Blessed by Arizona Highways

A great magazine gives my business a much needed shot in the arm.

Arizona Highways has long been one of my favorite magazines. There’s no other magazine that consistently shows off the beauty of our state with high quality photographs and articles that paint pictures with words. I’m sure that more than a few people have been lured to Arizona by something they saw in the pages of Arizona Highways. And I’m sure plenty of us have remained to make Arizona our home.

Last fall, I had to follow the route of Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. I’d hired a video production company to make a promotional video about my company and wanted footage from every location we visited, from Phoenix to Monument Valley. There would be a videographer on board for the entire six-day trip and another following in a truck with equipment they expected to need at each location. Since I had a spare seat on the helicopter, I decided to offer it to two different high quality travel publications. The idea was to put a photographer or writer on board and maybe build a relationship with that publication to trade flight time with advertising.

At least that was the idea.

The Arizona Highways editor responded quickly. He assigned one of the magazine’s writers, Keridwen Cornelius, to accompany us and write up a story about the excursion. If everything worked out well and they could use what she wrote, they’d send a photographer out to get pictures later.

Arizona HighwaysI was thrilled, but didn’t really expect much. I certainly didn’t expect the 10 pages about my Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure that appeared in the May 2009 issue.

I got my advance copies about two weeks ago. I ate up Keridwen’s words and aerial photographer Adriel Heisey’s photographs. The article is amazing. Keridwen gave readers a look into her mind as she experienced each part of the excursion, from our departure from the Terminal 3 Helipad at Sky Harbor Airport to our winding canyon flight down the Verde River — and everything in between. For the first time ever, I’m able to understand how people who don’t usually fly around Arizona in helicopters see and feel about the magnificent terrain.

(By the way, this is one of the reasons I like to fly people who don’t usually fly. I get to experience a bit of the wonder of it all through their eyes.)

The magazine reached subscribers on Friday, April 10. That’s when my phone started ringing. I’ve been answering questions and sending out printed literature ever since. The Flying M Air Web site has also been busy, with about four times the hits it usually gets. The magazine just hit the newsstands and the Arizona Highways Web site. I formally announced it on Flying M Air’s Web site and began offering a 10% discount for all excursions booked before June 30.

And yesterday I booked an excursion for a couple from Pine, AZ for the last week in this month.

To say that this is a breakthrough for me is an understatement. One of the toughest things about building a small business is getting the word out about your services — especially when your services have a limited market and are relatively costly. My company is the only one in the country offering multi-day excursions by helicopter. But I can spend thousands of dollars on advertising and not be able to reach the right people. After all, ads are ads — we see so many ads, we know how to filter them out. But editorial content is different. And there’s nothing better than seeing a positive report about a product or service written by an objective third party.

I feel extremely fortunate to have my business covered in such a way.

I hope everyone reading this goes out and tracks down a copy of the May 2009 Arizona Highways. I really think you’ll enjoy every single page.

LinkedIn Groups

A wasteland of advertising.

Okay, so maybe I’m being harsh and unfair. I just watched two back-to-back episodes of House on DVD and the Hugh Laurie character’s cynicism really rubs off on me.

LinkedInBut look three of the five most recent “discussion topics” in a helicopter-related group I belonged to on LinkedIn:

ABC Helicopters in ABC Florida
We are a flight training school that operate R22, R44,Schweizer 300’s and a Jet Ranger. If you are looking to become a Commerical pilot contact us at ww.abc.com

and

I am new to this group and looking to expand my network. I offer Helicopter flight instruction, demo flights, rides and rentals.

XYZ Choppers provides flight instruction, demo flights, helicopter rides, and helicopter rentals in Robinson R22 and R44 helicopters.

XYZ Choppers LLC is a Helicopter Flight school that is dedicated to the education and understanding of Helicopter flight concepts. As a student of XYZ Choppers, you will be learning how to fly in the fist 5 minutes of in-flight instruction. From the first lesson, you are on your way to becoming a helicopter pilot. We stress education in our ground school and consistently challenge your skill as a developing helicopter pilot.

and

Residential Airport Communities / Airpark Location Ideas?

I’m currently 70% sold out of AAA Estates Airpark on Lake AAA in east TX. See http://www.AAAestates.com/
I’m very interested in locating a new airpark location/area (City/State 300-500 acres) and would love to hear some ideas. I would be interested in an area/place that has the four seasons or very close to that.

Are these people freaking kidding me? How could any of these “discussion topics” be considered discussion topics? They are blatant advertisements, plain and simple.

My understanding of “discussions” is that people share ideas and opinions about specific topics they’re all supposed be interested in. I don’t think advertisements or solicitations for “ideas” that are obviously posted to get attention for business endeavors fall into that description.

