by Mark on January 21, 2010
Image by laurenmarek via Flickr
If you’re promoting anything online it can help your sales massively to localize your offer or the data on the page to the visitor.
An example of this might be some copy on the page dynamically generated for the visitor’s area – “Expert house painting in Seattle, WA. Click here for an instant quote.”
The easiest way to do this is if you have the searcher’s location already. For example: If you have a geolocated search campaign where the advertising network is providing you with zip and/or city data you can pass it through as a URL variable like yourpage.php?city=Seattle&state=WA
But there’s a sure fire way to make sure you’re localizing your content and offer to your visitors area; you can run a GeoTargeting PHP script in conjunction with a free zip code database.
I do this for certain things I promote on the internet such as auto insurance offers and other services that aren’t location specific but where I want the visitor to feel like they’re getting a localized result. It’s always resulted in a higher conversion rate when I’ve done that.
Instead of rewriting tutorials that already exist I thought I’d point you to a couple of resources that I’ve used.
Eric Nagel’s Geo-Targeted PHP script
Free Zip Code Database from the Zip Code Guy
Have fun and let me know how it works for you!
by Mark on December 22, 2009
photo credit: Christine & Eric
If you want to be good at something, practice it until you’re good at it.*
Haha! Isn’t that hilarious? But it’s true. Here’s a conversation I’ve had too many times to count…
“Hey Mark. I want to start my own business.”
“Really? That’s awesome! You know what I think of that! It’s the best way to financial prosperity – Kapow! And now let’s do a dance of celebration!”
“Yeah, yeah. Anyways, I’m kind of stuck. How do I start?”
“Well, what do you want to do? Do you have a product or service you want to sell? A unique idea that you’re not sure how to capitalize on?”
“You see, that’s the thing. I want to sell X but I don’t know how to do it!!”
“Ok. Totally. But why don’t you start by looking at where you want to go with X and then reverse engineer your success?”
“What do you mean ‘reverse engineer’ my success?”
“What I mean is, what’s your goal? Define what that successful business would look like and then deconstruct the steps it’d take to achieve it. Figure out what you need to know that you don’t know yet and then learn those things as you take those steps.”
“Yeah…I should go back to business school I guess. Get an MBA or something. Then I could start.”
And from there the excuses for not starting pour in. And they’re all very credible excuses at first glance. I’ve had many versions of the above conversation ranging from “I just can’t learn how to use this program therefore I can’t do X therefore I’m a failure.” to “I need to get my sub chapter S Delaware LLC set up with my iron clad operating agreement in place before I can get started.”
You don’t have to have a degree, pedigree, trust fund, bank loan, bank account, advisor, mentor, board of directors, letter from your mom or have “The Secret” memorized to get started down the path towards success. What you do need is a determination to learn and practice. All of the other stuff will happen as it needs to happen.
*I realize this whole post is an over simplification of a process that has a thousand sub-components but it’s the truest thing I’ve ever written.
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