Dial in to success: Telemarketing tips, targeting and testing the right way by Accutips.com

DNC legislation has plenty of direct marketers worried that the days of telephone marketing are as good as over. But several media sources reported great telemarketing tips in May, from broadening the scope of call centers to testing campaigns wisely.

In life as in business, every roadblock presents an opportunity.

Marketers who view the DNC regulations as a chance to re-examine their processes and results may well find ways to improve their company's CRM efforts, brand loyalty and profits all at once. The number one telemarketing tip of the month: Change with the times and adapt your phone power accordingly.

Here's a collection of the others we found:
Find new targets. According to Hayley Weinper, vice president of sales and marketing for Influent Inc., the Hispanic market remains largely untapped. Examine your other targeting options as well; there are new lists available every month, and if you find the right niche, you could hit pay-dirt.
Expand the channels your call center can address. Start accepting inbound calls and responding to e-mails all from the same department or headquarters. It's a way to ensure consistent, high-quality communication across more channels, which in turn can increase customer satisfaction and profit margin.
Consider outsourcing with an independent call center that specializes in your style of campaign or your industry. With the increasing level of complicated regulations surrounding telephone campaigns, many marketers sleep easier knowing their projects are being handled by firms whose sole job is to remain up-to-date on legal issues.
Test every campaign. Prepare your staff with good responses and rebuttals. Don't hesitate to listen to live or recorded calls, to hear how the market responds to your offer and your scripts. Modify your test as you learn from your mistakes. Document and analyze everything, so you can continually improve your odds.
Acquire your lists from quality sources. Make sure your list is as clean as possible. Ask your data provider how clean the list is and hold them to their promise.

New Study: 32% More Women 25-44 Read Direct Mail Over Email by Accutips.com

According to a new study by Baltimore-based Vertis Communications, 85% of women ages 25-44 read printed direct mail marketing pieces, despite the influx of electronically generated advertisements throughout the past decade.

This was a key finding from the company's study, titled "2007 Customer Focus: Direct Mail," released on Jan. 16. The survey of 2,500 adults measures both general and industry-specific shopping trends.

The study also reveals that 53% of all women surveyed ages 25-44 who have access to email read these advertisements, almost consistent with the 54% that did so in 2005. Furthermore, Vertis' study indicates marketers can increase the effectiveness of their direct mail campaigns by offering target consumers exclusive deals and coupons. 72% percent of total adults surveyed said they have replied to direct mail containing a "buy one, get one free" offer.

Additionally, 63% of all adults indicated they have responded to direct mail collateral offering a percentage discount on merchandise, up from 54% in 2005.

The direct mail study revealed the following additional results:

* Total adults who responded to direct mail via in-store visits, Websites, 800 numbers or mail remains steady, with 47% in 2003 and 46% in 2007
* The number of Hispanics who responded to direct mail marketing jumped drastically, from 38% in 2003 to 54% in 2007
* 57% of women ages 35-64 prefer that companies they express interest in, send follow-up communication through direct mail pieces personalized to their needs
* 38% of men 35-49 prefer generic direct mail when being contacted by a company in which they have expressed interest
* While 45% of total adults are open to receiving personalized, follow-up emails, younger men and women seem to be more responsive to this medium, with 52% of men ages 25-34 and 56% of women the same age stating email is an acceptable form of follow-up communication
* Text messaging is the most desired method of follow-up communication for younger men ages 18-24, with 23% desiring contact via text message from a company they are interested in, compared to 5% of women the same age
* Comfort levels of adults providing credit card numbers online have increased throughout the years, with 42% of total adults being "very" or "somewhat comfortable" in 2007, up from 32% in 2003
* 40% of total adults in 2007 indicate they are not at all comfortable providing credit card information online, down from 52% in 2003.

The Vertis Communications 2007 Customer Focus survey series also includes findings from the financial, credit card, insurance, publishing, casino gaming, retail and automotive industries.

Tips + Techniques Choosing a Database Vendor by Accutips.com

How to evaluate your current database services supplier—or select a new one—with complete guidelines for creating an RFP

How do you find the right company to provide all the database services you need—from cleaning and maintaining your current database to building a new one from scratch? According to the experts at Target Marketing Online, you do a comprehensive evaluation of each supplier you are considering.

To compile the RFP guidelines below, the authors turned to a recent database services survey. By studying the responses direct marketers gave to survey questions (such as "what do you look for when you choose a database services company?" and "what does a supplier have to do to give you good service quality?"), they were able to create a series of questions to be used in evaluating your vendors.

The same criteria you use to select a new database services supplier will also be helpful for evaluating your current vendor. It's not a bad idea to reevaluate from time to time. It can help you decide whether you're happy with your current supplier or it's time to put it out to bid. Ask yourself, "Is my supplier doing all it can to offer excellent service? Is my account team accessible? Will they be able to accommodate my future needs?" Your answers will be valuable indeed.

Once you've evaluated a number of firms' capabilities, the next step is to submit a request for proposal (RFP) to each firm you're interested in. Below is a comprehensive list of the issues your RFP should include.

Guidelines for Creating a Request for Proposal (RFP)

Your firm's current net revenue
Industry/market served
Housefile/database profile at present
Number of records
Customers vs. prospects
Source(s) of names
Mailing/media plans/frequency
Current enhancements
Service goals/requirements
Build a new database
Enhancement/modeling
Maintain/clean only

Other services that may be needed:
Mailing
Consulting
Analysis
Database access/software
Online databasing
Timetable/deadlines

Best of luck with all your prospects, and happy shopping!

Why Jerks Win At Direct Marketing by Willie Crawford

Have you ever noticed that some very successful direct marketers go out of their way to be cantankerous? Have you ever wondered why? Today we're going to discover their secret? It makes many of them millions!

Studies have shown that people buy on emotion and then justify it with logic. We buy new BMW convertibles because we know we'll look good in them. Then we rationalize that "BMW makes a very good car that will prove to be a great long-term investment."

Those direct marketers that come across as cantankerous, or even total jerks, are deliberately tapping into the emotional side of their market. They're doing something called polarization.

Polarization is the art, or science, of getting members of your market to take an emotional stance. You want to get them to either really like you - or dislike you. Those who are neutral rarely buy your products. Remember, people buy on emotion, even though they ‘re often not conscious of it. Getting people emotionally charged INCREASES your chances of making a sale!

One marketer that understands this concept and uses it brilliantly is copywriter Gary Halbert. Gary will tell you that he is the greatest copywriter alive, and he charges for his services accordingly. If you visit Gary's site at: http://TheGaryHalbertLetter.com you'll see that he is very politically INCORRECT. Gary goes out of his way to insult his audience, delivering smack after smack as he educates you on what good copywriting is.

Gary understands that not everyone is his market. So he creates strong feelings, and this drives away those who would never buy from him... and really endears him to those who appreciate his work. This tactic is very effective, and Gary has no shortage of customers making him rich.

Another marketers who understands this concept very well is Jay Abraham. I watched Jay Abraham, Stephen Pierce, and Rich Schefren orchestrate a teleseminar in 2004. Leading up to this teleseminar, they sent out a barrage of emotionally charged, very informative emails.

Their numerous joint venture partners also sent out a tightly orchestrated barrage of emails to their lists.

Those who saw the tremendous value in the free information provided in all those emails were charged up. They were so charged up that many could hardly wait for the teleseminar to take place. I was one of those nudged to sign up for this $497 teleseminar through all of those emails :-)

A final example of a marketer brilliantly employing polarization is a guy who calls himself "The Rich Jerk." I won't reveal his identity, but will tell you that coming across as a jerk is making him millions on the Internet. He is a very good marketer in his own right (he recently sold a website on Ebay for $379,000).

This "Rich Jerk" uses emotionally charged copy on his websites and it's very effective. Part of what makes his copy so effective is that he also incorporates proof of what he says. Reading this copy, you get emotionally charged up, and at the same time, you realize that you've encountered someone who can really help you succeed. You can see how he does this by reading his copy at: http://WhyJerksWin.com

By studying the examples above, you see that using polarization, or even coming across as a jerk, can be a very powerful marketing tactic. It can touch your reader at a deeper psychological and emotional level than many other marketing techniques. However, don't forget that another reason this works in the examples above is that these marketers also deliver tremendous value to their customers. They also PROVE their points.

Without also incorporating proof into their copy, this tactic probably wouldn't work. Without proof they would just turn prospects off. So now you know... jerks win at direct marketing because they employ polarization and proof.

Using Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) For Email Privacy

Need for Privacy

People have become hypersensitive about their privacy during the last few years. They now expect that their details will be used only for the purposes for which they have been provided and not shared by original trustees. This is especially true of email addresses because of the huge volume of unsolicited commercial email (spam) circulating the web.

In Australia and elsewhere, there are statutes requiring privacy when collecting and using personal information. (In Australia the Privacy Act (Commonwealth) was recently amended to include private sector use of personal information eg, medical records retained by private practices).

In an increasingly litigious society, there are not only sound business reasons, but legal reasons why you should ensure the strictest standards of privacy are applied to personal information of which you are custodian. Despite this, numbers of people using email unwittingly reveal the email addresses of other people to whom they are sending email.

This article tells you how to maintain client confidentiality when sending email to multiple addressees by using Blind Carbon Copy or BCC.

Blind Carbon Copy

The term Blind Carbon Copy is a hangover from the dim, dark ages before word processors when we used typewriters (some of you have probably never seen a typewriter). To produce multiple copies of a document, one had to place a sheet of carbon paper between sheets of plain paper so that the type key impact on the top sheet would be copied to the second sheet (and any subsequent sheets).

It was a somewhat messy, but proficient process. When one wanted to send an original letter to one person and copies to several other people without showing each recipient who the other recipients were, a BCC annotation was made on the original. Each copy displayed only the name and address of the individual recipient, but the BCC notation on the original showed to whom the copies had been mailed. A BCC looked like this: Bcc: Mr Tom Jones, 14 Weaving Court, East Melbourne VIC 3000

Some email programs allow you to enter email addresses into the BCC field and send them. When you do that each recipient receives your message, but the names of other recipients are not displayed.

