Social Media Search,Fair Advertising, Team Marketing & Passion

What happens when a couple of like minded passionate people focussed entrepreneurs with solid backgrounds in SEO and Social Marketing team up with a common goal?

Great things – that even have had Google sit up and take notice.

Andy Anderson and Dave Gilbert might live at opposite ends of the earth but in a business sense they’re totally united. Together they’ve worked on developing an integrated social media search engine with an integrated advertising platform that is focussed on the small to average sized home business owner and thats’ just the beginning…..

Together they’re planning a new team marketing concept where everybody is truly equal, and they’ve developed a unique concept called Social Impact Marketing (SIM). These guys love what they do and are committed to revolutionizing Social Media marketing.

Recently, I caught up with Andy and Dave for an interview and we covered loads of ground. I learned a lot about Social Media just chatting to these guys and I’m sure that you will too.  So without further ado here is the full interview

Mark Hodgetts: Where did Kooiii come from – what sparked it and how did it come together?

Dave Gilbert: the name was actually my idea and was derived from the famous aussie bush call coo-eeee

Dave Gilbert: but the system is a joint effort between Andy and myself , Kooiii actually started as a web directory that would support our old search system at easysearchlive.com

Andy Zeus Anderson: Kooiii began about 4 years ago when Dave and I met. He had Easy Search Live search engine and I had just begun the process of selling ZTCUSA Community. In all actuality I started out as a affiliate for Easy Search and as we began putting together the future I became a partner with Dave, his son, and two other gentlemen. Dave and I assumed control in October of last year as the other partners found outside interest and brought Dale on as a partner later that month. Kooiii and KART Advertising are a dedication to continued service with the small and home based business owner in mind. We believe in a fair and level playing field for business of all size, something you just don’t find with our corporate competition.

Mark Hodgetts: So when did you hit upon the idea of integrating Social Media and Search?

Dave Gilbert: well that came about 7 – 8 weeks ago I stumbled across a script for hotspot social (another of our domains ) where we because of the name wanted a social community and thought micro blogging would be ideal On seeing the script in action it sort of hit us that we could do more with it than just provide a twitter clone

Andy Zeus Anderson: From the beginning we have worked at adding social interaction to our search engine system with a greater dream of a socially impacted search results system where members affect buzz and popularity. About 2 years back on our MyViralBlog.com site we started toying with the viral impact of social media and weblogs using WordPress and Twitter. In January of this year a lawsuit settlement gave us the funds to actually secure the technology to bring these concepts together in a fluid manner.

Dave Gilbert: you have to understand Andy and I have a sort of unique relationship we both think and act as 1 like we were twins and it’s not uncommon for us to post the same thought or idea at each other simultaneously

Andy Zeus Anderson: Kooiii is a culmination of the marketing and community systems, training, and education we have amassed over a long period of time. While it looks massive, it is also very much a business built on an alternative home based business platform met by the challenges most small businesses face with a lack of outside funding, small budget, and built brick by brick.

Mark Hodgetts: Kooiii’s Alexa ranking has grown massively in a very short period of time what do you put this growth down to – have you struck a chord with small home business owners?

Andy Zeus Anderson: Social media has an underlying power that even major names such as Google, Yahoo, and Alexa have begun to embrace. The first element is in user engagement, followed by the viral growth of word of mouth. Just like telling a friend about the great meal you had at a local restaurant, social media impacts a business on a much larger scale. Instead of complimenting a company to 1-5 people you post and it reaches hundreds of thousands of people in a day’s time. Our first stage of Social Impact Marketing, the very system described in our viral pdf, is adding a team element to social media presence.

Dave Gilbert: actually Kooiii’s Alexa was sort of an accidental discovery see both Andy and myself started promoting Kooiii heavily using other social networks and sort of fell into a system of cross promotion that quickly became a fast track method we named SIM or Social Impact Marketing

Dave Gilbert: mind you SIM still has elements of SEO involved but the main thrust comes from social interactions