I’m already a commercial helicopter pilot. That’s why I joined the group. I have no need for entry level training or helicopter “rides.” I’m not interested in giving people advice about real estate.

I’d like to see the group turn into something of real value to commercial helicopter pilots. The ads I’ve been seeing don’t meet that criteria.

Is this the way LinkedIn is going? Are the group discussion areas becoming a Craig’s List for a specific topic?

If so, I want nothing to do with it. I have to look at enough advertising every day. I shouldn’t have to look at it when trying to network with and learn from people with similar interests. I just dropped out of both groups I joined last month. Frankly, I have a lot better ways to waste my time.

Seven Mistakes to Avoid When Using the Internet to Market Your Products

Why is it that some companies just don’t get it?

Over the past week or so, I’ve been doing some research into coffee carts. You know what I mean — those movable carts you might see in office building lobbies or airports or malls that sell espresso and other hot and cold beverages. I’m working on a business proposition where I might just need one, so I’m been trying to see what my options are.

Trying is the correct word in the previous sentence. I’ve been trying hard to use the Internet — including Google, of course — to find businesses that manufacture or sell the kind of cart I want. What I’m finding, however, is that very few companies that make or sell this equipment have a clue about how they can use the Internet to make information about their products available to the world 24/7.

Why This Really Irks Me

Putting Your Small Business on the WebYou have to understand my frustration with this. After all, back in 2000, I wrote a slim book for Peachpit Press titled, Putting Your Small Business on the Web. I wrote it primarily to help small business owners understand how the Web could help them so they wouldn’t be victimized by unscrupulous Web developers. Back in those days, the Web was relatively new and people simply didn’t understand how to take advantage of it. My book explained what the Web could and couldn’t do for them and provided advice for making the most of what the Web offered.

Please understand that I’m not trying to sell anyone on this book. It’s old and terribly out of date. One of these days I’ll revise it and release it as a ebook or possibly a print on demand project. If you really want it, you can find used copies of it on Amazon.com. (That’s where I found this picture of the cover; I’d discarded my old scans of it.) My point is, I wrote a book about this eight years ago and I’m still finding people making the same mistakes I told them to avoid.

But They Just Don’t Get It

One of the things I advised was putting all of your product information on the Web. Photos, descriptions, dimensions, and yes, even pricing. This is the information people want when they’re shopping for solutions. Having complete information helps people decide whether to take the next step — which might include buying the product.

Yet in my search for coffee carts — and yes, I did use all kinds of appropriate search phrases in Google — I did not find many companies that provided the information I needed. Instead, the search results included companies that made one or more of the following mistakes.

  • They didn’t sell the product I was searching for. Yes, my search phrase was one of the phrases that appeared in the site’s meta tags or in page content, but that’s not what they sold. They sold vending carts that might or might not be used for coffee. Not what someone serious about building a coffee business wants. In this case, they’d used their meta tags to enhance search engine results in their favor, thus wasting the time of people who pulled up their pages. Just another example of SEO gone bad.
  • Blurry CartThey didn’t include images of their products. In this category, I’ll include companies that included blurry — yes blurry, as shown in this actual image from a site — images of their products and companies with a lot of broken image links. And how about a company with an embedded movie that simply wouldn’t play? I’d say 50% of the sites I brought up had insufficient illustrations of their products. Because I’m very interested in how my coffee business might look, these sites wasted my time.
  • They required you to fill out a form fully describing your business before they’d give you any information at all. WTF? Needless to say, I didn’t waste much time there because I certainly wasn’t going to provide that kind of information just to see what solutions they might have.
  • They provided vague information about some products but required you to contact them by e-mail or phone to learn more. So much for 24/7 information. I’m the kind of person who often does research at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Will someone be answering the phone when I call? I don’t think so.
  • They listed so many products that it was hard to distinguish between them. One site, for example, offered eight different 7-foot coffee carts. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. There wasn’t enough information about any of them. And since the same company listed over 100 vending products, I started wondering whether they had any coffee expertise at all. Surely a coffee cart has different features than a hot dog cart.
  • They forced you to go to a different site — or multiple sites — to get complete information about a product. One site, for example, showed a blurry image of a coffee cart and listed specifications, then listed three individual Web sites where you could get pricing. Why three? Why go elsewhere at all? Of course, when you got to one of those sites, you’d have to search it for the product you were interested in. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time or patience to waste chasing information.
  • They have bad links on the site. For example, “Click here to get manufacturers specifications.” When you click “here,” it takes you to the home page of another site that lists hundreds of products — not the specifications you expected to find. Yes, it’s yet another way to waste my time.

