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Thursday, April 21, 2005 |
In a recent press release, Yahoo announced:
Yahoo! Inc. a leading global Internet company, today announced a new feature on Yahoo! Local that provides free Web sites for small businesses. This free and easy-to-use feature builds upon Yahoo!'s leadership position as the number one online destination for local information and small business services. Small businesses can quickly and easily establish an online presence and connect with the increasing number of consumers using the Internet to find comprehensive local products and services. The service is available in beta at local.yahoo.com/freesite.
"As more and more consumers rely on the Internet for information about their neighborhood [~] from finding restaurants to plumbers to dry cleaners [~] local businesses are realizing the value of reaching potential customers online," said Paul Levine, general manager, Yahoo! Local. "By providing small businesses with free Web sites, we are not only helping them leverage the Internet, but also adding depth and comprehensiveness to our local product for consumers."
According to The Kelsey Group, over 50 percent of the more than 20 million small businesses in the U.S. do not yet have a Web site. With the launch of this new service, Yahoo! now enables these businesses to establish an online presence by providing a simple interface and template that allows them to create a site in minutes. These new Web sites are automatically integrated into Yahoo! Local, extending businesses' reach to consumers who use search engines to find information about local products and services.
The free service complements other innovative merchant offerings in Yahoo! Local, including Free Basic Listings and Enhanced Listings. These tools give merchants the power to add and edit content about their business on Yahoo! Local. A small business may extend its Internet presence over time as their online needs grow with award winning services from Yahoo! Small Business such as: domain name, e-mail, enhanced Web hosting and e-commerce solutions.
"By bringing together our leadership in essential small business services, our vast consumer reach, and our local and search expertise, Yahoo! is uniquely able to help small businesses get started and be successful online," said Rich Riley, vice president and general manager, Yahoo! Small Business. "This new service complements our industry leading suite of online services that help small businesses get online, sell online and market online."
Context Tag: websites
(For a sample of one Yahoo! Local biz site, see the one I created for Dilbeck Marketing: nc.local.yahoo.biz/dilbeckmarketing.)
5:52:03 AM 
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Saturday, March 12, 2005 |
Yesterday morning, I wrote an article about using blogging to help bring more visitors to your website -- for free. I'm sure that's something that everyone with a website would like.
Follow the steps in the article:
How to get more visitors to your website for free
If you are technically inclined, it will take less than an hour to do this and you should see more visitors to your site in the next couple of weeks or less.
If you are not particularly technically inclined, follow the steps just as they're shown and you can do this in less than two hours. I think you'll be happy with the results of such a small amount of time and effort.
If you've been having a hard time getting your site listed in the major search engines -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- this technique has been known to be effective in getting your site spidered and indexed in under a week.
Of course, you have to do your part and create quality content for both your website and your blog on a regular basis, but this will help you get into the search engines or get higher placements in the results.
8:20:07 AM
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Tuesday, March 8, 2005 |
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Wednesday, January 19, 2005 |
In a three part series of postings in his blog, A Fine Kettle of Fish, Bob Cargill lists 10 reasons why blogging is becoming more important for people in our industry. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
I think the reasons he outlines are just as applicable to people in a wide variety of other fields.
Why wouldn't a real estate agent, for instance, maintain a blog of listings and sales? This would provide great information about the local business and it would be a great place to add more information about the area and the reasons to relocate there. Over time, this could be a repository of knowledge that would never make it to a website because it is so much easier to blog than it is to update a website.
The usefulness of a blog for a travel agent is likewise rather obvious, in my opinion. What better way to tell us of new specials or trips the agent has recently taken. A blog would offer a convenient way to inform clients and potential clients of the good, bad, and ugly in the travel business.
I won't continue to list examples. Either you "get it" or you don't.
11:03:12 AM
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Wednesday, January 5, 2005 |
It looks like I picked the right year to focus on adding more blogs and more RSS (also known as XML) feeds to my sites!
From the Pew Internet & American Life Project site:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
If you're one of the 62% who don't know what a blog is or what RSS is all about, let me recommend the following sites to start learning about them.
RSS was co-developed by Dave Winer and you should read about Radio Userland, the product I use to manage this blog and nearly 5,000 pages on several websites. Also, be sure to read All about RSS.
