This 4 hour seminar features national experts as well as representatives from Google and Bing, covering an incredible amount of Internet marketing information.

• You can sign-up now for just $89 (Save $40!) by using Five Technology’s promo code:  five2010

This workshop will be held at the fantastic Westin Hotel in Edina, located just off France Ave.  There are two identical sessions, one morning and one afternoon, but seating is currently limited to just 200 per session.

Local University introduces, explains and teaches Internet marketing basics, aimed at the small business owner and marketing person.  Incredible insight, process, best practices, D-I-Y tips and case studies will be provided on:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Local search (Google LBC & Maps, Bing Local)
• Social Media (Blogs, Facebook & Twitter)
• Web Analytics

This event is truly one of kind to hit the Minneapolis & St Paul area.  Take advantage of the opportunity to learn Search Engine Optimization tips and techniques that will lead to sustained, long-term search engine rankings (and new customers).  The last Local University event in Spokane, WA was a huge success.

Local University Presenters
I’m also excited to be part of the outstanding line-up of presenters including David Mihm of GetListed.org, Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, Mary Bowling, Ed Reese, Ryan Hayward of Google and Mikko Ollila of Bing.

Register Today
Head over to the Twin Cities registration page (use our promo code) and reserve your spot.  If you’re coming from outstate Minnesota, the Westin is offering a $139/night rate for fantastic accommodations.

You simply won’t find another seminar, with this amount of information here in Minnesota for the price.

Local University Twin Cities is sponsored by Google, Bing, Deluxe and ReliaCloud Cloud Servers from VISI.

For me, small business is all about great people. They are inspired, resourceful, passionate and ever adapting.

Thanks to these characteristics, I feel great about the landscape of small business in 2010. Though consumer and business spending may vary, credit and loans will remain tight, some great things are going to happen. Many have already planned out what they can do this year to improve.

Small business has two fantastic things going for it in 2010:

• Opportunity and Technology

Opportunity: With any slump or downturn, there is the new battle to emerge or launch new ideas. Whether it’s an existing small business adding a service or product to their offering, or a longtime corporate worker being laid off and now taking the jump to work for themselves, opportunity is rampant.

Technology: Without a doubt, here is the part that excites us at Five Technology. We’ll get the chance again this year to work with some incredible businesses ready to leverage technology like never before. It might be a web redesign, a CMS integration, starting a blog, networking with social media or a custom web application that will push efficiency like never before.  The web is business in 2010, just think about it.

So let’s get after it. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity and mesh ideas with technology, to increase marketing efforts, sales, processes and efficiency.

Let’s make 2010 the year of the small business.

My presentation went great and we covered a lot of great information on viewing your website as an employee.   The CMWA group has a great vibe and they had a flurry of good questions for me in the Q & A portion.  Somehow, I survived.

Here are just a few of the great businesses I was able to speak to and with last night:

Mestads Bridal,  Mulligans Event Center,  Yapuncich Photography,  Pianist For Parties,  Northern Lights Video,  Blooming Creations,  Icing Dreams Specialty Cakes,  Capture Video,  Blackberryridge Golf Course,  PrimeTime Wedding DJ and Reichel’s Catering.

Thanks for having me out CMWA!

Over the last 20 years, EasiWay has grown to be a leader in the screen printing industry, making the most efficient and environmentally friendly screen cleaning and reclaiming products and solutions.  They desired a new look that was crisp, clean, had a water element and a touch of green.

Here are are initial logo design concepts:

EasiWay was impressed and excited with their design choices and it made narrowing down a few to explore difficult.  Through further discussion and ideas, one logo design concept was chosen to work from.  We then presented  a few versions and ultimately came up with a winner.

EasiWay’s new logo design:

The team at Easiway Systems was great to work with and we are now creating their new product labels as well as their e-commerce enabled website.  Stay tuned for the launch of the new website in the near future.

My Twitter use has a very high value to me and if fact it even has a number.  I’ve posted in the past on the benefits Twitter showed me right form the start, how it can drive blog traffic and a big attempt to amount 100 reasons for a business to Twitter (still short, add one!).

My Twitter ROI as of today is:  $13.50 per Tweet

As of the tweet I’ll put out to announce this blog post, I’ll have closed just over $25,200 in business only and directly because of Twitter and my 1,870 updates. That is just plain cool.  Even better is I have many more projects being quoted, referrals being given and connections being made.  Strictly from Twitter.

