Are You the Real Joe Sugarman?
My background in Internet Advertising actually started taking root way back in the seventies when I majored in television and film production with a minor in advertising at Grahm Junior College in Boston, Ma.
One of my most memorable classes was when a professor introduced us to the writing style of Joe Sugarman, who owned JS&A Group Inc, America’s largest source of Spaced-Age products such as the Pocket Yellow Pages, the Soviet Challenge chess game and the Nuclear Mailbox.
At that time Joe was the Direct Marketing Man of the Year and in 1991 was presented with the prestigious Maxwell Sackmein Award for his contributions to direct marketing.
After my retirement from law enforcement in 1997 is when I decided to dive into the brave new world of Internet Marketing with my Radarbusters website and I dusted off my old class notes to freshen up my marketing skills.
Joe Sugarman tip #1: You must become an Expert
Well this was easy, I was a retired cop and I taught hundreds of other cops to use radar guns and write speeding tickets, therefore I was an expert in traffic enforcement and speed enforcement radar. The persona of Radar Roy was born.
Joe Sugarman tip #2: You Must Know Your Customer
This was the hard part, who was my customer?
At first I envisioned testosterone filled young men with supercharged cars drag racing down the highway, boy did I get that part wrong!
My perfect customer ended up being a 35 year old insurance salesman, married with two kids, earning $35,000 a year who hated their job.
His “fantasy result” was driving a Ferrari with a radar detector on the windshield driving on the Interstate with the top down outsmarting “the man”.
Joe Sugarman tip #3: Plant the Seeds
My perfect customer normally called or emailed me on a Monday because they got a ticket over the weekend and wanted to know how to beat their ticket.
I gave them my advice while “planting the seed” on how to avoid the next ticket by recommending the perfect radar detector that cost over $300.00.
At this time I heard the familiar “my wife would kill me if she knew I spent $300.00, don’t you have something cheaper?”
Sure I did, but they were not as effective as the $300.00 unit.
My $300.00 unit would detect the police officer’s radar guns seven times the distance more than the cheaper models and lets not forget about the cost of the ticket and the increase of your auto insurance over the next three years. Besides I offer a full money back guarantee if your wife finds out, just return it in the next 60 days, no questions asked.
I knew I was on target, I knew their desires, their “fantasy result” and answered all their objections. It was here that they pulled the “trigger” and purchased one of my $300.00 radar detectors!
Over the next ten years I repeated this process over and over reinforcing my message in videos and my copyrighting and growing the RadarBusters network to include a number of other websites, making my moniker the third most used keyword term when searching for a radar detector and positioning the brand to a seven figure business that completely dominated the radar detector niche.
Then in 2007 one of my competitors bought me out, a dream come true.
After taking a year off to fulfill some of the items on my bucket list, like learning how to fly a plane, I decided to jump back into Internet Marketing full time as a consultant and teacher.
A few weeks ago I was on a conference call with one of my first students who today works for an Internet Marketing firm and is also is self employed as an affiliate marketer. We were discussing a website they were planning on launching and wanted some SEO tips. Also on the phone was someone named of Joe Sugarman, could it really be the Joe Sugarman that I idolized as a budding Internet Marketer?
“Are you the same Joe Sugarman who wrote Triggers?” Joe replied yes and then asked how I knew about him and his book.
I explained that I had followed him for years and that he played a large role in my success as an Internet Marketer.
A few days later to my surprise a UPS truck shows up at my office with package containing a box of BluBlocker sunglasses and signed copies of his books!
Then the following day I’m asked by my student for my opinion on his firm’s new website.
This site focuses on a woman’s skin care product so not having any experience in this product or market I take the next logical step and round up some of my neighbors to look at a website.
The first neighbor her mid sixties comments; “It looks like a cheap ad at Walmart”
The second neighbor in her 40’s; “That model looks fake, no one could ever look that good, I don’t trust this site”
Then the third neighbor in her 20’s; “I don’t trust what they are saying or what they are selling that model doesn’t look real to me”
OMG! Now to report this to my student who would then would report it to his Internet Marketing firm…
As I passed on the bad news I also made suggestions on how the site could be salvaged.
I was careful not trying to come off as some Internet marketing guru because in reality I was just putting a new spin on some good old fashion marketing tips that Joe used and taught during his career.
But nothing could prepare me for what happened next!
In a follow-up email I was asked if I would be interested in developing their entire web design and SEO campaign not only for that site, but several others that were under development.
Oh, and by the way my student added, Joe Sugarman is the CEO of the company and you would be working with him.
Google Wave – Catch the Wave Now!
Over the past month I’ve been following Chris Lang who is one of Google’s Analysts and is one of the Beta testers for Google Wave on his website TheGwave.net website.
Chris and I first met at my Phoenix SEO and Internet Marketing MeetUp in July where he invited me to his first public demonstration of Google’s new social media platform last week here in Phoenix.
First off if you think that Google Wave is just some other social media tool such as Twitter, Facebook or whatever you are WRONG!
Google is an entirely new platform for communication and collaboration with your friends, family, co-workers and just about anyone else.
Utilizing Google Wave people can communicate and work together in real time with formatted text, photos, videos, maps and much more.
