Local University Forums Launched to Teach About Local Marketing

Local University Forums Launched to Teach About Local Marketing
DrawQuest Shuts Down After Failing to Monetize
Content Network Adds Commerce: TechMedia Acquires BuyerZone
Chrome Cracks Down on Extensions for Adding Unwanted Adware
The Bright Side of High Employee Turnover

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 04:00 PM PST

teach about local marketing

Local University has just launched Local U Forums. Local University holds in-person events about how to market local businesses online, across the United States. Its new Forums are a way to extend that education to an online venue.

Local U Forums are for those who want to learn about how to market a local business online. If you are not able to attend in-person events, or want to stay up to speed on local marketing throughout the year, you can visit the Forums, 24/7. David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal, co-founders of Local University, emphasize that the Local U Forums are designed for small business owners and managers, as well as marketing and SEO professionals.

Access to Local Marketing Experts

Local U is an exclusive private forum in the sense that you must buy a subscription to join. That’s a good for getting high quality information. I’ve been a Moderator at another niche private forum for 5 years, and the quality of what I’ve learned is consistently high. In a private high-quality forum, the information tends to be reliable.

Local U’s Moderators are local marketing experts of some note. According to Mike Blumenthal:

“We wanted to provide an environment where it was clear the answers would be coming from folks that were knowledgeable about local marketing.”

Forum Moderators you may run into include the likes of Andrew Shotland, Carrie Hill, Phil Rozek, Dan Austin, Darren Shaw and Nyagoslav Zhekov. There are even two people whose expertise is so well known online, they need only single names: Helmut and Treebles.

Forums are superb for networking, too. If you want to get to know the movers and shakers in a field, join a niche forum. Niche forums, especially subscription-only ones, are intimate. That increases the chances of getting to know people personally.

The Forums resulted from a lot of planning by the faculty of Local U. The group, said Blumenthal:

“. . .had long discussions about the pros and cons and whether we could sustain the effort. We conceived of it at our first meeting as a new company early in 2013. Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing, David Mihm of Moz & Ed Reese of 6th Man Marketing started building it out with technology and content around June of this past year.”

Access to Educational Materials

A membership in the Forums gives access to educational materials not available elsewhere.

“We recorded and produced our complete Local U Advanced Seminar from Seattle and have made that available to all participants. We partnered up with MOZ and spent a fair bit of time producing mini topic videos, ” said Blumenthal. You will also find research material that is not available publicly, such as a study about which sites consumers actually visit to find local businesses. And exclusive Google hangouts will be available for members only. (More background here.)

Content and time are never truly free. Another reason Local University is charging a subscription is to underwrite the cost of creating training materials, Blumenthal noted:

“Education … has always been our objective. But we felt to provide the level of quality that we wanted required a revenue stream.”

Subscriptions for the first 50 members are $99/month. After that, the price likely will go up, Blumenthal and Mihm say.

However, as with anything, it’s best to look not only at the cost, but at what you can get back. The real question is, by becoming smarter about local marketing, how many more sales can you drive to your local business from the Web and mobile? And will those sales pay for the cost, and drive growth and profits?

Image: Local U

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DrawQuest Shuts Down After Failing to Monetize

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 01:30 PM PST

draw guest

DrawQuest, an app centered around daily drawing challenges, announced it was shutting down this week. On its official blog, the DrawQuest team announced the app would see no further active development. However, there will be an effort to keep it live for a few more months for the benefit of the user community.

In the tech media, some expressed surprise at the decision to pull the plug. The app has 1.4 million downloads, 550,000 registered users, 400,000 monthly users and 25,000 daily users.

Meanwhile, Founder and CEO, Chris Poole, posted a fairly transparent postmortem on his personal blog, spelling out some of the team’s missteps.

First, the company switched products too late in the game with too little money left to develop a new idea. Poole explains:

“Building any business is hard, but building a business with a single app offering and half of your runway is especially hard (we created DrawQuest after the failure of our first product, Canvas).”

Poole had raised about $625,000 in seed funding from investors Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Kenneth Lerer and Joshua Schachter in 2010, TechCrunch reports.

After that came another $3 million in 2011 from Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, and Joshua Schachter.

The original funding was to develop Canvas, a forum for sharing and discussing online graphic and art images. But then Poole’s team switched to DrawQuest instead about a year ago.

