Under the terms of the deal, significant interior and exterior renovations and modernizations have been planned for the building. “Crabtree Valley has always appealed to me as a center of activity in Raleigh and we are excited to have the opportunity to become a part of the area,” said Jon Jordan, president of Atlantic BT.  “We believe that the location gives us a great competitive advantage, not only in significant visibility and nearby shopping and dining, but its central location is very convenient for our employees from the Raleigh, Cary, and Apex metro areas.”

Atlantic BT’s current headquarters is also located on Creedmoor Rd. a few miles away. The new headquarters at over 11,000 sq ft. more than doubles the company’s current space and will provide room for the company to continue expanding. In recent years the company has grown rapidly, landing on each of the most recent Inc 5000 lists containing the fastest growing private companies in America. This year alone the company has grown more than 50% in year to date revenues.

Provided in the agreement is an initial 5 year lease with options to expand within the building as well as rights to increase its equity participation and to extend the lease  for up to 20 years. “We are excited to have growing technology company like Atlantic BT make the decision to move its headquarters into our building, and look forward to working with the company to undertake the planned renovations,” said Richard Ladd, managing partner of Crabtree Partners.

Atlantic BT has been involved in other expansion in the past 4 years including the acquisitions of Novel Projects, eSearch Logistics and Praxis Studios giving the company strategic advantages in .Net development, hosting and design respectively.

Peter Pessetto of Keller Williams Commercial represented Atlantic BT in the transaction. Crabtree Partners was represented by NAI Carolantic and CDS Properties.

About Atlantic Business Technologies

Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc. is a full service Web development company that offers the tools, resources and services to get any business moving. The company focuses on combining new ideas, specific requirements and years of experience into high-quality, results-oriented Web solutions for small to medium sized businesses. Atlantic BT offers end-to-end solutions for over 800 clients, including professional business Web site design, e-Commerce and programming solutions, business grade Web hosting, Web strategy and all facets of Internet marketing.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, however. There are dozens of other ways a professionally designed, state-of-the-art site can help your business, including reducing customer service time, educating customers, and decreasing costs on recurring orders. To that list, I’d like to add one more benefit…one that can literally make or break any company, but most clients never think of: recruiting.

For much of the world, your website is the face of your business. The numbers change in every industry and geographic locale, of course, but it’s safe to assume that more than three quarters of all online businesses – even those with brick and mortar locations – will never be seen or experienced offline. That means it isn’t just customers who are forming impressions from your site, but prospective employees, as well.

What are they seeing from your company’s site? Are your pages helping to attract quality candidates? Since it can cost, on average, more than 50% of a new hire’s salary if they don’t work out, you need to be sure they are a good fit. Here are a few steps you can take to increase the level of talent that your website is bringing you:

Post openings. As obvious as this might seem, lots of businesses never post their openings on their websites. Usually, it’s because they don’t want to be deluged with resumes, or are only seeking local candidates. Even if that’s the case for your company or department, however, it makes sense to extend your search to your website. For one thing, you’ll probably attract sufficient local traffic to justify the effort. But more to the point, some of the best employees come from a business’ customer base. Who better to work for you than the men and women who already know and love what you sell?

Seek referrals. You could always take that idea one step further and seek referrals from your online customers. Given that you’re about to devote a serious amount of time and money interviewing and training a new employee, offering a few hundred dollars in the way of a gift card or free merchandise is a small price to pay to have people recommend a strong candidate. Just be sure you outline exactly what type of employee you’re looking for, along with the qualifications and background needed.

Show appreciation. Actions always speak louder than words, and one of the simplest ways to attract top talent to your company is by showing that you care for the employees you have now. While it’s a bit of a longer-term strategy, highlighting a member of your team and one of his or her achievements each month can help create the impression that your business is a good place to work. And as an added bonus, it might help morale around the workplace, too.

Be fun and personable. We all know that the best jobs aren’t necessarily the ones that pay the most – they’re the ones that we actually look forward to going to. Your website doesn’t have to be a barrel of laughs to show your office or facility has a little bit of personality. In fact, all it usually takes is a willingness to highlight a few details here and there, like photos from a recent company picnic, or staff pages that show off a little bit of flair. As with the other steps, this extra touch doesn’t only help your recruiting, but can also strengthen customer relationships by giving customers a “behind the curtain” look at your team.