That is why they are called ‘blind’ – they are not seen.

By using the BCC feature you preserve the identities of those who are on your mailing list and ensure that anyone receiving your email cannot email your list or harvest their email addresses and sell them.

Your Email Program

When you obtain an email program, make sure it has a ‘Blind Carbon Copy (BCC)’ feature. Programs such as Outlook Express and Outlook 200? have BCC capability. Although I have never used it, I'd be surprised if Eudora and other common email programs didn't have it too.

If when you click to send a new email your email client displays only the To … and Cc … boxes it may be that the Bcc feature IS available, but is simply not displayed. Try the View menu or Help menu to see if you can find a Bcc option.

If your email program has a BCC option that you can select as a permanently visible option, select it. If it doesn't, you may need to think about getting a new program.

How to Use BCC

When you send email messages to multiple addressees and you do not want each addressee to know who else has received a copy, use the Blind Carbon Copy field.

Simply enter all the addresses in the BCC field separated by a semi-colon, comma, or whatever your program uses. When you click the send button, your email will go to each individual with only his or her name in the To field. None of the recipients knows to who else the email has been sent.

Outlook 200? will allow you to send BCC addressed email without an address in the To field. Other email clients require at least one address in the To field before they allow multiple recipient addresses in the BCC field. Test the program you use to see if it needs to have an addressee in the To field. If so, address it to yourself. (Surprisingly, email programs usually allow us to email ourselves ... that's why I receive so many emails from Jennifer Lopez (just joking).

If you need to make an entry in the To field, place your own email address in that field and everyone else’s address in the BCC field.

Disadvantages

What you need to know about BCC is that some spam filters automatically delete email addressed in the BCC field so it never reaches its destination. This means that while sending BCC is okay for privacy, your email might not always reach the intended recipients.

A problem I had with Outlook Express 2002 was that if I sent my email using BCC I couldn't print a hard copy of the sent message with the addresses on it. I had to write address details on my file copies for record keeping purposes.

If sending BCC email is likely to be impractical for you, then you need to consider upgrading your email client from the standard run-of-the-mill version to a professional version. That's what I did.

Email Management Programs

If, like me, you distribute large quantities of email regularly to newsletter subscribers, clients, club members, colleagues or anyone else, you will be better off getting a program designed for high volume mailings.

I use and sell a heavy duty bulk email program that lets me do simply, many tasks not easy to achieve with standard email clients like Outlook 2002. For example, the program I use will allow me to:

Automatically record subscriptions to my newsletter
Personalise each email with a recipient's name or any other information I choose to include eg, place of residence
Send as HTML or plain text with or without attachments
Do a partial send to my distribution list eg, if I wanted to email everyone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, clients 64-73 of 3,000 or all persons whose title is Ms I can do it

By having a separate program for bulk emailing, I overcome the problems involved with privacy and reduce the likelihood that my messages will be eliminated by overzealous spam engines.

If you rely on email to carry out business activities (and who doesn't?), it may be time to consider how well your email strategy meets the needs of your business in today's security conscious society. More information and a free download that will help you save time can be found at our site.

 

UNDERSTANDING MLM MATRIX PLANS by Judy Thompson

If you are already involved in, or are contemplating a business using network marketing or multi-level marketing (MLM) as your marketing strategy, the better you understand it, the wiser and more successful you will be.

Network marketing companies select a certain type of compensation plan for different reasons. In this article I want to give an overview of the “matrix.”

What distinguishes the matrix compensation plan from other plans? It is a limited width plan. The width generally ranges from 2 to 5 people on the distributor’s first level. As more people enroll, they go under those first level people. If, for example, there were 3 first-level people, there could be 9 people on the second level, and 27 people on the third level, etc. Thus, an organization could conceivably grow into hundreds, or even thousands of people. The company promoting the products or services will determine how many levels deep they will pay. The company will pay you a certain percentage of the product purchases for each person in your downline. If you have a downline of only a few people, your bonus check will not be very big. If you grow into hundreds or thousands of people under you, then you will be paid a lot more.

A matrix plan allows for “spillover.” Spillover occurs when someone not enrolled by you is placed in your downline, and thus, has “spilled over.” This can be a neat, exciting thing to happen to a new distributor. It should never be counted on as the primary means to build a downline. In fact, probably the majority of people in a matix plan will never receive “spillover” from their upline. To be a beneficiary of “spillover” you have to be in the right place, under an upline member who is doing quite a bit of recruiting. However, it can be a very helpful thing to someone who is serious about building an organization.

The biggest drawback to a matrix plan and “spillover” is that often it attracts the lazy type of person who doesn’t want to work. So, you have a bunch of people joining just looking for their “spillover.”

While the matrix compensation plan is used by only about 9% of MLM companies, it generally is very attractive to people who can just work their MLM business on a part-time basis. The low monthly volume usually required helps it to be a workable plan for both part-timers and the non-sales types. Thus, in spite of some disadvantages to the matrix, people who are willing to do some work are likely to find that success is truly within their reach!

Quiz: What Kind of “Sales Shoe” Are You?

Have you ever wondered what type of saleswoman you are? It doesn’t matter if you run your own company or sell for someone else – it is extremely important to know what your style is. What does The Sales Diva mean here? Well – let me throw my high heel on my desk here and I will explain.

Are You a “Shoe-In” With Your Customers?

The most important aspect of selling is to understand and relate to your customer. And before you can do that – you have to know yourself. Contrary to popular belief – you don’t have to twist yourself into a pretzel to be a success in sales. You don’t have to copy anyone else. You just have to be YOU – with all your quirks and also understanding your strengths.

The sales quiz below will help you determine what type of “Sales Shoe” you are wearing…and what areas of selling you need to improve. Answer yes or no to the following questions. Compare your point total to the scoring key at the bottom.

1. I enjoy the challenge of finding new clients.

2. I feel the most satisfaction with a client I have known a long time.

3. I like most networking events.

4. When I am faced with a difficult client I am not afraid.

5. I love when there are lots of details to put together.

6. Money is a motivator for me.

7. I get excited when I am working with a new client.

8. I love change.

9. I love getting out to networking events and meeting new people.

10. Following up with customers is easy for me.

11. Goal-setting is really important to me.

12. I get excited about unknown opportunities.

13. Self-motivation is one of my greatest skills.

14. I love people – that’s why I got into sales.

15. I rarely feel nervous when I ask for the sale.

16. I don’t tend to take rejection personally.

17. I love exceeding my goals.

18. People often tell me that I am a great listener.

19. It doesn’t matter what I sell as long as I believe in it.

20. I love learning and invest yearly in professional development.

21. I think that the word “selling” is a fabulous word!

22. I am an expert at asking questions.

23. I enjoy solving problems.

24. Relationships are my middle name!

25. My customers see me as an expert.

26. I have a clear picture of who my target audience is.

27. I know what I need to do to market myself.

Scoring Key: What Shoe Are You?

22-27 Points: High Heel Pump
You go girl! You are dedicated to helping people and making money at the same time. Just make sure to keep yourself on track – start a Success Team so you continue to stay motivated.

16-20 Points: Stiletto
Great score! You can run a block in your high heels and not even get a run in your nylon. Just remember – to maintain customer relationships – you have to slow down and pay attention to some of the details.

11-15 Points: Mary Jane Classic
You’re doing fine but there is room for improvement. Your shy nature may be holding you back in some areas. You don’t have to be behind the scenes – you get out there and shine! Try taking a public speaking class – it will do wonders for your confidence!

6-10 Points: Sneakers
You’re busy but not much is happening. You may be feeling a little frustrated at why success isn’t coming faster. Dig deep here – what are you afraid of? It’s time to get a mentor and also quit trying to do everything yourself.

0-5 Points: Flip-Flop
Don’t despair! Many of your attitudes about sales can be adjusted – if you’re willing. Use this quiz as a starting point to pinpoint the changes you want to make. Consider reading one professional development book a week and also getting some sales advice for your business.

How to Increase Your Sales BEFORE You Launch Your Product or Service

Want to increase your sales BEFORE you launch your product or service? The following are some of the most effective ways to do just that:

1. Use Social Proof
What is "social proof"? Simply put, we are all conditioned to watch what others are doing and follow along (think teenagers). Using social proof in your marketing helps you to influence your customers to purchase your products/services, get new prospects to sign-up for your list, and get people talking about you and your offering - and that's just the start.

So, how do you use this psychological trigger in your marketing?
One way is to use results-based testimonials. Ask your current customers or clients to give you results-based testimonials. They literally say, "I used this product and these are the results I got." Having celebrities give these to you is great, but make sure you have testimonials from REAL people. Those are the ones that are really going to cement the idea in your potential buyer's mind that they can do it, too.

2. Answer your prospects #1 objection
To take "social proof" to a deeper lever, anyone who is buying anything almost always has this #1 objection: "Sure, you can do it, but can I do it?"

In addition to using yourself as an example (if appropriate) as evidence that what you are offering does what you say it will, it's also important to make sure you get "social proof" from people in your client/customer's peer group. Then your potential buyer sees people like themself and understands that "Hey, it worked for them, it can work for me, too."

3. Use a time limit
Creating a sense of urgency around your product or service will make it that much more enticing to potential buyers. For example, Jeff Walker just released his "Product Launch Formula" and has promised to sell it for $997 for one week only. After that he will raise his price. He doesn't even have to tell us by how much. Just knowing that you have one week to buy at a lower price creates that sense of urgency.

4. Use a limited quantity
If you are selling a physical product and you are only having 100 produced, then use that information to create the same sense of urgency you would with a time limit. Use a countdown on your website to further create the feeling that if your potential buyers don't buy now, they may miss out.

5. Use a time or quantity limit on bonuses
Additionally, you could offer bonuses for a certain length of time (first week only) or for a certain number of products sold. For example, the first 30 buyers would get an additional special report (valued at $XX).

The last three strategies also help your buyers feel like they are part of your "club" when they join by purchasing your product or service.

