TalkLocal

Sales Teams Are Expensive

I'm a little late since PubCon was last week, but something in John Battelle's keynote speech has stuck with me. John was talking about his publishing network Federated Media and how hard it is to find good online salespeople. He said that finding a good online salesperson that sells advertising is twice as hard as finding a good programmer. He also said that the average cost for a salesperson per year is about $140,000.00. As high quality blogs and websites develop that gain large audiences, John states that for a blog publisher to take on the costs of 2-3 salespeople and still try to make money will be a failed venture. So your options are to join his network and maybe make $6,000.00 a month. I think he is a little off. In some areas of the U.S. a good salesperson is easy to find, if you look in the right place and train and develop the talent. I also think you can get them for much less than his number.

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A lesson in the Blogosphere

I learned a valuable lesson today. The lesson is that everyone is a journalist, everyone is listening, everyone is talking to everyone else and that this can bury you or catapult you to the top. I spent the last 3 days at the Webmaster World PubCon in Las Vegas talking to hundreds of fellow marketers and spammers. I was sitting at a lunch table next to Andrew Goodman of Page Zero who also happens to run a popular search marketing blog at Traffick.com. We talked for a good hour or so on my background and what I do and a little about local search and user generated content sites. Later that evening, Andrew penned a blog post  about our conversation and posted it live at the top of his blog site.  I wasn't prepared for what I saw, but I guess getting a link-in from a reputable site like his isn't bad.

 

Page Rank Zero Millionaire

I was a Google Page Rank Zero Millionaire in May of 2005. My business partner and I sold our web advertising business despite being blackballed by Google. The key was that we learned to distribute our advertisers via xml into various other places in a rev share model and we were also able to still pay for traffic at Google and arbitrage it well. I should start an e-book on how to become a Page Rank Zero Millionaire. (should I trademark that?).

Askthelocal.com - U.K.'s First Local Search Engine

Askthelocal.com  claims to be the U.K.'s first local shopping search engine.

Webmasterworld Pubcon

I am at the Webmaster World   PubCon Conference  in Las Vegas. By far this is the best search marketing conference I attend. Today's keynote speaker was Guy Kawasaki a former Apple executive turned venture capitalist. He was quite entertaining and energizing. Andy Sack of Judy's Book gives a good synopsis of Guy's speach at his Blog. A couple of companies that I talked to today that I found interesting were Consumer Search  and Xooni. Xooni's president, Mike Chipman was a former Urchin employee. Urchin was purchased by Google and became the Google analytics product which is free. Mike now does consulting for Google to support the analytics project, but also will soon have the ability to resell the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini Search appliance. Mike thinks there is a huge opportunity to sell the mini appliance at about $2-3000.00, while Google has been focussing on the 30,000.00 deals.

The Digital Yellow Pages On My Home Phone

The talk that print and traditional yellow page directories are losing traction is true, but I believe we still have a ways to go before we begin to rely on Internet Yellow Page directories and Internet local search from our homes to replace our big bulky yellow pages in our kitchens. I still don't have a computer in our kitchen and I don't find my cell phone as a good way to search for local businesses. What if there was a device that had the yellow page/local business data in it that sits in my kitchen like a digital rolodex, or what would it cost to build a home phone that had an easy to use search function built into it that could be easily updated with new business data updated through the phone line. Maybe I am just saying that I would use a device in my kitchen that wasn't a cell phone, a computer or my yellow page book.