Author: Rich Garling

A dedicated public servant, having served in elected office twice and as a lifelong Democratic Party Precinct Committee Person with a business background, all concentrated on organizing resources to work together towards a common goal. Served as an elected official, first on the Dekalb County Board (80-82) and later as a Trustee on the Village of Island Lake Board of Trustees (07-09). I have managed numerous election campaigns for local and State offices. Successful results-driven experience in IT program/project management, focusing on collaborating with multiple businesses work streams defining business process requirements into workable enterprise solutions.

It’s about traffic

Ok, the big question I get from my customers is how can I get more of the right kind of traffic to my website. A very good question. I certainly don’t get someone asking me to lessen the amount of traffic to their website.

Here’s what I do to attract more customers: I consistently try to put engaging content on my blogs, on my website and on my Social media sites that relates to what I do and to who I am as a person. I figure that I love what I do and so I know I’m going to be very passionate when writing about it. I also enjoy a number of others things in my life and I like to write about those subjects, too.

I have a great girlfriend whom I live with. We love taking care of each other.

I enjoy hiking in the local county forest preserves in the area. I love to take long bicycle rides. I like reading, watching a good movie on the TV. We’ll go out to the movies only to watch a flick where it has to be viewed on the big screen…like Avatar for instance. I enjoy BBQ on warm summer days sipping on a long tall cool imported or micro brewed beer with friends and neighbors.

I am very passionate about politics. You will likely see a few posts here where I wax poetically about the issues of the day. I think it’s important that we all are involved. After all, you may have the answer to solving this mess we’re in.

I love to garden. You can see how my garden progresses each year by viewing my Facebook page. I’ll talk more about this subject in the very near future.

Anyway, to get more traffic I know I need to add other things to the mix along with the good content. You see, everyone is saying you have to have good engaging content.

Really? Hmmm, imagine that.

But good and engaging content to one person falls flat to another. For example, my girlfriend hates computers. She uses them, but when I try to explain something technical to her she gets all glassy eyed and tries to change the subject to something else. I do the same to her when she tries to talk about a subject I have no real interest in.

So my subject matter has to be pointed at the right kind of traffic. Someone who is interested in what it is I do.

Getting attention can be easy. Charlie Sheen has been getting tons of attention. But as you can see from his traveling show, some audiences love him and some just think he’s stupid.

In my case, or at least I hope so, I want to attract attention that builds my business. I have to address those interested in what I do by showing them I know what I’m talking about. I have show why I’m the subject matter expert in my chosen field. And do this in a way that provides value and is entertaining. If my writing is boring then people will not read it.

All this means that I have to know who my “A” customer is. My “A” customer is the one I really enjoy doing business with. And it’s not the guy from across town who just wants to pick my brain all the time. Him I need to drop him like a hot rock.

Your “A” customer is the person/company that can afford your product, who will benefit from it, that is eager to buy from you. Those customers make being in business a pleasure.

So, write to your “A” customer.

What I’ve Learned About What Google Loves

As many years as I’ve been developing and programming websites I always realize that what I really love about what I do is…I’m always learning something new and challenging. I’ve been reading Evan Bailyn’s new book “Outsmarting Google” and it’s fantastic. And it validates much of what I tell our customers everyday…to rank high on Google you need to be the most popular guy on the block. If people think you’re important, so will Google.

And those customers ask the same question, every time. How do I do that? How do I become the most popular kid on the block, the one everyone goes to to answer the important questions when it comes to what they’re good at doing?

Well, first you have to realize that in order for people to think of you as the subject matter expert, you’re going to have to do a lot of hard work. This is not a if I build it they will come. Doesn’t happen on the Internet, hell, it doesn’t happen in life. So if you’re not willing to put in the time and effort than don’t expect anyone to do it for you.

So when you read or hear that content is king that is exactly right. And it best be original content. Copying someone else’s content is fine so long as you give proper credit. But Google doesn’t give it as high a score as original content. See, your content has to actually show your expertise. You can’t merely say it. You have to prove it. This fact is what makes the Internet the level playing field it is. Even the newest of us can become a recognized popular expert in a given field that drowns out the so-called credentialed expert who doesn’t publish on-line. It’s all about perception. So some kid could outshine a professor with a degree any day of the week and twice on Sunday if he’s been out there sharing what he knows with everyone around the world. And all those folks will be linking to the kid because he’s the only source in town who’s talking. Thus Google likes the kid because everyone else likes the kid.

Tomorrow I’ll start sharing what I’ve learned about building expertise on the Internet. I will be alternating between my personal blog and my company blog at Yellowbird Marketing Solutions.

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Retail Leads On-Line Ad Spending

Data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PWC show retail, telecom and financial services industry leading the pack with on-line advertising dollars spent in 2009-10.