Poole said the team had simply failed to make the business side of the equation work:

“I've come away with new found respect for those companies who excel at monetizing mobile applications. As we approached the end of our runway, it became clear to us that DrawQuest didn't represent a venture-backed opportunity, and even with more time that was unlikely to change.”

DrawQuest had hoped to monetize by selling drawing pencils for its app the way other games sell extra lives, but found it difficult to do.

Finally, Poole had hoped to find an acquisition opportunity for the company but to no avail. He told TechCrunch he believed part of DrawQuest’s problem was its inability to crack what he said was the “all important” million monthly users.

Digital properties are often courted for their rapid growth even if they haven’t found a business model, so this may have been the problem with finding another company interested in acquisition.

In his post, Poole said he hoped his transparency would help other startups.

“One thing I'll be doing more of is writing about my experience. Partially because it's therapeutic, but also because if there's a silver lining in all of this (and there is), it's that I can help educate others about a path fraught with hardship, but rewarding nonetheless.”

Image: DrawQuest

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Content Network Adds Commerce: TechMedia Acquires BuyerZone

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 11:00 AM PST

techmedia acquires buyerzone

TechMedia, a media company and content network, has acquired BuyerZone.

TechMedia operates a network of websites that are technology and science related, including Laptop, Business News Daily, Tom’s Hardware, Space.com and Top Ten Reviews. TechMedia says it has “72 million engaged tech and science enthusiasts” monthly.

BuyerZone is a lead-generation commerce site. It brings together SMBs who need business products and services, with vendors. A small business owner or manager goes to BuyerZone to locate vendors and get price quotes for phone systems, payroll services, copiers, forklifts and other services and supplies. BuyerZone said in its announcement that it has “over one million registered buyers and a network of more than 8,500 sellers across 150-plus product and service categories.”

BuyerZone was formerly owned by Reed Business information. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Strategic Content and Commerce Combo

These kinds of combinations can make sense. By adding a commerce component, content sites hope to expand their revenue streams. With direct commerce they do not have to rely solely on traditional advertising or subscriptions.

Commerce platforms likewise have an incentive to pair up. With Amazon seeming to rule the world of consumer e-commerce, and Google displacing commerce through its direct shopping results, it can be hard to grow a commerce platform today. Commerce platforms always need more buyers. Content draws buyers in.

That’s especially true for small business services, because it’s typically a more complex purchase. Buyers tend to research purchases ahead of time — where else, but on content sites.

The announcement seems to bear this strategy out, noting:

“With this acquisition, TechMedia Network continues to expand its ability to both drive and simplify complex purchase decisions for end-users through an industry-unique combination of Content, Community, and Commerce.”

Up to now, BuyerZone has used a growth strategy of drawing traffic through affiliate/partner sites. In an email sent to affiliate partners, Aaron Bailey, General Manager of BuyerZone, was quick to reassure affiliates that little would change:

“Rest assured, this acquisition will not affect the way you do business with BuyerZone. It will, however, make available to BuyerZone significant new resources that will expand our ability to monetize the high-quality traffic you generate on our behalf. BuyerZone will operate as a standalone entity within TechMedia Network, and the BuyerZone affiliate team will remain dedicated to supporting you and helping to grow our partnership.”

(Small Business Trends is technically an affiliate of BuyerZone, although the relationship is not yet fully implemented.)

BuyerZone also has a consumer arm to find items to buy for your home. The announcement makes clear that this is mainly a small and medium-sized business (SMB) play, however.

Image: BuyerZone video still

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Chrome Cracks Down on Extensions for Adding Unwanted Adware

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 08:00 AM PST

add to feedly

Google has removed “Add to Feedly” and one other Chrome extension from its app store for improperly loading ads to users’ computers. A new version of “Add to Feedly” has since been restored to the Google Chrome Web Store. A single user review claims it now works without serving unwanted adware.

Google took action against “Add to Feedly” and another app “Add to Twitter,” after recent complaints by users, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Personal technology columnist Amit Agarwal wrote on his website that he created “Add to Feedly,” a few lines of code, so users could add RSS from websites easily:

“When Google decided to pull the plug on Google Reader, I quickly made the switch to Feedly since it was (and still is) the best alternative to Google's RSS Reader. The one important piece that Feedly did not offer was a Chrome extension that would let users subscribe to RSS feeds on any web page with a click.”