Andy Zeus Anderson: Combining the effect of proper distribution of RSS Syndication feeds with community bookmarking and social sharing we saw a website go from 50 page views a day to 45,000 page views a day in 6 weeks time off the efforts of 3 people. In the near future we will be providing additional training materials on advanced SIM Marketing but fully believe it to be a house system that will change the world of Internet marketing forever. Well mate I would term it more of an educated accident because we had been using all of the elements, viral blogging and social interaction in a singular effort for over 2 years. The base principals of SIM are shared in our Viral Blogging Basics post, but the Kooiii result came only when we combined 4-5 elements we did with all our sites and made them a team effort

Dave Gilbert: yep

Mark Hodgetts: We’ve discussed teams once or twice before – your views on a proper TEAM structure and game plan are fairly strong Andy

Dave Gilbert:I think SIM is best summed up with a picture lol

Andy Zeus Anderson: Very much so. I sold ZTCUSA after achieving the peak of success in having fired my boss to work 100% from home, and the depths of failure, having lost everything to an injury and a lack of support. A vital part of the Zeus Team Concepts training was in team marketing, but out of arrogance and a bit of lost vision I didn’t practice what I preached. When I hurt my back there was nobody in place to be me, to help members, to motivate and step forward. TEAM is a powerful word, as do it alone is ripe for failure

Mark Hodgetts: You’re talking about empowerment and growth within a team structure – while many of the TEAMS populating the landscape are promoting enslavement

Dave Gilbert: yeah some folks have strange ideas about how a cohesive team is supposed to work yes you still need a team leader but that leader needs to also be capable of listening to his team and directing it based on merit rather than enforcing his/her own direction

Andy Zeus Anderson: Fact is in Internet marketing especially TEAM is a word often misused and taken for granted. Instead of being a mutual support system and a basis to share, efforts, knowledge, and results too many take team to mean, Football on Sunday, wrestling on Monday but the TEAM is doing the work so I don’t have to. Fact is a team based on the few doing the work of the many will always fail. In ZTCUSA myself and the co-op advertising did all the work while the members reaped 99% of the rewards. Our current systems remove that do it for you and strongly promote the proper concept of working with you to achieve more.

Mark Hodgetts: What you’re saying Dave is that a team leader doesn’t have to know everything, he/ she has to be able to help people recognize their potential

Dave Gilbert: yes that’s right if the leader does all the thinking then the team ceases to be necessary

Andy Zeus Anderson: Ethics is the most vital practice of teamwork. It’s the requirement of contribution meets the output achieved in each member doing their part. Not because the team wouldn’t pick up the slack but because letting the team make up for your reduced effort is the worn thing to do. With ethics everyone contributes and all are rewarded, without them everyone trusts someone else to take up the slack and the team fails.

Andy Zeus Anderson: Dave and I agree on the leadership assesment. Our partnership grows strongest not in what either of us knows or does but in what we know and do together.

Dave Gilbert: same as if only 1 or 2 members do all the work while the rest sit on their hands then instead of having a team of 10 you have a team of 2 and the results will reflect that

Andy Zeus Anderson: Dave is the OLD Salt SEO. He finds his best work in forums, article directories and blog. I am the new tech marketer who can have a mass presence in 30+ social networks and also bring the direct marketing and team motivation to the table. Neither of us is strong without the other but together we have stood unstoppable.

Mark Hodgetts: I seem to remember reading that Google tried to make things hard for you for a while – if that’s correct its kind of a back handed compliment