Retail leads them all with spending of $4.53 billion in 2009 and $5.16 billion in 2010. It’s estimated that spending will increase to $9+ billion by 2015. Retail accounts for 20% of the overall on-line ad $ being spent.

Following behind retail and estimated to lag further behind by 2015 is the telecom industry with $3 billion spent in both 2009 and 2010. Telecom is estimated to spend a meager $5 billion in on-line ad $ by 2015.

Financial services follows with $2 billion in 2009 and $3 billion in 2010 with an expected jump to $4 billion by 2015.

Holding up the bottom is Healthcare/Pharma, Media, and Entertainment with < $1 billion each and are not expected to go very much higher by 2015.

Other industry groups will increase their on-line ad $ spending by significant percentages: automotive by 14%, CPG by 29%, and healthcare by 13%. But none will be able to match retails spending levels.

What this means to the my industry is that marketers should concentrate their efforts on the top markets for drawing in customers. The action is going to be with retail, and telecom and financial services are following close behind. But keep an eye on automotive as they’re expected to leap into second place by 2015.

For affiliate marketers it means you should be adding more retailers to your list of advertisers. They’re going to be spending the big bucks and it will pay to tag along.

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5 web apps that make life a little easier

From our friends at Mashable:

Have you ever tried to open a file only to be stymied because you have to download software or even upgrade the latest changes to it? I know I have and it is a royal pain. Zamzar offers a handy tool to convert text, audio, video formats into a format you can open. Simply upload the file, tell them what format you want it converted to and they e-mail the finished copy to you. That’s cool 🙂

GE.tt is offering easy to use way to share files in the cloud. It’s free so long as what your storing is temporary which makes it good for quick transfers that regular email can’t handle.

Ninite offers a quick and easy way to re-install all the applications, from browsers to messaging and more, that you use regularly. Just check off all the browsers, readers and media players you use and it downloads them via an automated installer. It even eliminates all the extra crap that generally comes along with a single install. Now I like that idea because I have no need for a half-million tool bars on my desktop.

LucidChart offers a free (up to 2 users) way to create impressive charts, diagrams, and graphs that you can draw online. You can create flowcharts, wire-frames, network diagrams and more. I plan to start using this one regularly.

I used to have a copy of special characters on the side of my file cabinet so I could remember which alt key combos I needed to use to create whatever character I needed. Now I can go to copypastecharacter and just simply copy and paste what I need.

Hope the above prove to be useful. If you have more, let me know and I will post them here.

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4 Mile Hike

Walked my usual 4 miles this morning. I find it invigorating exercising daily. I don’t get drowsy come middle afternoon. I actually sleep better at night. My girlfriend says I move around less. She likes that rather than my usual jitters. I have a path laid out at several local county forest preserves. Lake County has some wonderful forest preserves located throughout the county.

I’m in need of a new pair of boots. I had a pair of Sonoma’s for the past 15 years. These boots were comfortable from the get go. Before the Sonoma’s I had Lowa boots. Lowa’s are made in Germany. Great boot, once you got them broken in. I have a problem where one foot is wider than the other. Most shoe stores don’t want to break up a pair so that I have one boot/shoe wider than the other. Understandable, but it means a painful walk for me until the one boot stretches. I didn’t have to do the breaking in with the Sonoma’s. I liked that. But recently I bought a pair of Sonoma hiking shoes. I thought they would last me a while, especially consider how long I had the other boots. Nope! Within 4 months they fell apart. You can imagine my surprise. And my dismay.

So now I search for a better pair of hiking boots. I will chronicle my adventure further. Meanwhile, any suggestions are certainly welcome.

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On-line Marketing Plan as Part of Marketing Strategy

Opportunities are lost due to limiting on-line marketing strategy plans to simply one-way communication vehicles.

Marketing plans are most effective when you’ve fully integrated traditional marketing such as phone, direct-mail or face-to-face selling with online channels and are used to support the whole buying process from pre-sale to sale to post-sale. Add to the mix the continued development of customer relationships and you create a symbiotic process that increases leads and revenue.

And while the on-line marketing part of the plan can span right across an organization’s many functions such as customer feedback, customer service, product development, sales, finance/payment, delivery and administration, on-line marketing plans tend to be looked at strongly as mainly marketing communications plans, to the detriment of what more it can offer the company. Opportunities are lost due to limiting on-line marketing plans to simply one-way communication vehicles.

The reality is that any on-line marketing plan needs to be a part of a broader marketing plan. And it should also fit in with the overall business plan. It should be an integral part of the company’s overall strategy to bring in leads as well as information.

Check out Gary Vaynerchuk Thank You Economy

Check out the Gary “@garyvee” Vaynerchuk video we posted at Yellowbird Marketing site. He really says it all.

7 ways to handle negative responses

I recently had a former customer call me up on the phone. He was asking me to help him with removing a negative comment that was posted on his listing in Google local directories. He thought it would go away if we took his website down.

It should become apparent as to why we no longer do business with this guy.

See, rather than deal with the complaint on its merits, he wants to ignore it. He claims the complainer is being unreasonable. The complainer felt he was being taken for a ride by my former customer. I wasn’t really disagreeing with the complainer (by the way, I’m not the complainer), which is why we no longer have this guy as a customer.

So I thought I would discuss the 7 ways we recommend to our good customers how you should look at handling complaints:

1. Never fear the complainer – Complaints are an opportunity for you to show your community how you handle adversity. Avoiding it says as much about you as does confronting it.

2. Be totally honest – admit fault, within reason, even if it isn’t your fault. If one of my customers complains I didn’t perform as they expected, even though what they’re complaining about isn’t in the scope of the project, as long as it’s reasonable I will take responsibility for the misunderstanding and work to correct the problem. I will not bury my head in the sand and hope it goes away.

3. Respond back in the medium where the complaint originated – If the complaint is from Twitter, don’t respond back in LinkedIn. Keep it within the medium received. Responding back in a different medium makes it look like your avoiding the issue.

4. Use the complaint as feedback from your customers – If your widget has a problem you will usually receive that information in the form of a complaint. Use it to fix the problem and show the world how you did it.

5. Listen – Many times when a customer is complaining all they want is to be heard. It’s as simple as that.

I had a customer of a customer many years ago who called complaining that a battery pack her son used in his hobby race car had exploded while being recharged. Back in those days it usually took twelve hours to recharge a battery pack. The kids would buy 2-3 battery packs so that they could race for hours. They also used to try to recharge the packs very quickly, literally zapping the daylights out of them. The problem was that NiCad batteries are a notoriuosly greedy substance. The battery doesn’t know when to quit taking a charge like SLA batteries do. There is a lot of heat created while charging which builds pressure inside the battery. So, once in a while a battery being charged too fast will build enough pressure to pop its top.

Scares the hell out of you.

It scared this Mom’s kid, which of course upset her. The sales person who took the call was having trouble getting her to be reasonable and so I took over. I asked her what the problem was and she proceeded to yell and scream about what had happened. When she appeared to be running out of steam, I asked her if there was anything else that concerned her and she proceeded on for another 10 minutes. I asked her one more time if there was anything else she wanted to tell me and she went on again, but only for a minute.

I then apologized to her for the incident. I asked her a few questions and I discovered that her son, when zapping the daylights out of the battery, didn’t use dry ice to keep the battery from overheating. He couldn’t afford dry ice so he tried the not so good alternative, ice cubes. She wasn’t too happy with her son when he admitted to what he was doing. You can’t really fault him since many of the other boys were recharging the batteries and he just wanted to do the same. The charging instructions that come with the batteries are usually tossed aside rendering them useless. So, I told this mom I would send her 3 battery packs for free along with a detailed set of instructions on how to properly charge them.

Total cost to us was $75.00. But we gained a customer for life because I took the time to listen.

6. Follow up – Never assume the problem is totally resolved, always follow-up. This will reinforce in the customers mind that you really are listening.

7. Make sure you share these experience with your audience – Don’t be afraid to share the real you. Your audience will love you for it.

Confusing Internet

Many small to medium size companies find the Internet to be a very confusing place.

My friend Tom was recently lamenting:

How come I’m not getting traffic to my web site?
What is this Social Media thing all about?
Will it last? I’m told I should have a website.
I’m told I should be on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…aahhh.
Too much to decide on, too much time involved figuring it all out.
How is it that some people seem to be all over the Internet and I can’t even get off square one?

Like anything out there worth doing, the Internet takes a lot of hard work, which means a lot of time. And time is something many of us have very little of to start with. So to put more time into something that has a really steep learning curve and doesn’t seem to produce results makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, right?

Tom continued to think out loud:

But gee whiz, look at Charlie, the Butcher across the street. I’ve never seen him so filled up with customers. The wife said she saw a coupon he had put onto this thing called Facebook. All of her girlfriends are raving about it. She used that new smart phone I got her last Christmas to scan something called a QR code, whatever that is.

But I just had the website redone last year and it cost me a bundle. I’m still not getting any leads from it.

Come to think about it, that damn phone book ad isn’t producing butkus. And it costs hundreds per quarter for it, tried to cancel it months ago but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

Sure wish there was someone out there who understood business and could help me develop a marketing strategy that would make sense, remove the confusion and make it productive.

Well there is, Tom. Call me at Yellowbird Marketing Solutions and I’ll help you figure it all. We can help you develop a package that will fit your budget and produce results. I’ll even show you how to cancel that phone book ad that does nothing but frustrate you.

You can find me at: