How To Train New Local Marketing Staff Members

[Phil Rozek]

Whoa, Nyagoslav?your people are going to need glass eyeballs after all that reading!

I do hope your posts are at the top of the required-reading list (they?re at the top of mine).

 

[Keenan Glass]

Great thread, great idears and resources.

Screen capture video is my choice for training, let's me show and tell and can be reused until the rules change... again.

 

[Nyagoslav]

Phil, your posts are at the top, mine are much lower

Keenan, two reasons why I don't use videos:

1) Because my staff is on-site, i.e. I don't outsource to virtual assistants. So I'd always prefer to show myself rather than have them watch a video.
2) Because the Internet quality in Malaysia is one of the poorest I've experienced in my life (and I have been to quite a few countries), and while my connection is the fastest available here, it still can take well over 6 hours to upload a 10 minutes video. And the fact that I have limited data (yep, no unlimited option, and yep, I know we are in 21st century) just adds up to that

Nyagoslav

 

[Linda Buquet]

Wow, this is such a great thread and packed with good ideas.

Thanks so much Nyag for all the awesome tips in post #20 too!

 

[Chris Ratchford]

Wow- I just read this entire thread for the first time. Great stuff!

This definitely hits close to home. I'm a one-man agency and just hired a parttime SEO about 3 months ago.

While he was well versed in traditional SEO, Local was new to him. I treat SEO (and local) like Mr. Miyagi did w/ Daniel-son. I made him paint the fence, wax on wax off, and sand the floor.

All of these processes don't really mean much until you put them together.

That being said, I signed him up for Linda's training and it was beneficial.

But that was one hire. If I had to do it for multiple hires, I need to hone my process.

I'm definitely going to review everyone's comments and dig in much deeper.

Thanks!!!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

AWESOME Nick. Thanks for sharing and I LOVE the color coding.

That's too important of a post to have hiding in this one thread, so I'm going to copy to new thread too with appropriate title so we can all share and add to it.

Will wait til Monday to do it when there are more folks online to see it!

Hi Linda, did you get a chance to break this off into it's own post? I was looking around, but couldn't find it.

 

[Nick.SEOSpark]

Hi Linda, did you get a chance to break this off into it's own post? I was looking around, but couldn't find it.

Hi Colan. Yes, Linda created a post here:

http://localsearchforum.catalystema...are-ultimate-list-local-search-rss-feeds.html

It's certainly not a comprehensive collection of Local SEO experts, but rather just a collection of ones that I am following at the moment.

If anyone, is looking for a full-comprehensive collection of Local SEO experts, please see this new post by Nyagoslav Zhekov:

Who Is Who in Local SEO | Local Search Marketing Blog by NGS

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Thanks Nick!

 

[JacobPuhl]

Good stuff. I look at the training 3 fold.

1 is Google Places & Local Search in general. I'm a fan of having the trainee go out and do as much research as possible and create a report back for me. This is crucial because I can then gauge how good they are at researching an unknown topic and finding answers quickly. We all know how many times daily we have to do that in this industry! After that it's a lot of sit downs and walking through how things work currently.

2 Is researching current listings IE a Name/Address/Phone analysis. How do you find incorrect listings or incorrect citations? How bad of shape is the client in? This is outlined in a Google Doc step by step.

3 Is citation correcting and building. We use a google docs folder with google presentations (pwpts) for each of the most important directories (say top 20 yelp, angies, Goog Yahoo Bing, data providers, map providers, etc) which is constantly being updated. That way one person or citation manager can come in and get up to speed on each individual citation source and the details that make it it's own animal very quickly.

Work in progress so far

 

[Linda Buquet]

Welcome Jacob. I read your blog. Great to have you join us!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Just wanted to complete the circle and be sure everyone reading this thread realizes that the AWESOME QUIZ for training new staff, OR for your own edification was completed.

Read about it here! http://localsearchforum.catalystema...-take-google-local-rules-quiz-guest-post.html

Congrats to my right hand man Colan and thanks to our Top Contributor Phil for a job well done!