Generating online orders is important, and no Internet marketing venture is going to succeed if you can’t convert visitors into customers. But, as any experienced business owner or manager can tell you, having the right people around you can make every aspect of your business easier, not to mention more profitable. Take that knowledge to heart and add elements to your site that can help you attract the best talent. It’s usually not that hard, and the effort will pay for itself many times over.

850 The Buzz and 620 The Bull Sports Programming Assets Will Transfer to CBC

Raleigh, N.C. — Capitol Broadcasting Company (“CBC”), Curtis Media (“Curtis”) and McClatchey Broadcasting (“McClatchey”) today announced a transaction in principle to exchange certain broadcasting assets that will allow CBC to expand its sports coverage in the Triangle across the AM and FM dials, allow Curtis to expand its statewide news operations, and see McClatchey exit the broadcast business via a divestiture of its principle assets.

Pending Federal Communications Commission approval, Curtis Media will acquire WRBZ (850 AM) from McClatchey and convert it to a music format. It will also acquire the North Carolina News Network from CBC. In turn, CBC will acquire from Curtis WDNC (620 AM) and the rights to the existing 850 The Buzz sports programming, which it will integrate within the newly acquired WDNC and its two-year-old 99.9 The Fan sports talk radio station.

To that end, David Glenn will move from 850 The Buzz to 99.9 The Fan and host a regular noon to 3 p.m. show, while Adam Gold and Joe Ovies will move from 850 The Buzz to the newly renamed 620 The Buzz hosting a drive-time morning show.

In addition, CBC will acquire from Curtis WCLY (1550 AM) and will change the station format to the popular Hispanic-focused ESPN Deportes.

All three stations will be managed by veteran 850 The Buzz General Manager Brian Maloney, who will report to CBC Vice President George Habel. The three sports radio stations and their employees will be housed in new broadcast studios under construction at the Highwooods office complex off Capital Boulevard in Raleigh.

“We like the idea of giving sports fans different programming options up and down the radio dial,” said Capitol Broadcasting President & CEO Jim Goodmon. “This adds to our web, television and radio sports platform for listeners, viewers and advertisers. Also, I’m pleased that we’ve developed an opportunity to serve the growing Hispanic community. Interest in sports is a strong and common thread in the Triangle.”

“The North Carolina News Network is a good strategic fit for Curtis Media,” said Curtis Media founder and CEO Don Curtis. “Already, WPTF has the largest radio newsroom in the state, originates State Government Radio and the Southern Farm Network. The North Carolina News Network extends our service to seventy-five stations reaching 1.6 million listeners.”

“The Buzz was the Triangle’s first sports station,” noted Billy McClatchey, President of McClatchey Broadcasting. “We built a strong brand over the past decade – entertaining and effective for advertisers. It’s gratifying that it will be carried on at Capitol.”

About Capitol Broadcasting:
CBC, Inc. is a diversified communications company which owns and/or operates WRAL-TV , WRAL Digital , WRAL-FM , WRAL-HD2 , WCMC-FM , Microspace , the North Carolina News Network , CBC New Media Group and Wolfpack Sports Marketing in Raleigh, NC; WJZY-TV and WMYT-TV in Charlotte, NC; WILM-TV and Sunrise Broadcasting in Wilmington, NC; WRAZ-TV and The Durham Bulls in Durham, NC; and real estate interests including the American Tobacco Project and Diamond View office buildings in Durham, NC.

Microsoft and Yahoo announced a 10-year alliance in web search but as far as I can tell nobody really cares about Microsoft or Yahoo search engines as long as they continue to return some kind of search results when you enter a keyword. I think if their users really cared about cutting-edge search technology (or were even aware of it) they would already be using something else. More likely the deal will create a single competitor for Google to focus on in the search market. Like other mergers (while not an official merger it is a merger of search technology) this will give some users who have resisted making the jump to Google a good opportunity to make a switch. Expect Google to pick up another 3-4 points of market share pretty immediately if Microsoft and Yahoo get overly cozy and make the technology transition too obvious or annoying for users. Also expect some short term improvement in aggregate revenues, as advertisers are able to place more ads with less effort. In many cases, smaller advertisers usually prefer to only run on Yahoo and Google.

One side-effect of the deal that I haven’t seen considered is that Microsoft may be able to strong-arm Yahoo into a full sale since they now control a high percentage of Yahoo’s revenue through their latest agreement.

Google’s announcement that they will be creating an operating system is interesting but in itself not particularly exciting either. What’s more important than the sheer announcement of a new OS is the fact that a viable alternative OS is even possible. This is a significant paradigm shift that will likely play a major role in our computing future. As Google points out, “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.”

Google is paying attention and taking notes:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up… Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

Many corporate users are heavily dependent upon custom applications that are written for Windows in much the same way that you still see the occasional green-screen application managing some unique function for government or retail. The shift that has happened recently is that software as a service or SaaS has gained significant strength. Salesforce, Basecamp, Google Doc’s, and a host of other truly great online software applications have given momentum in a trend which will underscore the first viable threat to Microsoft that I’ve ever seen. People buy computers and operating systems for what they can do, not for the operating system itself. If users can do what they want to do without Windows (or rely upon any particular OS) then they will.

Microsoft’s dominance is still largely dependent on the Windows client operating system (not including server revenue). In their most recent quarter Windows client operating system revenue was more than 23% of gross revenue and has probably been higher in previous quarters when overall performance was better. Closely linked to the 23% is all of the server and software revenue that is generated as a direct result of the client OS’ dominance.

Judging from Bill Gates reaction to the news, Microsoft thinks it’s just business as usual although I’m not sure they can really do much in response. With a fundamental shift in computing underway they could start moving their applications online, but that will only hasten the demise of Windows. If Microsoft follows its current course and doubles-down on its investments in installed software vs. SaaS here is the way the future looks:

• Corporate Users — Will continue using Microsoft until their custom applications are ported to the Internet or rewritten as SaaS applications. Corporations can save obscene amounts of money within their computing environments without distributed application computing using Microsoft. Once a few leading companies embrace the new paradigm the others will quickly fall like dominoes.
• Personal Users (not gamers) — As long as the new operating systems can play music, manage photos and browse the web the low price and ease of use will attract users. Most users young and old spend the majority of their time on the Internet and if they aren’t actually on the Internet they are probably doing things that could easily move to the Internet (such as personal finance apps, local email, photos, etc). Of course there is always the Mac as an option for power users which many people argue is better for personal users of all types anyway.
• Gamers — There are already specialized platforms for game playing such as Xbox and Wii. Once lightweight low-horsepower systems become the norm, gamers are likely to continue moving toward these offerings.
• Graphics/Design/Engineering — The Mac is a better platform for these applications and their users already. Remaining holdouts will see more pressure to move to Mac.

Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson,” a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as “volcanic.”  (Source: CNN)

So a few of us were discussing if there were any other celebrities (not political figures), who might bring down the Internet if they died unexpectedly.

While there wasn’t an official consensus and we hope these individuals have a long fruitful life,  we came up with the following list of probable celebrities who would have such impact:

1. Oprah
2. Tiger Woods
3. David Beckham
4. Madonna
5. Muhammad Ali
6. Angelina Jolie
7. Kobe Bryant
8. Britney Spears
9. Michael Jordan
10. Brad Pitt

There are many businesses who find themselves in the pay-per-click trap and at the end of the day most of their profits are paid to Google for the advertising they rely on to sustain their businesses. Getting to the bottom of this “pay-per-click trap” and how you could be working for Google will take a little explanation.

Media outlets and other sources of advertising have always charged based on the number of impressions/viewers/listeners/readers and set their pricing based on what the market will bear. So what’s wrong with that?  Well, traditional media is different from Internet advertising, specifically the pay-per-click model and how it affects pricing and competition, and this changes everything. (check out “Do We All Work for Google?“)

Let’s step back and explore the basic economics behind PPC advertising and its relationship to Internet commerce. PPC advertising is setup in a bid/auction model where the more you are willing to pay, the higher your ad will be placed in the sponsored results for your target keywords. Using free-market economic principals you would assume that over time competition for these keywords will naturally increase the cost per click. So again, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong is that the very nature of the Internet permits hyper-competition, therefore creating sustainable profit in markets where significant barriers to entry or competitive advantage do not exist is virtually impossible.

Using a recent headline bankruptcy to illustrate the point, Circuit City for most of its life was a 100% traditional retailer, it had physical locations, sales people on the floor, and used lots of traditional advertising to bring customers in the door. If someone wanted to compete with them they had to also have a physical location, sales people, and use traditional advertising to bring customers in the door. So at least on the surface Circuit City and any competition that entered the market such as Best Buy would face similar challenges and would expect a reasonable profit margin to make the creation of the enterprise worthwhile. If there are already a couple of competitors in the market that aren’t making unreasonable profits or running inordinately sloppy operations, it’s unlikely that would-be competitors would jump into the fray lightly.

By contrast can you even count the number of online retailers who sell most or all of the products that Circuit City once carried in their stores? Searching for a particular model of LCD TV yields thousands of online retailers offering the product up for purchase. So what is the competitive advantage of one online retailer over another? For some shoppers it might be service or product information, however most shoppers will use whatever sources they can find to narrow down their selection but will make the purchase from whoever has the lowest price. So the only tangible advantage an online retailer has over another is cost and how readily they can be found on the Internet.

This brings us back to the PPC model and the underlying economic principals it relies on to generate staggering profit and growth for Google quarter after quarter. Anyone who wants to jump into online commerce can setup a Yahoo! store and a Google AdWords account and be ready to sell merchandise in a few days with very few barriers to entering the market. This new merchant has virtually no overhead outside of his or her basic living expenses such as food, rent, and advertising.

The cost per click will naturally increase as each new competitor enters the market and the only thing that will stop the increase in PPC bids is the inability for the market to bear anything higher. This happens in nearly real-time as advertisers adjust their bids based on sales conversions, and in the very back of their minds the profit they are making on those sales. Businesses with the best converting websites and the slimmest overhead and profit will ultimately prevail and at the end of the day Google very well might be making more profit from your business than you do. If Google is making more profit from your business than you, then like it or not you’re working for Google.

You might be thinking that Internet commerce is hopeless at this point, but that’s not the case. The key to competing on the Internet is that you MUST find ways to carve out competitive advantages or you will be doomed to work for Google and eke out whatever meager profits the market will bear.

Areas you might consider exploring for competitive advantage are search optimization, building a better Website, creating a very focused niche with exceptional knowledge within that area, increasing the value of each customer through repeat purchase programs, customer referral programs, or partnerships.

Here’s how the PPC trap works:

A business jumps into online advertising by bidding on a few keywords on a search engine. At first, competition is low and the bid price for the keywords is also low, so the business is able to grow and prosper online. As time goes on, more competition enters the market and bid prices steadily increase. By now the business is dependent on the flow of new business leads from the paid advertising, so they double-down and increase their spending to maintain top positions and traffic. As spending increases, conversions decrease because there are more competitors aggressively competing for each customer.

We call it a trap because companies we’ve worked with (and we were brought in to help) were literally trapped by their paid search engine advertising. The operation they have created around the business generated from the PPC advertising creates fixed overhead/expenses so they are forced to continue advertising just to sustain their operation. However, simultaneously they are breaking even (or worse) from their ongoing operations due to the high cost of advertising.

Breaking the cycle can be difficult and requires some delicate work to bring the business back to profitability and eliminate the PPC dependency. In many cases it simply involves a focus on fundamentals including increasing conversions, increasing revenue per customer, reducing overhead, and a focus on natural search engine optimization. However, in some cases the business fundamentals can be so upside down that the only option is a bankruptcy reorganization and subsequently focusing on the fundamentals described above.

If you think you might be at risk of falling into the PPC trap, the sooner you identify the issue and begin working on solving it the stronger your business will be in the long run. Even if things are going well and profits are strong, if your business is based in a large part on PPC advertising it would be smart to diversify your advertising and marketing a bit and concentrate on building competitive advantages wherever possible.

As a side note, if you found this post interesting you might also check out our related article “Are You Working for Google?” This covers the PPC model in a bit more detail as well as our thoughts on sustainable competitive advantage on the Internet.

