NEW YORK (AP) — Dex One Corp. and SuperMedia Inc., two Yellow Pages publishers, on Tuesday said they agreed to merge, with the goal of saving money in a dwindling business.
Shareholders in the companies will exchange their shares for new shares in a new company, Dex Media.
Based on the closing stock prices of Dex One and SuperMedia on Monday, the new company would be worth $100 million. But shares of both existing companies jumped in heavy Tuesday morning trading, putting the total value of the new company at about $115 million.
Shares of Dex One added 48 cents, or 39 percent, to $1.81, while SuperMedia shares gained $1.27, or 49 percent, to $3.85.
Dex One shareholders will own 60 percent of the new company and SuperMedia shareholders will own 40 percent, proportions that reflect the relative values of the companies as of Monday’s close.
The companies said Dex Media should be able to cut annual costs by $150 million to $175 million by 2015, partly by job cuts. The two companies employ a combined 5,800 people.
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
The CEO of SuperMedia, Peter McDonald, will be CEO of the combined company. Alan Schultz, chairman of Dex One’s board, will chair the board of the combined company.
Alfred Mockett, Dex One’s CEO, will step down when the deal closes.
Both companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2009, as consumers shifted from using printed directories to doing online searches. They exited bankruptcy in 2010. Both sell listings in online directories as well, but have been unable to compensate fully for the drop in print revenue.
I started taking drum lessons in seventh grade. We were taught “rudiments” which are like scales for other instruments. Learning these rolls and triplets prepared me for band and orchestral music but not for jazz and not for improvisation. I didn’t realize I needed a different perspective, one with rhythm and passion. A friend who was a jazz musician gave me The Drums of Passion by Michael Olatunji. He thought it would give me that new perspective. I have never lost this rhythm. Listen and you’ll understand.
Passion and experience
Many a night have I tossed and turned with words scrolling through my mind trying to find the right headline or a different arrangement for a sentence. Obsessive? No, exacting. This is the kind of passion I’m talking about.
Expressing the right idea, touching someone else’s heart, creating interest and value for the reader, that is writing with passion – regardless of whether I am working on a TV commercial, a video script, a website or a brochure.
A good copywriter can climb right inside the mind of the reader and that takes experience. A huge part of copywriting (and Internet marketing especially) is being able to strike a cord with a particular audience. What motivates my audience? What makes them angry, frustrated, happy or hopeful? That is always in the forefront of a good copywriter’s mind. How can I move them to action?
I am more inquisitive than most people I know. I am called on to write about photovoltaics, free-range chicken and cubicle furniture. I am challenged endlessly to come up with new angles on the same products and services. Without a genuine lust for learning, and a healthy tolerance for research, I would not be able to understand the mechanics of everyday objects (the crux of copywriting). Good copywriters crave knowledge, are tickled by trivia and love knowing the inside story.
To write marketing literature that really connects with people and drives them to action, I need to understand, and more importantly the reader needs to understand, the values your business holds dear. All of this information forms the foundation of your business branding but rarely can you articulate those details, with passion. I need lots of details and I need to hear you express why you are in business.
This appreciation for what you offer is fundamental to transforming routine promotional language into a heartfelt brand identity. If done well, the copy in a sales letter or a newsletter or a speech will take the prospect on a small journey. The story will help the customer know exactly what they are buying and why they are buying from you. This is the voice of your brand which lingers in the subconscious of your audience because it speaks their language. A good copywriter will breathe life into your brand, creating a personality that your audience will value. Before you tell them what’s in it for them, you have to explain what’s in it for you.
So I am an editor, headline writer, technical translator, researcher and improviser — all of which require passion and experience. The first is inbred; the second is only gained over time. It takes a lot of practice to get it right and hours of rehearsal to make it blend together.
Research indicates that the majority of buyers conduct their own research using the internet and then contact you, not vice versa. Do you know what your customers/prospects are searching for in relation to your business?
When is the last time you used your “yellow pages?”
The Internet is the first place they turn for information and they do it nearly 18 billion times each month. Your website is unlikely to be the first thing they find. You can engage them earlier with stories, fact sheets and case studies using the technologies of connection rather than waiting for them to find your website.
Q1: What are the three most important buying criteria for your prospects?
Start talking about these criteria on line. Become “needs focused.”
Q2: What are the three biggest challenges you’re having with your prospects?
What are their worst fears? What do they think might go wrong? Describe what you do in your business to relieve their fears, besides promises. Develop recommendations to help them avoid these problems.
Producing interesting, non-promotional content is critical. It is more than offering product or service information. It is understanding what customers are looking for when searching. What problems are they trying to solve? If you publish solutions, answers and guidance you begin to look like the best choice.
If you struggle with writing, or the time to do it, hire a professional writer to do some of the work with you. Have a publishing schedule.
Chas. McNamara – SHOW&TELL
Phone: 720-951-0001. Email: cmcharlesmcn@gmail.com
If our ideas aren’t worth a nickel, you won’t owe us a dime.
