A Website With A Message
The fun part about a microsite is the focused message. Cotton Incorporated needed to reach dairy farmers with the benefits of feeding whole cottonseed to their herds in new ways online.  The website is filled with valuable information on WCS facts, feeding, storage, pricing and more.

We built a custom WordPress blog as whole cottonseed news delivery feature that allows for the posting of news, press releases and video updates.

The website also features information on WCS dealers so that dairy farmers can locate where to get pricing information and buy product.

Components Of The Web Design Project
For a microsite, we still packed in a bunch of great features into this project.

• Web design
• Custom jQuery JavaScript slideshow
• Content management with the SMC
• Custom WordPress blog/news feature
• Video player
• Integrated Twitter feed
• Custom contest entry forms
• Dealer locator
• Media and resources
• Email marketing opt-in

We’re looking forward to further work with Harvest PR and Cotton Incorporated to achieve macro results.

Visit the website: http://www.wholecottonseed.com/

At each of the Local U stops I’ve been a part of, the information, attendees interaction and speakers seem to get better.  A cool aspect of Denver was having attendee’s coming from afar to get their local search goods from New Mexico, Arizona, Nebraska and even Japan.

I’m not that surprised though when you consider the expertise, the content covered and the ridiculously low cost to attend a Local U event. Any past attendee will rave on the value.

Search Engines & SEO
I presented on the general workings of search engines and what a business can do to be more visible online, both to search engines and consumers.  Finding fun and real ways to show how a small business can approach their website, develop compelling content and prove their credibility online is a favorite for me.

Local Just Keeps Getting Better
The evolution and growth of local search continues at a rapid pace and Local U’s packed room of attendees were rabid for all of the great tips, ideas and strategies to win at local. Maps, SEO, directories, social media and even QR codes were discussed.

Great Presenters Willing To Share
At every event, I keep hearing comments and reading Twitter comments (#localu) on the quality of the presenters and the ease of access to them. Local U is an intimate setting that encourages interaction and conversation.  All of the speakers are willing to talk at length before and after the event, allowing for further questions and discussion.

From left to right: Mike Blumenthal, me, David Mihm, Matt McGee & Mary Bowling.

Get It From The Source
All of the Local University presenters offer great local, search, marketing and social media content on their blogs.  If you haven’t visited them before, I recommend doing so:

• Mike Blumenthal – Understanding Google Maps & Local Search
• David Mihm – Mihmorandum
• Matt McGee – Small Business Search Marketing
• Mary Bowling – seOverflow blog

Finally, if you’re new to exploring local search and helping your business online, start with GetListed.org to verify your local search listings are claimed.

The event was rock solid and I enjoyed sessions on web analytics, content strategy, online community building, mobile and more.   I didn’t poll the hundreds in attendance, but heard many comments on the quality of this years event.  Outside of the sessions, time spent with other presenters Jeff Sauer, Aaron Landry, Chris Silver Smith and Nathan Eide made for great discussions and fun.

Small Business SEO
The MIMA Summit seems to carry a bigger agency type feel for the programs and attendees, but a few sessions catered to the small business.  I spoke on Small Business  SEO On A Shoestring and had a great time presenting and fielding questions. My slides are below.

A big thanks to the MIMA board for inviting me to present and all of the volunteers that made the 2010 event so great.

BTW – My first preso slide contains my ALL TIME favorite shoes as a kid, ’89 Air Jordans.

MIMA Summit 2010 – September 27th & 28th
The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s annual Summit is an event to be reckoned with.  I’m excited to be presenting a session on Small Business SEO On A Shoestring Tuesday morning.

I’m humbled to be part of a speaking line-up that includes Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Silver Smith, Jeff Sauer and some other talented Internet minds I enjoy and learn from often.

Local University Denver – October 21st
You won’t find a better small business Internet marketing seminar for the money than GetListed.org’s Local U series. The same as the  Minneapolis Local U event earlier this year, I’ll be heading the session on Intro to Search Engines.  Covering local search from many angles as well as social media and SEO, this event is the best in pure information and best practices.

Don’t miss out on speakers David Mihm, Ed Reese, Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling and Matt McGee.  Sign-up and use promo code five2010 to get $40 off the ticket, it’s just $89 for the 1/2 day session!  Go ahead and sign-up.

I received a call from the client, of our client, to let us know how impressed and satisfied she was with their website.  Again, it wasn’t our client … it was the end-user of the website, a general consumer.

Wow. Of course this is one person’s opinion, but the fact they took the time to locate that we had designed the site and then picked up the phone to let us know their happiness is just plain cool.

Her name was Pam and she sure made our day start off great in the Five office.

Pam let me know that the combination of visual elegance and how easy the website was to use and navigate made her want to call and thank us.  The website she’s referring to is Simonson’s Salon & Spa, which we redesigned earlier this year.

With the end goal of our web designs always being user satisfaction, it was great to get a first hand account of this.

Sure analytics, conversions and all that user data goodness can let you know it’s a job well done, but having Pam take the time to call you is rock solid.