Another good resource, and one that keeps getting better, is written by Ken Evoy. One of Ken's claims to fame is presiding over the company that developed Site Build It!, which I think is the best web design, hosting, and promotion service on the planet. I am one very happy customer. The product just keeps getting better. Visit the Site Build It! link first so you can see where he's coming from. Then, go read the information he wrote about RSS: Really Simple Syndication for his Site Build It! customers.
I spent several months in late 2004 developing my blogging infrastructure and staking my claim on several blogs at blogger.com. Now that the development work is mostly done, I can pass along newsworthy information to a wider audience faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Also, from the other side of the story, I use Radio Userland to read others' RSS feeds using the news aggregator that is built in. I subscribe to a little over 50 feeds and read them on a more-or-less daily basis. It's a lot easier to read the RSS feed and then click on a link that interests me than it is to remember to go to all 50 of those sites and try to find the new information.
I'm to the point now that I'd rather get newsletters and site updates in an RSS feed than in an email message or newsletter.
I have commented on quite a few blogs and I always meet an interesting person on the other end when he or she responds to my comments.
One of the most interesting recent developments -- for me at least -- has been the addition of RSS feeds to the Site Build It! customer forums. Now, instead of having to go to the forum every day, I added the RSS feed and I can easily read down the list of posts to see which ones I want to read and perhaps respond to. This is a very busy forum, and the addition of the RSS feed has shaved a couple of hours off my forum reading time every day.
I think we'll be seeing much more about blogs (also known as weblogs or journals), RSS, XML, and similar topics this year.
If you have a business with information that changes on a regular basis, you should look into blogs and RSS syndication.
2:38:11 AM
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Friday, December 31, 2004 |
After working hard this year on building a variety of websites and blogs, it's gratifying to see the work start paying off.
My brother, David Dilbeck, owns GeorgiaDragRacing.com and I manage most of the site. For the first time, we had over a million page views, but that's a bit misleading because we moved many of the new photos to Webshots.com and the news is now hosted on his weblog at gdrn.blogspot.com, so the actual number of page views is probably substantially higher.
There were over 174,000 unique visitors at JohnDilbeck.com who looked at over 885,000 pages. I'm always surprised by this because this is a site where I experiment to see what works and what doesn't and it has no discernible theme, other than things that tickle this big brain of mine.
I was researching search engine placements for some keywords on all the major search engines and I'm happy to see that we continue to get more and more top 10 positions on hundreds of key words and phrases -- so we're obviously doing something right.
I've been working the last three months or so to target the keywords "Cherokee County, NC Business" and "Murphy, NC Business" and I'm happy to see these new sites rising in the search engines. It is my goal to help people in my home county promote their organizations and activities more effectively on the Internet by providing either free or inexpensive advertising and promotion venues. Working together, we achieve better results than working alone. I'll prove that in 2005.
Because I'm interested in so many things, I'm going to take the parts of JohnDilbeck.com that are theme-related and move, or duplicate, them on smaller themed sites. We'll see if that results in higher traffic and better conversions or whether I'll just waste some time experimenting.
Also, to further segment my interests, I've created quite a few new blogs and they will be associated with new websites. I think it will be better in the long run, but it's more work now. Also, while I'm in development mode, I don't get as much real writing and promotion done, but that should improve by March, 2005, giving me all the rest of 2005 to put my promotional plans to work.
I'll be putting a full list of all my blogs at http://JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/ and all my websites at http://JohnDilbeck.com/websites/ so I can keep track of all of them! As of yesterday, all of my blogs have been upgraded to make it easy for you to subscribe to the RSS feeds, and I'll be moving more and more towards RSS in the coming months.
I appreciate your visiting my site(s) and I hope we're providing information you find interesting and useful.
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Happy New Years, y'all.
6:56:20 AM
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Sunday, December 19, 2004 |
I've been telling you for a long time how much I like Site Build It! and how much the tools included with this outstanding website design, hosting, and promotion service have helped me earn more with my sites.
From now until midnight on Christmas Day, you can buy one SBI account and get a second one free. That's an outstanding bargain and I just wish I had the time and energy to take advantage of it.