Also take a look at Five Content Marketing Tips.
We have talked a lot about bounce rate in the past (Bounce Rate = % of Single page visits), Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors…. Many times, I have referred to bounce rate in the context of blog design, mobile device support, landing page optimization etc.
This time, we are going to talk about the REAL Google Analytics Bounce Rate data with the help of the most important factor that you should care about in your site analytics viz. Audience Engagement. Let me explain the two dimensions of engagement namely visit duration and page depth with the help of the pictures below (Click the pictures to enlarge):
Now let us analyze the data in the above picture.
Essentially, 79.72% of the visits to the particular niche blog did not stay for more than 10 seconds!
The second picture below shows one page depth of 77.43% and this is nothing but the bounce rate in Google Analytics overview page.
From the above two information, it is pretty much clear that even though the one page visits are only at 77 percent (which anyhow is not a good figure) or so, for practical purposes, the visits that stayed for a lesser duration are much higher. i.e. Almost 85% of the visits are less than 30 seconds long. This essentially means that your actual bounce rate is much higher!
Well, it depends on your website type.
If you have a content rich blogs, news site or rich information sites then something like 50% of bounce is acceptable, and up to 75% would mean that you are probably running a site with not-so-interesting content and more than 75% or 80% is probably disastrous. In other words, a content rich blog should have a very good page depth values for 2+ page visits and duration of visit should be higher as well.
However, in the case of a niche blog that has affiliate links or ads right on top, it may not be bad to have a high bounce rate. Before establishing this theory though, you need to analyze top outbound-click areas using a proper analysis tool. If your conversion rate is as good as 30% or 40% then having a bounce rate of 80% is not at all bad. For a niche blog, if the page depth and duration of visit are high, but still have low conversions, then there’s nothing to boast about a low bounce rate value anyhow.
In essence having a high bounce rate is NOT necessarily bad! At the end, it all depends on the bottom line that you are targeting with respect your blog or site content. These bottom line attributes could be money, goodwill, readership, list building etc.
At the same time, if none of your goals are met and you still have high bounce rate, you are basically not going anywhere. You may be having some serious problem with your blog in that case. These could be the site performance, too many or intrusive ads, poor typography, design or readability, poor support for multiple device and browser type and most importantly poor content. Fortunately Google Analytics provides extensive data on what type of technology, content or geography has resulted in high bounce rate. You may want to delve deeper into such data than just worrying about what is shown as your Google Analytics bounce rate %.
If you have spent any time on my website reading about PPC or pay per click marketing and would like to try your hand at running your own campaign, shoot me an email, and I will give the first 30 people a $100 Google AdWords credit. You can use this credit to run your own PPC campaign online.
The reason that I am offering this to you is because most business start with attempting to run campaigns on their own before every contacting me about doing it for them. It’s only after many failed attempts that I receive a call asking for help, or even to take over their accounts.
Setup of an AdWords campaign is so simple on the surface, but once you get into the program and start building out all your creative, choosing keywords, and destination pages…most people decide to hire a professional.
Again, no strings attached $100 credit for any new (have not attempted AdWords before) account. My only request is that you have a five minute conversation with me about your business.
Call me at 720.427.3707 or email me at Chris@onlinemarketingdenver.net
Allowing comments on your website is a great way to allow people to engage with you, your site, and your products. The unfortunate aspect of comments are the spam messages created as replies to post on your site.
Every day I have a 10 minute process that I go through on every website that I own, cleaning out the spammed back links. This example is 1 weeks worth of spammed back links to just one site of mine. You can see all of the comments over the course of one month. 99.9% of all comments waiting in the moderator control panel on this wordpress site are all spam placed by other people in order to create a back link to their respective site.
Here is just a small sample of the the comments created on this one site. Some of them don’t even attempt to cover the fact that they are spam.
Not a single back link will ever be approved on any one of my sites. I only link my site to other site that have useful similar information about the topics of said site.
Often times my customers tell me that they are going to pay for back links, or their in a review of their current SEO status we discover back links created in this format. With the nature of Google’s Algorithm, poor back links not only hurt the destination site but the site the back link is posted from.
I have recently consulted with a company in Sacramento CA about this topic specifically. This customer was paying an SEO firm out of the bay area, one thousand dollars a month for Search Engine Optimization. The company wasn’t showing up on any keyword terms. It took just a few steps to establish one of the possible reasons the site didn’t show up. They had over 1,400 inbound links to the site, from site that had nothing to do with the companies offerings.
After spending more than 20 hours trying to clean up the back links, and allowing over a month for the changes to be noticed, the customers MOZ rank climbed over 2 points, and the sites SERPs were impacted positively on over 20 keyword terms.
In conclusion, it’s more important today than ever before to use quality SEO companies like Denver Media, or 29 Prime, to do your companies SEO. It’s also noteworthy to not be fooled into thinking that a $5 offer on some website will benefit your SEO in any positive way.