Obviously, you can use these tactics unscrupulously, and I'm sure you've seen it or experienced it yourself. But if you want your business to truly be successful, in all the ways that are important and meaningful to you, then you must only use these strategies with integrity and honesty.

If you really are only going to print 100 copies of a physical product, then only print 100 copies. That doesn't mean that you can't do another print run. It just means that you tell your market that you're only going to print 100 now, and if you do decide to do another run, then they will have to wait another two or three weeks before they can get their copy.

If you really are going to raise your price after a certain date, or after a certain number of items are sold, then you must follow through. You can give your current base a chance to buy at the "original" price before you raise it, but you still must raise your price if you say you will.

Your integrity using these strategies will create more sales for you than ever before. But use them to manipulate your prospects and it will come back to haunt you...guaranteed.

Oh, the Mistakes Spokespeople Make

Question: What do many new spokespeople at technology companies have in common?
Answer: they make similar mistakes and fall into similar traps.
Based on my experience as a media trainer, the most common ones include:

1. Misunderstanding the Media. Too many spokespeople confuse PR opportunities with free advertising. Ouch! No reporter, editor, or host wants to be a billboard for your products or service; their job is to provide interesting and useful information to their readers or audience. And if you help them do so, you'll maximize your chances of positive coverage.

2. Misunderstanding the Spokesperson Role. Some spokespeople think that they're on a sales call when they meet the press. So they toss out puffery and hyperbole or try to "close on the objection." Then they become frustrated by the "poor" coverage, if any, that they receive. The key is simple: inform, don't sell.

3. Lacking Message Points. At first blush, it might seem that telling spokespeople to have message points is as obvious as telling them to wear clothes during an interview. But in fact, many spokespeople do arrive metaphorically naked for interviews - bereft of key message points. Deliver several strong messages well, and you might just see them in print or on the air.

4. Unleashing a Core Dump. When spokespeople feel the need to educate the interviewer about everything that could be known about their products, services, or companies, the interview loses focus. An effective spokesperson knows when to cut to the chase and assess what level of detail the interviewer is seeking.

5. Over-Answering. Most inexperienced spokespeople don't know when to stop talking. By babbling on, they increase their chances of being misquoted or driving the interview off-topic. Don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - keep answers short and to the point.

6. Failing to Listen. A guaranteed way to irritate an interviewer is to interrupt or finish his or her questions. You need to establish a rapport and communicate respectfully - just as you would with a colleague.

7. Speaking in Jargon. It's often tough for spokespeople to adjust their technical level to that of the interviewer. But it's also critical. If you talk over the interviewer's head, you'll decrease the chances of an accurate write up; if you "dumb down" the information for a technologically-sophisticated interviewer, you'll likewise decrease the chances of getting the kind of coverage you desire.

8. Missing the "So What?" Too often, spokespeople focus on the intricacies of their technology and forget that ultimately, the game is about offering a better value proposition for your customers. Demonstrate how your products and services solve your customers' problems and help them achieve their goals.

9. Trashing Competitors. Spokespeople can easily lose credibility if they boast about overthrowing the 800-pound gorilla in their market space. Far better to talk about the unique features and advantages of your offerings and how you plan to increase market share. In short, take the high road when it comes to competitors - you'll do more to increase your chances of obtaining the good press you deserve.

10. Playing Tug of War. Some spokespeople believe that they need to come across as "tough," so that they can control the interview through intimidation. Bad idea; you might win a battle or two, but you'll still lose the war. Victory goes to he or she who controls the ink. So be a smart player and check your ego at the door. Are there other mistakes spokespeople can make during an interview? Sure. But if they can avoid the "Big Ten," they'll maximize their chances of a successful experience with the media

Are you leveraging your unpaid sales force

Five keys to growing your business through referrals

You’ve honed your technical expertise, you’ve established your business and got your team in place, but why was it no one told you you’d also have to develop marketing and sales skills?

That’s not what you were expecting when you established your professional services practice, be that as a lawyer, an accountant, a designer or consultant. In fact the idea of selling leaves your cold.

The reality is most of us dislike selling. Equally, we don’t like being sold to. This simple fact is often overlooked, yet it has the potential to be the key that unlocks the growth of your business.

People do business with those they know, like, trust and respect. In other words they want to build a relationship with you before they invest their hard earned money in your solutions and services.

Referrals are often the most powerful way to expand your business requiring little marketing spend and providing you with immediate credibility through the reputation of the person referring you.

But how often do you miss the opportunity to ask for a referral? Do you have a specific strategy and action plan to manage your referral process? Are you leveraging the support of your unpaid sales force - your clients who already know, like, trust and respect you?

Here are five keys to growing your business through increasing your referrals.

How to ask for a referral

Review your current clients and identify three of them that you can contact this week about the potential of them referring you to others.

When you speak with them, thank them for their business and tell them you enjoy working with them. Advise them you are in the process of expanding your referral based business. Explain that you would like to partner with them to help you grow your business and ask if they could refer you to 2 or 3 of their contacts.

Make sure you advise them of the profile of your ideal client that you would like them to refer you to. If they are able to identify someone, ask if they would contact the person ahead of you reaching out to them to introduce yourself.

Make your clients proud to refer you

Most of us delight in great feedback and there is nothing better than having someone thrilled because of the results they have achieved through working with someone you referred to them.

When a client refers you, their personal reputation is on the line. They won’t refer or recommend someone who they don’t believe in. It’s therefore paramount you deliver to your highest standards when working with the contact you have been referred to.

Connect with your potential new client

When you make contact with your potential new client, reference the person referring you and advise them that your mutual contact thought it would be a great idea if the two of you connected.

Make sure you don’t overwhelm them with your great technical expertise. Actively listen to their challenges and concerns. Offer suggestions and be generous with your advice - make them feel you have their interests at heart.

Remember, you can’t convince them to work with you; even though you have come highly recommended, they have to grow to know, like, trust and respect you on their own terms.

Keep your client in the loop

Don’t forget to keep your original client informed of how things progress with the personal contact they referred you to. That is not to say you should disclose anything confidential – just make sure they know that you have made contact and whether you are going to work together.

Reward your referral partners

Consider rewarding your referral partners, perhaps by entertaining them to lunch or introduce a different service agreement or fee structure to formally reward your clients for their referrals. After all, they’re helping you grow your business and are sure to remember to provide you with referrals more often if they know their support is appreciated.

Don’t wait for your workload to quieten down before you implement a referral strategy. To grow a thriving professional practice, business development needs to be part of your ongoing agenda. Developing and implementing a referral strategy can help you propel the growth of your business without the anguish of feeling you have to sell and with little investment in overheads.

You Haven't Earned the Right to Sell to Me!

How often do people try to sell us something before we have expressed an interest, have a desire, or are in the market for what they have? It seems the standard for many salespeople is to try to sell to anyone and everyone regardless of the interest level.

When someone attempts to sell us something before we have expressed an interest, the initial thought may be, “Why would I buy from you? You haven’t earned the right to sell to me!”

The fact of the matter is that selling, both online and off, is about determining if there is a need before ever attempting to match a buyer with a product or service. It is about providing enough information for the buyer to make the best decision based on their needs. And it is about gaining trust. The most successful sales professionals are those who are a resource before they are a vendor.

Having been in both brick-and-mortar and online sales and marketing for many years, it never ceases to amaze me how many people try to sell without determining the customer’s needs. They don’t seem to realize that the better the match, the more likelihood for return business. The better the match, the more trust gained. If you depend on repeat business or referrals, trust is absolutely a factor in your customer’s decision to come back to you when they need your product or service.

Anyone who has been in business for an extended period of time (or plans to be) would be hard pressed to believe otherwise. Whatever you are selling, the buyer’s experience from the initial visit and/or purchase will likely determine whether or not they will ever purchase from you again.

When a customer has a great experience from the beginning the chances of them turning into a repeat buyer is more likely. It is a proven fact: it is more cost effective to have repeat buyers than it is to constantly seek out new customers. That is not to say you shouldn't be adding new clients as part of your business model. Building trust with existing clients will add to your conversion rate more consistently.

What is often missed in the equation of sales and marketing is the lifetime value of a customer. Once the initial sale is made they are forgotten. With proper care, a one-time or occasional buyer can turn into a loyal buyer. And loyalty is more often than not based on trust.

We live in a “try before you buy” society. Because of this many buyers use what is referred to as the buying ladder. The buying ladder is very applicable to brick-and-mortar sales as well as Internet sales.

Before buying a high ticket item, buyers will "test the waters.” This can be done in a number of ways: by test driving a car, taking a tour of a home, asking friends and associates for a recommendation. When purchasing on the Internet it can be downloading a free information item or buying an inexpensive product from a website to test out the level of service, quality of product, delivery time, quality of information (in the case of an information product), and response time. It may even depend on the buyer’s “gut feeling.” What are your own buying habits? What process do you go through before making the decision to buy?

When you gain trust people want to do business with you. And they want to tell others about the experience. Have you heard the expression that if someone has a bad experience they will tell more people about that experience than they do a good one? I can’t say that I necessarily agree with this statement. There are occasions when I have heard people rave about a great experience over and over again.

Buying decisions are made for a number of reasons, but they ultimately depend upon whether or not the buyer trusts the process. And if they trust you. It is through the process of building trust that we have earned the right to sell.

Sales Leads: Maximize Your Sales From Longer-Term Sales Leads

Want to learn how capture and nurture three-quarters of the sales lead market through effective communication efforts?

First, you must learn to slow down. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? The same principles learned within that fable can be applied to your business marketing strategies today.

While business-to-business marketers race to snatch up the most promising and qualified short-term prospects that come in from any marketing-lead-generation initiative, nearly three-quarters of the sales leads that can convert to sales are being heavily ignored.

Why? Because salespeople are measured and paid for winning the race for short-term sales, usually causing them to focus on the easy sales opportunities and to ignore the longer term prospects. And because there usually is no process in place, the job of nurturing, managing and tracking the longer-term pipeline opportunities falls by the wayside.

This lack of a sales leads development process may be costing your organization big bucks in lost sales.

