It’s been awhile now since I switched this site over to using the Thesis Wordpress theme.
So far everything is coming along fine.
To make Thesis look different from all the other Thesis blogs – I had to brush up on my ‘CSS Skills”… as limited as they were (are).
More than likely I’ll use Thesis on every blog I build from here on out — unless something else better comes along. But I don’t see that happening for awhile.
Here’s a couple more sites I have built using Thesis.
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Twitter over some Pizza!
Here’s a “Big Idea” for Restaurants who deliver.. and those who don’t.
How cool would this be? – think about it.
Let’s look at it from your ‘Customers’ perspective.
Joe is sitting in his cube on the 22nd floor… it’s 11:30 or so – almost time for him to grab lunch.
Since Joe ‘follows’ you on Twitter to receive your daily lunch ’specials’; your Pizzeria is the first place he thinks about at lunch time (being you sent him a ’specials’ tweet earlier).
Instead of him heading down twenty two floors to your Pizzeria and waiting 15 minutes to get his food, he shoots you a Twitter Message with his order.
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While doing a bit of shopping today… this story came to mind.
John was just getting ready to close up the feed store and head to the house… it was one of your typical North Texas Winter nights.
Twenty degrees… snowing… sleeting… raining … winds howling from the north… it was just flat out nasty and cold outside.
John walked up to the front of the store to flip his sign over to ‘Closed’, when a truck pulling a horse trailer with New Mexico plates came barreling into the parking lot out front.
The man driving jumped from the truck and ran into the feed store just as it started to pour down rain.
He was drenched.
John asked the man; “what can I help you with on this miserable night friend?”
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Own a business in a Strip Shopping Center?
Here’s one way to help prevent the Shopping Center from becoming a Ghost Town (and help you stay in business).
Something you can easily implement and do today.
Leveraging the Obvious
Start a ‘joint venture promotion’ with other business owners in the same shopping center… that’s an obviously easy thing you can leverage – your local business relationships.
If you own a Dry Cleaning business… I’m sure the guy three stores down who owns a Pool Supply business has customers who needs dry cleaning every now and then (you think?)
Same with the Florist… bet her customers need some dry cleaning or pool supplies too.
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But I need to know all that web tech stuff, right?
What prompted this post was a conversation I had with a new client this past week.
First, she asked a couple hundred internet marketing questions.
How to set up her blog… how to make those pretty web 2.0 graphics — squeeze pages, setting up an autoresponder, newsletter and how to make her blog all slick and pretty.
I told her to forget about all that tech stuff… it’s not a priority.
“There’s a lot you need to know and learn that’s far more important before we jump out there and throw up a blog and add all those pretty graphics you want” I told her.
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It was just a matter of time… but it’s now official.
The Search Engines surpassed the Printed Yellow Pages when customers are looking for local information, products or services.
If you own an offline business of any type… Pizza shop, Hardware Store, Accountant, Landscaper, Ballet School, Roofing Company, Fitness Trainer… doesn’t matter, your ‘potential’ customer will become a customer of your competitor if they can’t find you online.
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Email Marketing for the Offline Business.
The September issue of my printed, and snail mailed “Big Ideas Marketing Strategies Newsletter” was dedicated to email marketing for the offline business (as you already know if you are a subscriber).
The newsletter goes out to local businesses I work with in McKinney and Collin County Texas area… and a few out of state clients.
One thing I touched on was doing a “Recommended Services” add in to your email newsletter.
It went something like this;
Let’s say you own a Landscaping business in McKinney, Texas.
If you happen to be my Landscaping guy… you obviously know my house is needing a bit of painting (not much – just the facing on the chimney).
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Testing out a new service, UMapper.
So take this for what it is, a test post… since I have no idea how it will look until I hit the ‘Publish’ button.
This could be a great tool for local businesses.
You can move the map around… zoom in… basically do everything you can do if you were on the Google Maps page.
Looks pretty good so far.
And I should mention, you do this using a Wordpress plugin and then display the map you created at the UMapper site.
andrew
