The Web Works for Local Business

My itchy nose and watery eyes tell me that spring is in the air. Along with that comes hot weather, which prompted a search for someone to fix something that was wrong with our air conditioner. I was too busy dealing with house repairs to deal with that. Did I mention that an idiot drunk driver crashed into our house in February? Thank God no one was hurt but it threw my life into chaos.

Anyway, my husband found somebody and last week he showed up and replaced the evaporator coil and now we have a nice cool house, just in time too because the temperature is in the 80s already. So as I paid the guy, I noticed a URL on the invoice and asked him if he’s using the Internet. His answer surprised me…an enthusiastic YES.

He went on to tell me that most of his leads are coming from the Internet and he’s thinking of discontinuing his Yellow Pages ad.

This is BIG! When a small “Mom and Pop” type business discontinues their Yellow Page ad, or even thinks about it, that tells me that they are finally starting to “get” it. The light bulb is finally on and in this case, Alex is thinking about how he can take that three grand he’s paying for that teeny tiny unchangeable ad in a book that nobody even looks at anymore and generate leads online.

Proof positive that the web works for small local business and even better, they are starting to realize it.

Read “The Go Giver”

It’s not often that I read a book start to finish in 2 days, or continue to think about it afterwards. That was the case with “The Go Giver”, a little story about a powerful business idea. It’s very easy reading, and really forces you to look at yourself closely. Do you have an abundance mentality? The book teaches that changing your focus from “getting” to “giving” will yield surprising results.

I’ve heard this said in other ways, i.e. if you help enough people get what they want, you’ll get what you want. And if you look at some of the most successful people in business, you’ll see that it wasn’t money motivating them, it was their passion that was driving them.

I did a call a couple days ago where I discussed the role of passion in deciding what niche to pursue. It certainly does make it easier to succeed, don’t you think? I’d love to hear from some of our moms out there on how you decided which niche to pursue online and why it was the perfect (or not so perfect) topic for you!

I think you’ll enjoy the book…I bought it from Amazon.com, it’s by Bob Burg and John David Mann.

Is it the Death of the Blackberry?

Before I begin, let me say upfront that I am not a Blackberry addict — I have one, but I seldom use it. It’s good for when I travel and don’t feel like lugging my laptop.

I can check my email, but it’s pretty much useless for web surfing or anything else that I really want to do. The keyboard is just not big enough, and it’s never caught on with me. I almost never take it with me unless I’m actually leaving town.

Since I’m not a frequent traveler, it’s cost per use winds up being about $200-300. Pretty stupid, huh?

So a few weeks ago I heard about a mobile laptop, one that’s about as big as a DVD case, weighs less than 2 pounds, allows you to surf the Net and use Skype, and retails for $399.

It took me all of a week to decide to buy it, even though I just bought a super-duper Dell XPS with Dual 20″ monitors, one for my desk, one for my treadmill desk. That frees up the laptop that I use on my treadmill desk. And it frees up the Dell Dimension that I had for 5 years before buying the Super Duper Dell. The triplets will get that one, and the laptop is for whatever.

So why do I need a new one?

Because it’s so CUTE — you should see this thing!

It weighs next to nothing…it can easily fit into a regular size purse or even a large fanny pack. I have a Baggallini wallet bagg and it almost fits. If I need to carry more stuff with me, there’s a backpack purse — I just tried it and it fits with room to spare. I think I’ll be carrying the backpack more often.

I just got my Asus today, so I can’t give too detailed a review, but the screen looks great. The icons are big, so you get the feeling that you’re looking at a Blackberry with a very large screen. I haven’t been able to connect to the Internet yet, so I can’t tell you how the web browsing part goes, but so far everything looks readable and the keyboard is typable.

If it all works out, I may get rid of my Blackberry, unless I need it for connecting to the Internet. According to the reviews at Amazon.com (that’s where I bought it), it’s supposed to be easy to connect to the Internet. I’m reasonably tech savvy, so I think I’ll be able to do it.

Here’s the info:

Asus Eee 4G-Galaxy 7″ PC Mobile Internet Device ( 512 MB RAM, 4 GB Hard Drive, Webcam, Linux Preloaded) Black

It’s also available in white, and a new version is coming out that offers 1 GB of RAM and an 8 GB hard drive for $100 more. I didn’t want to wait, though.

