Anatomy of successful WPMU Multi-User Blog – CityScoop.us story | An Internet Advertising Consultant Marketing Blog

Anatomy of successful WPMU Multi-User Blog – CityScoop.us story

By Israel Rothman on November 16th, 2011

When I met John Kitts, he was working with my daughter in a restaurant: he was 23 years old, and had never sold anything before, but did have some computer and technical savvy – a musician.

My company had been completely taken over and changed by the second round investors, who were doing everything wrong and who eventually destroyed the company: I wanted to prove a point, and I trained John to sell: he sold $8,000.00 of advertising in his second month (I made sure of it).

When coracle was about to go down, John and I had a discussion, and my son and I sold John a WPMU setup (Word Press Multi-User, sometimes called Multi-Site) in 2006: Cityscoop.us Local Business News – a B2C advertising site that creates local search rankings immediately without breaking search engine rules.

John has been earning a full time living from that site ever since, selling local advertising and the resulting SEO benefits of blog aggregator : cityscoop.us. We recently upgraded the site – it had been completely stable for 5 years, because John never updated the code (WPMU was very buggy in the beginning): so we had to some very difficult work to update the code after all this time and the code changes; we moved the database into the new, much more robust programming. Now the site could become a full blown social network, and, in my opinion, that is the next step.

In this, the first chapter of the new: 2012 Rothman Guide to Enterprise Level Social Media Marketing:

With the history of our products and services and history and clientele to build on: we will now address the very tricky and sophisticated task of taking a business to the next level, and viral nationwide expansion by way of social media marketing.

We will collaborate with John as he prepares to raise some $$ to take his 5 year old company to the next level, and we will assist him in planning that process (one that I have gone though many times).

Cityscoop.us is very inexpensive, and very easy, with lots of support, and a very low entry price. The problem is expanding without capital, with John overloaded and doing everything himself. It is my opinion that the solution is to add on higher end services to create a commissioned sales force that can make a living: but make no mistake: John has ever needed another job, and he has supported himself, as have I, through the worst recession ever; and he is poised, as he goes through this very difficult step to the next level, to raise capital and expand profitably. Very few have accomplished as much with nothing but a $1,500.00 website and their time during these very tough years. Needless to say, we all had to shift our focus from mostly Realtors to other businesses during this time.

It has not helped the way venture-capital funded companies keep coming up with ridiculous advertising propositions and hiring young people with no experience on salaries to try to sell the overpriced advertising: then subsequently going out of business leaving a mess and a trail of dead bodies!

Now, with the new Plugins available like MapPress that inter phases with Google maps API, and our own plugin that adds a system of GUI pages that feed and are linked to each other as easily editable value-added navigation to WordPress; BuddyPress which effectively turns WPMU into a full blown social network; and our voice broadcasting and email marketing systems: there are an infinite number of ways for john to automate some of the things that require his time; and to add on revenue sources to allow him to hire help.

With our very modern systems of expanding and actually cash-flowing without capital, John will be successful in bringing cityscoop.us to the next level as a Local News Advertising Agency; and with our obvious link authority as the original person (me) to use those four words together, this article will achieve some rankings also.

Just for the record, what we are discussing here, and will continue to discuss, as we have for the last ten years (as people rolled their eyes) is marketing with real content: what we like to call “social media advertising agency“.

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