Coeur d’Alene Web Marketers Group

Here are some more photos from our last meeting.

Ed Birch preparing for his presentation.

Ed delivering his information.

Mark, Randy, Dave, Ed, Russel, Sheri, Stephen all attentively listening to the presentation on continuous improvement.

We were able to have Ed bring his projector and screen for the presentation. It provided a great way to deliver a presentation. You can see how the meeting room fits in with the rest of the coffee house and how it is a great place to have a meeting.

Randy from Trienelle expanding on a point made by another member.

Dave from Case42 in Spokane tells us of a successful campaign for a client of his on Pay Per Post

Our next meeting is on October 3rd at 8am.  We will be hosting the get together at Calypso’s on Lakeside again.  We had such a good time there and the facilities are wonderful.  We had a few people say they were unsure of attending because the meeting was at a coffee house due to the typical noise level, but rest assured, there is a seperate room that is very quite for our meetings.

Ed Reese of Sixth Man Marketing will be presenting to the group.  Ed is an SEO expert and will be walking us through basic Search Engine Optimization, what it is, how to understand it and how you can apply it to your business strategies and tactics.

Here is what Ed had to say about his upcoming presentation: “SEO gets a bad rap, mostly due to the 5-10 emails a week guaranteeing top positions on Google. These emails are spam.  No reputable SEO would ever guarantee search results.   I am going to set the stage and explain what search optimization is and what it isn’t. People often get too focused on their rankings and miss out on the bigger picture of how many relevant visitors get to their web pages to make a purchase/transaction/find information – that is what’s important. The key is finding and ranking for terms that will resonate with your customers that will lead to an action; that’s effective SEO.”
Ed has been working in SEO since 2003 and before that he worked in Seattle and the Bay Area in media sales/software marketing.  I think he’ll be bringing vast experience in this increasingly important online marketing niche and really helping all attendees get a better understanding of SEO.  He did want everyone to be sure that this isn’t a pitch, he won’t be selling any of us on anything.

Ed has some great stories, and not all relating to SEO.  Maybe we can get him to open with his stint as a professional Korean bowler or a semi-pro foosball player.

If you’d like to join us please feel free.  You can RSVP here – http://web.meetup.com/151/calendar/8695611/

We are asking everyone to bring $5.  the $5 goes towards the fee for the room, but we get a credit for coffee and food for the same amount, so you are really buying your beverage

As promised, follow this link to download Ed Birch’s presentation on Continuous Improvement – Up Your Game.

Last Friday we had our monthly meeting. We held it at Calypso’s for the first time and I have to say it was a great venue for our meeting. Calypso’s is a great host with great breakfast items and wonderful coffee. If you haven’t been to this coffee shop yet, make a point to work “remotely” one day this week. The wifi is fast and the coffee hot and they have plenty of space.

Ed Birch started the meeting off with his presentation on Continuous Improvement. His strong background in management was shown as he walked us through some of the main areas of continuous improvement and how we could use this concept and the processes within it to grow your business, keep your clients happy and run a more efficient business. Ed will be sending over his presentation later today. I’ll be uploading that here for you to download. If you have questions, feel free to email Ed at edward@birchconsultinggroup.com or 208-659-1690.

One of the things that stuck out to me is that we often have processes in our business, whether they are accounting processes or basic business processes, for us it was our process of contacting our partners. These process are hardly ever as efficient as possible and often have areas of waste that we can, when we map these out, that we can cut. Making these processes more efficient allows us to better respond to our market, better deliver for our clients and in the end add more to our bottom line. I highly recommend you check out the presentation. Here is a pic of Ed during the meeting:

After we all had a few questions we got into our hot seat. We didn’t have a formal hot seat for this meeting, but we all discussed Twitter and other social networking things. We discussed Twitter’s demographics and possibly uses for business, the main one highlighted was it’s use for customer service.

A few of us shared some examples where we were personally contacted by corporations who read our twitters, whether they were positive or negative, and responded to us directly. It can be a great way to interact with your customers.

At the end of every meeting, we go around the table and share any new sites or resources we have used or discovered since our last meeting. Here are the ones we shared:

• Help A Reporter Out – www.helpareporterout.com – This is a site that sends out requests from reporters looking for experts in many different areas. If you are looking to be cited in the press, this is a great resource for you to keep abreast of what opportunities are out there.
• Ed Reese, a new attendee from Spokane, gave us SEOMOZ.com.
• PayPerPost.com – Dave from Case42Media shared a case study of one of his clients and their success with this web site. Dave, feel free to expand on that in the comments section.
• MarketingExpiriments.com – A site that Randy and Denver from Trianelle use often.

Ed Reese, our new resident SEO expert, will be giving next month’s presentation. We’ll have more information on that later this month. The date will be 3rd at 8am.

I’d love to get everyone’s feedback on the meetings, so please feel free to share in the comments section here. What did you love, what did you learn?