Dave Naffziger's Blog

A week after the launch of deals.judysbook.com we began to receive substantial traffic from the search engines. In fact a month after launch, search traffic comprises well over 60% of our activity. An interesting thing has happened though. The content that receives search traffic is different from the content that our regular users engage with.Take a look at our top categories of deals (as determined by aggregate traffic over the last week):

1. Freebies (70% of traffic is from returning users)
2. Personal Care (9% of traffic is from returning users)
3. Apparel (66%)
4. Kids & Baby (37%)
5. Food (44%)

Put another way, our users only care about 2 of our top 5 categories (Freebies & Apparel) . The other three categories would be replaced by categories that didn’t make this list. We have different interests among our regular and our new users.

At this stage, we’re developing to serve the needs of our regular users. Our website stats supplement conversations that we’re constantly having with our users. However, we might have misread their needs had we settled for the first order analysis.

At JudysBook, we have a tremendous interest in helping local businesses succesfully build their businsesses online. There are a number of resources that they need to investigate:

Create a free business listing at:

• Judy’s Book http://manage.judysbook.com (of course, I’ll list our service first)
• Google: Do a search for your business name on Google Local. Click the Edit This Listing link at the bottom of the page
• Yahoo: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/ Don’t get the free web site. Yahoo just uses this to sell advertising to other businesses
• AOL: Go to http://www.digitalcities.com/ Navigate to your city and your category. Click the Add/Update a listing link at the bottom of the page.
• Amazon A9. Find your business on Amazon A9’s yellow pages. Select the Update this business info box in the lower right (not the bottom right).

On every site, read the reviews of your business. If the reviews seem fraudulent, send an email to the website.  On JudysBook, they can go ahead and respond to a review on the same page where the review is listed.
Advertise on Google and Yahoo

• A really useful tool for building your keyword list is here: http://5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php
• AdWords supports geotargeting. So in addition to the local list you’ll build at the link above, you should take all of your generic keywords and restrict them based on geotargeting.
• Yahoo doesn’t support geotargeting, so you can’t use generic terms (restaurant). You’ll need to use ‘seattle restaurant’

This list is by no means complete, but it should give a pretty good starting point for marketing your business online.  I’ll try to add types of resources in later posts.