BILLBOARDS AND THE FUTURE

One digital billboard can do the work of 6 to 8 conventional static billboards. In my opinion they look much more attractive that the static billboard. The cities are trading off the tradition static billboards at a ratio of 4 to 6 static billboards for one digital, that sounds like a win, win for everyone, right?. Not really unless you are a large billboard company that would like to trade off your income billboards.

Some of the politicians and garden clubs would take them all down if and plant flowers or a trees. Can you imagine Times Square without its electronic billboards? How about the flashing billboards in Las Vegas? Would you take the famous “Hollywood” landmark billboard down and plant a few bush or trees instead? What if you took all the billboards down? Stripped every American city naked of all the billboards and cleared them from the highways? Would that not be a desecration of the face of America? You bet it would and it is not going to happen.

I think you will be seeing less static and more digital billboards across America in the future as laws regulating and governing billboards get tighter. The trade-off of 4 to 6 static billboards for one digital is a great deal for the cities but not for all billboard companies. For instance a small mom and dad billboard shop in LA or Dallas may not have 4 to 6 billboards to trade-off for one digital billboard, where a large billboard company such as Clear Channel Outdoor which has many. How do you make this fair to the mom and dad operators? Their rights are also important; these kinds of laws knock them out of the race leaving a monopolized market by the large companies. The small guy loses once again.

It would be great to see the clutter cleaned up and quality control move in as long as it is not at the expense of the little people who make up the majority. If the mom and dad operator’s rights are to survive is important to take them into consideration when writing new laws by both state and local governments.

BILLBOARD CASH FLOW MACHINES

It is time to get back in the game, there is still at least one business out there that is still making money and that is outdoor billboard advertising. Outdoor advertising is an annual  multibillion billion dollar business. Money markets, stocks and bonds, real estate you are just treading water and in many cases you are losing ground against inflation. I am sorry to say they don’t cut it in today’s economy.  You need to consider adding an alternative investment to your portfolio consider outdoor billboards it can improve your ROI (return on investment) dollars.

Did you know “Digital Billboards” in a great location can produce 6 to 10 times the revenue of a standard static billboard in the same location? Have you ever had a ROI on an investment on a $400,000.00 to $600,000.00 Investment produced $48,000.00 to $80,000.00 per month? Can your bank do that? Stocks and Bonds? Do the math and then contact me, I want to find and build you a  “Digital Cash Flow Machine”.

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“A few years ago I was one of those people who said digital would never work. You have to prove something to me first, I am from “Old School when it comes to Outdoor Advertising”. Over the past few years I have watched outdoor digital technology improve each year, as it improved it caught the ad agencies and advertisers. I watched the images change to sharper and more colorful images. It was finally a Wall Street firm who convince me this was the future of outdoor advertising when they offered me a partnership in a national digital billboard network. The demands today for digital billboard advertising space is incredible, they actually do make great returns on investments! The secrete is placing your digital billboard in the right location and that is when you need to direction of an experienced Billboard Consultant.” 

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Like any normal investment this it is about bottom line, return on investment. These digital billboards really work like they said, they worked so well I coined the phrase and name for them “Cash Flow Machines” because that is what they are.  The returns on investment are incredible and vary from location to location. My company can help you find the right billboard location,  this is one of the many services my company offers. We can can help you find and develop the billboard location that is right for you. We are a turnkey billboard development company and we are there every step of the way from the beginning stages of development to the finish product. We will also show you how to set up and jump start your new outdoor billboard advertising business.

Check out my website then contact me if you have questions on how to get started.

For more information e-mail me Tom Gunter at TopGunUSA@aol.com and check out my web site for Billboard Brokers of America at. http://www.billboardbroker.com

Google’s Attack Of The Penguin

If the title sounds like something out of a cheap late night horror flick, I can honestly say it has been a nightmare story for me and many other web site owners recently hit by Google’s Penguin.

If you have a web site by now you have already heard of Google’s latest Penguin release, if you are a SEO you was most likely already prepared for it.

In reality Google did not take anything from anyone they just did a little house cleaning.

My name is Thomas Gunter, I own a company named Billboard Brokers of America and my web site was one of those that got hit and I got my butt kicked by the little Penguin guy. I was penalized for 30 days, lost a lot of my hits and could not be found on the Google search engine. I was not aware that some of the things I was doing was not consider Internet etiquette.

I am certainly not an SEO by all means. I did not want anyone else including a SEO to build my web site so I built it myself. I built it my way. I basically had many of the keywords my largest competitors still have posted on their front page. It looked so cheap to me I made my keywords the same color as my background. Well, if you don’t know already that is considered masking and that my friends will get you penalized.

Google’s Penguin update penalizes websites that are over optimized and have to may keywords,they considered that spamming. I did some serious research to find out what Google considers a good web site.

I found out they are looking for unique content material and back links to websites that are very similar to the ones the web site is linked to and spam free. This is one of the most recent moves by Google to make sure they are actually ranking websites that are the most important to the Internet. Penguin was created to target web sites that do not meet up to Google’s current standards and published in their latest rules and guidelines.

