As the Webmaster for a trade association, I occasionally get the request to “please remove my information from the website” Now on first blush that may seem like a strange request.  After all, you joined the association in-part to network and gain exposure.

However, some people move to Las Vegas to reinvent themselves and others come here to hide out.  So they like to network, just not be exposed too much.  They like to be invisible or maintain some privacy.

In other instances, start-ups may only have one phone line, theirs.  The home phone or the owner’s cell phone and they want to keep that private.

In that case, I send them over to Google for their Gmail and voice services.

Gmail

Today’s most popular smartphones are powered by Google’s Droid.  That means Gmail is their default email service on the phones.  That is a good thing because Gmail has also become the popular Email address for small business and entrepreneurs.

With Gmail, you can run your entire email and autoresponder system from your phone, even if your primary email address is on a different domain.  Import, export and forward emails with filters and other priority set-ups.  All done very easily from one mobile email address.

Google Voice

Now they merged Gmail with their popular Google Voice service.  Another free service that gives you a local or regional telephone number, voicemail and other features you would normally associate with a landline.

When you get a voicemail, you also get an email with the transcript of the voicemail.  The voice recognition isn’t perfect, but works very well for most calls.

You can access Google phone from an app on your smartphone and the receiving party will never know your real phone number. Plus you can call international for pennies a minute.

So now you can have a virtual office phone number that can be forwarded to several different locations or be ignored at the push of a button.  Plus have a record of that call for reference.  All this and much more for the low price of…. Nothing.  Just logging on and signing up.

Hope This Helps,

Mark Anthony

How do I know?  Because Mary from Des Moines Iowa, sent me a nice email thanking me for the article and wanting more information about the topic I wrote about.  BTW:  welcome to my website and newsletter Mary!

The website has turned into a spammy, get rich quick affiliate ad site, so I refuse to promote it anymore, but the article is in the archives and apparently still getting traction after six years.  So I will leave it there.

I find it funny because I get all the emails form the “guru’s” of home based business and their pitches about article writing.  I also get the flack from people who never see the value in it.  “Too much work, not enough payback”. Well, here you are.  Proof that article writing for other websites does indeed work.  That it can lead to more subscribers and more visits to your website. Even after six years.

As a consultant, I have done test articles for prospective clients.  They weren’t sure of the value of Internet marketing and fine tuning their website, so I would write a quick little article about their business and post it on a similar industry website.  Give it a week and have them do a keyword search.  They would see that my article ranked better in the searches than their own website.

Yea, I would always get the job after that!

BTW: If you would help on this topic for your business, feel free to give me a call (702) 443-7015

Take Care
Mark Anthony

Meet Mike, the bass player for the heavy metal band Dim, in Las Vegas.  That cute thing next to him is “with the band”.  I like to call this photo “The New Face of Marketing.”

Scary as it is, the title has some merit to it.  The photo was from last night’s Vegas Rocks Music Award Show.  I was there, covering the red carpet for The Vegas Tourist.

Walking around in the sea of tattoos, body piercing and just the usual heavy metal,  weird outfits, these two caught my eye and I asked for the photo.  He kindly introduced himself and shook my hand before he introduced the rest of the band sitting behind him.

Trust me, I wasn’t dressed for the party, I was there for the red carpet.  Blue jeans, polo shirt and camera.  I could never fit in to their world.  He kindly obliged.  He than introduced himself, shook my hand and introduced his band mates sitting behind him.

Other than the face paint, piercings, tattoos and head gear, he conducted the introductions as if we were sitting at a conference table in a fancy office someplace. Calm, professional and very casual.

So what took me by surprise was that thirty seconds before this photo, he was trash talking with another reporter in your stereo typical heavy metal band type of language.   I can respect a guy who can walk the line like that.

So I quickly said my thank you’s and moved on to other interesting characters.  Soon finding my way back to my cohort on the red carpet.  She and I started to talk until her face turned white and she stopped talking as her eyes shot past me. That’s when I realized that Mike had come up along side me and again, graciously asked if I had gotten the name of the band?  Also to please look them up on the internet.  After that, he thanked me for asking who he was earlier and left.

The photo of that moment is still being hidden from me for blackmail at a later date.

Here you have a band member, surrounded by other media of his genre or niche, going out of his way to find another media person who is obviously not of his circle of fans.  Making sure he gets the name right and thanking said media person for the question.

That’s marketing!

On the Internet, the only way to find them is by a search.  You will find some youtube as well as interviews and reviews.  They do have a myspace page.  Nothing wrong with having that.  Myspace is a perfect place for their fan base.  Your typical myspace reader fits their demographics perfectly.  However, I would have at least a domain name pointing to the page.  It makes finding them a lot easier.

By The Way!

Not to scare any parents out there with kids who are musical prodigies:  Mike grew up learning classical and orchestral style bass.

There is something to be said for a strong virtual community.  One of the key reasons I use StudioPress for WordPress website themes is because of their awesome support.  Not just from the owners and founders, but from the serious community of professionals that exists within their support area.  People who are there to help no matter the problem or your level of understanding.

I have been a StudioPress user since almost the beginning when Brian Gardner created his first series of themes.    Whenever something didn’t make sense or I screwed up a site,  I would log into the support area, post the question and within a few minutes to an hour, have some reply.  Most times it would solve the problem or on that rare occasion I would hit a bad time warp… I would get someone who politely tell me it was their bedtime in some region of the world and that they would find the answer in the morning. Their morning.  And not worry about it.

Trust me when I say that they help anyone no matter the level of understanding.  We were all newbies once and the people behind StudioPress understand that.  When I first started working in WordPress and themes, I asked some really stupid questions and I always got a polite, understanding, detailed answer that solved the problem.

