their ads, websites, brochures and things, because they don’t have anyone to bounce the ideas off of. It is especially true if you can’t afford an advertising agency and don’t have any formal training in marketing or advertising.

For $50 IDEAS4 will provide you some basic feedback on your creative – ads, direct mailers, whatever – and help point you in the right direction strategically and creatively. That is a great deal.

At the higher end of the spectrum, we can provide a deeper look at an entire campaign, from target audience to execution and can provide creative resources like copywriters,  photographers, stock photo houses and others.

In the end, we hope they like the feedback and the new direction they are provided and decide to hire IDEAS4 to do some of their work, but it’s not mandatory – this is just a resource for small businesses to help make their marketing and sales effort  stronger.

For more information go to http://www.critiki.net

Every day it seems the economy is getting weaker and slower. As that happens, high ticket item sales will become smaller and smaller as customers focus on the “important” things and hold off large purchases for another day. It’s a great learning experience for all of us who have not gone through a downturn like this (which no one alive has).

This has been especially true in my business, web development, branding, advertising and marketing. Where I used to rely on a few large projects per month to make a nice living, those big projects are getting smaller and fewer and farther between. Lucky for me, I have a small, nimble business that can change models quickly with a little retooling. The key is recognizing what my business strengths are, available to exploit, be able to choose a strategic direction and move forward with all my energies.

The strategic leap I made, and you might find this to be true as well, is that it is easier to sell an low priced quality product to more people than an expensive product to a few people (who aren’t buying right now anyway). The underlying model is based on social networking, but you can take that model and stretch it in all kinds of ways to make it work for your revenue model. So I share this change in the hope of providing some ideas you might consider as the market continues to soften.

One of the things I have been doing over the past 5 years is buying domain names. After a year or 2 I realized I wasn’t focused on the right model, but ended up with about 1000 pretty decent names. I was hoping to land the big one and hold out for millions, but that hasn’t worked out quite how I planned.

As luck would have it, several of the names were perfect for new internet businesses. But instead of selling them to others to develop, I am moving forward with the development myself. With the design expertise, and a few good programmers, getting the sites launched would be affordable. So off we go.
Right now we have 4 properties in development built on different internet business models, one that we expect to have very high traffic on that will be free, generating revenue from advertising, one is a B2B  sellers paid / buyers free model, one is an inexpensive everyone pays for the service model and one is an off-beat charity site for “grownups.”

Although different  revenue models, the one thing they all have in common is social networking. 

Whether B2B, B2C or C2C, the place to be is social networking. What we have done is thought outside the box – beyond “sharing stupid human tricks” online and building revenue models based on the social networking platform that are not available right now.

We expect live launch in the coming days, one at a time. As they launch, in addition to posting the information here, we will be sending out press releases, posting on facebook, linkedin and other social media sites and starting to build a network of users inexpensively but quickly over time. I will let you know here, how each one is doing as we move forward.

So good luck with your own business process shift, and I hope you find new ways to generate revenue in this down market.

Search engine optimization is the hottest thing to hit the web since the IPO. Companies are spending thousands of dollars on SEO trying to get on Google’s first page of their keyword list. One of Google’s key evaluation criteria is the use of a keyword in the domain name. Which, in itself makes a lot of sense – especially if the company spent a lot of money buying that keyword domain.

But where is the Brand in all this generic keyword madness? Companies are dedicating all this money on generic search terms, and not spending money building the influence of their Brand. In the long term, who wants to be known as “plumber” instead of Superior Plumbing?

Is every company going to be someday known by their generic keyword? If you’re not careful, you could be in for a world of hurt.

One day soon, and they do this all the time, Google will change its algorithm as to how they rank natural search results, and much of the money the company has poured into SEO will be washed down the drain in a split second. What they should have done is invested more in their Brand, something they control completely, and build that Brand into something people will want to search for: ” I need Superior Plumbing, not just a plumber.” Every dollar you invest, grows your Brand over time, and is not spent on risky, potentially useless SEO.

Our philosophy is to have companies invest smartly in SEO, doing the logical, common sense things that all companies should do to build a better website. In fact, much of Google’s ranking criteria they make public is just plain old common sense stuff. The balance of the money they had budgeted, we invest in building their brand; online and offline.

You can’t get that kind of common sense thinking from an SEO-only company, they want all your money now, and more later when the rules change. But working with a company like IDEAS4, we look at the long term strategy of SEO and your marketing dollar investments and make sure you spend the money wisely.

Don’t lose sight of continuing to build your brand by spending all your marketing dollars on generic keyword  SEO. In the end, you’ll have a diminished brand and a ranking somewhere on page 6.