If you are looking for a way to build a site that attracts targeted visitors instead of sitting there and growing cobwebs, this is your opportunity.
You can get both sites for the price of one -- or you can keep one and give it to a friend, relative, or colleague to help them build their business, too.
I host my Act On Your Dream! site using Site Build It! and I couldn't be happier. I haven't had the time to build that site to where I want it, but that will be one of my major priorities in January and February.
I can tell you, however, that I've been using the tools that are included with an SBI site to help me on all my other websites, even though they are hosted on other services.
If I were starting all over from scratch and if I were only going to build a few websites, there is no doubt in my mind that I'd use Site Build It! to do it.
If you want to build your business and promote it online, don't pass up this opportunity! If you wait just one second after midnight on December 26, you'll miss the special sale. Don't delay.
7:19:36 AM
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Wednesday, November 24, 2004 |
Promoting a business in Cherokee County, North Carolina just got a bit easier. Whether you are located in Andrews, Brasstown, Culberson, Marble, Murphy, or one of the other communities in the county, you are invited to take advantage of the new portal for Cherokee County, NC and the new Murphy, NC Business Directory.
The portal for Cherokee County, NC is a free, interactive resource for anyone interested in Cherokee County and what's going on here. Residents of our county are invited to participate in submitting news and announcements of events and meetings related to your business, club, organization, team, church, or other group. Any press release you would submit to an area newspaper is welcome here. You can register as a member -- at no cost -- and submit a news story or discuss your interests in our forum.
You can link to the websites of your choice in our web links section, so be sure to link back to your organization's website. We don't require reciprocal links, but we welcome them.
Would you like to write a review of a book, song, movie, play, or anything else that interests you? We have a review section just for that. Did you have a particularly good experience with a person, group, or business in Cherokee County, NC? If so, write a review -- or testimonial -- and tell us.
In the main menu, in the left column or the pages, we have links to county, state and national government information; chambers of commerce; calendars of activities and meetings; the Nantahala Public Library; news from a variety of sources; and more.
At the new Murphy, NC Business Directory, you are invited to list your business. The cost is very reasonable and there are several advantages for listing your business here.
Gold Members can create a page just for you that lists your business, your description (in your own words), coupons, specials, and links back to your website. You can also post an unlimited number of items for sale in The Marketplace and submit as many free classified ads as you'd like.
Two other levels of membership offer features that should appeal to businesses of any size in Murphy, NC.
Anyone, business or not, is welcome to post free classifieds to the site. It's easy to do and you can register for free. Each ad runs approximately 30 days and you can resubmit it for free when it expires.
Between these two sites, you should find many ways to promote your business. Coming in the next few days will be pages that list many other resources for effectively marketing your business and products or services online. Some are free and others are reasonably priced.
With more and more people going online every year, all businesses should be promoting themselves online. Even local businesses with local customers can now gain a competitive advantage by advertising on the Internet. For much less than the price of a small ad in the yellow telephone directory pages, you can promote your business online to a wider audience.
You never know where a new customer, client, patient or friend will come from.
John L. Dilbeck, owner of Dilbeck Marketing, in Murphy, NC, is the webmaster who manages both of these new sites and he invites you to register as a user on either or both sites and tell us all about your business or other organization in Cherokee County, NC.
Whether your advertising budget is hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, or only hundreds of dollars, you'll find a cost-effective promotional vehicle at one or both of these sites that anyone can use. It takes a technical wizard to make it easy for others to use, and anyone can use either of these sites, regardless of your experience on the World Wide Web.
Whether you sell used children's clothing or million dollar homes, you can place a classified ad from the comfort of your home or office at no cost.
Gold Members of the Murphy, NC Business Directory can post as many items for sale in The Marketplace as you want, and you can choose to add a picture to the ad if you like. There are no newspapers that will let you pay one small annual fee and run as many ads with pictures as you'd like. The Murphy, NC Business Directory offers you just that opportunity and it can be viewed from anywhere in the world.
To celebrate our Grand Opening, any company that registers for a Gold Membership before 12/31/2004 can choose to pay half-price for a full year membership (expiring on 12/31/2005) or get two years for the price of one. This offer expires at midnight on December 31, 2004.
