How should you go about increasing your revenue? Should you focus, first, on cutting expenses or should you be looking into new advertising opportunities?

When business owners look for new ways to increase their income, one crucial component that often gets neglected is their customer database. Your existing (and previous) customers are the easiest customers to obtain and are, simultaneously, the least expensive in terms of marketing and advertising.

Here are just a few of the tactics you can undertake with your existing clients:

1. Upsell your customers to a better, more valuable, deal.
2. Convert your one-time customers into continuity customers.
3. Resell customers before their renewal date.

Regardless of which methods you undertake, you must understand the true lifetime value of your customers.

First, how much money does it cost you to bring in a new client / customer?

Then, figure out how much money your customers (on average) spend over a lifetime of purchases? And are these one-time purchases or weekly or monthly or yearly, etc.?

Next, calculate your profits on those sales and decide just how much of that profit you would be willing to spend to acquire the customer in the first place.

If you own a swimming pool maintenance company, for example, take the average number of years your average customer has been with you and the average monthly amount that your customer spends with you. Let’s say that the average customer is with you for 4 years at an average of $150 per month. That’s 48 months x’s $150, which equals $7,200 per customer. Let’s say your average monthly profit per customer is $100. This would make your average customer value $4,800.

Now, the next question to ask yourself is: “How much money am I willing to spend today in order to make $4,800 over 4 years?”

If this was your average customer value, would you be willing to pay (on average) $500 per customer?

This lesson should teach you two things:

1. To focus on growing your customer list based upon what you’re willing to spend.
2. How vital it is to do everything you can to increase the lifetime value of the customers you already have.

Make it your goal to keep customers for a lifetime. You can do this with steady and frequent communication. Keep your customers engaged with you and your business and give them a reason and a desire to do business with you.

Don’t fall short by not staying in communication. Keep your customers in touch with what your business is currently doing and what it can offer.

You can do this with a company blog, a company Facebook page or Twitter account. It can also be done with the occasional email, but don’t forget the power of an old-fashioned telephone call, even if it’s just to say hello!

If you’d like further assistance with your marketing plan, let us know. We’d be happy to help and, as always, our consultations are always free.

For backdrop, IAC kicked off CityGrid last year as a set of APIs which formulates all of Citysearch’s local listings and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The firm then rebranded its Yelp-like local business content platform CitySearch as part of CityGrid Media.

All of the local listings in Citysearch are obtainable through CityGrid’s APIs so that anyone constructing a mobile app or local Website can seize business listings, addresses, phone numbers, photos, reviews, and more and produce their own apps around them. CityGrid also matches local advertisers with these local publishers.

The statement today offers the company’s complete Places repository yet because CityGrid has joined with Infogroup to add Infogroup’s full data bank of 15 million local businesses to the API. All of this will be united with CityGrid’s built-in advertiser base and provided via the new API suite.

The API includes places facts for over 15 million local business listings, close to a million advertisers across 75,000 cities countrywide, targeted web and mobile formats to drive engagement with service provider marketers, iOS and Android SDKs and more.

CityGrid also aims to furnish its API free to developers and will be leading a workshop at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon.

Davinci Virtual Office for Google Places

Some companies have attempted to remedy this problem by renting an address with Mailboxes Etc. or the UPS Store, but the problem with this tactic (primarily) is that it violates Google’s rules. What will end up happening is that Google will discover what you are up to and, when they do, they will remove your Google Places page altogether.

Why Davinci Virtual Office a great solution for Google Places:

If you work from home or have a mobile business that doesn’t really require store frontage… or are just in a bad location in terms of where you’d like to show up on Google Maps and, by extension, Google Places, one of the best things you can do is lease a virtual office from Davinci. Davinci Virtual Office Solutions is the leading provider of turn key virtual communications and virtual office solutions. If you simply need an address to call your own, you can get that from as low as $50 per month, but Davinci’s virtual offices and virtual office services can also include local or toll-free telephone and fax numbers, digital voicemail, electronic fax, email, online command center, unified messaging, voicemail to email, fax to email, professional live receptionist services, virtual assistants, live call answering, screening and forwarding, find me, follow me, surveys, outbound calling, customer service, appointment scheduling, order taking, and much more.

Features for Davinci Virtual Office:

Davinci virtual office and virtual office services have locations worldwide. With professional business addresses in over prime 600 locations, mail forwarding, lobby and directory listings, access to conference rooms and day offices, catering, administrative services, virtual assistants, business support centers, resident agent services, license hanging and more, Davinci Virtual is helping businesses maintain a global presence on a local budget.

With Davinci’s virtual office and virtual office services, you can grow your business the smart way. Davinci is the affordable, no hassle alternative to leasing full time office space or hiring an in house receptionist. Not only will Davinci reduce your cost of doing business, we can actually improve your bottom line. Our live receptionist services, virtual assistants and virtual office location products are designed to project the best possible image for your business; all without the overhead.