Do you have the patience to move slowly and steadily for the sales in those longer-term sales leads? Or have you, in essence, ended the race to win these latter-day sales?

Industry experts estimate that only one-quarter of those who are going to buy do so in the first six months. Yet, roughly another quarter buys within a seven- to 12-month period, another quarter buys in a 13- to 18-month period and the final quarter will purchase sometime after 18 months. If your organization's concentration is on the first quarter, for quick selling turnaround, you are leaving the remainder of those sales leads (three out of four sales opportunities) out there for your competition to pick up.

These longer-term sales leads must be nurtured with a series of communications efforts designed to move prospects along in their buying cycles. In other words, the philosophy to getting your share of those future sales is simple-stay in sight, stay in mind and stay in the race.

Here are 4 questions to ask yourself when designing your sales lead nurturing programs:

1. How do we best deliver messages to the people who will influence or make the final buying decisions?

2. How do we stay with them as they move through their consideration and buying process?

3. How can we communicate in a way that addresses the prospects' issues and reduces the perceived risk of buying from our company?

4. What can we offer that will cause the prospects to engage when they are ready to move forward with their buying process?

Want to engage prospects and start a sales-winning relationship with sales leads? Here’s how:

Use a series of ongoing communications-by mail, e-mail or phone-designed to keep pace with the prospects' information needs to make decisions about your kinds of products or services. I've found that, as an added benefit, sales revenue per customer is usually significantly higher for those who are included in the prospect relationship-marketing program versus those who are not.

Be sure to include multiple offers that appeal to all stages of a prospect's buying process. For example, if prospective customers are still early in their buying process, they will be more receptive to offers for free information in the form of how-to guides, white papers or e-mail newsletters. As prospects move further along in their buying process, appropriate offers may include those that require a higher level of interest or commitment on the part of the prospect. These include webinar invitations, demonstrations and checklists, and other decision-making tools. As prospects approach the buying ready point, they will be more receptive to such offers as longer, in-depth seminars, needs assessments or meetings with and getting proposals or quotations from your sales and marketing department.

If you use effective and efficient relationship communication skills and not just focus your company's efforts on the easy or short-term sales leads, you can pick up the three out of four sales that others are leaving on the table. And that how you to win the business marketer's sales lead race.

10 Steps to Successful Selling On Ebay

Step 1: Identify your market. Take a while to sit and watch for what sells and what doesn't out of the items you're interested in. Any market research data you can collect will be very useful to you later on. You'll probably see the sweet spots quite quickly - those one or two items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Step 2: Watch the competition. Before you invest any money, see what the other sellers in your category are up to, and what their strategies are. Pay special attention to any flaws their auctions might have, because this is where you can move in and beat them at their own game.

Step 3: Find a product: Get hold of a supplier for whatever it is you want to sell, and see what are the best rates you can get. Don't be afraid to ring round quite a few to get the best deal. If the eBay prices you've seen are higher than the supplier's, then you're set.

Step 4: Start small: Don't throw thousands at your idea straight away - get started slowly, see what works and what doesn't, and learn as you go. Remember that it's very cheap to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work!

Step 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying different strategies until you find something that works, and then don't be ashamed to keep doing it, again and again. The chances are that you?ve just found a good niche.

Step 6: Work out a business plan: A business plan doesn't need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline the market opportunity you've spotted, your strategy, strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. This is more for you than it is for anyone else.

Step 7: Invest and expand: This is the time to throw money at the problem. Buy inventory, and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal number of sales each week, increasing it each time.

Step 8: Make it official: Once you've made a few thousand dollars worth of sales, you should really register yourself as a business. Don't worry, it's not expensive or hard to do - a lawyer is the best person to help you through the process.

Step 9: Automate: You'll probably find that you're writing the same things again and again in emails or item descriptions. This is the time to give up on the manual method and turn to automated software that can create listings for you, and respond to completed auctions and payments with whatever message you provide.

Step 10: Never give up: Even when it looks like it's all going wrong, don't stop trying until you succeed. If you keep working at it then you'll almost always find that you make a real breakthrough just when things are starting to look desperate.

Once you get into the swing of things, you might start thinking that you should quit your job and take up eBay selling part time. But it's not always as easy as that - there are all sorts of factors that you need to consider.

How to Use Bonuses to Boost Your Sales

To boost your online sales, create partnerships with colleagues, and increase the overall value of your product or service, add a bonus (or several) to your offering.

Here are 5 ideas for bonuses you can use to increase your sales:

1. Offer a special report.

Take several of your articles with a common theme that complements your offering and compile them into a special report. If you don't have articles that seem to fit, think of additional information that you did not include in the original product and write it up as a special report. Use your word processing software to write it, then convert it to Adobe PDF to make it look nice (you can convert your documents into PDFs for free at http://convert.neevia.com/). Or offer a special report written by a colleague of yours with information that complements your offering.

2. Offer an audio.

If you are selling a product that is education-based, offer a follow-up teleclass to answer any questions that your customers may have about the material. Or record a special audio to go along with your product that offers some additional material that you didn't get to cover in the actual product itself, or that is an introductory or overview of the material covered in your offering.

3. Offer a resource file.

If you want to increase your customer's satisfaction with your product, offer a quality resource list, so they don't have to waste time and money searching for where to go or who to hire to follow your sage advice. Put together a list of the service providers, websites, ezines, books, magazines. etc. that you personally use (or that come highly recommended to you by your trusted colleagues) and that are related to your product or service. Create a PDF of your compiled resources to offer as a bonus. For example, one bonus that comes with my 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™ is Alicia's 6-Figure File of Recommended Resources, which is a list with links of who and what I personally use to make my business run successfully.

4. Offer a workbook.

Just like so many self-help books do, create and offer a workbook, action guide, success journal, or the like to go along with your product or service. Pull out the main points of your material and create exercises to deepen your reader's understanding, or create sections in which your reader can add their own thoughts and ideas as they work through your information.

5. Offer a discussion list.

You can do this a number of ways, but the easiest and the one that will require the least amount of effort on your part is to create and offer a discussion list via Yahoo Groups or Google Groups. It's free and can help to build a community of people who have YOU in common, and it gives them a place to offer each other support. You can pop in and out at your leisure, maintaining and strengthening your relationship with your customers.

Another way to do this is by offering a membership site (which is an article for another issue) as a very valuable bonus. For example, with 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™ I offered Charter Membership spots for a reduced membership fee as a bonus.

If you haven't tried tacking on a couple of bonuses to your offerings, do so and see what happens. My bet's on increased sales... :)

The Importance of Attention Grabbing Headlines.

It doesn't matter if you have a professional looking website, with a superb product or service. Nor does it matter if your sales copy is the best there is. Without the right wording in your headline, you will not make many sales. Do you know how to create the perfect headline?

A very good friend of mine, Mavis, made the fatal mistake of ignoring the importance of killer headlines. This mistake nearly lost her her business. She had a great niche product, hand-crafted jewellery. She was able to sell loads of beautiful items through her stall at a local market, but she wanted to start selling her wares to a wider market and saw the internet as the perfect medium.

With only basic computer skills, she managed to put a pretty impressive website together. Her sales copy was good, she put in the essential call to action, everything was just perfect, or so she thought.

So what did Mavis do wrong?

Simply, it was the headline. It just didn't work. It didn't have the power to grab the attention of the potential customer. The headline does 90% of the work when it comes to sales copy. Unless you can catch the interest of a customer, you have no customers. Not a plan if you are trying to make a living through the internet.

Did Mavis know how important the headlines where?

She did plenty of research before she set up her website. She read everything that she could get her hands on. Covering all the topics from web hosting to marketing, sales copy to advertising. But nothing on the importance of headline wording.

Everything she read she put into practice. Considering she knew very little before she started, she did an amazing job. Thinking that she had covered it all and with everything in place, she launched her site and generated lots of targeted traffic to it. She only made 2 sales in 4 months. Not looking good for Mavis is it.

She rang me up one day and asked me what was she doing wrong. She told me that she was at her wits end and didn't know what to do. She said that the website was getting lots of visitors, but they weren't staying there long enough to become customers. I went straight to view her website and as soon as the page loaded I could clearly see what the problem was. You guessed it, the headline. The powerful and hypnotic wording was just not there in her headline. That one, singular oversight was costing her dearly. The website was beautifully designed and easy to navigate. The sales copy was very professional, she used all the right calls to action and offered an excellent refund policy. But the fact is, no-one ever saw any of this because they never got past the headline.

I told her to come around to see me and I would show her how she could turn things around. Mavis and I sat at the computer and I showed her the good, the bad and the ugly of headlines on websites. Within a few minutes, she could see where she was going wrong. She just hadn't been using the right words to get the effect that is needed. You have to GRAB the attention of browsing customers, by using powerful, emotional and hypnotic words. So I made us another cup of coffee before we sat down and I showed Mavis how simple it is to make sizzling headlines.

You need to start by creating a 'benefit statement'. This is what will make your reader want to know about what you are selling. Then you sandwich the benefit statement with action words and phrases. These are the true ingredients of attention-grabbing headline writing.

Okay, so what is a benefit statement?

This is simply the end 'result' of what your customer will experience when purchasing or using your product.

In mavis's case we came up with the benefit statement of "own unique hand-crafted jewellery.' Then we decided to sandwich this with 'the perfect way to' and 'delivered straight to your door.' The result:- "The Perfect Way To Own Unique Hand-Crafted Jewellery, Delivered Straight To Your Door." We played around with a few more, but decided to give this one a go.

What happened to Mavis's business?

Mavis went home and immediately set about changing her home page. She removed the old headline and replaced it with the new one. Within 24 hours of Mavis uploading her updated website, 5 orders where placed. By the end of the month she had made sales of $1564. She hadn't made any other changes to her website, just the headline and it completely turned her business around. She did have the advantage of already having targeted traffic visiting her site. Before the change of headlines, that traffic just clicked away from her page, but with the new headline, they became drawn in, taking time to have a look at the exquisite goods that Mavis had to offer. Some people staying long enough to make a purchase. Goal accomplished.

