Workbox is excited to announce the launch of Liquor License Connection at http://ca.liquorlicenseconnection.com. This new business is changing the way liquor licenses are bought and sold in California by giving license owners and buyers a more transparent, efficient and inexpensive way to engage in the sale of liquor licenses.

Currently, most buyers and sellers need to work through a broker to help them navigate the paper-work intensive and confusing process required by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Liquor License Connection, however, gives liquor license sellers and buyers a simple way to negotiate a price and complete a sale. Liquor License Connection also streamlines the documentation process for buyers and charges much less than typical brokers.

Additionally, Liquor License Connection shows comparable sale prices for similar, recent transactions (known as “comps”) to registered users so there is less mystery involved in the transaction negotiation.

Finally, if a particular sale requires a little extra assistance, or other services are needed, Liquor License Connection has highly experienced partners who can help with liquor license expediting, escrow, 500 foot surveys, legal services and recording services.

Again, we are very excited to be part of a business that could radically change and improve an inefficient and confusing industry.

What Workbox is doing: all technical development, UI and online marketing consulting.

Workbox is proud to announce that we published our first WordPress Plugin!

Click Here to Download the plugin

Click Here to visit the WordPress plugin site.

Description: Allows Google Analytics to track clicks on links to downloadable files without having to code each specific link.

Requires at least: WordPress 2.0.2

Tested up to: WordPress 3.1

Instructions: Download and activate the plugin. The plugin options page (Google Analitics Options) will be available under Settings in the Admin panel.

Plugin options:
1. Google Analitics ID – enter your Google Analytics ID.

2. Domain – domain name for which the tracking is being configured. By default, the domain is set to the domain name of the site where the plugin is installed.

3. Include jQuery Script. The plugin uses jQuery library. If your site is already using this library, select “NO”. If your site is not using it yet – select “YES” (in this case the library will load from the plugin catalog).

4. File extensions you want to track – list of file extensions you want to track, comma-delimited. Only letters, digits and underscore and space. To track pdf files, write “pdf”.

5. Enable Plugin? turns the plugin on and off.

Important: If your Google Analytics tracking code is already in the page template, please remove it. The plugin will insert the code automatically.

FAQ: What happens if you don’t remove your Google Analytics code and install our plugin as well?
Answer: Either there will be a javascript error (the page will load fine) or the stats will be submitted twice. So we strongly recommend that you remove your Google Analytics code when you install the plugin.

Screenshot:

Click Here to Download the plugin

Click Here to visit the WordPress plugin site.

The Good News

There has been a lot of interest in Perfect Market, Inc.’s “Vault Index Summer 2010,” which argued that “hard” news stories are more profitable than “light” stories when the value of advertising clicks between the two types of stories is compared. In other words, advertisers pay publishers significantly more for clicks from ads on hard news stories pages than ads on soft news pages.

For example, stories on immigration reform generated $26 per 1,000 impressions, while stories about Lindsay Lohan’s sentencing generated $2.50 per 1,000 impressions. The deep news story’s clicks were more than 10 times as valuable.

Here’s the release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/10/prweb4663624.htm

Also, a study by the University of Pennsylvania showed that deep, interesting (or “awesome,” as they put it) stories generated more “sharing” – i.e., the stories were emailed, blogged, tweeted, shared on Facebook, etc.

Here’s the NY Times story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html

This seems like encouraging news to folks who despair of the web’s vapidness. However, if you dig into the stats, it isn’t clear that “hard news” or “awesome stories” can be profitable or stand on their own.

The Hard Questions – Long Term Value and the Bottom Line

First, SEOmoz, a search engine optimization expert site, found that Perfect Market’s data was a bit flawed.

Specifically, SEOmoz wanted to see:

• The value of the links brought in from those stories

In other words, what sites are linking to the story and how much traffic or how valuable (from an advertiser’s point of view) is their audience? Do these visitors click to other stories, too? This data is critical for search engine optimization, and can be measured with the right tools.