Penguin’s update is really an aggressive SEO beast to deal with.Google’s latest action is to encourage better developed of websites without spam. Two examples are keyword packing and keyword masking. Google’s Penguin upgrade penalizes keyword stuffing greater now than in the past. Hopefully you have been spared and had enough time to remove anything that would be considered keyword stuffing and masking.

As for me I cleaned my web site up and filled it with new content. I have three keywords that has me back on Google’s front page. Traffic is coming back up, I hope to be back to normal within the next month or so.

In summing it all up the Penguin update didn’t really change anything that Google had not already deemed unacceptable. If you are really interested in building and maintaining your own web site check out what theses search engines are all looking for first.

For more information on this article you can e-mail me Thomas (Tom) Gunter to Topgunusa@aol.com  or visit my web site Billboard Brokers of America at http://www.BillboardBroker.com

Billboards of Mass Distructions

Billboards That Fell Victim to Florida Hurricane Jeanne.
Jeanne was one of the most expensive and destructive hurricanes in Florida history.It sruck the Florida mailand of Florida September 26, 2004 after killing almost 3,000 people in the Carribean.

Hurricane Jeanne at landfall in Florida in the early morning hours of September 26 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How To Invest Like A Billionaire

I was doing research on billionairs when I ran across this article IHere is an in Forbes I though I would pass along to my readers.

Dean White, 83, started building his billion-dollar billboard business in his teens, selling signs for his mother and father while in high school. After a stint at the University of Nebraska and graduating from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, White took over his family’s Whiteco Industries in 1946 and spent the next 50 years buying up a mix of conservative (billboards, apartments) and cyclical (hotels, construction) assets before selling the billboard division to Chancellor Media for $960 million.

Today he’s worth $1.4 billion and ranks 278th on the Forbes 400 list of America’s wealthiest citizens. These days White says he is giving equal weight to conservative and cyclical investments to get the best return on his cash.

On the conservative side of his portfolio, White is still invested in signage. With partners he owns and operates a Chinese billboard outfit, Whiteco Qingyu, which owns 550 billboards worth $95,000 each. He says he’d eventually like to get back in the U.S. market. White recommends investors by buy shares in a billboard company, such as Lamar Advertising (nasdaq: LAMR – news – people ), which owns 150,000 billboards in the U.S. and Canada.

Invest Like A Billionaire: Read Dean White’s Investment Tips

White also owns a slew of apartments. “You don’t have the ups and downs in apartments that you have in other real estate holdings,” he says. Today he owns and manages 3,575 units from California to Connecticut.

But White says the average investor is better off buying shares in real estate investment trusts that own apartments, rather than buying and managing apartment buildings on their own. The reason: managing an apartment complex can be a costly headache. White recommends apartment REITs like billionaire Sam Zell‘s Equity Residential (nyse: EQR – news – people ) or Archstone-Smith Trust (nyse: ASN – news – people ).

The flipside of White’s portfolio is made up of assets that take advantage of economic cycles, like hotels and construction companies–investments he says you should get in and out of depending on macro trends. “We started out with a couple of Holiday Inns way back when,” says White. He built up a portfolio of midtier and high-end hotels, mostly Marriotts and Holiday Inns.

Last year, White Lodging Services sold 100 hotels (mostly Marriotts) to Black Entertainment Television founder and billionaire Robert Johnson for $1.7 billion, netting a “nine-figure sum.” The company still retains a lucrative management contract for most of the properties. White believes hotels are at their peak right now, saying, “Everybody is making money.”

If you can’t afford a hotel, White says investors should own REITs that specifically target  high-end hotel properties in urban areas. Two REITs that meet his criteria are:

LaSalle Hotel Properties (nyse: LHO – news – people ). LaSalle owns and manages 32 upscale hotels in urban, convention and resort markets. Two recent purchases include the Holiday Inn Manhattan on Wall Street in New York, for $50.5 million, and the Graciela Burbank across the street from the Warner Bros. Studio Ranch in California, for $36.5 million. For the first nine months of 2006, LaSalle revenue rose 65% to $467.4 million, and net profits nearly tripled to $68.9 million, mostly due to the sale of the Chicago Marriott hotel. LaSalle shares rose 29% in 2006.

Host Marriott (nyse: HST – news – people ). The nation’s largest lodging REIT, Host Marriott operates 128 luxury hotels in the U.S., Canada and Mexico under posh brand names like Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons. The company is expanding abroad, using joint ventures to buy properties like the Hotel Arts Barcelona in Spain. For the first nine months of 2006, revenues increased 25% to $3.2 billion. Net income rose 21% to $565 million over the same period, due in part to the company’s acquisition of Starwood (nyse: HOT – news – people ) hotel properties.

Another industry that White says has economic trends in its favor is construction. He says the labor shortages, especially in home building, make these companies extremely valuable. He recommends investing in national construction companies that are not exposed to one region and prefers those that build in urban areas. Check out Granite Construction (nyse: GVA – news – people ), which works on both private and public sector projects, including roads, highways, tunnels, bridges, mass transit facilities and airports.