Later, Amit says he was approached by a potential buyer and agreed to sell the app, but now regrets that decision:

“One morning I got an email from someone ( I tried Googling her name but it returned no results ) asking me if I would be interested in selling the Feedly Chrome extension. It was a 4-figure offer for something that had taken an hour to create and I agreed to the deal. I had no clue about the buyer and was also curious to know why would anyone pay this kind of money for such a simple Chrome extension.”

The result? The new owners apparently added code which turns the links in every page a user visits into spammy affiliate links.

We’ve had our own experiences with browser extensions that carry unwanted adware here at Small Business Trends. CEO and Publisher Anita Campbell explains:

“The problem with unwanted adware and Google Chrome extensions has been an issue for a while now, but recently adware developers have gotten more aggressive. They have started buying up browser extensions from original developers, just so they can fill them with adware. In December we got hit with the Conduit extension that added unwanted adware via my browser on various computers, for every site I visited. I first discovered it when I went to Small Business Trends and noticed annoying ads I had never seen before. I knew we hadn’t placed them there. Turns out, they weren’t in our own site, but were in my browser and it just ‘seemed’ like they were in my own website. I had to take several steps to delete the unwanted extension, clear cookies and history, and reboot.

Some have called these extensions viruses, but they are not really a virus. I would describe them as aggressive and unwanted adware. So if you suddenly start seeing lots of annoying ads, take a close look at the extensions to your browser. It’s not just Chrome that’s affected, but some of these adware injections also affect Firefox.”

Google recently rewrote its guidelines to prohibit developers from using such tactics when adding extensions to the browser.

Image: Google

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The Bright Side of High Employee Turnover

Posted: 22 Jan 2014 05:00 AM PST

benefits of employee turnover

Are you worried about losing key employees this year?

A Right Management study says 83 percent of employees definitely plan to look for jobs this year, while 12 percent say they might and just 5 percent have no plans to look for new jobs.

This is bad news for your business, right?

Maybe not. Instead of getting in a lather trying to figure out how retain your current employees, look at the silver lining. This could be your chance to unload some deadwood…and attract new blood to your business.

How to Benefit From Employee Turnover

1. Start Searching for New Employees

Of course you can post a want ad, but since many dissatisfied employees are searching on the sly, you'll likely have better luck with more stealth methods.

Take full advantage of your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to find out more about people in your industry who are go-getters, up-and-comers…in short, your dream employees. Make connections and get to know a little about them.

Remember, even the 12 percent of employees who say they "might" seek new jobs can be swayed with the right offer—so you'll never know until you make that offer.

2. Hold Your Team to Higher Standards

Do you have slackers on your staff or employees who are coasting or not living up to their potential? Now's the time to put their feet to the fire.

Consider holding more frequent performance reviews—not just annually, but quarterly. There's ample evidence employees like getting frequent feedback, but providing reviews more often also benefits you. Instead of waiting a whole year to discuss nagging problems with a person's performance, frequent reviews will spur you to get the issues out in the open so they can be dealt with.

You can set shorter time frames for improvement and move faster to let the person go if necessary.

3. Watch Your Team Fire Up

A little uncertainty isn't necessarily a bad thing. Think about how you react when a key client has a shakeup or shows signs they're considering letting you go. You do everything you can to keep them, don't you? The same principle works for your staff.

When employees see that you are holding reviews more often, paying closer attention to performance, calling some employees on the carpet and perhaps even letting some go, even the good team members will start getting a bit nervous about job security.

However, that anxiety can be motivating as employees seek to earn your approval (and keep their jobs). Your top performers will get energized to do even better, while those poorer performers who don't want to make the effort to improve will start job hunting. (If you're lucky, you won't even have to fire them because they'll leave of their own accord.)

4. Reward Top Performers – But Know That Everyone Can Be Replaced

Don't let your best employees dither too much about their job security. Your reviews should recognize them for going above and beyond. At the same time, know that they, too, may be searching for other opportunities.

Don't bend over backwards to keep a key employee on board if he or she really wants to leave. I've learned many times as a manager that no matter how indispensable you think someone is, everyone can be replaced—and sometimes, a dose of new blood is just what you need to reinvigorate your business.

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