Don’t get yourself banned from Google Places… but do get yourself on the map!

Visit Davinci Virtual Office today for more information.

Plan: Get a Davinci Virtual Office to improve your Google Places results!

Recently, Groupon has seen a huge increase in the number of competitors seeking to “clone” its business model. An acquisition by Google may help protect them from the frenzy; however, that said, just because Google is behind the helm, future success isn’t guaranteed. The Groupon model is so simple that big names, like Walmart and Amazon, have already jumped into the game, offering similar group buying models of their own, but where the giants typically offer nationally brands, Groupon focuses on group buying power at the local level… which is why a Groupon acquisition by Google certainly matters to a local search engine optimization company like bPUBLIC.com!

This video is also available on Vimeo. Honestly, I like the look and feel of the Vimeo website much more than I do that of YouTube. However, we all know that YouTube is owned by Google, so we always duplicate our efforts with both sites.

That video was generated using screen recording software of the original video (which is why there are some video artifacts in the beginning, plus I think it has to do with YouTube’s encoding… we also uploading the video to Vimeo and didn’t notice any of the video artifacts), which you can view here on Citysearch.

You can also visit The Children’s Academy.

Overview:

About: Chartbeat launched in April 2009 and is used by some of the most popular sites on the web including the Onion, Mahalo, Pitchfork, and DailyKos. Based in New York, the team is led by General Manager Tony Haile and is part of betaworks, a media company focused on the real-time web and social media.

Chartbeat sprung from a Betaworks product called firef.ly, which enabled real-time messaging capabilities between website owners and their visitors. Adding upon firef.ly, Chartbeat evolved into a monitoring tool.

Chartbeat currently has 8 staff and it recently raised $3M from Index Venture. So it’s in the scaling up phase of the company. “The scale phase is equally important,” Borthwick said, noting that the key point is “how to do that fast and cheap.”

From Chartbeat’s Website:

• Control the story, track a product launch, or exploit an opportunity as it happens. Our dashboard, iPhone app, and email & SMS alerts let you know the minute your traffic spikes, your servers crash, or your page slows to a crawl.
• Our unique measurement technology shows you whether people are actively engaging with your content, not just how many page views they received.
• Our simple dashboards take analytics beyond the analysts. Now the people on the front lines can understand what’s happening and what they need to do.

Contrasting Chartbeat with Google Analytics:

“Not only does chartbeat make data available in real-time, it also receives constant updates from a site’s users about what they are doing. Although Google Analytics can tell you how many people loaded a page in a given time period, chartbeat can tell you how many people kept the page open and are on it right now, and whether they are actively interacting with it.”

Though Chartbeat may have the appearance of some unaffordable, high-end tech app… maybe because it has so many high-profile clients under its belt; however, truth be told, it’s actually very affordable. Most websites will fit quite nicely within Chartbeat’s generous $9.95 per month plan and options for very large websites go up to $149.95 per month

View this impressive Chartbeat Demo->

From their website: “You can create trails either through our browser plug-in, or directly at trailmeme.com. As you navigate make your way through content or research on the Web, you easily keep track of your trail by using the plug-in, add your own connections and annotations between content, and link and organize the pieces in your trail in multiple ways. By sharing your trail, others are able to ‘walk’ it by either navigating through the content through the various connections you’ve made, or from a higher-level map view that allows users see the entire outline of the trail.”

Trailmeme made its official launch at DEMO this week, as a Xerox-incubated startup tool enabling users to bookmark and organize web based content as diagrams in order to draw connections.

According to Mashable’s interview with founder Venkatesh Rao, Trailmeme’s mission is to help searchers and users of the web to overcome “information overload”. Rao states: “The real-time web is great, but it has us constantly living at the microsecond level, tweeting furiously on our smartphones. We don’t dare step back, because we are afraid we’ll miss something. The way to overcome that fear is to have the big-picture tools that allow you to step back and look at the web at different scales, see things in context and not always be clicking the squeakiest tweeted link. A trail can reveal that the most important article on a topic is a year-old blog post rather than the latest, squeakiest link.”

One thing remaining to be seen is how to encourage user generated content, because without it, a service which depends upon it will soon whither on the vine. Of course, that could have also been said regarding Wikipedia.

Screenshot of Social Media Trail:

Trailmeme has also made available a WordPress plugin that allows you to create trails out of posts on your own WordPress blog (self-hosted, not WordPress.com). Also available is a similar plugin for MediaWiki, and a Trailmeme Firefox toolbar and Bookmarklet.

We will be keeping our eye on Trailmeme to see what, if any, impact it may have upon search engine optimization (SEO).