So far I love it, but the proof is in the using! Stay tuned…I’ll post my review after my trip to L.A. next week.

Walk While You Work At Home

Hello from my treadmill desk! Yes, I am walking at the rate of 1.8 mph on my Smooth Fitness treadmill as I’m typing this. People sometimes ask me if it’s hard to type and walk at the same time and the answer to that is “no”. And even if it was, I’d do what my son tells his sisters all the time - “Build a bridge and get over it.” Because having a treadmill desk has been life changing for me.

If you’re an internet based mom who’s at the computer all day, wants to lose weight or just stay healthy, and have trouble fitting in the exercise, you may want to do what I did — put together your own treadmill desk.

That’s what I did a little over a year ago, and it was the best $2,500 I ever spent. You may not have to spend that much — if you already have a laptop all you’ll need is the treadmill. Maybe you already have the treadmill, sitting in a corner, gathering dust. Whatever it costs, please think about investing that amount in yourself.

I’m embarassed to admit what I weighed when I got my treadmill desk, maybe I’ll ‘fess up later. But I will tell you that I’ve lost 41 pounds during that time and the biggest factor in that weight loss has been the treadmill desk. Initially I thought of it as an experiment, and almost didn’t get the heavy duty treadmill because I wasn’t sure if I would like it. But I’m glad I didn’t get a cheapie treadmill because it would have died by now for sure.

If you’re interested in putting together your own, you can find out how I did it and even see pictures on my blog www.SharonSays.com, and you should also check out Jay Buster’s website, http://www.treadmill-desk.com

Feel free to ask me any questions, and if you get a treadmill desk, be sure to let us know!

Sharon

User Generated Content at the Local Level

Newspapers are finally realizing the value of user generated content.  A recent article in the Houston Chronicle announced the re-design of the web site and invited readers to “Find out what news your neighbors are sharing and post some of your news directly to the Web site in this new feature.”

It also informed me that residents had posted more than 100 images of local people, places and events. And that I could catch up on the latest word in my area and chime in with my.02 cents worth in blogs by local reporters.

Do you see the significance of this? Have you seen any other examples of “local” user generated content? Am I the only one excited by this?

Google Street View: For the Spy in You

Check out this headline from the front page of the Houston Chronicle: “Houston joins Google’s Street View”.

I just love Google. They really get how important the internet is to consumers and local business, and have always led the field in creating tools and resources aimed at helping to put the two together.

So of course I was delighted to read that Houston had been added to the Street View lineup and immediately went out for a stroll around town. Since we live in the suburbs and I work at home, this is something that I probably otherwise wouldn’t do. At least not today.

In case you’re not familiar with Street View, it’s a feature of Google Maps that displays pictures of city streets taken by Google’s car-mounted camera over the past year.

It usually focuses on the downtown area and major streets of a given city. So far it’s only US cities, but I have no doubt it will expand. Visit http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/index.html for a quick video tour.

I fired up Google Maps at http://maps.google.com/ and clicked on the “Street View” tab and see that Street View is available in 9 U.S. cities to date: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, Orlando and New York, Houston, Denver, and Miami.

I clicked on the little camera icon for Houston, clicked on the “zoom in” link, and there I was, a little gold stick figure icon standing in the middle of downtown Houston.

It takes a bit of practice to get used to moving around. It helps to look at the video first, as it shows you how to actually “walk” down the street. Of course, I rarely read the directions so I dove in and learned the hard way how to steer my little gold man around town.

At first I thought it was going to be like A9.com, the now defunct Amazon search engine that at one time offered something similar called “Block View”, which sort of graphically represented a neighborhood and you could “see” what businesses were nearby, sometimes with actual photos of businesses.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I know where something is located only in relation to another business. That little consignment shop right down the street from Kroger. The beauty supply place across from the post office. And so on.

So anyway, I roamed around downtown Houston for awhile, then decided to venture out to NASA’s Johnson Space Center where I used to work many years ago and haven’t been back since. It was so cool to zip down El Camino Real, passing intersections as I went. You really feel like you’re in a car! Once I got used to it, I decided it was better than A9’s Block View.

Of course, something like this automatically raises privacy concerns. If you happened to be walking down the street in any of those cities when the Google cam went by, your image could very well be in the Street View archives.

