.:RIMproInsider:.

Thanks to Lee Oddem of Online Marketing Blog for this tip for submitting multiple urls to Yahoo for free. Normally you have to submit one URL at a time. Now, you can submit many urls at once using Yahoo’s free submission service.

Basically, you create a list of all the urls you want indexed in a text file and name it urllist.txt (Yahoo’s suggestion). Example: http://www.domainname.com/urllist.txt.

Place the file in the main directory of your web site and submit the URL to the Yahoo free submit form.

You must have a MyYahoo acount but that is painless and free.

Once you upload your txt file submit the URL of that file, ei -http://www.domainname.com/urllist.txt to

Yahoo’s Free Submit Page

Read a great quote in Fast Company written by Wenda Millard, Chief Sales Officer, Yahoo.

“People aren’t going to listen to you unless you’re part of their world.”

One of the things I see so much in the marketing we do in the RIM world is that we are very much stuck in our world of shelves and box counts, and cubic feet.

Honestly, I have yet to meet a client who prefers to be billed in cubic feet. It’s confusing to them. Granted once they learn they shrug their shoulders and accept it. But clients think from the perspective of a box.

If you want people to hear your marketing, start by getting out of your world and into theirs. Into their problems and ways to solve it. Ways to provide measurable, realistic solutions to the problems they have with their inactive or semi-inactive files, their media storage and backup rotations, their need to access files more quickly than a day through digital access and their security issues as it relates to the paperwork they create everyday that needs to be destroyed.

There is a great tool by 5Minutesite.com for producing keyword phrases for local search. Called Generate Local Adwords & Keyword Lists, this is how you work it. Enter your zip code, the radius you want covered and then it automatically generates keywords phrases combining the numerous towns and cities that you can cut and paste into your payperclick information.

Check it out.

Thanks to SEO Book on pointing this out…

I read a great post this morning about websites. Substitute “service” for “product” Then realize your prospect is likely saying this too.

So what?

So I came to this website and read about your product. You’ve given me a product description, features and benefits, and product photos, yet after reading it I still have to ask….

So what?

Do you hear their question? Are you answering it?

Congrats to Carolyn Curtis of Richards and Richards in Nashville for getting some great coverage in the Tennessean

Also congrats to Candice Askew, owner of Confidential Document Destruction Services and Ken Dean, director of operations at Datashred, both of Shreveport for getting coverage.

I keep repeating this over and over. Get free publicity from your local papers. It works. Its free. It builds your credability and exposure. In our business what could be better. This builds the trust before they ever even talk to us.

Everyday I talk with many of you and what I constantly hear is your desire to improve… improve sales, improve marketing, improve web results, improve employee performance, improve time management, improve hiring process, improve efficiency, improve … improve… improve.

Here is the problem I see. You cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Case in point. I hear this one alot from my clients.
“I want to improve my web site results.”
My question then becomes. “What results are you getting now?”
The answer I get most often.. “I don’t know”
My response… “How do we know if we are improving if we don’t know where you are now?”

So the best thing you can do is measure everything you want to improve. Religiously. Intensely. I measure my web stats 4 times a day. I know who has been on the site, how long they stayed, which links they clicked, how many people clicked which links. On my newsletter The RIMproReport, I know how many times people have looked at the email, who they forwarded it to, what articles they wanted more on and what was the actual read rate.

Everything I can measure I do. And by measuring all these things, I have the ability to know where I want improvement, then the metrics to know after changing something, to know if I actually got improvement.

Read a great article about white spaces in marketing.

To marketers, “white space” means the places where customers shop, but where existing media, channels and promotions cannot reach. “White space” represents un-exploited opportunities. These include uncovered, under-resourced and new markets and customers as well as gaps in marketing process due to channel, organizational and media inefficiencies.

Where are those in our industry? For records storage it may be how to reach all those in “self storage” Where are the places your customers might be, but you think you have no way of getting to them? Is there someone else getting to them, that you might cooperate with?