I did find one company that had PDFs online that could be downloaded for specific products. The two-page PDFs had good photos and were relatively clear about the product’s specifications. They did not, however, include pricing. To get pricing, I had to e-mail the company. They responded quickly with yet another PDF. My question: Why wasn’t the pricing PDF also on the Web site?

Good Information Results in Sales

The result of all this is that after spending about two hours searching for a product that might meet my needs, I found only one company that makes a product I’d consider buying. I don’t know about those other companies — there wasn’t enough information on their sites to convince me that they knew the business and made a quality product I could rely on and afford. The company with the good information is the one I’m seriously considering doing business with.

What companies don’t understand is that their Web presence is almost like a storefront. If its shabbily maintained and doesn’t deliver the information people expect, that reflects on them. (I wrote about that in some length in the book, too.) By failing to make the most of their Web presence, they’re just adding more useless information to the Web — branded with their name.

Facebook Ads

A more targeted approach to advertising?

The other day I discovered Facebook ads.

Let me take a few steps back before I move forward.

I have a Facebook account. I even have 50+ friends on that account. But I don’t use Facebook. Frankly, I feel that I have far better ways to spend my time than “writing on walls” of my friends, playing online games, and browsing a social networking site for social interaction.

The only reason I ever go to Facebook is to respond to friend requests. If I personally know the requesters or interact with them on Twitter, I accept the request. Otherwise, I ignore it. I also ignore invitations to most groups. After all, if I’m not there, why join a group?

Every once in a while, I come really close to killing my Facebook account. Then I figure, what the heck? It doesn’t cost anything and I have most of the notifications turned off so it doesn’t even bother me much.

But the other day, when I was on Facebook responding to a request from someone I don’t know who happened to go to the same high school as me (I can’t make this stuff up), I noticed the ad column on the right side of the page. At the very top was an “Advertise” link. Since I’m always looking for new, affordable ways to advertise my helicopter tour and charter business, I clicked the link.

I won’t bore you with the details. Simply said, the advertising feature makes it very easy to create targeted text/image ads that link to a site or page. You can pay per impression or per click. You can set per click and per day maximum budgets, so you don’t have to worry about going broke. And, since the only place these ads appear is on Facebook, you don’t have to worry about some Webmaster clicking up a link to squeeze a few more pennies (or dollars) out of you.

Arizona by HelicopterGift they Won't ForgetI set up two ads. One (left) is for my multi-day excursions. It’s displayed to male college graduates throughout the US, aged 25-50 who like helicopters, adventure, etc. My logic is that this is the kind of trip that would appeal to men and since it’s not exactly cheap, the college graduate and age requirements may limit the impressions to folks who have more money to spend. (Although who has any money to spend these days?) The other (right) is for Christmas gift giving. I targeted that geographically to the Phoenix area, with no other limitations. Clicking either link takes you to Flying M Air’s Web site where the clicker can find more information and pricing.

Facebook has some good management tools to help you see how many times each ad has appeared and has been clicked. For example, on the first two days my ads were online — and that’s not even 2 full days — they appeared a total of 60,000 times and were clicked 16 times. While you might not think that’s very good, I’m thrilled. I don’t want people to click if they’re not interested, since I have to pay for each click. The campaign is under its daily budget (so far) and I can remove or suspend either (or both) ads any time I like.

So I’ve set up two ads to run for a full month. Let’s see where it takes me.

Comments? Want to share your experiences with Facebook advertising or some other pay-per-click system? Use the comments link or form for this post. Please limit your responses to experiences as an advertiser, though. I’m not interested in reading about the success or failure of someone’s get-rich-quick on Web advertising scheme.

How Stupid Are We?

Apparently, some of us are very stupid.

I’m shocked and saddened by the spread of evil bullshit by conservative Republicans and the McCain campaign — and the way some of the American public seems to be swallowing it.

It’s all over the Web. I can’t spend an hour reading respectable publications without finding more and more examples.

In a Time Magazine story, “In Battleground Virginia, a Tale of Two Ground Games,” writer Karen Tumulty describes a meeting at a Virginia McCain campaign office:

With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: “Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon,” he said. “That is scary.” It is also not exactly true — though that distorted reference to Obama’s controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. “And he won’t salute the flag,” one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, “We don’t even know where Senator Obama was really born.” Actually, we do; it’s Hawaii.

It’s the sheer stupidity of these McCain campaign volunteers that I find most offensive. Rather than learn the truth — for example, where Obama was born — they’d rather spread gossip, rumors, and lies. They don’t care how their candidate wins — as long as he wins.

And frankly, McCain’s not much better than his volunteers.