Reportedly there have been pictures of students sunbathing in bikinis, somebody’s car in a driveway, a cat in a window (one blog post said “Dang, it’s so detailed, I can even see he’s a tabby!”).

Of course Google is sensitive to the issue and will remove objectionable or sensitive images if the person is recognizable and asks for the photo be to taken down. To give you an idea of what kind of photos you can find, check out The Top 15 Google Street View Sightings.

Also this blog post gives links to many more: Boing Boing

Ok, your turn. Check out Google Street View and post any cool pics that you find!

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Don’t Let This Happen To You

Ok, the first thing I’m going to share with you has nothing to do with local business per se, it’s a valuable reminder for any business that has a website and relies on that website for income.

Make sure that your website is backed up at all times and can be restored at a moment’s notice. You’d think that someone who has been online for as many years as I have wouldn’t get caught looking the other way.

Yet, while I was in California on vacation, my server was hacked, along with many others hosted with my ISP. I found out about it last week, 2 days after I got back.

Theories abound as to how it happened, but finger pointing and the blame game can come later… the important thing was to restore each of the 76 sites on my server to its original state. The sites looked normal at first glance, but some nasty code had been added to many of the pages that made Google think that we were distributing malware. Not good.

I thought I had prepared for this — daily backups had been scheduled when I first got the server. I made it very clear that backups were important and needed to be done like clockwork. And they were. At first.

Do you see where this is going?

Yes, at some point, somehow, some way, I ran out of space and didn’t have enough for backups anymore. The drive was 60% utilized and the backups are zipped so there should have been enough space, but whatever. The last backup was 2 months old — arrgh!

Ok, well, no use whining about it after the fact. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. Got the server people to run a script to clean all the pages. It took 3 times, but it finally worked.

Next, the issue of backups. In addition to the scheduled backups on the server, I signed on with an external company so they will be maintained in another place. Daily. Automatically. No running out of space.

Finally, find another hosting company, one that specializes in dedicated servers. That took the longest but I finally decided on a high end hosting company that will actually manage the server for me, keeping an eye on things and making sure nothing like this happens again. And to be on the safe side, I hired an external server management company to fill in any gaps in the hosting company’s coverage.

Yes, it’s going to cost me a couple hundred dollars more a month for all of this “insurance” but if it will keep me from having to endure another week like the one I just went through, it will be so worth it.

And now, I need another vacation!

Hello Internet Based Moms!

Hello fellow Internet Based Moms! My name is Sharon Odom Fling and I’ve been on the Internet since 1995, and making a full-time living online since 2002. I come from a corporate background, first as an engineer, then a systems analyst. But I was always a maverick who bucked the trend, walked to the beat of my own drum, wanted to do my own thing.

Luckily, the Vice President I worked for at The Walt Disney Company was also a maverick, and after I discovered and fell in love with the Internet, allowed me the freedom to rewrite my job description. I started developing database driven websites for our department, which led to developing even larger applications for Disney’s Intranet.

After I gave birth to triplets (2 girls and 1 boy) in 1997, my manager allowed me to telecommute 2 days a week so I could be near my children, although I did have a nanny. It was a dream job and a great situation.

Meanwhile, I started freelancing, helping small business owners get their business online. It became obvious early on that most small business owners didn’t have a clue about the power of the Internet, and had no idea how much it could help their business. Unfortunately, that has not changed all that much in the past 7 years!

In 2000 I left Disney but returned as a consultant for my old department, working totally from home (I still had to have a nanny!) After Sept 11th, consulting funds dried up and I decided not to look for another job — I was officially an entrepreneur. I wrote my first book “How to Promote Your Local Business on the Internet” in 2002, and have never looked back.

I created www.GeoLocal.com, a site devoted to local internet marketing, and teamed up with SiteSell.com to publish “The Local Business Masters Course” in 2006. More recently I partnered with internet marketing expert Terry Dean to create a 6 CD audio course titled “Next Generation Marketing Magic”, a local internet marketing primer and resource guide.

My focus is on lead generation and local online advertising, which is an area that has been largely ignored by most online marketers. From mobile local to local lead generation, the possibilities are endless for those who will reach out and grab them.

I’m very excited to be a part of this fantastic group of women, and look forward to sharing information and experiences with all of you!

Sharon Odom Fling

P.S. Click here to ask Sharon a question!