Any participant in your Wave Network can edit, reply and add content to your wave at any time and other participants can play back the Wave to see what was changed, by whom and when.
A Wave is live in real time. As you type other participants in your Wave can see edits and interact in real time.
The first step that you’ll need to participate in Google Wave is to have a Google Profile, here is a link to mine:
http://www.google.com/profiles/RoyReyer
How to Create a Google Profile
If you don’t already have a Google profile you will need to create one, the process is fairly simple;
Step One: Get a Gmail Account.
Do not make the fatal mistake of registering some wacky name or using your business name for your main profile. Remember this “People using Social Media hate to be marketed to, however they love to buy stuff”.
What does this mean? Well think of it this way, if you saw someone using a name of a business you may have second thoughts of adding this contact to your network because of spam. However if the person used their real name with a photograph, you may be more inclined to adding them to your network.
Step Two: Create a Google Profile
a) While you are signed into your Gmail account, click the link that says “Settings”
b) Go to the Google Account Settings tab and click on the “Google Account Settings” link
c) Now your Profile (or lack of a profile) should be displayed.
d) Click on the “Edit Profile” link
Step Three: Edit Your Profile
Start with the tab “About Me”
Put in your name and contact information. If you would like to have your full name displayed in Google’s search put in a check mark.
If you want to allow people to contact you without Google showing your email address, put a check there.
Add a short bio, make it interesting.
Add links to your favorite websites
Check your profile URL and then press the “Save Changes” button
If you have any photos that you would like to add to your profile, go to the Photos tab
To change/modify your contact info and to allow who gets to see your full contact info check the appropriate boxes.
Get Started with Google Friend Connect
The next step is to create a Google Friend Connect Account:
http://www.google.com/friendconnect
Here is a short video explaining how it works:
Step One: At the login screen determine if you adding Google Friend Connect to a Standard website or a Blogger account. For this tutorial we will explain the steps on how to add Friend Connect to a standard website.
Step Two: Provide Google the name of your website, the home page URL and the language of the website
Step Three: Download the two files to your computer.
Step Four: Use an FTP program to upload the two files to the root directory of your website.
Step Five: Press the “Test to finalize setup” button
Step Six: Set up your member’s gadget and then copy the code to your website
When it’s done it should look something like this (yes I know I don’t have many friends yet. If you enjoy this post please add yourself as a friend)
Joining Blogs and Adding Friends
Now that you have a Google Profile and a Google Friend Connect widget on your website click the “join” button and confirm that you want to join.
Next you can add friends by clicking the avatar of other users in the Friends Connect Gadget.
Google Reader
The most important tool in your Internet Marketing arsenal is having a Google Reader Account.
When I owned and operated my Radarbusters network I used the Google Reader to “spy” on my competitors, used it for reputation management and to keep alert of any trends in my industry.
Another benefit is that Google monitors the subscribers to your RSS feeds as an indicator of your websites quality.
When someone joins your network thru GFC, your RSS feed is automatically added to THEIR Google reader by default in their shared items.
Now your Google Friend Connect Friends can “share your feeds” with a note and add comments.
I encourange anyone that is involoved in Intertnet Marketing to Catch the Google Wave now before your caught up in the undertow later and to sign up now!
Free SEO Event; Az SEO and Internet Marketing Meetup
One of the most critical and costly mistakes businesses make when creating their online presence is the development of their website.
As an example over the past several weeks I was brought in as a consultant by two separate companies whose goal was to increase their positioning in the organic search results (free search engine rankings) and to increase their Google AdWords quality scores to lower their pay-per-click advertising.
Both clients had new websites that were developed by outside web design companies that had no background and/or experience with search engine optimization and the cost of each of these clients’ sites was over $12,000.00.
When I met with each client and showed them the problems with their new websites and telling them that it wasn’t going to work, their first comment to me was “Well I paid all this money to these guys, shouldn’t had they known better?”
My short answer is no and this is why;
Many web developers take short cuts when building websites using stock images, templates and wizards taking the “website out of the box” approach and building what I refer to as an “economy car”.
You can never take an economy car out to the Indy 500 or a NASAR event and expect to win, to be successful you need a high performance race car!
The same is true with your online presence with Google being the ultimate endurance event.
In other words in order to be successful in today’s online market you need to have a high performance website that will dominate your competition.
Now I’m sure that you’re thinking to yourself “Heck, I have to spend boat loads of money to have someone like you to build this high performance
website so I can be successful in Google”, my answer is no!
However what you do need is some of the basic understandings of what the search engines like and dislike.
Therefore, during our FREE SEO Training Meetup in September, I show you some of the most common errors people make while developing their websites along with free tools and web publishing programs that you can use to get started.
And if any of our participants are brave enough, we will also do site reviews of their websites giving tips on how they can improve their online presence.
For more information about this free event and/or to sign up, click here.
After reading this post, please be sure to sign up for my “FREE SEO TIP OF THE DAY” if you have not yet done so.
By subscribing you will receive my daily newsletter where I discuss the strategies that I’ve used to build out my RadarBusters network to a seven figure business which I then sold to one of competitors in 2007 making my family and I millionaires!