In conclusion, the headline is THE most important thing to take into consideration when writing your sales copy. Getting it wrong can have devastating results. Getting it right can have positively profound affects.

Never, ever underestimate the power of headlines. Unless you want your business to suffer dismally low sales and never really make it off the ground.

If you are having problems writing your winning headlines, you could always pay someone else to write them for you. Or you can get a software program that will do it for you. The first option could be a bit expensive, but there are some fairly cheap software programs that you will be able to use every time you need new headlines, so I would recommend this.

How to Sell Your Expertise Over and Over Again

Putting all of your eggs into one basket in your business is never a good idea. Diversity is key, which means that your revenue should come from a number of clients (not just two or three) and preferably should come from multiple sources other than your primary service. These multiple sources of income are called "multiple profit centers", or MPCs, a term I first heard when I read Barbara Winter's book, Making a Living Without a Job, back in the days when I was trying to determine how to be successfully self-employed.

I've often been asked if your income sources should relate to your primary line of business, or if they can be varied and unrelated, like a writer who does copy editing and ghostwriting for a living but also owns rental property and scouts garage sales for gently worn children's clothing and sells it on eBay. You can do whatever best fits your personality, but I think it will keep you saner to corral your MPC's under your primary business umbrella.

Robert Allen, in his best-selling book, Multiple Streams of Income, discusses the "five rings of riches", which I think of as ever-increasing ways to create multiple profit centers. The rings include:

Ring 1 -- Sell Your Core Expertise: In this innermost ring, you are selling your core expertise as an accountant, attorney, web designer, security system installer, carpet cleaner, etc. To this ring, I want to add selling tools you've purchased to use in your business but you don't use all the time, like a telephone bridge line that you might subcontract out to other users.

Ring 2 --Teach Others Your Core Expertise: You develop ways to teach others your specialized knowledge or guide others in how to enter your industry.

Ring 3 --Teach General Skills: In the process of running your business, you probably developed a set of business management skills that have led to your success, and can pass that learning along to others in your industry.

Ring 4 -- Sell Other People's Products: You have in your arsenal a listing of both tried-and-true products you've used in your field of expertise, as well as a database of loyal customers. Why not introduce your clients (and potential clients) to these wonderful products?

Ring 5 -- Support Other Infopreneurs: By the time you reach this largest and final ring, you will have become an infopreneuring expert. Allen suggests that this is the time to offer services and advice to other infopreneurs.

Think of MPC's in this way: You own a great business and are phenomenal at what you do and everyone who needs your service should have access to your expertise. However, if you're in a time-based business, as many service business professionals are, there are only so many hours in the day that you have to work with clients. There are two ways to change this: to hire more staff or to replicate yourself. Hiring more staff (or even independent contractors) typically pushes up your overhead costs and will probably only increase your profit margin slightly. Replicating yourself is much easier, and I'm not referring to some Star Trek-like device. By replication, I mean having products available that will either bring clients into your marketing funnel and introduce you to them in a lower-cost, non-threatening manner, or better serve your existing clients without necessarily needing you to personally attend to the client.

The primary method of delivering products to your clients 24/7 and selling in your sleep is via a website. Technology exists that permit visitors to come to your website, read about what you do and how you do it, purchase any number of products from you, and have that all happen automatically. Electronic products are wonderful, as the delivery of that type of product can be 100% hands-off. A physical product that has to be shipped does require some human intervention, but that doesn't mean it has to be you! There are a number of fulfillment companies that have spring up over the years that you can pay to do your product fulfillment for you.

So, what kinds of products could you offer via your website? Here are ten ideas:

1. Special Report
2. eBook
3. Tips Booklet
4. eCourse
5. Audio tapes/CD
6. Teleclass/Telecourse
7. Membership Subscription website
8. Consulting/Training
9. Licensing your content to others
10. Selling other people's products

These ten strategies are only the tip of the iceburg. Take your content and what you know and re-purpose and re-package for profit!

How To Get Meetings With Decision Makers

'Getting in front of the decision maker' seems to be the holy grail of the sales world. Most people think that the only way to secure meetings is through luck or cold calling. Yet there is an easier way.

The following steps are identical to the steps I followed on my journey to becoming a 'Client Magnet'. Eventually, I didn't have to make any cold calls, because all of my meetings were taking place at the request of qualified, ready to buy decision makers who had already decided that they wanted to work with me.

How to Get in Front of Decision Makers - the easy way

1. Focus on a specific niche because that automatically makes you a specialist and a certain authority.

2. Get known as an expert in your field by speaking at events and conferences populated by your target audience, write articles and get them published in trade publications read by your target audience.

3. At the end of your article or talk offer a giveaway such as a free report that conveys your expertise, and provides valuable useful content to your reader. Give this in exchange for the reader's contact details and permission to stay in touch over time.

4. Send a follow up sequence of messages (automated if possible) that drip feeds further valuable content to your prospect, and subtly conveys your expertise, your authority and lets them know about success stories other clients are having.

5. Resist the temptation to ask for a meeting immediately, the people who are really keen to meet you will call and ask anyway, the others may need more time to get to know you. Don't risk scaring them off by pouncing for a meeting immediately. Being 'needy' for a meeting hurts your credibility too, because in the world of selling professional services, there's an unspoken assumption that if you are any good at what you are doing, then your diary should automatically be full (I know that's not how it works in practice, but that's the bias you're up against!)

6. In at least one of your messages, offer a meeting, but make sure you outline all the potential benefits of meeting with you. It's got to be more inspiring than 'free consultation.' Ask yourself, what does the prospect stand to gain from meeting with you - even if he or she DOESN'T become a client immediately? Will they learn something new, get reassurance, have their awareness raised on a certain area? If you want to 'sell the meeting' you have to sell the benefits of the meeting.

7. Some people will respond immediately, others will need more time. Have a regular follow up (such as a newsletter like this) that keeps you in contact, and continues building the relationship with your prospects.

8. Get used to receiving calls from people along the lines of 'we're thinking of doing a new project a we're wondering how you can help us'. Enjoy meetings which have a completely different dynamic from the meetings you secured via cold calling, because you've been invited in as an expert, and the prospect is already 'pre-sold' and wants to work with you. Notice that your conversion rate is higher at these meetings.

9. Tweak the process. If you're not getting enough meetings, what needs to change? Do you need to get more people into your funnel at the front end, or do you need to improve your conversion process of prospects to meetings?

10. Enjoy the process as momentum builds and the 'snowball effect' kicks in. Enjoy being a 'Client Magnet' and able to pick and choose from a tempting array of potential projects.

Because of the steps involved in laying the foundation, many people shy away from the easy way. It seems like there is too much ground work involved! And maybe there is, in the short term, but you are laying a foundation that will continue to reap rewards over and over. And what's the alternative? Another cold call?

If you don't want to be at the mercy of random projects coming your way, and you don't want to be tied to a desk cold calling for the rest of your life, then this is definitely the path forward that I recommend.

10 HEAVY DUTY Online Sales Grabbers

1. Give your prospects extra incentives so they will order quicker. It could be free shipping, a faster shipping option, free gift wrapping, etc. Another common example that we have all heard of is buy one get one.

2. Make your small business look big on the world wide web. Design your web site using professional graphics, ordering systems, organized layouts, etc. It's obvious, if you look professional more people will come to you.

3. Attract a lot more customers by giving them clear ordering instructions. Give them all the information they need so they can complete their order easily. People hate nothing more then having to go back and ask for help becuase it wasn't explained right in the first palce.

4. Give your customers buying incentives so they'll make repeat purchases. Offer them discounts, free gifts, bonus points, etc. Give them a reason to come back to you and buy again.

5. Tell people about your site whenever you get a chance. Those people will tell other people and so on. It's a cheap way to multiply your advertising. Word of mouth spreads very fast and the more places you advertise the better off you are.

6. Write and send press releases for your web site. Use a strong headlines, make it newsworthy, and tell the journalist why their readers would like it. Think big and think of the greatest reasons for why your business exists.

7. Use a lot of headlines on your web site and ezine. Some types of headlines are free offers, questions, problem solvers, sales, and statistics. It makes it seem like you are offering more and you can give a better first impression.

8. Design graphics, templates, buttons and banner ads for other sites. Allow people to use them in exchange for your web link on their home page. Make good relations with other web sites and advertise for each other, it could benefit you alot and you may get some good deals.

9. Use time saving promotional software. You can automate your search engine submissions, posting to online classified sites, etc. Automatic submissions are so much better then doing it the manual way one by one, you'll never finish and just waste time.

10. Advertise your online business by dressing in clothes that are imprinted with your ad. It could be a T-shirt, ball cap, coat, etc. We've all seen people dressed like that, wether it be for a construction business or McDonald's.

B2B Sales Lead Investment: Match Your Demand Generation Programs With Your Sales Needs

Billions of dollars from business-to-business marketing budgets are spent each year on sales lead generation. Billions more dollars are spent to fulfill and follow up on marketing responses, and to determine which sales leads are qualified and ready for sales attention. Unfortunately, much of this investment in B2B sales lead generation is wasted. Why? Because many sales lead generation programs and lead qualification efforts are not in harmony with the needs of sales.

With this in mind, have you optimized your company's sales lead generation programs to be in harmony with the needs of your salespeople, reps, resellers or distributors? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Have you built consensus with sales management on the definition of a qualified sales lead? Has this definition been clearly communicated to all parties?

Typical definitions include criteria such as:
- Does the prospect have a need or an application for your product or service?
- What is the prospect's role in the decision-making process?
- What is the prospect's timing for purchase or implementation?
- What is the status of the prospect's budget?
- What is the size of the opportunity?

2. Have you calculated how many qualified sales leads are needed in the sales pipeline in order to meet or exceed the company's sales revenue goals? Have you broken that number down into how many qualified sales leads are needed each month and each quarter? Have you built your company's sales lead generation programs with those target numbers in mind?

3. Have you put in place programs specifically designed to weed out the non-prospects and nurture the longer-term, not-yet-qualified opportunities-only forwarding the truly qualified sales leads to salespeople, reps, resellers or distributors for follow-up? Have you budgeted appropriately for this important sales lead development function?