• The branding impact of the visits generated

Will visitors think of the website for hard news in the future? Does the story increase the site’s stature and value to visitors who read the story? Learning the answers to these questions is a little more difficult, but would provide valuable data to a publisher.

• The value of sharing activities from those visits

This is what the NY Times article is about. Did visitors email the article to friends? Did people subscribe to RSS feeds or email updates when they visited the article? Did visitors post the article to Facebook or tweet the article? This is data that all online publishers should be gathering as a matter of course.

SEOmoz is questioning whether, in the big picture and for long term revenue, the hard news stories are as valuable as the click revenue suggests.

Here’s SEOmoz’s article: http://www.SEOmoz.org/blog/traffic-bait-and-ad-clicks-perfect-markets-study-isnt-telling-the-whole-story

Second, neither SEOmoz nor Perfect Market discussed the cost of the content itself – a critical piece of data when analyzing profitability.

“Soft news” is cheap. Let’s face it – any idiot with a digital camera and blog can create a controversial post about a celebrity. Good, solid journalism requires expertise, resources and hard work. In other words, quality content requires time and money.

For a publisher it might seem that the real question is: if a silly story about Lindsay Lohan costs 10.01 times less than a story about immigration reform, why not turn your site into Gawker or TMZ?

Fortunately for democracy (and our brains), analytics is confirming what smart publishers and editors have always known: you need a balance of news, entertainment and opinion. Fluff brings in eyeballs, serious stuff keeps viewers engaged and sharing, and they all make money in their own way. The trick is figuring out how to allocate resources and content so the publication is profitable.

Solid analytics will help.

Most small business customers are local. Also, most small businesses don’t have a lot of money to spend on online marketing. Fortunately, three of the most powerful local online marketing tools are free and easy to use. And they are specifically useful for helping nearby customers and clients find you.

In this post, we’ll tell you about:

• Google Local Business Center
• Yahoo!Local
• Yelp

All three get lots and lots of traffic, and Google and Yahoo! will list your business on their excellent maps. And did I mention they’re free?

Tip: Search engine optimizers have been recommending these tips for years. Isn’t it time you took advantage of these tools?

1. Google Local Business Center

Google is the king of online search and has some of the most-highly used mapping tools in the world today. Be sure your business is listed so searchers can find you in their area.

You’ll need to create a Google Account, then add your business to the Local Business Center. It requires a few steps, but it is pretty easy and it is free!

Here’s how to sign up with Google Local Business Center:

1.1. Go to http://www.google.com/accounts/
In bottom right, find this text and click:

Don’t have a Google Account?
Create an account now

1.2.  Sign up – Follow Google’ account sign up process. It requires a small amount of work.

1.3. Once you’re signed up and logged in, go to the top account page, and find the “Local Business Center” link – Fill out the form. Request that they send you a postcard to confirm, rather than other options which require doing work to your website or loading a file via FTP.

1.4. The postcard from Google will have a link and PIN on it. Go to the link and enter your PIN – you’re done!

Another way to sign up with Google – search these words in Google: Google Local Business Center – the search results will take you directly to the starting page which shows a little video overview.

Also, Google, as always, has great online help:

- Getting started: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=21029&topic=21030

- Adding a listing: http://maps.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=21029&topic=21032

2. Yahoo!Local

Yahoo! may not be quite as popular as Google overall, but they are very powerful in local online marketing. Registering your business is very simple and, again, it’s free.

Here’s how to sign up with Yahoo!Local:

2.1. Go to: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php – Complete the basic form, then click on the “> Additional Information” text link and fill out the rest of the form – the more complete, the more useful it is for your customers. That’s it!

3. Yelp

Yelp might have gotten some bad publicity lately, but they are simply too powerful to ignore. Signing up with them requires a few steps, but you can’t beat the price (free). To be sure you are listed properly, you will need to create a “Business Owner Account.”

