Mike Bray

Mike Bray is the President and CEO of Geo Marketing, Inc. With over 30 years of Marketing experience. The past 16 years Mike devoted strictly to Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Internet Marketing. Mike has literally worked with hundreds of companies, from the one man band, to large public corporations. Through his vast and diverse search engine optimization, search engine marketing and internet marketing experience Mike has successfully increased online visibility and sales in just about every industry from call girls (he’s Las Vegas based) to political campaigns and from jet charter services to fishing charters. Although primarily focused on Geo Marketing’s corporate owned web properties, Mike finds it hard to resist a challenge and still accepts an occasional client.

“Mike Bray is an internet marketing guru who really cares about his clients. His calm tone combined with vast knowledge really gets the job done.”
Dr. Sid Solomon

“Mike is great when it comes to understanding the problem and going at it like a bull dog. He also has a great staff who approaches the entire situation and not just the problem or task of the moment.”
Kevin Booth

“After Mike optimized my website and set up a simple online campaign, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing! I had to add more sales staff to keep up with the traffic. Mike! I didn’t believe in web optimization…now I’m a believer!”
Rob Olson Owner, Quantum Merchant Services

About the Book

Internet Rich book cover

Introduction

By L. J. Martin

Social Media is about Relationships, about people, about exposure. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and those under 30 are adept with computers, iPhones, notebooks, and teachers are complaining that students are texting with one hand, in their pocket, so as not to be caught. Facebook has topped Google for “weekly traffic” in the U.S. One in five couples now meet online. One in five divorces are blamed on facebook. Kindergarteners are now learning on iPads, chalk-boards have gone the way of buggy whips.

If facebook was a country, by population, it would be the third largest in the world.

A new member joins LinkedIn every second.

If you want to be part of the world, the internet world, the social networking world, and you must be if you’re to be in business, then it’s not a question of “if?” merely a question of “when” and “how well?”

Who does it well? Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, and Lady Gaga have more Twitter followers than the total populations of Israel, Sweden, Greece, Chile, Australia and North Korea.

Over one half the total internet traffic in the United Kingdom is facebook. YouTube had 37 million viewers for a single VW ad during the Super Bowl. An ad for the introduction of the Ford Explorer had more viewers than a Super Bowl ad.

If Wikipedia were a print book it would be a mere 2.25 million pages and take you more than a lifetime to read.

The eBook has overtaken conventional paper book sales.

You must be a part of social media, or you might as well go into the buggy whip biz.

There’s only one way to get in front of the better part of a billion people in this world…short of marrying an heir to the British throne…and that’s what we’re discussing in this book.

When my wife and I decided we would become writers, more than two dozen years ago, there was no internet, at least not one which had found it’s way into every office and most bedrooms and dens in the country and across the world.

The marketing of books consisted primarily of bookstores, supermarkets, drugstores, and general stores such as WalMart and Target. There were also a number of book clubs that dealt via the mail. At that time there were over 1,500 wholesale “book buyers” in the country who bought books for placement in those markets. Most of those books were bought by buyers at Independent Distributors (ID’s) across the country. We soon learned that although booksignings were occasionally wonderful for the ego, they were unproductive other than making a friend of a particular bookstore owner or manager—not that we don’t admire and value hard working bookstore owners and personnel.

As book stores began to fade from prominence and book chains captured a good part of the market, it became less and less long-term economically important to make a friend of a bookstore person, as they’d be going back to college in the Fall or moving on to take a job at Sears or in the underwear department at Target. Your time was much better spent visiting an ID book buyer or taking donuts to their 5 A.M. driver meetings…after all, the driver was the one who racked the books and oft times made the decision if your title was eye high or could only be seen by the book consumer’s dachshund, and those distributors and store sold 80% of mass market books in the United States.

Shortly after we began writing (75 books ago), and schlepping our books, the business began to consolidate, and eventually ended up with three or four major distributors owning all the others. The word was that those hundreds and hundreds of book buyers were consolidated down to a dozen or less. And it became more and more difficult to “smooze” a book buyer. If you weren’t John Grisham you didn’t get in the door.

One thing you can be certain of, and that is, just like the weather here in Montana, you only have to wait a short while and things change. The major change in the scenario of selling books was the internet, and a company called Amazon. I must confess that I thought Amazon was a passing fancy, but then I would never have invested in a company that wanted to put water in plastic bottles and sell it for a buck, or wanted to put a coffee shop on every corner and sell coffee for five bucks a paper cup. Who the hell would drink coffee out of a paper cup? Now there’s Amazon and lots and lots of other selling oppor-tunities, most of which are included in this volume.

I am not a techy, but I saw the writing on the proverbial wall as the internet began to grow. And I learned how to write a webpage when HTML was done by writing code. I thanked the hyperspace gods when programs came along that would shorten the process. But I never mastered the ins and outs of the internet, even though I was fairly early into the game of print-on-demand books, eBooks, and selling via your website.

Then I received a call from an old friend. Mike Bray was also early into the game, but his slant was pure selling on the net. It didn’t matter to Mike if it was water or widgets, he sold it via the web, and sold it very, very well. And he wanted to help me sell books.

I’m still not a techy, but I know a whole lot more about the web than I ever thought I’d know, or need to know, or want to know, thanks to Mike. And the good news, I’m selling a hundred times more books than I ever sold before. And that, my friends, is why you need this book.

It’s Mike’s know how and my meager contributions and poor editing, but this book will make your life much easier if you decide to attack the internet and sell your own stuff. And it doesn’t just apply to books. As I’m both a fiction and non-fiction writer, and my wife is a novelist, we’ve concentrated on books…but selling on the net is selling, and it doesn’t matter if your selling books or boomerangs, it’s all the same to the internet.