“…by not playing the game, by not getting in there and figuring out what to do, they’re really missing out.”

Mike:
Hey everyone, it’s Mike Sullivan. This is MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs and bring you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful.

Joining us today is Travis Smith of Lift Division. Lift Division is a search engine marketing and email marketing organization, and Travis is one of our subject matter experts. Travis, great to have you with us today. Can you tell me a little about Lift Division?

Travis:
Yeah, sure. Lift Division is a search marketing firm. Myself and Jamie Stephens started Lift Division, I guess it was in April of 2010. So right at a year later, we merged with Pure and Brent Beshore bought our company, and Jamie Stephens continued to do programming and build up his product called Book’d. But I came on board with Pure, and so I run the search team here. Lift Division has maintained its identity, but we are definitely a Pure company. Pure owned.

Mike:
Travis, you have a background in engineering. What made you decide to step away from engineering and into internet marketing?

Travis:
Yeah, that’s a good question, and I get that question a lot, like how I went from engineering to marketing. They seem a little bit disconnected, but what I’ve found, actually, in studying marketing is a lot of the great direct response marketers were former engineers. I think it’s because marketing is a really good blend of psychology and math, and especially online, everything is trackable, and it’s a numbers driven game. Particularly with search, we’re dealing with search algorithms. So how I got into it was partly boredom and partly interest. I was never really satisfied with engineering, but I did it for seven years. I had gotten a degree, and I just didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how to get out of my situation. Engineering is pretty specific, and I was kind of locked down. It’s not a like degree in business or whatever.

My company at the time, our workload was really slow. So I was getting kind of itchy to do something else. I started studying how to sell things on eBay and just tinkered with it a little bit. This was like 2000-ish, 2001, and then I bought this book, which is one of the reasons I’m really passionate about information marketing, because I bought this $40 e-book on how to build a Yahoo! Store. It’s from Andy Jenkins, and the book literally changed my life. It was probably the best $40 I’ve ever spent, because it equipped me to do keyword research, identify a niche, set up pay-per-click ads in Overture at the time, which was bought by Yahoo!, and then build this Yahoo! store.

So I didn’t really know what to do, I’d never run a retail store, but I grew up riding ATVs, and the market was pretty wide-open online at that time. So I found a guy who would make custom seat covers for me and drop-ship them if I just sent him the orders, and that evolved into . . . I ended up with four warehouses across the country that shipped every part, basically, that an ATV would need. I ran it all out of my house on the side, for years, and everything was drop-shipped. I never stocked any product. Then it finally just grew to the point where I was kind of forced to quit my job, which is really what I wanted to do anyway. I wanted to get out of engineering, so it worked out well.

Mike:
This is clearly your area of expertise. What are some of the things that small businesses are missing when it comes to internet marketing today?

Travis:
I think they’re missing a lot, quite honestly, specifically local businesses, Main Street businesses. The Internet is a little bit scary for these businesses I believe. If you’re not in the space every day, keeping up with the blog posts and actually executing strategies, it can be overwhelming. But one of the really cool things that’s happened is Google, specifically in the last few years, has made Google Places and local search really, frankly easy for Main Street businesses to dive into and get internet traffic. Because national SEO, which is what I refer to as basically anything that doesn’t produce a map result, so if you’re in that space, the search can be very complicated. But anyway, what I think these businesses are missing is just frankly all of the prospects that are looking for them in Google and Yahoo! and Bing, but Google obviously has the most market share. So, by not playing the game, by not getting in there and figuring out what to do, they’re really missing out.

I talked to a client the other day. He bought my training course on Google Places, and he told me that he gets a tremendous amount of business from Google Maps. Actually, he gets five-to-one customers from Google Maps as he does in Google AdWords, which is their paid version of search. But I was actually a little bit shocked by that in this local market, but there is a tremendous amount of business there to be gained. Certainly with mobile, people are going to Google more often for local solutions.

One more thing I want to say about that, too, is that email marketing, I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the opportunity to email market. The ability to build an auto-responder sequence and capture a lead and attempt to convert that lead into a customer with automated email is one of the best levers that has been created in probably the history of marketing, because you build it once, you flip it on, and it runs forever. One or two percent of visitors are going to convert to a customer if you do nothing, but you can turn on an auto-responder sequence and crank that up to maybe five or ten percent. There’s a lot of opportunity there and a lot of small businesses don’t do it.