If it is super time critical or I need specialized work done, there is the list of approved StudioPress web designers I could hire.  The same people who often times spend hours in the support area, answering other questions for free.  So it’s a win-win situation.

A while back, I did an upgrade and lost (or so I thought) some changes I made to an earlier design.  Logged on, posted the problem and in ten minutes had it fixed better than I had hoped for.  Come to find out that it was pretty much on my end.  One line of code needed to be changed.  But the response was almost immediate and the changes solved the problem and made it all work a lot better.

It’s not a closed community, like other CSM communities or forums.  The people you meet there will also help point you to other great websites that offer other plug-ins or tweaking to super charge your website or to learn new tricks in design, programming and Search Engine Optimization.  Stick around long enough and you will find yourself answering questions as well.  Adding to the community.

The other reason I stay with StudioPress is that Brian (the founder) and his team continue to make the current list of Themes work even better.  Not just building new ones, but going back and improving what they already created earlier.

From single site users to web developers, StudioPress has the the themes that work good, look good and are easy to maintain.  Check them out and see what I mean.

Take care,

Mark Anthony

Having some limousine experience in my background, we hit it off right away and started to talk.  Her business is new, unique and with her personality, on the verge of doing some amazing things.  She asked for my thoughts of her business and some better ways to get it into the minds, hearts and bookmarks of people coming to Santa Barbara.

You Asked…. So here it is….

The limousine/tour business is a male dominated, ego filled niche.  So you will find resistance everywhere you turn.  Something you have already encountered.  Take it as a badge of honor, not as a knock against your business or your ability to make it into a success.

The product you offer is unique.  You have a charming and disarming personality with a lot of enthusiasm for what you are doing. These are two marketing tools that will serve you well.

Now onto the Internet Marketing:

Get on your webmasters backside and get them to do what you are paying them to do:  Build a friendly website.

Get rid of the flash on the home page.  Flash was cool and fun to look at about 10 years ago.  It doesn’t load well.  Especially on mobile devices or iPads.  My Android just laughed at it.  If you are stuck on flash, at least have an easy to find, good sized click button to bypass the intro.

I believe your future is with traveling impulse buyers, many are seasoned travelers with mobile devices, smart phones and other wireless devices.  Not sitting in the office, in front of a computer with a giant monitor.

You belong to the Chamber, get their annual survey and see where the visitors are coming from.  Than jump online and find travel, weddings and tourist related blogs, forums and other communities of people from these places.  Jump in and join their conversations.

You have a unique product in a beautiful town.  Highlight both items a lot more.  Nice sized pictures of the vehicle being enjoyed by your guests in various locations around the city should be on each page.

Give each photo a name that reflects what the pic is (mission_sb.jpg)and use alt text telling what the photo is.  Search engines read photos giving you even more exposure.

Get thumbnail pictures of your “team members” next to their name.  Maybe a little bio on why they love to do tours.  Make them a person; sell the personality of the people and the passion of the business as well as the tours.

Do you see a pattern here??

Keywords are not accurate for what you told me you are doing and want to do.  Plus keywords, page descriptions are missing from many of your web pages.  Yes, search spiders still use them.

Let it be known that you can pick up at various hotels and that you can work with tour groups on a budget and on a schedule. Notice the word “can”.  Not that you do or you do at all hotels, but you offer the ability to.

The text on the website is very corporate speak.  Business talk is not for fun tours and group activities.  Make it lite and tourist friendly.   Bullet points of who you affiliate with and who you are governed by.  (Reverse those.  It’s better to push the community efforts than the legal stuff)

Get a toll free number.  And ditch the plain looking business cards.  Nice 4 color business cards cost about the same and look a lot better, especially if one side has a photo of the limo!

Get rid of the Yahoo email and get a Gmail account.  Like I said when we talked, Gmail will open doors for you on the Internet like no other source.  BTW, I don’t see any analytic’s on your website.  So how do you know how people are finding your website??

Get on twitter and twit about your tours with photos and guests pitching in when they can. Same with FaceBook, flickr and webshots.  Start a YouTube channel and post some videos of your tours and your town….   Sorry, but it’s all a necessity for the tour business.

When you create email accounts, profiles on other websites and social media, keep it all as close to your business name as possible.

Create a few other websites that can feed the tour website.  I imagine a nice photo blog of Santa Barbara and maybe even a tourist type podcast.  Both would help make you the resident expert in Santa Barbara tours and tourist updates.

It would not be me, if I did not suggest a blog.  Either a stand alone or with the current website.  Talk about the day, the guests and things that you are involved in.  Nothing too dramatic or time consuming.

The blog would promote you, the tours, the people and the fantastic sights of Santa Barbara.  Of course, this all leads back to the tours you offer.

That’s it on a first look.  If you need any help or have questions with anything I said, give me a shout and we can talk.

Take Care

Mark Anthony

So I started another one and pointed this domain to that new website.  Than life went into over drive and I never had a chance to really keep it up.  But it was still there.  Several clients and friends pointed out the lack of writing and the new domain.  The lack of writing they could forgive, the new domain made no sense.

Starting to feed a new domain right after I preached about the virtues of an aged domain in the new Google search engine updates.  Why would I want to start over when I already have something that is already well known to the spiders and the bots??

So here I am, starting over because I didn’t do another little thing I like to tell others to do… Backup and download.  I never downloaded my previous blog before I wiped it out.  Thinking that the articles themselves may have been infected.  So there is nothing left from all my older postings.

So – forgive me for I have sinned…  I shall do better in the future!!

Hope you all are having a great week and look forward to future installments.

Mark Anthony