Five Technology programmer Travis Neiderhiser will be leaving his desk later this month to head to Afghanistan with his Army Reserve Unit, the 407th Civil Affairs Battalion of Minnesota. Army Specialist Neiderhiser (soon to be Sergeant) will be leaving Five’s friendly confines for a 400 day tour as his unit operates in support of both conventional and special operations forces.

Just as many thousands of United States soldiers, both overseas and here on US soil, Travis is making a huge sacrifice to defend our freedom, protect our country and work for a better future.

While your opinion on the war may be for or against, the reality of what a soldier puts on the line to do their job is nothing less than incredible.

For Travis, this means leaving his wife, 4 year old daughter and son … a son that is scheduled to be born on July 19th, 2010.  If’ he’s lucky, he’ll get one week with his new son, before he has to endure a year without holding him.  These types of sacrifices make it easy for us around the office to pick up the slack in his absence.

In the office, we’ll miss the humor, the random outbursts, his YouTube finds and the energy that Travis brings to the day.  We’ll have far more Diet Coke available while he’s gone, but maybe we can care package some over there.  Travis has come along way in the last 2 years at Five in many aspects and many of us call him a friend more than an employee or co-worker.

While we throw him a few parties to send him off in style, we also look forward to the welcome back party in about 400 days.

I’m also not willing to let his service and sacrifice go unnoticed.  I invite you to comment with your thoughts or encouragement, it’s the least you can do for someone willing to put it all on the line for you.

Thank you Travis, thank you 407th and thank you to all US service members.

This week I had the opportunity to speak on search engine optimization at a conference put on by the Immunization Action Coalition out in Philadelphia.  The conference is called the Social Media Summit and focuses on helping the medical and health community bring awareness to vaccinations, immunizations and health using social media and Internet marketing.

My role was sitting down with many of the various organizations attending and conducting a review of their website and search engine optimization efforts.  In my hour sessions I focused on SEO best practices, establishing trust online and offered action items for their websites to improve their websites visibility to Google, Bing & Yahoo.

It was a fun challenge to work with medical and health organizations both large and small and discuss websites ranging from 15 pages to 50,000 pages and the  efforts needed to optimize content and spread their message online.  From building links to maximizing your meta page title, we covered a lot of ground.

Organizations I worked with over the 2 days included:

• American Academy of Family Physicians
• ECBT – Vaccinate Your Baby
• National Association of School Nurses
• Autism Science Foundation
• National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners
• National Network of Immunization Nurses and Associates

The conference also engaged some other social media professionals to launch a social campaign right from the conference for Real Guys Immunize.  A very cool idea for a conference.

The best news is that I didn’t have to get any shots to take part in this conference, but I did learn some valuable information on vaccines and children.  My thanks to all of the great attendees I met, the Immunization Action Coalition and Eventive Meetings.

A Focus On E-commerce Fundamentals
Mauer’s Quickswing has been selling their baseball training products online for years, but their former e-commerce site had holes in it.  We took the Joe Mauer approach and focused on the fundamentals:

• An engaging, unique and clean custom web design
• Clear navigation, content and links to view and buy products
• Well structured and simplified product detail pages
• Search engine friendly build-out leveraging SEO best practices
• Easy e-commerce check out steps
• Flexible and easy back-end management for the client (SMC)
• Secure shopping with SSL & Merchant account services

We’re pleased with the overall outcome of the website and look forward to driving an increase in sales online for the Quickswing.  We’re not mad about having the Mauer team in our dugout of great clients either.

Check out the website: http://www.mauersquickswing.com

For the last three years, David has sough out, compiled and published his Local Search Ranking factors that are the read in local search.  In bringing together a great group of local search experts together you get more than one opinion, rating and thoughts on over 60 elements that are part of local search (good, neutral or bad).

Many of my favorite local search gurus are included in the panel including Mike Ramsey, Paul Jahn, Ed Reese, Mike Blumenthal, Andrew Shotland and more. Over 30 experts, all in 1 post.

Thanks again to David Mihm for this incredible resource and having myself and Five Technology be a part of it.

Two packed sessions of Minnesota business owners, marketers, web designers and more soaked up an incredible amount of Internet marketing knowledge from leading experts as well as staff from Google and Bing.  GetListed.org’s Local University delivered as promised with solid education, best practices, approach, tools and more that anyone can implement at some level for marketing online.

Personally, in helping bring the Local U event to the Twin Cities it was satisfying to hear so many of the positive comments following each session and read all of the tweets.  Below are just a few Twitter comments from the day:

This is one workshop that is only out to educate it’s attendees, not sell.

Thank you to all involved, local sponsors Deluxe & ReliaCloud, the attendees, speakers, promotional partners and friends that help me pull this together.

The amount of valuable local search and online marketing information that was shared is awesome.  Smart people that enjoy sharing their vast knowledge is what Local U is all about.  How great is that?  I’m proud to have been part of this great group and event.

Here are a few photos from the event ….

Learn more on GetListed.org and the Local University series, who’s next stop is Cleveland, Ohio in June.