2:13:42 AM
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Monday, June 7, 2004 |
I just noticed that my SFI sales team, while still a very young venture, already has affiliates on five continents.
Only with the invention and wide distribution of the Information Superhighway would something like this be possible with the expenditure of so little money in promotion and advertising.
Of course, it is also a testament to SFI Marketing Group, a company that has been investing millions of dollars and years of effort to build a great marketing organization. I've been a team leader for just a few months, but it's only because of all the effort they put into building the infrastructure, hiring a great staff, creating training systems, programming their computer systems, negotiating contracts with suppliers, and handling shipping and customer service that I've been able to jump in and start building a sales team with them so quickly.
I'm looking forward to helping the affiliates who have joined my team build successful home businesses of their own. Together we'll help each other succeed.
Thanks to each of you!
A company is only as good as the products we sell, and I'm happy to see our selection of quality products grow and improve.
If you're interested in building a home business of your own and you're willing to invest time, effort, and two or three dollars per day to promote and grow it, I invite you to join my sales team, too.
10:40:01 AM
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Tuesday, June 1, 2004 |
Recently, Google.com and WordTracker.com joined forces to
create a site that makes it simple to do quick research for
finding niches that may be profitable for your website.
You can test it at NicheBot.com.
It's easy to use. If you need more detailed research, they
refer you directly to WordTracker.com.
Last October, I wrote an article on building web traffic,
and I updated it earlier today. You can learn more about
finding niches and building traffic to your site there.
I recommend several tools that I use on my sites.
The updated article is:
Building Website Traffic.
Finding a niche and building a site with real, helpful
content is the only way that I know of to compete with the
big companies that have much more time and more people than
we'll ever have. They can control the general keywords and
can afford to spend thousands of dollars in advertising
every month.
For those of us with smaller budgets and less resources,
we have to be more agile and look for treasure in the
niches.
If you can identify a niche and build a website that has
great content, you can build traffic and eventually
monetize that traffic by selling your products, services,
or recommending products for sale through affiliate
programs or arranging to get finders fees for sending
targeted leads to other companies.
You can learn a lot more about this from Ken Evoy.
He teaches you how to find profitable niches in his
Affiliate Masters Course which you can download free. It's in PDF format.
6:04:43 AM
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Sunday, May 23, 2004 |
Everyone has a passion in life.
There are thousands of companies that offer a way to build a website. There is only one that offers a way to explore your passion and tell the world about it.
Perhaps your passion is a hobby or a business. Perhaps you want to help others. Whatever it is, there is a right way and a wrong way of presenting it to the world over the Internet.
The wrong way is to get a cheap web host and put up a website that recreates your brochure. Who's going to find that?
The right way is to write about your passion. Build a website full of excellent content that offers information others want to find.
In the offline world, it's all about location. In the online world, it's all about information.
If you provide good information, the search engines will rank it highly and people will find you. This builds traffic, and a website with no traffic is just a waste of time and money.
There is exactly one company that will teach you how to write about your passion and build a website that automatically attracts targeted traffic with no tricks and no need for advanced technical skills.
Site Build It will help you tell the world about your passion.
It all starts by wanting to share your passion with the world -- that's where you come in.
4:05:47 PM
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Monday, April 26, 2004 |
Dilbeck Marketing has slashed the prices on all our custom printed business promotion products to celebrate the arrival of spring.
In addition to large discounts, we've added many new products that you can use to promote your business, organization, or cause. Our entire selection of business cards, stationery, labels, buttons, magnets, bumperstickers, rubber stamps, and many other items are now on sale. All prices have been dramatically lowered for a limited time.
Our prices have always been competitive, and now they are even better.
Not only have we lowered our prices, we've added hundreds of new items:
* Have you been looking for short run commercial print items? We have 'em! Buy small quantities of custom designed announcements, bookmarks, full-color letterhead, greeting cards, and post cards. They're printed digitally for fast delivery and outstanding quality and price.
* We've added a new class of stock business documents including mailers, LazerStock, VersaSeal, HCFA forms, and integrated products for all your business document needs.
