I’ve certainly taken my lumps believing that I could figure something out on my own. The interesting part is that if we just followed the same advice we received from our first grade teachers we’d be much better off. Ask for help. Most challenges in business have been faced before. Someone out there has untied that extremely difficult knot that you are currently wrestling with. Find them and ask them.

I’ve found fantastic mentors in networking groups, professional associations, on an airplane or sitting outside the local pub under an umbrella. Your friends and colleagues know people who have been on the same journey. One of my closest friends and business partners I met because I invited myself to a BBQ he was attending.

The most remarkable thing is that most people are more than willing to help. The most seasoned professionals love to see others succeed. They all know how hard it is to create and build a company. If you are genuinely interested in learning from them, they will provide wisdom.

So check your ego at the door. Get out there. Meet smart people. Let them lead you. They have done it before.

McDonalds wants in on this? I was so surprised I checked with PR News Online.  Here’s what they had to say: http://www.prnewsonline.com/water-cooler/2013/05/09/pr-expert-weighs-in-on-mcdonalds-charles-ramsey-tweet/

With my own not-very-scientific review of comments on Twitter, it looked like public opinion was pretty squarely pro-McDonald’s; lots of analysts felt they’d made a serious blunder but consumers loved them for it.  And, surprise, I was delighted to learn that tweeters are now daring McDonald’s to do everything from put Mr. Ramsey in advertising to remodel his entire street. This unexpected lagniappe, the much-deserved support for homespun hero Charles Ramsey seems like a laser light show in an impossibly dark situation. http://indecentxposure.com/grind/70390d06d81b3e00448754f6e11a8d6ded976e58/#.UY-8GkO-FgQ.twitter

We help businesses be found with AgileBid, our automated pay-per-click management service, and unlike social media, our outcomes are pretty dependable. Many of our customers are experienced franchise owners providing janitorial or disaster restoration.  Across the country, they are early-to-the scene at places like fires, thefts and health care cleanups.  Of course connecting your social presence to your community is personal; just like individuals, only each business can decide when and where it’s appropriate to lend a voice.

On May 23^rd McDonald’s announced that they’d ‘been in touch’, awarding Charles Ramsey free McDonald’s food for a year.  I felt vaguely disappointed, though I’m not sure why. I’m still ruminating, but maybe even if the timing of McDonald’s original tweet felt off, the opportunity to do good, to empower and elevate help make it understandable.

We’ve focused on the domestic market, but the recent press we’ve gotten has spurred a much higher level of interest than we expected from international markets and we’ve gotten inquiries from advertisers and agencies from every continent in the world except for Antartica (and if anybody on Esperanza Base is running a PPC campaign, we’ll optimize it for a month, on us). All that interest means we need to broaden our visibility beyond the united states, while still focusing on concentrations of small and medium e-commerce businesses.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve rolled out three partnerships we are very excited about.

AgileBid is now available through the network of cloud services stores operated by SaaS Markets, a leading provider of cloud based app stores worldwide. This important partnership introduces AgileBid to a worldwide audience of small businesses in the millions through about 40 stores in 21 countries, including Denmark!

We’ve also been accepted and strongly reviewed on Getapp.com, the number #1 independent Cloud Apps Marketplace that helps businesses to discover, compare, review and purchase the best B2B apps. Getapp has also provided some really interesting comparisons between us and other companies in our space, and you can check those out here.

Finally, we are super excited to have launched our app for Shopify.com.  Shopify is the platform of choice for 50K+ e-commerce businesses, and for those who want to save time, save money and improve results managing PPC, our integration will allow them to purchase and use our Service from inside of shopify. It’s pretty slick.

We’re always trying to expand our footprint and get the word out to more small businesses. Watch this space for future developments.

Here’s the noble problem; today Brad’s life reads like a nightmare.  Should he continue making his display cases by hand?  Does he have enough help to fill orders?  What about inventing new flavors?  How does he make more sales and scale up production?

I have mucho respect for Portland Bee Balm, bootstrapping their way to success.  That journey is personal. It reminded me of my experience with another local, the MerryHempsters of Eugene.  Here’s the lagniappe.  I’d never heard of them and organic, vegan, sustainable lip balm wasn’t even on my mind in 2007.  I was searching for inexpensive items that might be uber-attractive to college students. The Hempsters wanted online sales; owner Gerry Shapiro would tell me later that trying to grow by placing his product in stores had exhausted his time and his pocketbook.

The promo featured a tube of organic orange hemp lip balm as a free gift to any student who would sell their old textbook to this niche site.  Each tube cost a dollar.  One year later the company I served had doubled, adding more than ten million dollars in new sales of used textbooks online. Fast forward and I’m part of Ideagility today, helping smart, small and medium sized businesses affordably explode by being found online. I wasn’t thinking about that in 2007. We were just tickled, Gerry and the Merry and I, to find each other without going to the store.

• Now matters.  Getting in-market today matters more than waiting to get it perfect tomorrow.  By increasing or decreasing the investment in paid advertising automatically, as dictated by actual analysis of Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS):
• Our client’s customers are three times or more likely to “click on” a paid advertisement than an organic listing online.
• Campaign ROAS of 8X or more most frequently justified an increase in paid advertising spend for individual customers; over 65% of online retailers surveyed by Internet Retailer reported that their organic listing decreased last year, despite significant investment and due at least partially to the difficulty of keeping up with the frequent Google changes in API that determine free rankings.
• Single topic paid advertising campaigns drove more conversions than generic campaigns that shared multiple products or services; 70% of survey responders reported spending 20% or more of total marketing dollars on paid ads online, and more than one third credit search with generating 50% or more of company sales.
• Our customers drove conversions higher by ‘going local’ with refined keywords matches and negative keywords that limit response from customers you cannot fulfill; survey responders report that eliminating broad matches worked to reduce their cost-per-click.
• Be relentless. Recording phone call conversions for future learning by the entire team rocketed our client’s ability to improve.  Service providers like disaster restoration specialists very effectively use pay-per-click advertising to drive potential customers with urgent needs to call.  Listening to these phone calls, and analyzing the best and worst of them inspired team-wide improvements that led directly to more sales again and again.
• Test every day. Automated keyword testing provides continual learning, supporting customers who need to find new sales.  We’ve learned that all our customers need new sources; micro targeting and keyword testing success lead directly to creating more sales.  Near impossible to do when leading campaigns by hand; manual campaign management is too time-intensive.  Programming in extensive, ongoing keyword testing with a local focus on what’s working now revealed startling new sales and customer interests last year.  Using our software to uniquely identify the exact keywords responsible for conversions online and by phone led to even deeper levels of growth.
• Be found. Customers searching for your products and services right now need you now. If they can’t find you, they move on.  Forcing first page placement when needed, during highest volume seasons, is sometimes worth the cost.  Search marketers who do not vary their paid ad spend to match the buying season miss valuable opportunities. 

“Search engine marketing presents a real challenge to a lot of small and medium-sized businesses,” says Andrew Frank, an analyst at research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. “The cost of automating and optimizing bidding strategies has been high enough to exclude smaller players, so the next phase of offerings must focus on affordability for this segment.”

Obviously we agree, glad to be here.

- Rahm

AgileBid is flexible, smart and innovative – the first service of its kind generally available for small businesses (SMBs) at a fraction of the cost.

We think so, too!

-Rahm

First, we have big news happening very soon, so watch this space.

Second, the Austin team just moved into our new office at Capital Factory, a high tech incubator/co-working space in beautiful downtown Austin. In this video, CMO Rahm McDaniel walks through the office, evaluates key features and offers his assesment.

Watch it Yourself:

Below are a few of our favorite tools that can help you build a fully automated social marketing campaign.

• Twitterfeed: This service allows your RSS-enabled blog posts to be automatically posted to your Twitter at customizable, pre-determined intervals. Links in your posts become shortened Bit.ly URLs, which provide insights as to the number of clicks and geographic locations of your audience. Another useful feature of Twitterfeed is that you can repost from other company or people’s blogs, giving them credit using the “via @theircompany name” option. Posting other stories from companies and individuals in your niche will help you establish authority and provide valuable, credible content for your audience. It also builds great niche associations.
• HootSuite: This service allows automated posts and offers built in Twitter and Facebook analytics. One thing that sets this service apart is its ability to handle more than one social media account (5 or more accounts is a premium service). You can write a single post that gets transmitted to multiple accounts including MySpace, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and more.
• Buffer: This web app works as an iPhone and Android app as well as a desktop extension tool for the Chrome browser.  It allows you to store interesting content found from the web in a custom Buffer queue for posting later on Twitter and Facebook. The service posts your Buffer content throughout the day at optimal time intervals to gain the largest audience for each post.
• Tweriod: This service shows you the best times each and every day to post a tweet for the widest possible reach. Tweriod analyzes your tweets, followers, and reach to determine the best time of day for you to Tweet. You can automate your tweets to correspond with the most effective times to post.

One thing to consider with any automated social media strategy is redundancy. That is, posting all the same things to your Facebook, Twitter, & Blog.  Reserve certain content for Facebook, some for Twitter, some for blog posts only. This will help keep audience engagement high and will prevent your readers from reading the same post twice.

Also make sure you keep a human element in your strategy at all times. You don’t want to make it seem too robotic. Reply to tweets with sincerity and spend a few minutes each day watching your Twitter and Blog posts to track engagement.

In the end, by automating the vast majority of your efforts and coupling that with human oversight, your fans, friends, and followers will stay engaged and your social media campaigns will flourish in popularity and effectiveness.

Just for fun, here’s a bit of backstory:  All of the original photography found on our website is the work of retired photographer Roger Garland. (And if you don’t know Roger’s amazing artwork, you may know him as the founder of Greyhound Pets of America.) Do you recognize Chicago?  The Portland Pearl District?  How about Kansas City?  We picked these fabulous photos to better represent the many diverse locations of our customers — from Illinois to Idaho, from Texas to Tennessee — we’re proud to serve you.