FactCheck.org, an independent, non-partisan organization with the lofty goal of checking the facts in public statements to expose the falsehoods, has been having a tough time keeping up with the bullshit hitting the airwaves and the Web this election season. While it has exposed some falsehoods and misleading statements made by the Obama campaign, the vast majority of false claims appears to be coming from the McCain side.

In ““He Lied” About Bill Ayers?,” FactCheck.org staff write:

In a TV ad, McCain says Obama “lied” about his association with William Ayers, a former bomb-setting, anti-war radical from the 1960s and ’70s….We find McCain’s accusation that Obama “lied” to be groundless. It is true that recently released records show half a dozen or so more meetings between the two men than were previously known, but Obama never denied working with Ayers.

In “Dishonorable,” FactCheck.org writes:

The McCain-Palin campaign released the ad, titled “Dangerous,” and said it would be televised nationally. It recycles a misleading, 14-month-old charge that Sen. Barack Obama disrespected U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan by accusing them of “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” It also misrepresents votes in favor of withdrawing troops from Iraq as being votes “increasing the risk on their lives.”

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins wrote a brilliantly sarcastic piece titled “Dear Old Golden Dog Days,” where she laments the passing of the early days of the campaign. Of McCain’s current campaign ads and the current Republican strategy, she states:

Now they’re all about the Evil That Is Obama. The newest one, “Ambition,” has a woman, speaking in one of those sinister semiwhispers, saying: “When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers. When discovered, he lied.” Then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, she starts ranting about Congressional liberals and risky subprime loans. Then John McCain pops up to say he approved it. All in 30 seconds! And, of course, McCain would think it’s great. For the first time, the Republicans appear to have captured his thought process on tape.

The Republican campaign strategy now involves sending their candidates to areas where everybody is a die-hard McCain supporter already. Then they yell about Obama until the crowd is so frenzied people start making threats. The rest of the country is supposed to watch and conclude that this would be an enjoyable way to spend the next four years.

One of the 212 commenters (so far) to the piece, Walt Ingram says, in part:

I don’t know if Sarah Palin is really mean spirited or if she understands what a disservice she is doing to the country. I do know however that she is drunk with the euphoria of cheering crowds and the power she has to excite and fire up the anger and hate within her crowds. She wants to get people to believe that Obama is “un-American.” Unfortunately some people are taken in.

The rest of his comment is certainly worth reading, as are the other “Editor’s Selections” comments for the post.

The McCain campaign is apparently able to whip up crowds to a frenzy of hate. As reported on CBSNews.com in “Kerry Condemns ‘Hate-Filled’ Language at McCain-Palin Rallies:”

“The reports are piling up of ugliness at the campaign rallies of John McCain and Sarah Palin,” Kerry writes. “Audience members hurl insults and racial epithets, call out ‘Kill Him!’ and ‘Off With His Head,’ and yell ‘treason’ when Senator Obama’s name is mentioned. I strongly condemn language like this which can only be described as hate-filled.”

The Kerry making this statement is John Kerry at a fundraising appeal for the Obama campaign.

CNN.com also reported on the change in McCain’s rallies in “Rage Rising on the MCCain Campaign Trails“:

With recent polls showing Sen. Barack Obama’s lead increasing nationwide and in several GOP-leaning states, some Republicans attending John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign rallies are showing a new emotion: rage.

The article goes on to report multiple cases of McCain-Palin rally attendees shouting racial epithets, calling Obama a “terrorist” and yelling “treason” when his name is mentioned, and booing McCain when he assures them that Obama is a “decent person.”

This topic even came up on NPR’s Diane Rehm show on its weekly News Roundup. The 10:00 AM segment for October 10 became heated when Diane and her three guests, Eleanor Clift, Matthew Continetti, and Juan Williams discussed how Republican rallies are generating hate toward Obama. Ms. Clift stated that the McCain camp was “flirting with very dangerous rhetoric” and voiced her concerns about vocalizations of “Kill him!” at rallies. (You can download the segment here; the discussion begins at 27:40 minutes.)

It seems to me that the McCain campaign isn’t doing anything positive to improve its chances of winning the election. Instead, it’s polarizing the public, driving a wide wedge between the believers of this “dangerous rhetoric” and the thinking public who know better. It’s dividing the nation.

What good will that do us, especially in these troubled times?

How can the McCain campaign continue with this policy of personal attacks against Obama, attacks designed to scare voters and fire them up to a hateful frenzy? How can this possibly prove McCain to be “presidential material”?

And can people really be stupid enough to believe the Muslim, terrorist pal claims?

I guess folks like these can — the craziness starts at about 2 minutes in: