The local search which shows ten results has now been shrunk to top 7,

A thru J became A thru G.

We are seeing company phone numbers disappearing from the top 7 Local Search results

Top Google Map listings are now ‘paid’ listings in some local markets.

Android 2.0 has made its debut, and it’s making a big impact on "Local Search" !

We have every reason to believe these changes are only the beginning. If you are doing some online marketing (or relying on your web presence as a source) for your business, these changes will impact you. You need to know how to deal with it because there IS a science to it but alas, many marketers or companies aren’t even aware of these changes and happily (or unknowingly) rely on traditional SEO that they did a while ago one time.

I’ve demonstrated this at a seminar that I gave recently at Association of Small Business Enterprise (ASME) of Singapore and one company did it with great results in 48 hours.

Couple this with the fact that Local Search is primed to eclipse the importance of Yellow Pages (if it hasn’t already for many businesses).

EVERY business with a phone number already knows the marketing importance of Yellow Pages, historically speaking, and  it’s easy to conclude these very same businesses are awakening to a monstrous PROBLEM… They are fast realizing that a good listing on Google Maps and Local Search is becoming MORE important than their Yellow Page listing!

…and they have no choice but to pay somebody to manage their Search Listings just like they do their Yellow Page Listing.

Getting a local business well listed, getting them properly verified, and building an arsenal of favorable reviews takes a fair amount of expertise that exceeds what most business owners are willing or able to gain. The Local Search wave is cresting…and it’s about to crush the Yellow Pages…which is destined to drown in a rip current of change and drag down any business that doesn’t make an orchestrated switch from Phone Book to Google Maps.

Ok, I might be a little dramatic but the numbers are showing this to be true.

I’ve talked to businesses which have spent thousands on Yellow Pages and are not able to track or see the results. With omnipresent internet, many are turning to their PC, Smartphones, netbooks and Ipads/tablets to look up a business instead of the yellow pages.  And in online search, Google is king and then the other 2 big search engines Bing and Yahoo take the rest.

Local search , classified sites and directories are fighting for the pie in Singapore e.g Rednano, Mocca, InSing, AsiaOne and in this game, Yellow Pages is not a dominant force.

If you aren’t already looking at putting your business on local search or don’t know how,  you’re losing out on a wave of consumers that are looking for their solution and businesses there.  Here’s a video to get you started if you aren’t already listed. (Many SEO companies charge for his but we like to think our kind of customers are smart enough to do this easily without being ripped off. I included a step by step and some things to look out for.  So here you go FREE of Charge).

There’s more you can do to enhance this to rank it higher in a competitive niche which takes more time and effort. I might cover that in another upcoming workshop for business owners that we are doing and we have a system that we do this for customers.

I came across this ad from none other than Google and it was a moving story , simple and emotional.

It is very effective in delivering the message of how Google is an integral part of a young person’s life.

I watched it a few times and this is great emotional advertising for a product that is not sexy and there’s no need for distracting models and such. It’s about a story.

We help our customer’s pull out their stories and deliver their message , straight from the heart. More often than not, it’s unpolished and raw. I am often moved when we do this exercise successfully.  You can feel the passion ignited, the original values surfaced and the WHY comes out powerfully.  Nothing pretentious or highly polished.

And guess what, it’s way more powerful than a contrived ‘branding’ kind of ad. Talk to us if you want to try this out.  It’s a great journey of discovery. And we love it.

“Marketing Mojo With Radical Results”

That’s the tagline we are thinking of given the things we’ve done with our clients.

Hope you like the video. Contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do with you.

Our current education is preparing students for jobs that Don’t Yet exist.

The explosion of information is accelerating and it demands new ways to thinking and solving problems.

For businesses, it represents a phenomenal opportunity (or challenge for those who are stuck to old ways) to gain new markets , acquire customers , speed transactions on a global basis with new channels that are instantaneous, far reaching and probably didn’t exist few years ago.

Have a look at this video that showcase progression of information technology, researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Brenman which is intriguing and mindblowing.

As you view it, think about what it could mean for you and your business. We at ThinkAccelerator keep ahead of the curve and help our customer ride the wave and use the best tools and channels to achieve accelerated results.

So much theories have been bandied about and I thought this video provides some good insights from the horse’s mouth.

Here’s the latest from Google Chief Economist that sheds some light on this puzzling issue.

Just a short story about one interesting chap I met. He has been doing a killer job at Adwords and is pretty much underground, heck he is called X as his handle. Whilst he keeps underground , he  kicks the butt of pro marketers and ad agencies. I met him in Florida and he has some killer strategies and unconventional thinking that makes him top of the game. He recently wrote a book and sharing his strategies on a monthly basis on his site. Check it out at Affiliate Black Book

It is a culmination of his experience as marketer and a merchant, so he has seen tricks from both sides. Fascinating story. Often I find the entrepreneurial marketers are at the cutting edge and more nimble than the Agencies.  Hence, we keep updated with these marketers and the strategies to ensure we can compete effectively and bring out the best ROI in the shortest time.

Just when you think a person doesn’t have what it takes, it’s takes a moment for you to discover the richness of talent that goes beyond what we see and perceive.

Reminds me to give people a chance to shine through and not be judgemental too quickly. You just need to match the right platform to the talent. Awesome.

Don’t mind the silly face, Mark Joyner (certainly knows how to stand out and have fun). He is considered by many the Father of Online Marketing and Guerrilla marketing.

He has put all his effort into building a new brand and company called Simpleology. I asked him what inspired him to start this company and its content. His reply definitely hit home with me and also people I have coached and other marketers I have met.

The answer was this. In his years of coaching and providing marketing consultancy to small businesses and corporates, the most common problem is not the knowhow or the tactics/strategies that people are suffering from. It’s that many people are locked in their limitations of their potential greatness and complicate their minds on what is it they need to do to be successful.

He actually developed a process for his high end coaching clients to unclutter their mind and allow them to see through what was important and what they could do to unlock their great potential.

That is what I have been through in starting my business and in many others that I have helped and talked with. To have Mark build a company based on principle of simplifying one’s mind and processes just showed me how prevalent and deep this issue is.

So, if feel overwhelmed or seem to be running in circles in their business, check his new book out.

www.simpleology.com/simplebook.htm

I think having a brain defrag and reboot everynow and then certainly helps.Mark has put it down into a process. (you can tell he needs some head sorting himself from the picture above.) He’s having fun building his multimillion dollar business. Are you?

The two hot tools are Keyword Spy and Google Cash Detective.

It basically allow users to monitor who’s making money on the advertising side and more so , if they are affiliates doing it. Then you can reverse engineer what keywords they use, what campaigns they put up and even swipe their ads. Ouch for those who have been doing old Googlecash style promotions with direct linking.

Many people are using it and having profitable campaigns within 1-2 months. To the unsuspecting affiliate who has been advertising using their affiliate links, they will suddenly notice a drop in their traffic. I have already seen such instances by new unsuspecting marketers who’s campaign’s been swiped and wondering what happened. It’s not difficult to do and the data is out there.

For the more sophisticated marketer, this represents a acceleration in identifying profitable programs and reverse engineering those models. Chris Carpenter’s videos showed a great example of how a seemingly unprofitable campaign on the surface actually makes money on the backend and how hewas able to take that apart and duplicate it and be profitable.

One other site that came up is spyfu.com. You can see what a site is advertising, keywords optimized for and how much they pay for adverts. All you got to do is copy and improve on that plus reegineer the sales funnel and you got yourself an instant business that is very likely to be profitable.

The world of affiliate marketing especially with paid advertising (PPC) just got a lot more competitive and exciting. Whether you like it or not, the time for the lazy/Bum marketing types are up. In fact, many companies are overpaying for Pay Per Click advertising simply because they aren’t measuring their ROI down the keyword and through the conversion process.

I have done a few case studies that I share with clients to show them the right way to do it and the reaction has been very positive. Usually shocked.

I’ll talk more about tracking, sales funnel and backends in uture . That’s where the difference is going to be made for those who’s going to make  positive ROI in their online marketing.

It’s not about just one thing or tactic or tool. It’s the sales chain.

That’s me holding up a Fedex package with checks to illustrate what to expect for those who do affiliate marketing successfully.

What an event! 300 people came from all over Asia Pacific and even from US and UK into Singapore for this event. It was like a rock concert with all the lasers, smokes and even music performances.

Here I am speaking on the last day about how to get started in Internet Marketing effectively for new affiliate marketers.

Some of the interesting key ideas that were covered during the seminars were

1. Banners still work and there’s a way to make it effective

2. Web 2.0 traffic – it’s free traffic and you got to know how to syndicate your content and spread your message. There is a system to do this quickly and easily with software.

3. Having a sales funnel and system to upsell and cross can give you a jump in profitablity. One example was a site that Stephen had which had a 50% conversion on upsell which brought additional profits that he never had thought of.

4. Getting traffic with additional media like videos and there is a certain way to get noticed effectively.

5. Finding profitable programs to promote. I covered some steps on that manually . (Update: Recently a service came out on uncovering profitable affilate programs with the process I covered automatically which cuts a lot of time. )

The growth of Internet commerce and users in this region makes it a perfect time for people and companies here to launch their business online. It’s definitely an exciting time for Internet marketers and those who learn this skill effectively to capitalize on this explosive growth.

More tools and programs are coming on stream that is going to make it easy for someone to duplicate successful businesses online very rapidly. The challenge now is to be able to study , improve and add value to a successful business model.

I am doing a case study using couple of tools and will be sharing that with some clients on how you can literally get started and make money with these competitive intelligence tool and knockout existing lazy marketers. Exciting times for those who put in the effort, frightening for those who are not innovating and doing it the lazy way.

Brad Fallon, FreeIQ.com and Alvin

Brad Fallon fresh from his wildly successful launch of Stompernet at $10M sales in 1 day, is launching a new site that was inspired by Youtube and Clickbank. We were talking and he is excited that this is going to knock the socks off what’s out there in the affiliate marketing space.

People now upload a lot of videos to Youtube but don’t have a way to monetize it. So what’s a marketer to do? Many are putting links on the profile and url in the videos. What if you could upload your videos to a site, some free and some not, and have people pay there and then to watch it.

What about getting people to be affiliate for your stuff that you upload?  You need a marketplace like Clickbank and social networking of Youtube.

Well, Brad just launched FreeIQ.com today.

I have had a look inside and I must say I am impressed by the amount of work that’s gone into it. The affiliate interface is one of the most comprehensive I have seen.  There are already a number of marketers who have put their content there.

For those who have an inventory of audio or video (even ebooks), this is a great place to try out marketing them in such a network.  I got to get my own videos up there. Time to cut some footages.

I think this is going to be hot as more people know about it and use it. Clickbank’s got some competition on its hands.

Check FreeIQ out.

http://www.freeiq.com/special1