While it probably isn’t terribly important to the average web user or business person to be highly knowledgeable about these codes you’ve likely come across them in your travels on the Net so you might still want to know what they are.

Most web servers adhere to a standardized set of result codes that every request/response falls under. Each series has a general meaning and within the series there are very specific result codes.

• 200 – Success
  Everything is working properly. (these are generally silent or not sent to the browser because if everything is working ok you want to look at a web page not a message that says everything is ok)
• 300 – Redirection
  You are being sent from one page or url to another. (these are often silent because you are generally sent to a new location which should respond successfully)
• 400 – Incomplete
  Something happened and the request didn’t complete successfully. (these are generally sent to the browser in some way)
• 500 – Error
  There was an internal server error either related to the server or the software running on it. (these are almost always sent to the browser)

I’ll pick out a few of the more popular response codes you might have seen and provide some info about them, but here is a good list of all the possible response codes if you want the gory detail.

• 301 – The page you were trying to get to has moved to a new location. The server should automatically redirect you to the new page and you shouldn’t have to do anything further. Search engine marketers use 301’s a lot when a page is removed or a new website is created so that visitors and search engines can find the new page easily.
• 403 – You are not authorized to view this page. Either you authenticated incorrectly or your IP address is restricted from viewing the page. In either case its back to the drawing board for you.
• 404 – The page you were trying to get to does not exist. It might have existed in the past and has been removed or the link you followed was just wrong. There is no redirect and you’ll have to find your page another way. Our creative team put together a great 404 page for our site that hopefully not many people get to see. Check out http://www.atlanticbt.com/404
• 500 – Any 500 code probably means that something out of your hands has gone wrong. You might try back in a few minutes in case it’s a server load issue but if the issue doesn’t clear up you might try and let the manager of the website know that you had an issue. Try to remember what you did prior to the error because that can be helpful for troubleshooting.

Traffic — traffic is certainly an element of online success, but is traffic the only thing that’s important? Certainly not. Lets consider a site that sells automotive parts. If the site has 100,000 unique visitors a day but the traffic isn’t targeted its unlikely the site will be very successful even with that much traffic. Ie. if the visitor reaches the site because they were searching for computer parts its doubtful whether they will decide to pick up a new alternator for their Taurus on a whim. Carefully targeted traffic is much more valuable then untargeted traffic and will be reflected in conversion rates.

Conversion — While targeted traffic is a factor in conversion its not the only important thing. Once you pass this stumbling block there are a host of things that next become important. In short, for the highest conversion rates you want to tailor the page or pages that you deliver to visitors based on what they searched for and making sure you give them all of the information they need to proceed to your goal (either a checkout, contact form, or other action) in the least amount of pages. Every opportunity you give them to go elsewhere, even other pages in your own site, give the visitor an opportunity to do something other than reaching the goal. If a visitor can reach the goal by visiting one page, often called a landing page, then conversion rates will typically increase. If your visitors must visit multiple pages throughout the site conversion rates will fall, almost no matter how good the site is. The trick is to channel visitors to a goal and offer them as few opportunities to exit the channel as possible.

Return on Investment — At the end of the day, ROI encompasses the whole ball of wax. No matter what’s going on with traffic and conversions if you are spending more on advertising then you make in net income then your ROI is upside down. Its very easy for clients to lose sight of ROI when sales volume is up, but we’ve seen many businesses with multi-million dollar gross revenues (or even billion dollar revenues such as GM, Enron, etc) work all year without making a true profit. ROI is a simple concept and just needs to be calculated with fairly easily obtained business numbers. If conversions are accurately tracked to their originating source then calculating ROI for any particular marketing source or channel is easy. Lets take this basic example. Company sells widgets for $5 each. These widgets are drop-shipped and the cost of goods sold is $3. We can assume there is also another $1 in general and administrative costs required for each sale. So this leaves $1 in simplified potential net profit per sale. If we have a conversion rate of 5% then we can’t afford to spend any more than $5 per 100 visitors to break even. With this simplified example you can quickly see how easy it is to be upside-down with ROI if you don’t take the time to calculate it.