Trading Love

I love you.... no, not you.... you over there. Ahhhh, what the heck, we should spread the love all around! It's clear there's a lot of networking and business partnerships being formed on our network and we're excited to be a part of it. Business owners continue to use MerchantCircle to recommend their favorite businesses to their customers.

People helping people - it's one of America's most endearing characteristics.

We wanted to show our appreciation for the praise you've heaped on us, (you can read them here), and as part of our ongoing efforts, we're recognizing the business owners who exemplify our network of 170,000 strong.

Read about our latest highlight merchant, Angel's Affordable Web Design, here.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

150K... Yeah, We Passed That

With all the new developments recently, including 3 new employees (we're still hiring), new product features and heavy summer itinerary, we're delayed in announcing our growth past 150 thousand merchants across the country. In fact, we're about to pass 165 thousand merchants, but I thought 150K was a much rounder number for an announcement!

This growth means a stronger network of merchants for you to network with as we continue to be the fastest growing and largest online network of business owners in the country. Many of our merchants are finding new customers by customizing their pages and showing up higher in search engines. Don't forget to keep adding new content, like pictures, building coupons and writing blogs - all of it helps.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

We've Gone Mad From All Our Tinkering!

We have some of the coolest features in the works set to debut this summer, which explains the lack of recent blog posts. It’s super busy and really exciting around the office. Our 3 new employees and intern are now fully in the swing of things and the team gave the okay on releasing some advance buzz on one of our newest features.

You may already know about our MerchantCircle forums, where small business owners across the country are helping each other and trading ideas, but we’re going to take it to the next level - the local local level that is, or hyper local. Now that we have merchants in almost every city in the US, we know that there’s a real need for merchant discussion within cities.

Our city pages to begin with are pretty cool, take for instance this one in Colorado Springs. You can see all of the city's coupons, blog posts, top merchants and ads, but now they'll be even more informative as community members and business owners can post anything going on in the community. Say for instance a street fair, or block party, or maybe a huge sale, you can post whatever you want. Look for this interactive community engagement to be released over the next few weeks.

Let us know what you think as we make your community the strongest it can be.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

Stanford and Berkeley can Coexist

As the summer heat is making life unbearable in many parts of the nation, we decided to turn up the heat a little in our office. We just welcomed aboard a few new team members this week, including a fresh faced intern from Berkeley and a grad student from Stanford.

As you may know, around here in Silicon Valley, there's a friendly rivalry between the two schools. What's great about adding these two members is that now we can represent more colleges around the nation, including Northwestern, LSU, University of West Florida, UC San Diego, UC Davis and even lowly Santa Clara (just kidding).

Let me take a few moments to introduce Irit Epelbaum who joined us from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she completed her MBA. She got her Bachelor's in Economics from Yale University. Which translates to - she's much smarter than me. Not that that's any kind of achievement.

Irit will be focused on getting you, our merchants, more customers through our subscription plans. We're proud and excited to have her on board. But we're not done yet, our team is growing to make sure we continue to be the best place for a business to find new customers. Take a look at another of our job openings by clicking here. (If it says 'looking for Community Relations Manager,' I'm in trouble.)

Recently, we've also started to make sure we profile more of our 150,000 merchants. Take a look at this press release to see what I mean.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

Battle of the Kevin Leu's and What it Means to You

Alright, I've already been called narcissistic, so what have I got to lose? So at least several times a day, I Google my name - Kevin Leu - it's a good name. And for awhile I was running second in search results to some champion, child-prodigy flutist from San Diego. There were many nights when I hoped that he would give up the flute and do something more practical with his life, like gardening. Or maybe he could be like a normal kid and play video games all day long or other teenage activities like sitting in shopping carts while getting pushed at full speed into bushes.

Since this kid wasn't going anywhere, I started to think to myself, I have got to do something noteworthy so that I don't lose the battle of supremacy for the name, Kevin Leu. For example, can you imagine what it must have been like to be the other Howard Stern, Howard K.? I was not going to go through life as the other Kevin Leu; this was war!

