Nitsan Gaibel interviews Dave Miles, an internet marketer who has a very interesting background and has been innovating his whole life.
Nitsan: Dave, when did you begin innovating?
Dave: Well, I guess the first place I started innovating was when I was a Realtor and in the State of Rhode Island I believe I was the first individual Realtor to have his own website. There were other websites out there, but they were company websites and I decided that I needed to have my own. I left the real estate industry in 2008 when the market totally crashed, and I decided that I would put my marketing skills to good use and started my company Miles Internet Marketing.
Nitsan: And what kind of services did you offer?
Dave: You know that’s an interesting question because originally we started out just offering search engine optimization, or SEO as it’s known in the marketing world. And what we quickly found out as we were visiting small to medium sized companies is the vast majority of them; in fact 51% of them statistically did not have a website. And it’s difficult to sell search engine optimization services to a business that doesn’t have a website. In fact it can’t be done. So we quickly made a decision that since we had the skills and the knowledge on how to build websites, we better start offering them as part of our package, which we did.
Nitsan: And how has that developed? You offer much more than those now don’t you?
Dave: Oh yes. We had to continually add services: pay per click services, video and more. And each service must be special. For example, to create a video that is a marketing piece and then to optimize it so that it will show up on the front page of Google and top of YouTube for the keyword terms that a client is interested in ranking for so they can be found. Like for a chiropractor or a Realtor, things like that. Our latest innovation is creating “Reputation Video Commercials” which are professionally produced and display a 5 star review that a customer has written online for our client. These are very powerful marketing pieces that we can deliver very economically.
Nitsan: Those aren’t services that necessarily are innovative are they?
Dave: Well there are very few people out there that know how to take videos and get them to rank properly. There are tons of companies that make videos, but turning it into a marketing piece and being able to get it to rank online is very difficult and we are elite at being able to do that for our clients.
Nitsan: So is that why you’re the most innovative?
Dave: To make something correctly so it works is rare and requires lots of research and experimentation. Right now one of the hottest things in the market is called white board scribe videos, and they’re really tricky to make and have them look good, but to make them so that they will be optimized to rank on search engines and YouTube is quite difficult and requires constant updating. We have to constantly update our processes and invent new techniques that work.
Nitsan: I imagine many people have a misconception about how you work and what it requires.
Dave: Yes absolutely. Most people think they have to spend thousands of dollars to get a video made. The going rate in the industry is probably around 1500 to 2000 dollars a finished minute for a videographer to make to make your typical video. We have been able to take that price and slash the cost down by virtue of the streamlined process we developed. Since most of our clients are small business people we really wanted to have price points that would work for them and not bust their budget.
Nitsan: Isn’t one of the most common mistakes that people make is that they try to do it themselves?
Dave: I actually haven’t run into anybody that said that they tried to rank a video themselves. We certainly know lots and lots of people who make videos, but there’s no way that they know how to create the video in such a way that they will get effective results. And I might add that video search engine optimization; probably 70% to 80% of it is significantly different than what you’d do to apply search engine optimization on a website, which is where most people go wrong.
Nitsan: Can you now patent your process, stop developing it, sit back and enjoy the royalties?
Dave: Never! I have a network of people, experts, and we kind of all collaborate together to keep us in the forefront of what’s working. Because Google and YouTube keep changing their algorithm, which is how they rate things, they change them constantly. Just in the last month they released another change called “Pigeon” that has changed the rules yet again. So we’re always learning and reformulating to keep up with the changes that Google and YouTube are making.
You can find more resources to market your business online at Dave Miles’ website, http://milesinternetmarketing.com.