Here’s how to sign up with Yelp:

3.1. Go to: http://www.yelp.com/business?country=US – This page has a good overview of what Yelp is all about.

3.2. Click on the “Get Started” button – You will now see a page the asks you to search for your business, since there’s a good chance it already exists on Yelp. If you see your business listed, click on the “Select” text link, then the “Next Step” button.

If you don’t see your business listed, click on the “Having trouble finding your business?” text link at the bottom of the listings, and follow the same process.

3.3. Next, you fill out the basic information form. Yelp will then email you. The email will contain a link that you need to click to confirm you are with the business.

3.4. After clicking on the link in the email, you will get a more advanced form that lets you fill in more information about your business. Be sure to take advantage of this form – it gives you the ability to tell the world all about your business – for free!

I hope your business will take advantage of these three powerful, free websites.

Eric Weidner

The conversation starts like this:

(Eric’s phone rings at 6:30 a.m. Pacific Time)

CEO of Small-Cap Public Company: Hey, Eric. Some jerks are saying bad things about our company and stock on some websites.

Eric: Email me the links and I’ll check it out.

(Eric calls CEO at 6:40 a.m. Pacific Time)

Eric: The good news or the bad news first?

CEO: Gimme the bad news.

Eric: Google has cached the negative pages so you’re stuck with them for a while.

CEO: Ugh. Give me the good news.

Eric: The message board websites have removal request policies, and maybe if your lawyer sends them a letter, they’ll actually remove the posts. Also, it looks like you can respond to the posts.

CEO: Not sure my lawyer will let me respond or even acknowledge this at all. What else can we do?

Eric: The rest is the long slog. Create a blog, use social media. Use all the SEO tactics you can to override the bad content with your own good content.

CEO: Sounds expensive and time-consuming.

Eric: Well, it definitely takes time. But these tactics work.

CEO: %$#@!*& short sellers are scum!!!

The company is then typically paralyzed by legal, cost and time issues. Legal doesn’t want to deal with it, and nobody wants to take the time or pay someone to write the content, set up social media personas or build blogs. So nothing happens, web searchers continue to find negative content about your company and, in the short term, the stock languishes. But there is hope.

First, A Word About the Small Cap Neighborhood

Let’s be honest about Bulletin Board and Pink Sheet stocks. We’re in a bad neighborhood and the smallest misstep by the company will have the short sellers smelling blood. And shell companies often have a bunch of old garbage lingering around in various websites – either about the old company or the old management, or both – so you’re stuck with it even if it isn’t completely relevant anymore. So, there’s a good chance you’re going to have to deal with short sellers and the negative comments they generate. Whether the short sellers are behaving legally or not is not relevant.

The key is to acknowledge that people with an interest in your stock’s failure are going to say bad things, then go on the offensive by building a positive online reputation!

What Is An Online Reputation?

The good and bad things that people are saying online about your company and stock is called your “online reputation.” And, in practice, online reputation management (ORM) is very similar to search engine optimization (SEO). But first, a few definitions:

Online Reputation: The ratio of positive to negative content about your company or products contained in various websites or online services (like Twitter). If people are writing lots of good things about your company, you have a positive online reputation.

Online Reputation Management (ORM): The practice of measuring, monitoring and improving your Online Reputation. Many of the same strategies and techniques are used in ORM as in SEO: keywords, back-links, blogs, social media, PR, etc., but ORM for publicly traded companies also includes participating (either directly or through third-parties) in online forums, bulletin boards and message boards.

The Best Defense Is A Good Offense

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in online reputation management. That means getting ahead of the bad guys by posting as much positive, quality content about your company and stock that you legally can.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Content is king

Here is where the content comes from: Accurate press releases; blogs (a blog for each company division or product, and other personas); a LinkedIn account and group; Twitter personas; links with smart keywords to your press releases in the message boards, bulletin boards and forums.

You need to diligently and consistently create high-quality content to be sure your pages get into the search engines so your content pre-empts bad stuff.

2. Own the negative words

The shorts are going to use these kinds of words: scum, fraud, jerk, liar, psychopath, inept, stupid, incompetent, sleaze … you get the idea. A well-done off-brand or third-party blog can utilize these words so the search engines direct people to a positive blog rather than a negative one.