I’ve received this business from Twitter in a few routes:

• Industry peers. Thanks to Twitter I have connected with numerous other talented web designers and developers that have passed me leads.  Twitter allowed us to connect, view links to work we’ve put out and made them think of Five when there was a project or lead that didn’t fit them.  This has been both humbling and exciting as a some very talented people themselves think enough of our services to recommend us.
• Marketing proffesionals. I’ve connected with internal marketing talent from various companies locally and nationally that have put me on to RFPs, projects and other needs that I would have never known about without a connection via Twitter.
• Twitter friends. It might be baseball related, small business related, music related or another interest I have put out there, but I have connections that are non-web design related.  The replies and conversation might be about about the Minnesota Twins offense, but then a direct message comes out of nowhere with a contact person at a company that needs web help.

Do you have a Twitter ROI or a Value Per Tweet (VPT)?  Share it if you can.  I’m constantly amazed at the value I get from Twitter in news, connections, knowledge, ideas and yes … even sales.  I’m looking to add to my Twitter ROI.

A shift is taking place on the web for small business.  Websites and web content are moving to reality, far away from marketing hype.  If a company can change their approach and find ways to bring valuable content to users, then they can improve traffic and ultimately leads.

A Clear View, Show What You Can Do
A buzz word in the web design world is transparency.  To me, this simply applies to the ability to show potential customers and current clients just what you can do for them.  Instead of pitching them that you are “the best, the leader, number one” why not drill into exactly how you can help them?

Example 1: A CPA Firm could use their content to outline their menu of accounting services … and their content might read the very same as 10,000 other CPA websites in their industry.  If they shift their approach, they could provide a summary of how they helped a small business find financial efficiency, position it for growth and help it succeed.

They could show their target market exactly what they ARE doing and make it easy for that user to understand the type of benefits they bring with their service.  Their services mix to create success for a client, instead of a users trying to guess what they need off the standard services list.

Example 2: A Restaurant can show their menu items and a burger is a burger is a burger in print version.  But if you take a short video clip of making your gourmet or special burger, post a series of photos and customer comments on it … you have something to bring hungry stomachs in.

In taking the approach to show the reality of your ingredients, the process and the visual WOW factor, you have created a distinct difference from your competitors websites.

Those are just two quick examples of how taking a better approach to web content and involving ideas, media and real web content can have an impact.  EVERY business out there can find these valuable ways to better illustrate how they can benefit, help and serve their clients and customers.

Build you website visitor a clearer picture on your offering, expertise and process and you will become a clear choice as the one to buy from.

The line-up of speakers featured some great Internet minds.  Kicking off Friday morning was Jason Fried of 37signals.

Jason stressed getting away from failure (it’s not cool), the value in eliminating interruption, focusing on the  day at hand and not a 2 year or 5 year plan, putting the most effort into the things that don’t change in your business (service, process), and the value of your by-product.  I had a ton of interest in finding the by-product of your business, not just the specific service you offer, but the knowledge in the process of it.  This can translate into books, speaking events and more.

Another speaker I really enjoyed was Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless Tees.  His time on stage focuses on transparency and accessibility.  He outlined how these things contribute to success of his company.  Jeffrey hit upon the message of spending time with your community of customers/users and listening to them, reacting to them and acting on the right moves.

Gary Vaynerchuk closed out the presentations with his “loud” presentation (loud in a good way).  His passion for getting people to hustle, work hard, build a brand and deliver your expertise in any way possible is a great message.  Gary definitely let his feelings be known on how the Internet will squash everything … newspapers, TV and possibly high education. Gary also did some great Q & A with the crowd as well.

Other attendees recapped the conference as well, so check out Shane Adam’s blog, Read Write Web and Silicon Florist.  Check out Managing The Edge, it has a decent video segment of interviews from the conference as well.

It was a well put together conference, crazy successful for a first time conference.  I was encouraged by the fact I hold some of the same value in transparency and making things happen.  I also picked up some great ideas on other theories and ideas to strengthen the Five brand and business of web design.

In such an evolving industry it’s great to listen to great Internet minds and also interact with others fighting the good fight daily.  Overall, I give Big Omaha an A- and look forward to next year.