I recently began ramping up my online networking to see if: 1) I would get better Google SEO ranking, 2) get more link traffic from the networking sites I’m on, and 3) generate more business as a result of 1 and 2. On Facebook, I have gone from a few friends to more than 100, injected this blog there, started using twitter again and writing on a start up forum about advertising, marketing, websites and SEO. I have been on linkedin for years and I think it’s a boring, fruitless waste of time really.

So far my traffic is up considerably. I use Google Analytic to track day by day traffic, where it’s coming from, what was searched on in Google to get the visitor to my site and other stuff of marginal interest to me right now.

My Google rankings are up a little, but it’s difficult to tell because Google know who I am through their customer tracking and loves to show me my site ranking first on the first page. Others have me on page 2 or 3, others can’t find me at all.

I have not generated any new business as a result of the networking so far, but have made several wonderful business contacts (and sent them business), we are making several new business presentations in the coming days, found some old friends from college and high school (that’s worth its weight in gold). It’s amazing how much older everyone looks – except of course for me!

I focus my Google adwords on Tampa advertising agency, tampa web design, etc. so I don’t know where I am nationally. And since my company is a hybrid, I don’t usually rank really high nationally – because Google is looking just for web designers, or just for advertising agencies, another reason why geotargeting works better for IDEAS4.

What I really should do is build separate sites for each line of business, which is what I would recommend to my customers. But heck, I’ve just been too busy to get it done. But I will do that soon.

We are currently doing some other SEO testing with other website features that appear promising. I’ll keep you in the loop if it proves fruitful or not.

I am also building some new sites for myself that are some hybrid models of some popular online sites. As those approach launch, I’ll post them here as well. But for now, top secret.

I have become increasingly nervous over the past several weeks as the number of projects in Florida and around the world that have begun to slow and in some case stop. Many very good, potentially profitable projects have been put on hold until the economy improves. The funny thing is, they ARE the economy. 

If these projects moved forward, and money was spent, it would then begin circulating. As more money circulates. business begins to improve and more money gets circulated. It seems like a fairly simple concept, and maybe I just don’t get the big picture – but where are the cheerleaders and even just plain leaders? Oh they are in Washington getting ready to spend your trillions on a stimulus package that most agree won’t work anyway!

Since much of this turmoil was media generated in the first place, where are they in all this mess? Their revenues have tanked along with everyone else’s – They always seem willing to bring you the bad news where are they when we need good news to get the economy off its feet again?

It’s gonna take the folks, small and large businesses alike to push through the cloud of uncertainty and start spending money on previously green-lighted projects. If we all start ramping up our spending/buying, the rust on the wheels of the economy will begin flaking off and it will reengage once again.

There are trillions of dollars sitting in bank accounts of corporations unwilling to spend it. They want the government to do all the spending and risk taking – meaning they want someone else to take the lead, mainly, the American people. They have the luxury because the government is giving away money – how stupid is that? If they want their business to improve – and the economy as a whole, start spending again. It’s really that simple.

The Superbowl arrives in Tampa today, and luckily for all of us Tampa Bay natives, the weather is absolutely perfect. Sunny with a high about 65 degrees. It’s been a great week for our town, celebrities all over the place, the bars and restaurants packed with people – all in celebration of a football game that happens every year. Amazing!

I am a board member of an organization called Rebuilding Together Tampa Bay (http://wwww.rttb.org). It is part of a national effort to assist low income people with renovation projects for their homes, things that they would never have been able to pay for themselves – like a roof, kitchen appliances, repairs to HVAC and hundred other things.

This past weekend our local chapter along with the national organization and almost 1000 volunteers came together to renovate 22 homes in Old West Tampa, a nearly forgotten part of town because the residents are low income.

One of the homes was in such bad repair, that the volunteers and sponsor companies that were assigned that home decided it was better to tear it down and build the family a new home in its place. With the assistance of the City of Tampa fast tracking permits, they went from old house to tear down to rebuilt and move-in in less that 40 days – only about 20 days of actual construction! The home is just beautiful and the family was all in tears on Friday when they were handed the keys to their new home.

It seems kind of ironic that here we are in the city where thousands of people are spending millions of dollars to watch a football game that will last a few hours – while 1000 volunteers give up their days and weekends and contribute money that they probably don’t have to help 22 families with home renovations that will last a lifetime, and hardly anyone will ever know about it. We got 20″ in the local paper with no pictures, the Superbowl got about 10,000 or more inches and several special sections about the game.

No wonder our priorities are so screwed up. Too bad there’s no big corporate payback in helping people. I guess that’s what it takes these days to get attention. Sad.