Also, your SEC filings may contain good keywords you want to own (like “fraud”). Be sure you include this news content on your site, and perhaps have a “Financial News” headline section.

3. Respond professionally and graciously

As appropriate, thank writers for saying nice things about your company, either on a website or directly or privately to the writer. Tell nay-sayers that you hope that you can eventually convince them of how solid your company is (create some boilerplate text with your legal team that you can quickly post and forget).

Yes, this takes resources. And yes, it takes time before you see results. But, you’ll have the satisfaction of seeing your short sellers eat their … shorts … while your company builds a long-lasting positive online reputation.

Every business wants to dominate its market. But most businesses waste a lot of time and money with broad, sweeping online marketing campaigns that yield disappointing results.

At Workbox we have a saying: Don’t attack Russia in winter.

Workbox and MarketFlare give your business a complete targeted online marketing domination package:

• More customers and clients
• Higher click-through rate (CTR), lower cost-per-click (CPC), better ad position
• Stronger natural search results
• Higher pagerank (site authority)
• Online reputation improvement
• Better aesthetics & website usability

Here’s how we do it:

• Define your marketing mission and identify key performance indicators.
• Check current web marketing activities.
• Conduct both broad and targeted analysis of market and competition.
• Build an online marketing plan that includes best practices and innovative recommendations.
• Get active: based on the plan, build and implement programs and campaigns.
• Report and measure honestly, then refine and improve programs and campaigns.
• Introduce recommendations as markets and technologies evolve.

The Workbox and MarketFlare team has worked with powerful and bottom-line-focused online brands in extremely competitive markets, and can now offer our services to your business.

> Learn more about our online marketing services.

Over the next few months, we are going to explain each of the elements of great, targeted online marketing domination plans and campaigns, with details and tactics that you can apply to your own business.

Please note, we will never work with companies or products that will create a conflict of interest for our clients.

> Contact us to learn how we can build a plan that will give you targeted online market domination.

Our previous post, #1 – Tell Your Story Quickly, showed how to present what your company does as rapidly and effectively as possible. Now, we describe the kind of content you need to keep your site up-to-date – a process that simultaneously makes your company look dynamic, tells your story and makes search engines happy.

#2 UPDATE REGULARLY

Regularly update your website and you will convey two things to viewers: First, they will feel that your company is dynamic; if your site is dynamic it means your company is, too. Conversely, if nothing is happening on your site, maybe nothing is happening in your company.

Second, the most effective way of telling your company’s story is to post “news” items or stories about your company’s successes.

It turns out that Google also rewards websites that have fresh and keyword-rich content. This is particularly important for newer or smaller websites. Adding content on a regular basis gets you noticed by Google, and as you build up a catalog of content in your website, you are naturally adding depth.

Here’s a tip: Don’t get discouraged if something profound doesn’t happen every day at your company. The content that appears on your homepage doesn’t need to be earth-shattering. The point is to keep the homepage fresh, so try to add something at least once a month. And, at the end of this article, we show an alternative to “news.”

Technique A – Brag About Yourself  - Media Venture Partners

The web is no place to be bashful. Use your website to show how effective your company, products or services really are. This kind of content is the typical company news or “What’s New” stuff.

An example is San Francisco private equity firm Media Venture Partners (http://www.mediaventurepartners.com). In the left column (1.), they feature a little block titled “Our Successes”. The content links to a gigantic list of deals the company has completed – and very often the value of the deals. Talk about “walking the walk!”

Technique B – Brag About Your Customers or Clients – Cardinal Venture Capital

Silicon Valley’s Cardinal Venture Capital (http://www.cardinalvc.com) keeps its homepage and news section fresh with news about its portfolio companies (1.). Once again, this not only shows what they do and the type of investment they make, it shows that their investments are successful.