If you answered "yes" to these questions, the good news is that you are not guilty of wasting your company's sales lead generation investments. Instead, you are probably well-respected by the people in sales and corporate management.

Web Site Traffic - 5 Inexpensive Ways to Generate it!

It is quite obvious that even the best optimised site with the best copy written sales page will not make a dime without one very necessary addition. That 'addition' is Traffic.

Whilst there are many ways to generate traffic most of them cost money with no guarantees that a profit will be made once you have parted with your cash. However, there are also many ways to generate good targeted traffic which need not cost the earth and, in some cases, are even free. Here are five of the best ways to generate low cost traffic; they do involve some input but are well worth the effort.

1. Exchange Links

This is a proven way to generate traffic and a careful study of the top ranking sites on the search engines will show all of them with considerable numbers of links. It is to your advantage to ensure that all sites to which you link operate within a similar niche or theme as your own site. If you share a similar subject you will be more likely to get traffic as your site will be seen as a recommendation by the site they are on.

Another benefit to linking in this way is that your site will increase its chances of a higher ranking with the search engines. This, in turn, can help with eventually getting traffic from the search engines in addition to that from the linking site.

2. Writing Articles

There are many sites on the internet where you may submit articles (newsletters, directories, etc.) Many of these are free of cost so if cash is tight you can start submitting to these initially. If you want to save costs, you can write the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do the articles yourself if you can.

You should write articles that closely match the theme of your site. Try to write about something you know well. Give tips and guidance learned from your own experiences. In this way you will come across as an 'expert' in your field and this, in turn, can encourage your readers to then visit your site. Always include a resource box at the end of your articles which should be a short bio about yourself and include the URL to your website.

3. Traffic Exchanges

This is a form of link exchange except that members of a traffic exchange view each others pages by surfing. Each time you view a page you gain a credit so the more pages you view the more credits you receive. Your own page is then shown to other members normally using one credit per show. Once you have exhausted your credits you may earn more by again surfing. You also have the option to purchase credits if you wish.

Traffic from exchanges is not generally well targeted and does not produce many sales but it can be used quite successfully to capture names for your subscriber list with the use of a 'squeeze' page.

4. Your Own Newsletter

Once you have subscribers (via the traffic exchanges or other means) will need to send out your newsletter on a regular basis either weekly, monthly etc. This may sound a little daunting in view of the fact that you will need to write many articles on a consistent basis. However, this should present no problem as there a many writers and sites that are more than willing to provide you with free articles so long as their resource box remains at the end of the article. Any promotions you make in your newsletter will inevitably bring traffic to that promoted site and as your list of subscriber grows so, too, will your traffic.

5. Forums

Online forums and communities abound in just about any subject you can imagine. Find several forums that relate to whatever site you wish to promote and, after joining, you should carefully study the topics under discussion and then submit your own offerings by way of answers to published questions or even a question of your own. Make sure that the forum allows you to append your resource box at the end of your posting as this is where your traffic will come from. It is important to know that you are not permitted to blatantly advertise on these forums and to do so will usually mean you will be barred. So it is important that you are allowed your bio at the foot of your posting. Do not bother with any forum where your resource box is not permitted.

Each of these methods can generate a great deal of traffic and, with the exception of the traffic exchanges, the traffic will be very targeted. The method of using articles can, over time, build traffic to really large numbers. However it is important to remember that there are no free lunches in this world. If you do not pay with money then you must substitute with time. The great thing about these five methods is that you will never waste your time - they all get results, proven time after time.

Five Steps to Making Money With Other Peoples Products

If you want to make money online without having you own products, selling other people's products could be the ticket. Selling others products has many advantages. You do not have to spend time on creating the products, you do not have to set up a system to sell and deliver the products, and you do not have to get a merchant account and pay recurring merchant account fees. The person who owns the product does all of these things for you. All you have to do is market the product and make money with it.

So how can you make money with other people's products? People who have created products usually run affiliate programs. An affiliate program is a way for you to earn commissions every time you sell someone else's product. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will get your own unique id you use to link to products you are promoting. Once you make sales using your affiliate links, you will generate commissions.

Here are five steps to take to make money with affiliate products:

- Find A Product To Sell. Before going any further, you need to find a product that will sell. A product should have a professional appearance, be presented on a professional web site and be a quality product that you would want to recommend to others.

Once you find the product, join the affiliate program for it and get your affiliate links.

- Create A Web Site To Sell The Affiliate Product. Having your own web site to promote the affiliate products is best. I always recommend that you get your own domain name and web hosting to host your web site.

The cost of domain names and web site hosting has come down considerably since just a few years ago. You can now get a domain name for about $8 per year and web site hosting for under $10 per month. At these prices you don’t have to be a millionaire or commit to a large capital outlay to start your own web site.

- Create Content For The Web Site. To get more visitors and more sales, you need content for your web site. It is not enough to just link to the product with your affiliate link. In order to make money with your affiliate link you need to bring potential buyers to your web site. A great way to bring them in is with content that is of interest to them, and is related to the product you are promoting.

One good way to generate the content for your web site is by creating your own content and articles that are related to the topic of the product you are promoting. Another good way is by using the articles that were written by the author of the product. Many authors allow their affiliates use the authors' articles on their web sites, and use the affiliate link in the resource box.

- Optimize Your Web Site for Search Engines. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your web site. The more visitors to the web site you have, the more affiliate products you will be able to sell, and the more money you will make.

Make sure you optimize every page of your web site for search engines; that way you will get more web site visitors.

- Use Your Articles To Promote The Affiliate Product. Article publishing is a great way to drive traffic to your web site. Start by writing a few articles that are of interest to the people who would want to purchase the product you are promoting. Use the About The Author Resource Box to promote the product. Then take your articles and submit them to article directories. Doing this will bring more traffic to your web site and help you make more money.

Remember, you do not need to create your own products to make money online. Follow the five steps we outlined above to make lots of money selling other people's products.

Building Sales by Building Credibility...

When you're looking to buy on eBay, you'd want to check the seller's credentials. Does she have happy customers? Are there any complaints? What do they say about the way she conducts transactions?

It's the same if you're a consultant, speaker, or coach wanting to charge higher fees. Nobody will want to pay you more unless they know you have satisfied customers.

When a prospect scans your website, brochure, one-sheet, or direct mail campaign, there is one fail-safe method to establish instant rapport: testimonials.

Why should they believe what you state in your mailing? How do they know you're for real? Who else has done business with you? All of these are concerns your prospects have.

Your testimonials may mean the difference between more sales and leads, or them tossing out your message. That's why infomercials broadcast them every five minutes. Moneymaking websites usually have at least one page dedicated to them. And good sales letters include them in the mix.

Which is why you need them in your marketing: to build trust and credibility, to dispel customer fear and anxiety, and to make lots of money.

What to do first...

1. Ask your clients or customers who have benefited from your product or service to give you a brief testimonial. Usually they're more than happy to help. But if they're stubborn, you may want to offer an ethical bribe by saying, "I'll take 15% off your next order," or "I'll include your name in a drawing for my $500 workshop." And if they need help producing one, you can write one and have them approve it.

2. Make sure your testimonials are results oriented. Use specific numbers and amounts. For example, don't say, "I loved your tape album," or "Everyone thought you were a great speaker." These don't fly in this age of skepticism.

To increase trust use, "Your advice made me $40,000 in new sales the first month. We're on target to gross over one million dollars in sales this year. Thanks for your direction."

3. Use a real name and contact information from your client. Don't use initials. It just screams phony. Include a full name, title, brand name, company, city, state (and if applicable), a photo, and a website URL.

4. Include a good mix of clients. Depending on your target market, using high-profile individuals exclusively may not be totally necessary. A testimony from a work-at-home mom in Kansas can sometimes win more favor from prospects than a stuffed shirt CEO from New York.

5. And if you publish a website, a great credibility booster is using audio or video testimonials. Nothing is more powerful than actual clients edifying you or your products for the entire world to experience.

Testimonials are one of the least expensive, most productive tools to add into your marketing arsenal. But most entrepreneurs and business owners either forget or include ineffective, watered-down statements. Or sometimes they're too lengthy or even go overboard in their praise.

But not you...

Follow these steps today to gain credibility in a skeptical marketplace, lower your prospect's force field, and get ready for a dramatic increase in sales and leads.

Power of Testimonials

Acknowledge fears, face skeptics.

Why should prospects believe you? Chances are, your rivals are making similar claims to your company. And your prospect? He or she is probably more cynical than ever before and too buys to spend much time working out the differences between vendors.

So how can you convince prospects you are the real thing? Acknowledge fears, face prospects' skepticism and admit to flaws, problems and errors, says veteran marketer Lee Marc Stein.

Here's his 7-step strategy that turns skeptics into believers and buyers:

1. Recognize the power of skepticism. Every marketer knows the power of testimonials, but the most compelling and believable come from those who were the most skeptical. For example, "I doubted this system would reduce downtime any more than the other vendors we'd tried. But we've improved production 20%." Equally compelling are testimonials that include details of a problem the buyer encountered with your company and how they became a convert after seeing you fix it.

2. Use their words. Customers often say things in more credible language than you could ever imagine. That's why unedited user stories, quoting buyers verbatim and using their words to describe the benefits of your products or services pack a powerful punch.

A recent example: A new magazine targeted at men and women in the National Guard turned out to be a more powerful recruiting tool than anyone expected. Readers weren't attracted to the official stuff, but to the first person accounts with "real soldiers and families telling real stories," reports The New York Times, 2/01/05.

3. Look real. Instead of using fancy photos and professional models in your brochures— who always look too good to be true — try peopling them with real buyers and real workers.

4. Ask them to disqualify! If prospects don't believe you, ask them to disqualify themselves with a quick quiz. Overall, response will go down, says Stein, but your conversion rate should increase.

5. Acknowledge skepticism. If you know most people find your claims hard to believe, say so! Or if your industry has been plagued by companies overpromising and underdelivering, acknowledge it in your marketing material. Stein suggests saying something like, "We know you've heard the hype, the promises that are never fulfilled. But you can count on us."