If you are concerned about your companies current SEO efforts please contact Chris at 720.427.3707 for a free consultation.
I found this article today when i was looking at the ZMOT approach to looking at online marketing. It really is something that I talk with business owners about every day, yet don’t make any special points about it at all. The education process has become so short in many aspects that while the information comes up in conversation, I never really hammer the point home about how much goes into each program.
The online world can be tough to navigate sometimes, especially if you are trying to sell or market a product or service. There are so many websites, tools and strategies out there that promise you customers and sales contracts. Sometimes they work, but the truth is, there’s more to online marketing than simply having a Facebook page and creating some Google Ads.
Online marketing at its core is about creating great brand recognition, so that even if a customer doesn’t make a purchase in a given moment, they are well aware that your products exist. For a marketer, that is often more than enough. To build brand awareness, here are a few tips:
Generally, online marketing is similar to greeting your customer when they enter your store. You want to give a pleasant smile and introduce yourself, but you do not want to bombard them with questions and follow them around; you want to leave a good impression even if they don’t make a purchase. Marketing has transformed over the years and we as entrepreneurs need to remember that with this online revolution we can no longer rely on brochures and billboards. Word of mouth has become the “ word of the web,” and customers are creating our marketing strategies without us realizing it. We must learn to adapt and accept the fact that online marketing is going to be a new phrase on our yearly budgets.
Today was another first for me, after the announcement of WebVisible closing their doors after a 10 year run, and the official announcement from their CEO posted on Tech Crunch.
Here’s part of the note sent to employees:
It is with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that today, December 27, 2011 is the last day of operation for WebVisible. I know this is a shock and has come abruptly. Even with all our efforts to recover throughout this past year, we found ourselves in a position in which the debt load of the company was simply too much to overcome. Our bank foreclosed on its loan which means they are taking over the company’s assets and collecting all remaining payments. As a result they have forced the company to shut down….This happened quite suddenly, and the timing could not be more unfortunate…As of today there are no employees left at WebVisible, including myself and therefore there is no one to handle anything for you.. This is like a bad movie, I can’t imagine a worse scenario for shutting a company down and laying everyone off, the only concession I was able to get from the bank was to wait until after Christmas. As the CEO I apologize that I have not been able to do more to avoid this event and this timing.
We are still trying to get confirmation from the company, and will update when we hear back.
In an attempt to gather more information I did a search for the company name on Google, I was shocked with the paid results. I know shouldn’t be shocked, but if you look at the cost of the webvisible keyword today you might be shocked…Prices up to $9.54 a click, from the previous rate of 10 cents a click.
I have attached the SERP to this post for you to see just how aggressively other companies like Orange Soda, Netsertive, Hellogeo, visiture, and more are going after the Webvisible customers that were just left hanging in the wind.
If you are a business owner, or marketing professional that has been impacted by Webvisible shutting down, please don’t just jump to another company, spend your time doing research…don’t make an emergency buy.
If you are in need of transitioning your Search, Social, or Display campaigns please call Chris today at 720.427.3707 and I can help you through the process. I work for the largest provider of local paid search in the United States, a company that has more than 37,000 active customers, and has run more than 700,000 campaigns to date.
Today we’re thrilled to announce that ReachLocal has been named one of Glassdoor’s 50 Best Places to Work in 2012! Based on 250,000 employee reviews submitted in the last year, this Employee’s Choice award truly represents how ReachLocal employees feel about working here.
With 65,000 companies in the running, only 50 had what it takes to make Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work in 2012 list. ReachLocal is proud to rank #27. And with an especially high approval rating for CEO Zorik Gordon (at an impressive 80%), we look forward to giving ReachLocal employees even more reasons to “bleed orange” as we continue delivering the best solutions for local businesses all over the world.
According to TopSEOs recent release of the SEO firms in the North America, ReachLocal is ranked in the top 10 SEO firms. If you have been reading my blog, or site for any length of time it should be clear to you that ReachLocal is not in the SEO business. With that stated looking at the ReachCast product and the SEO benefits that the product has, based strictly on the design & implementation of the Cast Platform, SEO is a strong benefit of the product.
ReachCast was designed to be a social media product, however customers that have used the Cast product have seen the SEO benefits take on a value proposition of it’s own, in fact so much that ReachLocal is being recognized at the 8th best company for SEO. Please see the image below.
About TopSEO
Since its introduction in 2002, topseos has been identified as an independent authority on vendors who supply internet marketing products and services Our mission is to offer comprehensive and independent advice to assist buyers in making purchasing decisions from internet marketing vendors.
We pride ourselves on a disciplined research process that has us regularly engaged with the companies we evaluate. Our proprietary analysis tools and methodology, developed over multiple years, includes an extensive rigorous evaluation rating system that is applied to each company that is identified and researched. We gather information about products and services, about consumer demand in the marketplace, monitor industry-wide trends, exhibit and meet countless firms at industry tradeshows, and often times even visit firms that are evaluated.
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