As promised, here’s a list of the websites and resources that I mentioned during my talk. If you have further questions, please get in touch.

Interesting Stats:

• By 2015, more people will access the internet through a mobile device than through a computer.
• One out of every five searches has a local intent – good restaurants in Edmonton. On mobile, it’s even better – one in three searches.
• 40% of consumers look up more information on their mobile devices after seeing it advertised in outdoor, newspaper, radio or TV.

Resources, Websites, Things I Mentioned:

Here’s some information about responsive web design.

Google’s free mobile landing page builder.

Foursquare (and Diamond Gentlemen’s Club on Foursquare)

Yelp Edmonton

For tracking social mentions – Google Alerts and Trackur (also: Tracking Your Online Mentions)

Creative QR code examples

What does your website look like on a smartphone?

Google Places and Building Your Local Search Foundation with Citations

The #yegfood hashtag on Twitter – Edmontonians talking about food.

And Finally, Your To Do List:

• See what your website looks like on the major mobile platforms. Is it awful? Fix it.
• Search for what you do in Edmonton – does your business come up? No? Fix it.
• Search for your business on the social and check in services that I mentioned – did you know you were listed there? Start paying attention and start responding.

Want to share this with others? The short link is: tinyurl.com/yegmobile

Want social media training? I’m running a training session on October 26th, here’s the link to register.

Thank you!

This smacks of lazy marketing. This ad says:

1. Only women shop at IKEA.
2. Only women like home furnishings.
3. The only sport that women enjoy is browsing through the IKEA catalog.
4. It’s funny because usually the phrase is “Gentlemen, start your engines”. We’re making it equal-opportunity!

Do marketers really think that all the female demographic needs to be excited about your brand is a mention? Oooh, they’re talking about women! Take my money, please!

In January, IKEA was searching for agencies with “retail experience with a specific focus on the female demographic“. I find it difficult to believe that this is the very best that Leo Burnett could come up with.

Let’s not fall for this. Call IKEA out on their crap on Facebook and Twitter. Tell ‘em what you think of lazy marketing!

At least the ad isn’t pink.

If I was, then I too could have a site with no actual content and irrelevant links ranking in the top 3 for a popular local search term.

Here’s the culprit:

I was doing this search on behalf of one of my clients, and I noticed this odd little site (burlingtonaccountant.ca) cropping up in the top 3.

If you check out the site itself, there’s no actual content. The WHOIS is hidden, so I have no idea who registered it or why. It’s been around less than a year.

Here’s the best part – checking out their backlinks. It’s mostly blog spam – things like “thanks for the post” and “that was funny!”. Some of the links are no followed, but that isn’t stopping them from ranking well. Many of the links aren’t no followed at all.

113 links, none of which actually have anything to do with accounting, or Burlington. And yet they rank in the top 3.

Personally, I’m excited about local search – so excited that I’m making it a major part of my business in 2011. But this sort of crap clogging up the results just makes me shake my head. And then get back to work to bury these sites where they belong.

Two things to take away from this:

1. There are clearly huge opportunities in local search if it’s this easy to get in the top three.

2. It absolutely demonstrates the power of anchor text. Every single one of those blog spam links had targeted anchor text.

Do you have similar examples of bad local search results? Share them in the comments.

Why would I do that? Because homophobia exists and I worry about losing a client because they’re not comfortable working with me as a result. Which is pretty sad – why would I want to work with that client if that’s the case?

Almost everyone on my Facebook feed today is wearing purple today. It’s a lovely thought – wear purple to show your support for gay folks – but it can also be slacktivism at its finest.

My friend Robyn put it well – “I’ll know we’re better when gay friends stop reflexively fudging their pronouns in unknown company.”

Wearing purple isn’t going to stop bullying. I feel like we’re missing the point in what’s going on. Important points like the fact that it’s all boys that are killing themselves, that gay taunts are so destructive to a young boy’s sense of manhood that he feels that the only recourse is suicide.

Wearing purple does show that you care, but there’s deeper issues afoot that I feel are being overlooked. You can say that these problems are only happening in small communities where social change takes a long time, but that isn’t true, either. How many times have you heard “that’s so gay” in Toronto, a supposed bastion of queer liberation?

I don’t want people to wear purple and then forget about what brought us here – the consistent, pervasive, ongoing assumption that somehow being gay is less than being straight.

And now, to end off with a nice, heartwarming tale from my friend Donna.

This morning in Tim Hortons in Burlington a girl I would guess to be around 15 was ahead of me in line and she kept looking back at me. When I went out to go to my car she was standing there and she said I like your purple shirt and she showed me she had one on too. I said…today is purple shirt day! She very suddenly blurted out that she is gay and she picked today to say that out loud for the first time. So while this does not fix everything…I feel like purple shirt day can still do some good…for that girl I think it did anyway.

That is awesome. I love that purple shirt day made a difference for that girl.

1. Have an exit strategy.

2. If you have a business partner, get a good buy/sell and shareholder’s agreement in place. Talk to a lawyer. Get it done right.

3. Get a good accountant and take the time to learn how accounting works. Take the time to really understand your books and how it all works, especially taxes.

4. When you hire vendors, trust them to do their job. You hired them for their expertise.

5. Don’t always go with the cheapest option, sometimes the cheapest can cost you a lot of cash down the road.

6. Document your processes like you’re going to be hit by a bus tomorrow. It’ll help if you end up selling the business later (or if you actually do get hit by a bus). You need to make it easy for someone else to do what you do.

7. Sadly, a good product will not market itself. You will need to market it. Bad marketing can ruin a good product.

8. Marketing isn’t like “Mad Men”. Be nice to people, be honest, give people the information they need to feel like they are making an informed decision.