Keeping a “news” or “what’s new” section up-to-date is the most effective way to tell your company’s story because it gives real-world, solid examples of your successes. However, since you can’t always generate “news,” there is an alternative.

Technique C – Look Like A Genius – Garcia Interactive

If things are a little quiet around the office and nothing “newsworthy” is happening, another way to add content to your site is to write blog post, article, white paper or “thought-piece” about a topic that is of interest to your market.

Many companies utilize this technique because it accomplishes some things a news item can’t. First, an article can be used to position your company or an individual in your company as an expert in your industry. Timely or in-depth analysis shows that your team is on top of the issues and is confident enough to share their thoughts with the world.

Also, an article can be used as a way of promoting a particular area of expertise that may be extremely popular or in great demand. For example, at the beginning of April every year, you will see a plethora of tax-related articles written by accountants.

Mario Garcia, the world-class designer and chief of Garcia Interactive (http://www.garciainteractive.com), uses blog posts (1.) to keep his site alive and show that he has deep understanding of his industry. This type of blog post accomplishes many things:

- Positions Mario as a thought leader in his industry.

- Gives him a reason to email and post a link to his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

- Adds SEO juice to his site by keeping the site fresh and adding indexable content with important keywords.

Conclusion

Regularly updating your website accomplishes three goals. First, it keeps your site looking dynamic, which implies that your company is also dynamic.

Second, the content that gets added to your site shows people exactly what your company does and why they should work with you rather than your competition.

Finally, for smaller and younger websites, Google rewards fresh and deep content.

All the posts in this series:

4 Things Your New Marketing Site Must Do: #1 – Tell Your Story Quickly (http://blog.workbox.com/4-things-1-tell-story-quickly/)

4 Things Your New Marketing Site Must Do: #2 – Update Regularly (http://blog.workbox.com/4-things-your-new-marketing-site-must-do-2-update-regularly/)

4 Things Your New Marketing Site Must Do: #3 – Collect Contact Information (http://blog.workbox.com/4-things-3-collect-contacts/)

4 Things Your New Marketing Site Must Do: #4 – Measure Results (http://blog.workbox.com/4-things-4-marketing-measure-results/)

This NY Times article clearly shows the value of high-quality content for online marketing purposes:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html

University of Pennsylvania researchers confirm what many online (and offline) marketers know we need to do, but find so difficult to accomplish. Essentially, to get people to engage with and recommend our content, the content has to go beyond the mundane and capture imagination and awe.

Since it’s pretty difficult for us mere mortals to regularly reach the “awe” metric, perhaps “interesting” or “unexpected” is good enough. Maybe a different way at looking at things, or counter-intuitive data or advice would be most effective.

In any event, this article has given me a lot to think about, and I hope you find it useful.

Some specifics, at least for the NY Times’ demographic:

• Be intellectually challenging
• Positive beats negative
• Evoke emotions
• Don’t be afraid to delve deeply into a subject

If you have had success at creating “awesome” content, I (and anyone reading this) would love to learn more about what you did and how you did it.

Cheers, Eric

A few months ago, Workbox rebuilt and launched MacroGenics, Inc.’s corporate website. http://www.macrogenics.com Along with our typical amazing design work and CUT content management system, we built the MacroGenics team a handy, Flash-based “pipeline” manager right into CUT.

MacroGenic’s pipline charts appear in a “brief” version on the homepage, and a “full” version on the top product pipeline page. http://www.macrogenics.com/products.html. All the content for the Flash-based pipeline is managed through CUT. And don’t let the .html tag at the end of the URL confuse you – this is a dynamic PHP page with a nifty URL rewrite feature.

Categorized search results is another useful feature in MacroGenic’s customized CUT. Rather than give the visitor a simple list of results, MacroGenics has the search results categorized by the website’s architecture – so MacroGenics can control which results appear on top – like results that feature their products or technologies, rather than news.

We should also give credit to our design director, Stephanie Heald, for creating the easily-understood and great-looking pipeline chart and other branded infographics that are used across all of MacroGenics online and offline marketing materials.