* This is an election year and everyone should vote for the candidate of their choice! You can get the word out with a wide range of affordable election labels that include bumper stickers, lapel labels, name badges, and bend and peel business cards.
We continue to offer a full line of patriotic labels and American flags -- now on sale.
Don't delay! Take advantage of our dramatically lowered prices while they last.
dilbeckmarketing.clickprint.com -- A service of Dilbeck Marketing in association with Clickprint.com.
Thanks!
12:26:07 AM
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Thursday, April 1, 2004 |
Will Local Search Live Up to its Hype?. The potential exists for more geographic-specific search results and advertising, but meeting Web users' needs and getting local businesses to advertise remain challenges, say executives of search and online directory companies. [eWEEK Technology News]
6:52:14 PM
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 |
About a year ago, I started recommending, to anyone who would listen, that it was important to put full addresses, city, state, zip code and phone numbers with area codes on their websites.
Sharon Fling has been predicting the importance of promoting small local businesses on the Internet for a couple of years now, and those who have followed her advice are very well placed as we see more of the major search engines incorporate local searching in their arsenal of search tools.
Google now offers local search results -- something they've been working on for months -- and their implementation is coming along nicely.
For example, I just entered "restaurant 28906" on their search page, and at the top of the results it shows a heading link for "Local results for restaurant near 28906" followed by three local restaurants with their address and phone number.
If you click on the link just mentioned, it brings up a page of restaurants near Murphy, NC sorted by distance. It even lists the mileage and direction to the restaurant with a link for directions.
At the top of the page are other categories related to restaurants.
Right below that is a compass icon with a link to see the listings on a map of the region.
Clicking the link brings you to another page with a Mapquest map showing numbers indicating the restaurants. There is a legend to the right of the map showing the restaurant indicated by each number, with a link to the restaurant.
Mapquest maps for our mountain area are not extremely accurate and I often get erroneous results, but this map looks mostly accurate -- although not 100%.
If I click on my favorite restaurant in Murphy, Shoebooties Cafe, next to its number in the legend, it brings you to a page dedicated to Shoebooties, with its location noted on the map and a button for getting driving directions.
I'm less satisfied with MapQuest's driving directions, since they give you a 23 minute, 12 mile drive to get to a location that is about a 30 second walk from the main intersection in downtown Murphy. The last two or three steps in the directions are accurate, but I have no idea why they start where they do, way out west of Murphy a long way from the town.
Regardless of the deficiencies of the MapQuest directions, the Google implementation of local search is accurate and fast.
Let's try another. How about "antiques 28906" or "real estate 28906"?
For antiques, it lists three shops in the local section at the top of the page, but misses Pickled Parrot Antiques which is right in downtown Murphy and starts with a shop over two miles away. Pickled Parrot Antiques is listed first in the regular search results, right below the local results -- so there are still some bugs to be worked out for the most accurate results.
For real estate, the link to the full page is more accurate than for antiques. It correctly lists the downtown real estate agencies and extends outwards from there. This is clearly useful.
While the Google local results feature is not as accurate as being listed in the yellow pages, it is free and fast. As time goes by, I'm assuming it can only get more accurate as Google improves their algorithm and cross-linking.
I think you'll find this to be a very useful tool.
Looking for a bagpiper near you?
On a lark, I tried searching for "bagpiper 28906" and learned that Clay Will lives about 40 miles southeast of me on the north shore of Lake Rabun in Georgia. I bet I never would have found him in the local yellow pages!
But, just when this looks great, I tried searching for "musician 28906" and got results that were not very good. I know there are hundreds of excellent musicians within a 20 mile radius of here and none of them are listed.
"pizza murphy nc" correctly lists Downtown Pizza Co (where I had lunch a couple of days ago and enjoyed it) and branches out from there. It misses Papa's Pizza To Go in Murphy, but finds the franchise in Blairsville, Georgia, which it says is about 15 miles south of Murphy, but I'm pretty sure it's a good bit farther than that.
While still a work in progress, Google's local search is decidedly useful, especially for businesses that are most likely to have a website or which may be listed in various directories.
I could probably spend the rest of the day playing with this, but it's time to move on to other tasks!
7:11:59 AM
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© Copyright 2005 John L. Dilbeck.
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