You are missing out if you’re not in Omaha. I made the voyage down from Minneapolis to check it all out. I’m a big fan of people taking ideas and working them to reality like Jeff and Dusty did.  That’s real inspiration to me.

Local web talent What Cheer and marketing mix Secret Penguin hosted an open house that got the evening started.  Things shifted around the corner at 7:30pm to Slowdown, where Gary Vaynerchuk got things up another level by doing his Wine Library TV episode LIVE to a packed house.  Gary will be presenting Friday at Big Omaha as well.

Here are a few photos and video to give you a taste of the night.

Gary Vaynerchuk doing his Wine Library show LIVE at Big Omaha

Big Omaha Conference Kick-off With Gary Vaynerchuk from Five Technology on Vimeo.

Big Omaha co-creator Jeff Slobotski at the kick-off event with me

Badges?  You better believe Big Omaha has some stinkin’ badges!

It was a great night to catch up with some great web design and marketing minds I have connected with in person and online. Drinks and dialogue with Eric Downs, Steve Gordon Jr., Jeff Slobotski,  Robert Murphy, Michael Kelley, Brad Wisler, Chris Burns, Nathan T. Wright and a slew of others.

Things get even better tomorrow with a line-up of great speakers.  I’m pretty excited to hear from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame.

If you’re not here in Omaha, you can tune it to the chatter  http://twitter.bigomaha.com.  Holler at me tomorrow if you are here and I’ll be recapping Friday and the whole weekend next week.

But you, you’re not big.   You’re a small business and while you’re interested in tools and strategies to grow your business, you don’t know how to evaluate the Twitter buzz.  It looks like a time waster, meaningless chatter and something that falls to #524 of what you have to accomplish in your day.

You might want to reconsider. I could list out my 100 reasons a small business should get involved with Twitter, but I think having 100 different voices (comments) would be better.

So I’m putting it out to the Twitter community in the attempt to gather a total of 100 reasons or more to be on Twitter as a small business. Give me yours, leave your Twitter ID too (I’ll link it for you), and lets help those on the fence decide and all of us learn a new thing or two on the benefits of Twitter.

Number One: Who’s The Crazy One?
The first was reading a great Internet marketing article from Andrew Eklund on MinnesotaBusiness.com.  The article easily outlined why Internet marketing is a dream (and reality) for any marketing team/person.  Eklund had some great points that anyone could understand and my biggest takeaways were:

1.  Reworking old and tired traditional marketing is not the answer.

2.  Ignoring the medium (Internet) where prospects are, customers are and that allows for complete tracking of your marketing to sale process is plain crazy.

3.  Internet marketing is not risky, not marketing online is risky.

Give the article a read and you’ll hopefully find a spark to push yourself into investing more time and strategy into leveraging the great benefits of Internet marketing. You’re crazy not too.

Number Two: Ignorance Is Bliss? No.
The second thing that happened was a scenario that unfolded in my email inbox.  I received an email from a business development person I know that contained their newsletter in a PDF attachment.  I froze.  They had a great email subject headline on a topic that I wanted information on but … they would never know that.

I couldn’t believe that the company would ignore the fantastic benefits of email marketing after all that hard work.  They put together a well designed PDF, it had compelling and educating content … yet it was only doing half of its job.  It wasn’t going to clue the business in on its relevance, performance and its outcome.

If they had sent this information via an email marketing program they would have gained these valuable marketing benefits:

1.  Who opened their email newsletter

1b.  Better yet, they would have reduced effort (clicks & time) to get to the goods

2.  What links users clicked on to get more info or take action

3.  The ability to fully track users from email to website to conversion

4.  They can still include the PDF version AND see who downloaded that

This marketing campaign could have been so much more.  Don’t just go half way, take advantage of the simple opportunity to get everything you want from your marketing efforts.

So to get to my title question, what is holding your company back from Internet marketing?  As Ecklund’s article pointed out, it offers accountability, sustained progress, sales, leads, return-on-investment, and deep business intelligence.  Let’s add to that affordability too.  Email marketing is an extremely low cost.  Consider though, at any price, the ability to track and measure makes any number realistic when you know what it produced.

So get rid of your fear (or ignorance), make the move, take the right steps, ask questions, get answers and find the ways Internet marketing can improve your business.  There are many.