Coeur d’Alene Web Marketers Group

I’m so sorry we are updating this so late, but we are having our last meeting of the summer tomorrow June 5th at 11:30. We are trying something a bit different, a lunch meeting at Crickets in downtown Coeur d’Alene. Check it out

Joe Sousa and Frank Sousa of Traffic Geyser and Internet Marketing Associates will be presenting on video marketing online.  Here is a little bit about them:

Internet Marketing Associates has been in the internet marketing business for over 10 years now. We got our start doing SEO work for others and from there our company shifted into affiliate marketing, PPC marketing, software development, video marketing, and other joint venture partnerships. About 2 ½ years ago we partnered up with a couple other guys and developed Traffic Geyser which is a tool that helps distribute your video to many different video sites, podcast sites, social bookmark sites, blogs, and other places and is designed to help you achieve top rankings for your videos.

You can learn more about them and their product at http://www.trafficgeyser.com/freetrial.

The meeting will be a bit different this month.  We are meeting at 11:30 am for lunch at Crickets in Coeur d’alene.  Each person will be responsible for any lunch or drinks they wish to have and no charge for attending the meeting.

I hope you join us!

I’m sorry to get out the information on this month’s meeting, but here it is:

During Friday’s meeting, we’ll hear from Randy Wilkinson with a brief education on the difference the way you present a price can affect your response.  He’ll show you how weird we are as consumers when it comes to deciding the value your offer has.  Learn how the “decoy method” can boost your response and how The Economist Magazine used this tool to their benefit.

If time permits, I, Jamie, will present on outsourcing.  I’ll talk about my experience as well as the value of a great outsourced team, what they can do for you, what to avoid, how to manage your team and what obstacles you might face.  If you are looking to add resources cost effectively, you’ll definitely want to be here this Friday at 8am at Calypsos.

We also need two Hot Seats for the meeting.  What is a hot seat, glad you asked.  If you have a business problem you are facing or an idea tha tyou need help flushing out, you’ll have 10-15 minutes to get help from the entire group!  It’s a great way to get many minds behind your issues.  Email me at jamie@jebcommerce.com.

I’m so excited to see you all there!

On March 17th, from 10am to 1pm, the Coeur d’Alene Web Marketers group will be hosting a presentation by Matthew Scott. Matthew will be joining us in person at The Parkside Building, Corner of Front & Seventh – Downtown Coeur d’Alene.  601 E Front Ave, #204 – Idaho Title.

Matthew’s presentation is titled: “Learn the easy to implement basics for using virtual marketing to monetize and build a responsive business community.” There are so many different technologies that allow each of us to run our business more effectively and profitably. Learn how to use these technologies to grow your business, whether you are a consultant or retailer, service provider or store owner. Matthew will share his experience and expertise in this area to help each of us grow our business.

We are charging a nominal fee of $15 for this presenation to cover the cost of Matthew’s travel. We currently have limited seats, 30, so please RSVP today. To reserve your spot, click here.

Who is Matthew Scott?
Matthew serves as the Founder & Managing Director, The Strategic Incubator, a global strategic implementation firm equipping leaders to align strategic vision with a tactical execution of revenue producing activities in taking a great idea and building a revenue-producing process.

Matthew is also the Managing Partner and Co-Owner of The Trunk Club, a company that revolutionizes the way men shop for clothing and define their authentic style. The Trunk Club’s creative business model has been featured by Microsoft Small Business, numerous magazine and television media, and even recently featured in a book, entitled Plan As-You-Go Business Plan by Tim Berry, Founder of Palo Alto Software, the leading business planning software on the market today.

Matthew is the host for Personal Life Media, Book Digest, where he summarizes the best business books for busy business leaders in eight minutes or less.
Matthew is the creator of the popular men@pause seminar, conversations with leading entrepreneurs and best selling business authors focusing on strategic entrepreneurial life + work design.

As a chosen speaker for the prestigious Five Star Speakers, Matthew speaks to thousands of people every year on business development topics and designing strategic life + work design for entrepreners.

Matthew completed his Masters Degree in Management in 1991 and completed certification as a Certified Professional Coach sanctioned by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) in 2006.
Matthew resides in Oregon with his wife and three children living with intention next to the ski trails of Mt. Hood and the vineyards of Willamette Valley. He is scheduled to publish his first book, men@pause: executive men in transition in early February 2009.

We will be having our meeting this Friday at 8am at Calypsos. We’ll be starting out by watching a video on the Secret System. We will also be holding two hot seats and sharing with each other a useful tool we recently discovered. So bring your ideas!

If you want to be one of the hotseats, just comment below.

And now for the video description:

If you want the secret of Internet marketing, it’s this:

Internet marketing is really just a modern version of a well established science called “direct marketing.”

If you know the basic principles of direct marketing, being successful on the Internet is a breeze. On the other hand, if you don’t know them, then all the “guru” tricks in the world won’t help you.