9. Spell everything correctly. Use good grammar. Use a copywriter if your language skills are subpar, they’re worth it.

10. Explain how your product will help your customer. Do not talk about yourself and how awesome you are. Talk to your customer. Your product/service should help your customers feel more awesome.

11. If you make a mistake (and you will) be honest about what happened, apologise, promise that it won’t happen again, and then make whatever changes you need to so that it actually doesn’t happen again.

12. Be upfront about delivery dates. You will struggle with this. Everyone underestimates how long things take, especially in consulting.

13. Treat every customer like your first.

14. A bad customer can kill your business. If you can’t identify them before they sign on with you, figure out a way to have them go with a minimum of hurt feelings at the first availabile opportunity.

15. At networking events, listen more than you talk. If you think you might be talking too much, you are. Stop.

16. Get out there and meet people. If you’re an introvert (like me), I know it’s hard. Make goals for yourself – at this event, I will meet 5 new people. Find an extroverted friend who will start the introduction (that’s the hard part for me) and then let you have a conversation.

17. When you meet people, get their business cards. Enter them into a contact database (I use Highrise). Email them the day after you meet them and thank them for the connection, follow up on anything you discussed. Don’t put it off.

18. If you’re at a networking event and you meet someone interesting and say “we should go for coffee”, actually set that up! Nothing is more insincere than saying that and not following through.

19. Thank your customers regularly. Mean it.

20. You should always be doing business development, even if you’re so busy you’re not sure where you’ll find the time to fit it in.

21. When you’re marketing, don’t think in terms of numbers, think in terms of clients. For example, website traffic – you can have 5 million visitors who will never buy your stuff, or 50 visitors who will all buy your stuff. Sheer numbers of impressions will not sell your product.

22. Don’t write anything on the internet that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see. Or worse, your customers.

23. Buy the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and actually read it. That being said, don’t spend more time figuring out your productivity system than being productive.

24. If you’re sitting in your work space, not being productive but feeling like you should be there, go, do something else, come back later. Busy work isn’t productivity.

25. Set limits on how many hours you work in day. When you hit it, you’re done. Put down your work, come back tomorrow. If you leave your work in the middle of a task, it’s that much easier to get into it the next day.

26. Track your time – not in 15 minute increments, but write down what you do each day. Make sure you’re using your time wisely. Time is the most valuable resource you have.

27. Control your cash flow. Gross is not net.

28. You’re always learning, especially from your mistakes. Failure is good, it teaches you a lot.

29. Don’t burn your bridges, no matter how tempting it is. It’s a small world and you don’t know who somebody knows.

30. Don’t go outside of your business’s core competencies to make extra cash, no matter how tempting it is.

31. Be humble.

Why Edmonton? My fiancée has been admitted to the PhD program at the University of Alberta. Luckily, my business is really location independent. The internet has done so much to allow us to communicate remotely that working from anywhere truly is a reality these days.

I’ve been setting up tools for my business for quite some time with a mind to being able to work from anywhere. Here’s the list of what I use:

Vonage – For my business phone. Unlimited minutes and two phone numbers – one for those in Hamilton and one for those in Edmonton. Call quality so far has been excellent.

Blackberry – For cell and email on the go. I know some people prefer iPhones but I like the tiny keyboard for tapping out quick emails while I’m heading somewhere.

MyFax – Sometimes you need to actually send a fax. Instead of buying a fax machine, I have a subscription to MyFax, which emails me any faxes I receive as PDFs.

iPad – Yes, I bought one. I really do love it. I got the model with 3G so I have internet with me wherever I go. It’s super portable, and it’s great for killing time by working on my task list. I also bought the keyboard to go with it. The keyboard on screen is large enough that I don’t make too many mistakes, but I prefer a real keyboard for serious typing.

Freshbooks – For billing, tracking expenses and time tracking. If you haven’t tried it, you’re missing out. I use the recurring billings for hosting, domain registrations and search engine optimization contracts. Makes my life easy and creates easy reports that makes my accountant’s life easy as well!

Basecamp – For project management. I have been a client of Basecamp since February 9 2004 – 4 days after they launched. I’ve used it continuously since then for project collaboration. Clients (mostly) love it and I love that it keeps everything in one place and on track.

Highrise – By the same folks who brought you Basecamp. I used to work at a CRM software company and most enterprise-level CRM solutions are overkill for the solo or small business owner. Highrise keeps what’s necessary and cuts out what isn’t.

There’s are a few more web tools that I use for specific project reasons, but these are the major ones that keep my business humming.

There are things that I am going to miss about Ontario, and in person meetings will require more notice than a day or two, but I am looking forward to the adventure! I’ll be flying back to Hamilton for a visit in November 2010, and if you find yourself in the Edmonton area, drop me a line!

Here’s some stats from a client’s website. I won’t say what client or the time line I picked for the visits, but I can assure that this is very typical for their statistics.

Here is their browser breakdown:

And here is their breakdown for Internet Explorer:

We’re talking about a major update for this client’s website next year and the idea of having to support Internet Explorer 6 users gives me a headache. I will likely be adding the IE6 Update tool on my own website and talking to a few clients about adding it to theirs. There’s even a WordPress plugin for it.

Let’s kill IE6 dead!

In the year that I worked with them, I redesigned their website, implemented an email marketing campaign, and created a pay-per-click advertising campaign. We used email marketing to put together an automated “tip of the month” campaign – every month, an email is sent to their subscriber base, and the tip of the month is automatically posted to the website. The best part is that we only had to set it up at the beginning and it will run for a year without any additional work required.