6. Come clean about problems and stumbling blocks. By admitting faults in some areas, you'll increase prospects' confidence in other areas. It's basic psychology. So if you know your product isn't compatible with some systems, say so upfront. That's why warts-and-all blogs work so well: Customers feel like they're getting the whole story, not some glossy superficial brochure.

7. Provide altruistic value-added info. Another way to prove you're the genuine article: Provide value-added tools that help them help themselves. For example, you may want to offer a white paper that provides: "Six ways to run your business so efficiently you may never need our services!"

Be Direct - Profile of a Direct Marketing Consumer

Americans may complain about excess junk mail, late-night infomercials and telemarketing calls, but one thing is for certain: they work. Three-quarters of consumers who responded to a direct marketing offer in the past year made a purchase through a direct channel, according to a nationally representative in-person survey of 2,510 consumers age 16 and older conducted for Direct magazine (a sister publication of American Demographics) by Norwalk, Conn.-based research firm Yankelovich.

Consumers who purchase through direct channels differ significantly from non-purchasers in many ways, but most noteworthy is their anxiousness about saving time. Almost two-thirds (61 percent) of direct marketing purchasers say that they regularly multitask in order to save precious minutes, compared with less than half (47 percent) of non-purchasers. They are also more likely to buy takeout food, give up sleep and hire people to do things for them. Direct marketing consumers also lean on the Internet more heavily: 70 percent of purchasers say that they shop online, compared with 48 percent of non-purchasers, and 27 percent make financial transactions over the Internet, compared with 14 percent of non-purchasers. As a result, they are also much less skittish about disclosing personal info online: While 58 percent of non-purchasers agree that it isn't safe to use a credit card to buy something online, only 44 percent of purchasers feel the same.

How To Improve Your Publicity Design

Freelance designers who specialize in marketing materials are in high demand. As a result, freelance promotions designers can make up to $90 per hour. So what specialized skills do you need to be a publicity designer?

Actually, you don't need any. To move into freelance publicity design, all you need to do is:

1. Familiarize yourself with the conventions of direct selling promotional materials

and

2. Develop a basic understanding of your clients' marketing goals.

I'm a copywriter and I work with designers. I prefer to work with designers who understand the marketing aims of the graphic design assignment I hand to them. I tend not to call upon designers who design visuals that are unsuitable for the sales messages I am trying to communicate in my copy, however good the design looks.

That’s why the tips I reveal in this article are not really ‘design’ tips. They are practical tips aimed at giving you clarity when you interpret your brief. If you want tips on what colors or effects to use, this article isn’t for you. If you want ideas to help you plan your approach to publicity design, read on.

Direct selling promotional material
Direct selling promotional material has one objective: to sell. Every copy section, every photograph, every flash box, every graphic—should reinforce the selling power of the publicity piece.

But surely your job as designer is to make direct selling promotional material look attractive?—it’s the copywriter’s job is to sell the product, right? Wrong. Your job is the same as the copywriter’s: to sell the product. Making the piece look attractive is important, but it’s a means to an end. The real goal is to help your client increase their sales.

So what approach should you take to sell a product through design? Here are 5 questions to ask yourself as you’re reading the brief:

1. WHO IS THE CUSTOMER? What sort of people will read the publicity and buy the product? A clear description of your target audience will help you gauge what sort of feel your design should have. The look of your design should always reflect the preferences of the customer, not your own preferences or the preferences of your clients.

2. WHAT ARE YOU COMMUNICATING? What emotions should you convey? What specific things should you draw the reader’s attention to? Read your client's copy carefully. Use the message of the copy, especially the headlines, to inspire the ‘message’ of your design.

3. HOW CAN YOU REINFORCE THE MESSAGE OF THE COPY? Is your design consistent with the messages in the copy? Can you increase the impact of the copy message in your design approach? For example, if you're designing a brochure for some computer software, and the dominant marketing message seems to be that the software is 'easy to use', your design should reflect clarity and freedom, maybe with lots of white space and clear copy sections. In short, don't rely on your client to brief you properly on what the design should achieve. Take the initiative to work it out yourself.

4. CAN YOU SHOW PRODUCT BENEFITS? Can you demonstrate how good the product is through your choice of visual? Can you show how the product makes a real difference to people’s lives? Read through the copy and make a note of all examples of what the product does for the user. Then think about how you can demonstrate people benefiting from the product in your graphics and choices of photos.

5. HOW CAN YOU PRESENT THE PRODUCT? Can you show the product? Even better, can you show people using the product? Publicity that shows people is proven to be the most successful at driving sales. Good publicity should encourage readers to imagine themselves using the product—so show people of the same demographic using the product! Get as many pictures of the product as possible, and work these pictures into your design.

In marketing, successful design isn’t necessarily the best-looking, it’s the design that best complements the selling message of the copy, thus leading to more sales. Ugly publicity can be successful if it effectively communicates the selling message in a persuasive way for the target audience. Pretty publicity that wins prizes isn’t necessarily successful publicity.

If you want to learn more about improving your publicity design, start by learning about what makes good copy. Work out what the copy is doing and you’ll have a better idea how the design should reinforce it. My advice: Read a good copywriting manual.

Design custom brochures
Brochure design is challenging. The brief to produce an attention-grabbing cover with clean, consistently attractive pages can be daunting. Where do you start?

Remember your best-practice approach for designing publicity. Think about the reader and think about the essence of the product, service, or company that the brochure is selling.

Below are 13 tips for designing custom brochures that sell.

1. Find out what worked in the past. Take a few minutes to go through past publicity with your client to identify a successful look. If the target audience responded well to a particular style of publicity, there may be no point in reinventing the wheel.

2. Ask your client if the company has a house style and if your brochure should be consistent with it.

3. Keep in mind the product’s or company’s brand values when you are creating your general look. Ask your client to come up with five words that reflect the company's brand image and try to respond to them in your design.

4. For a general starting point, communicate an idea, a visual metaphor, or emotion that is associated with the product. Search the royalty free photo sites like Getty-Images or I-stock for images that respond to the general mood—but bear in mind your client will need to pay to use them.

5. Focus the visual idea on the product's Unique Selling Proposition. The U.S.P. is the one thing that readers will find most desirable about the product that is only true of that product.

6. Make the headlines stand out. Reinforce them with visuals if possible.

7. Use photographs as visual anchors. Faces help to humanize the design and make the product or company feel warmer and friendlier. Photos of people who reflect the target demographic work well because they help readers to imagine themselves using the product.

8. Ask yourself what consumer-need the product responds to, and use this as inspiration for your visuals. Some designs work well because they remind people about the nasty things in life they seek to irradiate, then present the solution with a photo of the product.

9. Use visuals to demonstrate the product:

- If the copy is highlighting a benefit, show somebody benefiting.
- If the copy is highlighting a feature, show it (for example, if it’s a small hand-held, show it to scale in someone’s hand; if it has lots of components or is part of big package, take a collective pack shot.)
- If the copy is highlighting the product’s popularity, show lots of people, preferably using the product.
- If the copy is guaranteeing the product, give it a guarantee stamp.
- If the copy is offering a money-back guarantee, show cash or a check.
- If the product is endorsed, show the endorser using the product.
- If the copy is leading with an impressive statistic, show it visually in a table or graph.
- If the product solves a problem, show a ‘before’ and ‘after’.

10. Each spread of the brochure should seek to catch the reader’s attention anew, to keep readers hooked so they carry on turning the pages.

11. Keep to a consistent style but try to let the design evolve with each page. A good brochure should tell the product’s story; it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Try to reflect this in your design.

12. Give the reader two options: to skim read and pick up the core messages from the headlines, sub-headings, visuals, and captions… And another option to read the headlines and the body copy linearly. Do this by creating a reading area where the general body copy fits into, but also pull out some of the additional copy messages, visuals, and flashes to catch the attention of wandering eyes.

13. Recommend using printing techniques to reinforce the message of the copy, such as spot varnishes, holograms, die-cuts, unusual folds, indented pages, additional pantones, and pull-outs.

When Should You Increase Advertising Spend?

You may get a bigger payoff from increased spending on advertising if you wait until the economy begins to contract, says new research. That doesn't mean advertising in a healthy economy is a waste of money. But when advertising spending is already high, there's a risk of "overspending," says the study. Too much advertising may help rivals by increasing a buyer's awareness of a category and not your company's brand!
Conventional wisdom was right

To examine the long-term return from advertising, researchers analyzed the performance of nearly 2,700 companies — and grouped them by type (consumer, industrial and service). They then compared returns from advertising in recessions and upturns. They found advertising was an asset that contributed to a company's financial performance for up to three years. And increased spending during a recession produced greater benefits than increased spending when the economy was doing well.

One reason for this outcome: Advertising sends a positive signal about future performance to investors. It works in much the same way that exhibiting at a trade show during hard times may inspire confidence in customers and sales partners.
What this means

If increasing advertising pays during a recession, what's the impact of budget cuts? You may lose momentum, but it's not fatal, finds the researchers. Here's why. Past advertising has a cumulative effect that can help you maintain your position for three years. But to get the biggest bang for your buck, they urge companies to maintain spending at a steady pace.

The researchers also found that not all companies are equal. Advertising spending had a bigger impact on consumer and industrial products than it did on service companies.

Where Consumers Do Their Product Research

Ever wonder where the vast majority of consumers do their research?

So, how do consumers find out about your products or services? Today everyone thinks that consumers go directly to the web to learn about products and services. But according to a recent survey by eMarketer, consumers are still seeking information in retail stores. The web was the second most popular destination for product research, but retail stores were number one.

If you are in a business that sells through retailers, its important to realize that consumers are going to retailers first and using the web to complete their research. Be sure to create point of purchase displays or product packaging that will provide all the information a consumer will need to make a buying decision.

It's essential that your web based information is in synch with in-store information, pricing, and so on. If consumers see inconsistencies in pricing, variety, or options, they're likely to frequent another vendor or simply buy on price.