Drayton is not only a successful direct marketer, he can legitimately be called one of the all-time greats in the business. The popular books he’s written on the subject are considered classics in the field.

But more important, Drayton is a player.

When advertising legend David Ogilvy wanted to break into the UK market, the only way he could get in was by buying his way in through Drayton’s company. In just three years after targeting the direct marketing agency business in the UK, Drayton and his colleagues had completely sewn the market up.

Drayton was a speaker at Ken McCarthy’s recent System Seminar in London. We’ll be watching a video segment of Drayton’s presentation there.

Wow, we had another fantastic meeting.  Even those in attendance that are not web marketers found great value in the Landing Page and Website Optimizer presentation that Randy and Denver put on for us.

Randy began the presentation with a vide from Marketing Experiments.com on headlines.  I know that I now have to redo my website after all the things I learned from this video.

Denver did a great run down of the free Website Optimizer that google has available.  It allows you to do simple A-B and multi variant testing on your website.  Denver set up a test during the meeting and showed us how it only took  a few minutes to do.  Incredibly valuable information.

Thank you both for presenting!  And if you didn’t know already, Denver and Randy are the reasons we have a CDA Web Marketers Group at all.  Over a year ago, they started the group that we all are just glad to be a part of.  Thanks guys!

Enjoy some pictures from our meeting.

Tom Latham

Jamie Birch

Most direct marketers (and web marketing is a form of direct marketing, after all) will tell you that perhaps the most important single element on your landing page is the headline.  If that’s true, are you giving sufficient thought to the headlines you use?  Do you know for sure that they are working?  How can you improve them?

On Friday, February 6, the topic of our meeting will be a focus how to create the most effective headlines and then how to test them to be sure that you’re actually using the best one possible.

The meeting will be hosted by Denver and Randy Wilkinson, of Trienelle Skincare.  The meeting will include a portion of an excellent online seminar by MarketingExperiments.com which focused on how to write headlines.  With that knowledge in hand, the question of how to test for the best headline is addressed by a thorough review of Google’s free tool, Website Optimizer.

Denver is head of online marketing at Trienelle Skincare.  Randy is the CEO.

The meeting is at 8 am at Calypsos on Lakeside in Coeur d’Alene.  There is a $5 charge to cover the room and Calypsos has great breakfasts and coffee. If you have questions or need information please contact Jamie at jamie@jebcommerce.com.

At our last meeting we discussed a second monthly meeting every month.  We called it a “working meeting”.

Here is the premise:  Every month we have a presentation on something we probably should or want to be doing, last month WordPress Installation.  We thought it would be a great idea to have a second meeting, two weeks or so after our monthly meeting, where we all can get together at Calypsos and share what we have done regarding the presentation at the last meeting and help each other with any problems related to that subject.

It would be an informal meeting with no presentation.  We would just have the room reserved and anyone who wants to swing by, well they can.  I’ve scheduled the room at Calypsos for Thursday the 22nd from 9am to 11am.  I will be attending and have a new wordpress blog that I’d like to get some input on.

If you plan on attending, please comment here so that everyone can see who will be there.  We’ll test out this method and see how it works.

So Thursday 9-11am at Calypsos.

Please leave a comment if you plan to attend!

What a great meeting today!  We had over 20 people at our meeting with many new faces.  We may have to find a different room!

Gabe Ripley gave a great walk through of installing WordPress and then walked us through some of his more complex installations and websites such as www.collegegolfcamps.com, www.onethousandthingstodo.com and www.western-art.com.  He went over many plugins, themes to use and other wordpress related websites.  Here are some of the sites he shared with us:

Themes

1. WordPress Theme Directory
2. Top WP Themes
3. Smashing Magazine

Plugins

1. WordPress Plugin Directory
2. Web Designer Wall
3. Lorelle on WordPress

Markup and scripting (HTML, CSS, PHP, JS, etc.)

1. W3 Schools
2. World Wide Web Consortium
3. Visibone
4. PHP.org
5. Free PHP
6. Mozilla.org JS Scripting Resources
7. Dynamic Drive

Best practices and inspiration

1. A List Apart
2. 456 Berea Street
3. CSS Elite
4. CSS Beauty
5. Coding Horror
6. We Love WordPress

Nathan took us through a very comprehensive list of sites to grab great free and premium themes as well as sites that use WordPress to great success.  Here are some of the sites he shared with us:

WordPress.org
Bloggingpro.com
Wpdesigner.com
weblogtoolscollection.com
smashingmagazine.com
speckyboy.com
wpengineer.com
wpcandy.com
wphacks.com
welovewp.com

Themes

revolutiontwo.com
press75.com
themeforest.net
woothemes.com

Showcases
markettheme.com
webdesignledger.com
mcjdj.com
ilovetypography.com
weborchard.com
iso50.com
fruitproperty.com
ironsmcduff.com

If you have any questions just post them here, I’m sure Nathan and Gabe would be more than happy to answer them for you.