Lately you may have heard about Mike Koenigs Main Street Marketing Machines, if not visit his site with this link. This is a product aimed at turning someone who has some knowledge about internet marketing into an expert marketer. Armed with this knowledge they provide marketing services to small businesses.

This is much the same as an earlier product from Kevin Wilke of Nitro Marketing. His program was Local Business Money Machine. I actually purchased this product however it did not give me what I wanted. It was a comprehensive program however did not give me enough confidence to go out to businesses, especially here in Australia.

What was missing from the Local Business Money Machine course was the actual hands on items such as templates to use for customers to create sites and other promotional methods. Also finding clients was not something I had confidence in doing based on what was in the course.

I was also concerned that the Local Business Money Machine product was too US centric. I felt my needs as an Australian were not catered for.

Now looking at what I have seen so far of Mike Koenigs Main Street Marketing Machines product he addressed my main concern in the latest video, “Will it work for someone not in the US?” He said an absolute yes. In some situation it might be even easier to do well with the system when applied outside of the USA.

Also as part of the system are templates galore for setting up sites or creating videos to use in promotions. Biz box pre-made templates makes it so you can concentrate on Marketing you clients businesses rather than worrying about writing articles, setting up sites and other tasks normally required to get things done.

What I also like about Mike’s product is that it uses Mobile Marketing methods. This, if you don’t note its significant s is huge. Using mobile marketing you can offer your client the way to send out messages that say “quiet Tuesday discount available”. If done right this can potentially turn a lousy day into a great one for a small restaurant.

I have to say this product has got me excited. In the past internet products have focused on creating lists, creating your own products or tricking the search engines.

Mike’s product will help you market for real businesses. There are millions out there. Most are so busy just running the business that they don’t know about efficient marketing or even any marketing at all.

The Main Street Marketing Machines system has everything ready to go…

Check it out.

Mike says the system will cost $2,997.00 with a single payment or you can take a six payment option of $547.00. There is a 30 day money back guarantee.

If you think this is a lot of money just think that you could get that much for landing just your first client. Fireman Mike made $5000 but I can’t tell you how much you will make. It is possible that you get this system and make no money at all.

The project is something to hold me accountable. I want to help others and make a difference. Sure you could say I am just wanting to get setup with a nice video editing studio but the main thing is I want to have something to push me to achieve.

This all came about thanks to Tellman Knudson and his information about crowd funding. It got me inspired to attempt to help out others through this model.

So far I have managed to get the pitch post using demo software but I can only do that for so long… Tying this to a project using the crowd funding makes sure that if there are enough good people out there to support me I will have to follow through and live up to what I am promising in the video.

Any money towards the project would be gratefully accepted.

The aim of the project is to help local businesses in Gungahlin stay afloat. I will help with video marketing for one business every two weeks free of charge.

Check out the project called “Local Business Helper“. It would be great if you can get involved.

One of the VIP levels receives recipes from my wife. I have to let you know she is a great cook so that alone is something to be excited about. I might even make a DVD and include her actually demonstrating the recipes.

If you make a pledge you can also get a .mobi site setup which I will host, or the next level up is a .mobi site and a 30-90 second video of your choosing.

I have registered gungahlinbusinessdirectory.com.au which will be used as part of this project.

Check back here for updates or visit the IndiGoGo project page.

Tony Parker is a player for the San Antonio Spurs while Tony Soprano is a television character from the popular The Sopranos. LeBron loved this question as it was something new to him during the basketball interviews he takes part in.

It turned out that LeBron is a big fan of this television show and he had a lot to say about the upcoming episode. He mentioned that he will record the show and watch it after his basketball committments. In the end the journalists were all laughing as it was not what they expected from a basketballer.

LeBron even said thank you for the question as it was so different from what he was used to. You can imagine how it is when you are asked basically the same questions over and over.

This brings me to marketing. With LeBron James the journalists were surprised that he had such an opinion of the television show and thought it was funny for him to be talking about something other than basketball. If a company wants to use a sports star to sell a product that has nothing to do with the sport the player participates in how much impact will that have?

For instance would you buy a kitchen appliance from a company just because LeBron James was appearing in a commercial promoting the product? If he was promoting basketball related products maybe this would have more of an influence on your buying decisions. I would be interested to hear your opinion.

Probably in situations like the above most companies could not say how successful an advertising campaign has been. For them to measure the success of a campaign they need some tracking mechanism. For instance have a specific telephone number to call when ordering the product that was advertised.

Tracking the results of advertising is one of the most important steps in the advertising cycle. Of course having a good ad to start with helps however if you don’t track the results you are just throwing money away.

Conversion statistics are also important. You need to know how many people are responding to your advertising. Beyond that you want to know what ads are converting to sales for you. If you are using adwords or some other form of pay per click advertising you are going to want to track at the keyword level.

The other day I was listening to a story about a guy that was tracking at keyword level and he found from his tracking and testing that just one keyword was making him all of his profit. Once he figured this out he stopped wasting money on advertising using the other keywords and ramped up his promotional efforts with the hot converting keyword. This dramatically boosted his profits.

The main thing I want you to take away from this article is the need to test and track your advertising efforts. Don’t advertise without it.