Mike:
I think this is sort of along the same lines. Tell me about your book, “Lift,” and what we’ll learn as small business owners from reading it.

Travis:
Yeah, I wrote the book in 2010, and it’s specifically for Main Street businesses that want to do-it-yourself approach to local SEO. They want to get traffic. They want to get ranked in Google Places. I did it for a couple of reasons. I had always played in the national sandbox. I had a friend come to me. It was a local insurance agent, and he wanted me to help him get ranked in the Google Maps. I hadn’t done any of that work before, so I had to really dig in and do the research and figure out how the algorithms were different and what we could do to help him. So in that process what I discovered was it’s not that complicated. Certainly it’s getting more complicated as time goes on, but it’s definitely easier. Google has made it easier for these small businesses. They’ve really given them the functionality in Google Places of an entire website. I mean, it would cost, probably $5000, $10,000, depending on who built it for you, it would probably cost that much money to build all of that functionality into your own website, and Google gives it to these businesses for free.

But what I learned was it’s not that complicated, and millions of Main Street businesses are still not playing the game. I mean, there are so many businesses that I encounter in the local search space that haven’t even claimed their Google Places listing yet. It’s not even owner verified. So the competitive landscape is thin in some places, different geographic regions and niches. So when I discovered that it was relatively easy, I told you earlier I was passionate about information marketing. I wanted to come up with a product that would teach these small businesses, equip them to leverage it and empower them, really, for transformation in their online marketing. Also, frankly, I just wanted to learn it better myself, so the best way to do that was to dive in and write the book.

Mike:
What are some examples of the industries you’ve served with internet marketing, and what kind of results have you seen?

Travis:
Industries I’ve served, I’ve done a lot of work in retail. For probably eight years, I’ve been involved with online retail. We serve clients in all kinds of service niches, as well, so retail, the medical field, insurance, all kinds of stuff. Probably one of my favorite case studies to talk about is what I did at SoccerPro.com before I started Lift Division. Soccer Pro was a really fun ride. I was the online marketing director there, and we grew the traffic about 800 percent in 18 months, and it was a fantastic thing to do because we were right in the middle of the recession. Essentially, what we did was we just scooped up market share from everyone else with organic SEO, and it was phenomenal. It was so much fun, and it really got me addicted to search marketing, because I saw the power of owning the top real estate in Google for a niche. So anyway, that’s probably my favorite case study, but we serve all kinds of industries, both local and national.

Mike:
So I’m constantly getting emails by companies claiming that they can provide me with number one placement in a Google search for my key term. Can anyone guarantee a number one spot on Google?

Travis:
Guarantee? I guess it depends on what their guarantee is. It’s a pretty gutsy guarantee, I think, and certainly they can guarantee it “or else,” and maybe that “or else” is you don’t have to pay them. Although I do know one guy that tried that model, and you only had to pay him when you got ranked. What ended up happening is that he got people ranked and they ended up not paying. So he stopped doing that. It’s difficult to guarantee any position in Google or any other engine. One reason is that the algorithms are changing, probably on a daily basis, I would assume. If you pay attention to Google rankings, they change a lot. They’re always testing. You can do a search now, and do a search for that same term in five minutes, and you’ll likely get different results. So it’s difficult to guarantee. What I can guarantee clients, and what I tell people, is that I guarantee you’ll make progress. I guarantee you will own a majority of the top real estate, okay, if you do all the things we recommend doing. But I never guarantee position. Frankly, you could wake up tomorrow, you could be ranked really well, like this year, Google releases the Google Panda update, and some people disappear. So we just don’t know what they’re going to do.

Mike:
All right, Travis. Anything else you’d like to add?

Travis:
I would encourage businesses, if they haven’t thought about search, to really consider it. Obviously, not every niche could benefit from search, but certainly most can. The other thing I would throw out is if you’re considering designing a new website, consider SEO before you do that. I see a lot of companies make the mistake of building a site and then they want to do SEO after it’s up. That’s really a disadvantage, because a lot of the things you want to do with the site’s structure information architecture, for SEO could be best done in the design phase. The other thing I would say is if you are a small business, a Main Street business, check out my book, my training course. It will help you, for sure. Every student who I’ve talked to that’s actually done the work has gotten results.

Mike:
Hey, Travis, thanks for all the information on internet marketing.

Travis:
Thanks a lot. I appreciate it!