Right off the bat, I had heard that linking to a site helps bring it up higher in search engine results. Linking is what I'm doing here, with my profile from my last job at Newscenter in Columbus, OH. It's when you create this link going from one website to another that apparently helps out these search results. So I did that a few times from this exact blog and waddya know? My Newscenter bio was starting to come up higher than that champion flutist.... I can't remember his name.

Well this wasn't half bad. I decided to create a blog recently off Blogger - an excellent resource (you can see my blog by clicking here), and start a company, Kevin Leu Productions and Public Relations (don't tell my bosses). Of course I used MerchantCircle to start my business presence on the web (you can see my business here), and I use our blog services as well to write about my business methods. One of the cool things that MerchantCircle lets you do is include all the links you have from any other websites. So I started to cross link all of them - my Myspace profile, my Linkedin profile, my Facebook profile, my blog, Silicon Valley Bachelor, and my MerchantCircle page.

One day later, I checked in and I was flabbergasted! I was now the top 4 results after I Googled my name and 5 of the top 10! I couldn't sleep that night for at least an hour (but then afterwards I slept very soundly, thanks for your concern). Man this was cool stuff. But now let me move on to you, (begrudgingly - I am narcissistic afterall). What this means is that by following some of the steps we lay out for you when you sign up on MerchantCircle, you too may be the most famous Kevin Leu....errrr, I mean the most popular business in local search results. Be on all the different sites that we list for you on your dashboard and link them together. Write blogs and fill in the keywords. And keep tabs on where you show up on Google. It's fun. Believe me - I do it several times a day.

Until next time, sincerely,

Kevin Leu
(The More Famous One)

Celebrate Good Times.... C'mon!

After hitting our One Year Anniversary since we launched, it's time to take a look back. When MerchantCircle launched in June of 2006, we had 5,000 business owners signed-on. Today, that number stands at 145,000!

We've added a number of new features over the course of this year to help you find more customers and have a more rewarding web experiences. Features that enable you to track what customers are saying about you on the web, features that allow you to engage and communicate with business owners all around the country, features that let you customize your MerchantCircle listing, and features that let you network across the web.

We've added a number of partners to enhance your listings and make sure that the content you create, including coupons and ads, are seen all across the web - not just on MerchantCircle. Those partners include Jingle, Judy's Book, Oodle, Edgeio, Local.com, Topix and yes, Google.

For our efforts and yours, we've been recognized by BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, CNet, ZDNet, AlwaysOn, and TheStreet.com TV among others. It's merchants like European Esthetics and Wellness, Wedding Supplies Unlimited and Higgy's Pizzeria that make us proud that we can give hundreds and thousands of customers a month access to these business owners.

Does all this activity make us less motivated for our second year? Not at all. We've got a ton in store for you this next year, much of which we're excited to unveil, because we know this will help you maximize your web potential on the web. Also look for us to pass a quarter of a million merchants signed-on this summer!

Many of our local merchants and partners will be joining us this Thursday evening as we celebrate a successful first year. Send me your email and I'll send you details. In the meantime, thanks - for everything.

Cheers,
Kevin
Community Relations

Merchant Love.... Platonic of Course

"Too many of us aren't able to practice their love with merchants all across this country."



With 140,000 merchants signed-on to our network, fortunately I'm able to practice my 'love' all the time. A few days ago, Lidia, from Lidia's Skin Care in Palo Alto, dropped by the office. While we don't normally have very many merchants showing up on our doorstep, it was a pleasure to meet with Lidia and talk about her MerchantCircle account. Lidia has almost no computer experience - which means we got along just fine. After several hours, I helped her include a link to her other website on her MerchantCircle page. At that point, I collapsed in exhaustion.

I think Lidia has a sense now of how to customize her page and create some cool content.

And today, Ryan helped out AJ from Hypnotic Salon & Spa in Las Vegas who called up and asked to find out more about how our pay packages can help bring him more customers. You get a heck of a deal for free, being able to customize a search engine optimized page, track all the reviews about your business on the web, communicate with business owners all across the country, but more importantly, connect with customers on the web. Our pay packages on the other hand, essentially take the pain out of figuring out how to advertise on Google and Yahoo and a number of different venues - we do it for you.

Feel free to contact us, I got plenty of 'love' for you all. (Non-creepy love that is).

Sincerely,
Kevin L.
Community Relations