Dave Gilbert: The one thing you have to remember is that we are not directly competing against Google or any other system out there Kooiii is a unique blend and any attack by other companies are simply deflected by that fact yes Google lodged complaints against us but this just pointed out holes in Kooiii’s defences and allowed us to shore those holes up and further protect our membership, the point I’m making here is there will always be those that see the bad in a program but it is how the leadership of that program reacts that can make or break it if we went to war with Google we most likely would have lost but by using the information contained in their complaint to strengthen our site we are able to survive and move forward, Dave Gilbert: getting pats on the back are nice but do nothing to improve you while criticism can point out small failings that you are blinded too and allow you to improve yourself so I would prefer to hear what’s wrong rather than what’s right Andy Zeus Anderson: Google has taken some actions that I best call suspicious even making us jump through hoops to stay off the black list for using a 3rd party advertising system with code they decided was bad regardless of the use. When we carried adsense on our website for a source of income we had ads switched on our English pages to Arabic, we also saw these so called 70% to the publisher promises result in 1 cent earnings on a minimum 10 cent click price. We went from $100 pay checks 1 month to $2 the next month. So there has been concern that they are taking adverse actions to keep us away from vital funding. In the end KART Advertising was developed to combat some of those situations but also to address other Google wrongs. Not all publishers are treated equal with them, and what they tell their shareholders and the news is not always so. Reading Searchengineland.com recently Google disclosed after decades that they reportedly pass 75% of revenues on to publishers. They have a minimum bid price of 10 cents per keyword and we are among thousands who have had zero pay and 1-4 cent clicks on a regular basis while major sites like MySpace can report $30 single click earnings. We level the playing field and treat all publishers equal. Google attacked affiliate marketers recently. No longer can you advertise affiliate links without a redirect in Adwords. Google has also penalized websites for paid links, aka affiliate links by cutting their page ranks, and basically has created a system where if you want affiliate revenue you have to go through Google Affiliate Network- a conflict of interest. Despite security technology being out and available to protect advertisers from fraud clicks in free traffic sources Google still does not allow use of traffic exchanges, link exchange, or safelist marketing for example to drive traffic to a website with Adsense on it. Their policies have made it so that affiliate marketers have to apply their trade through Adsense and GAN, and then return that money to Google via Adwords or accept slow growth. I owe my soul to the company store.

Mark Hodgetts: Finally a quick question about KART – the advertising income source -you have set yourself a goal of obtaining 1% of the market – how long do you give yourselves to achieve that target and how did you arrive at that target?

Dave Gilbert: well we arrived at 1% by not being greedy and over confident we know that to take any market share is a long process and we need to be realistic 1% is obtainable while 10% may be clutching at straws as for time line it’s hard to put a target date on something like that yes we would like to have our 1% yesterday but realistically it could take over 12 months to achieve it as we are only new and are forced to compete with companies that have been selling ads for 8 or more years In our favour we have modeled our advertising to provide lower costing while delivering a higher ROI for advertisers while bid pricing on Google rises daily ours can remain stable for weeks due to our scrolling text ads where instead of competing for a single top slot we can have 10 or 20 slots scroll through number 1 spot every few seconds this then stabilizes bidding by removing fierce competition for each top keyword

Andy Zeus Anderson: The goal can be obtained in as little as a year but we are projecting 3 years-5 years. Fact is 1% of our market can be obtained by being everywhere companies like Google are not. There are tons of webmasters struggling with poorly targeted advertising from publishers outside the Google YPN beltway who need KART. We can tap those markets by offering income above the exclusive millionaire boys club. Google and YPN for example make available a referral system for bringing new advertisers to a very exclusive group. Log in as a small publisher and try to find a means to refer advertisers for cash and you won’t find it. If you have a major web-host or large advertising firm though you get an invite to their certified partners programs. Our smallest affiliate can earn 10% residuals sending new advertisers to KART. Advertisers benefit by having bid prices as low as 3 cents per click, because they use KART while the competition is having bidding wars on Google, they reach customers who have not seen the competition’s ads. Our starting budgets are also smaller and because we are 100% pre-pay you can really control your budget. Add in the cutting edge integration with mobile ads delivery and social media marketing at no additional cost off that single sign up and KART is a win for business of any size.

If I had to summarize our business in a single word it would be passion. It has been a firm belief of mine since age 14 that to be a success you had to love what you do. You need to be passionate and show emotion in your presentation to have true Impact on those around you. Our company offers value and afford-ability to the customers we serve and massive opportunity to all who help us serve them. It puts service to those around us above self interest daily, and if you can’t be passionate about that….

===============end interview==================

These guys and their Kooiii program are certainly going to be ones to watch in the next 12 months or so.  Get involved with Kooiii now and become a KART affiliate at the very least. If you want more information grab their PDF report on Social Impact Marketing by visiting here

Do you agree these guys will make things easier for the little home business owner?  Leave a comment

Tagged as: Actuality, Andy Anderson, Aussie Bush, Business Sense, Common Goal, Continued Service, Corporat, Dave Gilbert, Ded, Ends Of The Earth, Gentlemen, Google, Home Based Business, Home Business Owner, Impact Marketing, Joint Effort, KART advertising, Kooiii, Marketing Concept, Marketing Team, Media Search Engine, Search System, Social Impact, Social Marketing, Team Marketing, Zeus