Many retailers are using their websites to capture customer information. This can be done at the store level as well. Ask purchasers and browsers to sign up for a newsletter or coupons that will bring them back to your store.

Collecting Information on Your Competitors

Discover the Do's and Dont's of competitive intelligence.

Collecting information about your competitors makes good business sense. However, you must do so in an ethical and reasonable way. Competitive intelligence from public sources, customers, and third parties can help businesses anticipate market opportunities, trends and competitive strengths and weaknesses.

These guidelines provide a step-by-step guide for acquiring the information you need without crossing the line.

1. Ask questions - If you come across or are offered competitive information and believe that it may be confidential or proprietary ask questions to find out how the information was obtained, or why it was made available.

2. Be ethical - How would you or your business react if you found out that your competitors were receiving the kind of information that you acquired? If you think that a particular way of gathering competitive intelligence may be unethical, you should assume that your competitors would view it the same way.

3. If it doesn't seem right, don't do it - If you're ever in doubt as to whether a source of information or contemplated technique of gathering information is proper or legal, you should contact your manager or attorney.

4. Breaking the law has consequences - If you improperly gather or use competitive information, you can be disciplined or terminated, and you could face criminal and civil penalties. Breaking the law can also result in adverse publicity to your company. Think about how you'd feel if your actions were publicly disclosed on the front page of a newspaper.

5. Legitimate sources of competitive information include:
Public sources. You may gather information about your competitors from public sources such as:
Newspapers, magazines, other published articles and television programs
Advertisements and brochures intended for public distribution
Information freely available on the Internet and online research services
Public filings made with governmental or regulatory authorities, such as SEC reports, patent filings and litigation records
Analyst reports
Industry surveys or reports
Public presentations given by competitors at trade shows and conferences
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and similar requests from governmental or regulatory agencies
Conversations with customers. Talking with customers is essential. The more you know about your customers and their businesses, the better you can meet their needs. However, you shouldn't contact customers for the purpose of obtaining confidential information about a competitor. Customers may disclose information about a competitor's products or pricing, so long as the information is not confidential.
Hiring third parties to obtain information. Sometimes company's hire third parties to help us gather competitive intelligence and information about the market for products and services. Third parties are subject to the same standards of behavior that you abide by, so you should assume that if we can't do it directly, you can't hire someone else to do it.
hird parties conducting focus groups or interviews with a competitor's suppliers or customers generally don't have to identify you as their client, so long as they identify themselves and their company. While a third party doesn't have to disclose the purpose of the focus group or interview, the third party shouldn't intentionally misrepresent the purpose.
A few of your competitors may have informed you that you cannot subscribe for their products and services. In these cases, you should not hire third parties to access the competitor's products or services. However, absent knowledge that a competitor would have barred or prohibited your access, you may engage a third party to subscribe to the product or service.
Keep in mind that your company can sometimes be legally responsible for damages or losses caused by a third party if you authorized or appear to have authorized any illegal actions. This can be the case even if you don't issue direct instructions to the third party, but know of the third party's likely conduct and "turn a blind eye".
If you engage a third party to gather competitive information, you should have the third party confirm that it is aware of, and agrees to abide by, applicable laws related to competitive intelligence.

Some types of information gathering, however, can violate the law or may be considered unethical. Some examples Include:
New Hires. What you can and can't ask former employees of competitors.
ou shouldn't ask or encourage employees who previously worked for a competitor to divulge confidential or proprietary information about the competitor, such as specific details about a competitor's operations and intentions, including pricing, future plans and forecasts which may have been considered confidential or proprietary by a competitor.
If you previously worked for a competitor, you shouldn't disclose information about your former employer that you believe is confidential or proprietary, or bring any of this information into your office.
However, you may discuss items of a general nature with an employee who previously worked for a competitor including anything that's a matter of public record or that wasn't treated by the employer as confidential.
Misrepresenting your identity. You shouldn't misrepresent your identity in order to obtain competitive information, if the person you're seeking information from would not ordinarily give you the information if they knew your true identity. This can be considered fraud. For example:
You shouldn't contact a competitor, posing as a customer, student, private research firm or potential vendor/supplier, to find out information.
When providing information in order to gain access to a competitor's website, you should answer all required blanks accurately, but you don't have to fill in blanks that are not required.
Stealing information.
You shouldn't attempt to acquire a competitor's confidential or proprietary information through illegal means, such as theft, spying or hacking.
You shouldn't perform any surveillance or monitoring of competitors outside of public places or engage in any form of electronic eavesdropping. However, if you're sitting on an airplane or are at an industry conference and happen to overhear a competitor discussing a confidential matter in the row ahead of you, the competitor likely has no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Giving gifts for confidential or proprietary information. In gathering competitive intelligence, you should not give entertainment, gifts, favors or gratuities to induce someone to provide you with information that's confidential or proprietary. You may, however, pay third parties for competitive intelligence that's derived from legitimate sources.
Anonymous packages containing confidential information. If you receive anonymous submissions of competitive information you shouldn't distribute or use the information.
Information marked "Confidential." etc. You shouldn't use or purchase information belonging to a competitor that is marked "confidential" or "proprietary."
Offers to access competitors' products and services. If you're offered access to a competitor's product or service by a customer, friend or other person, and you ordinarily would not be able to access the product or service on your own, you should decline the offer.
Misplaced or unattended confidential information. You shouldn't use confidential information belonging to a competitor that is accidentally misplaced or left unattended.
Dumpster diving. This is inappropriate and it may also be illegal.
Competitive bid information. You shouldn't seek or use information that you may receive about a competitor's bid if you're involved in bidding, especially on government contracts. However, you are free to use information that is disclosed by the government, publicly available or retrievable pursuant to a FOIA or other similar request.
Information offered in business pitches. If a customer offers competitive information to us during a business pitch, we should understand that the customer may owe a confidentiality obligation to our competitors who are also pitching for the business. As such, we should generally decline to receive information under these circumstances. However, if we are being told something very general or high-level, it may be appropriate for us to use this information in our bid and in our larger business strategy.

Regardless of what method you use to collect competitive intelligence, if you have any question as to the legality of your activity, err on the side of caution and chose another method!

How to Develop a Marketing Strategy

Developing a strategic marketing plan takes work - a firm understanding of the markets you plan to sell to, the products you and your competitors offer, your business objectives, and budget.
Part One- Market:

Objective: Identify and learn about the market segments you currently target and wish to target in the future– what motivates them to consider your products, what is their buying process, how do they consume media and how can we leverage former customer into longer term value for the business.

Steps to Accomplish:
Learn Current Market Segmentation- Geographic, Demographic, Psychographic, Behaviorial
Profile Market Segments- Revenue potential, Market share potential, Profitability potential, Lifetime customer value
Market Research- Primary (research you've commissioned on your own) and Secondary (industry research)

Part Two-Product:

Objective: Learn about the current portfolio of products and new product introductions being planned, primary and secondary uses, usage differences by market, core product benefits, competitors and competitive differentiators, seasonality, historical offers and measurement, lifecycle plan, profitability, complementary products in portfolio or outside portfolio, pricing and profitability.

Steps to Accomplish:
Product management presentations on above
Sample analysis and review
Competitive analysis and technology trends
Usage and satisfaction research- primary, secondary

Part Three- Business Objectives:

Objective: Understand key business initiatives, market conditions and revenue goals that will guide decision making.

Steps to Accomplish:
This year's Business Plan – define objectives for the business in the short and long-term.

Part Four- Marketing budget, Prior efforts & results, other planned tactics & timing:

Objective: Learn the parameters of the marketing plan including budget, previous efforts and success measurements, planned tactics such as committed resources, major sales campaigns and tradeshow events.

Steps to Accomplish:
Marketing meeting to review information and develop calendar of know tactics and market touch points.

Market Plan recommendation will include:

At the completion of this four step process, you should assemble a complete integrated marketing plan based on your business objectives, market segments, market research, product offerings, competitive positioning, and history of marketing success. This document should contain:
An overview of learnings, challenges and trends
Customer and prospect constituent groups
Key market touch points and communications strategies
Tactical recommendations
Measurement
Budget, Return, ROI

It is highly recommended that the plan incorporate a certain level of flexibility at the tactical level. As with any marketing campaign strategy, tactics should incorporate split tests, review and rework of marketing tactics. Budget should be repositioned to support marketing campaigns that show the greatest success.

Would You Like Fries With That?

The power of up-selling and cross-selling.

Recently while navigating an online bookstore I came across the James Frey book popularized by Oprah's book club: A Million Little Pieces. As I read about this book I was informed that "readers who bought A Million Little Pieces also bought the book, "Lies My President Told Me and Pinocchio."

Folks, I was being cross-sold, yet I wasn't cross about it. The reality of business is that customers want to be sold. They love to buy for their own reasons. Not manipulatively bombarded with sales pitches or indiscriminately pressured with endless offerings, but intelligently informed, guided and suggested with related, logical and natural purchases that further their goals.

Up-selling and cross-selling are two sales techniques used by professional sales and service staffs to increase sales. Are you making the most of suggestive selling?

UP With Selling
Up-selling refers to situations where your customer buys a product or service, and you encourage them to spend more for additional features or packages. They are upping the amount they are spending, albeit for more or better services or products.

Consider the customer seeking a point-of-sale solution for handling charge cards, yet opts to purchase a deluxe POS model for more money when learning of additional capabilities, security and flexibility.

You are shopping for a bare-bones SUV. The salesperson infoms you soccer moms tell him they love having the model with the DVD player in the backseat for the kids. Thus you buy that model with a fancy video system and then extended warranty too.

Sales Crossing Ahead Cross Selling refers to situations where a customer buys a product or service, and is simultaneously sold related items that often complement their purchase. For example: A customer buys a computer and is then sold training services or tutorial software to go with it at additional cost. Ditto when a man buys a suit and is then offered a color coordinated silk tie and dress shirt to go with it.

While we think of these as advanced sales techniques, they are actually rooted in the power of suggestion. People, once they've decided to buy, are naturally swayed by more and better options, additional value, and the excitement following their initial purchase.

Many customers don't know about additional items or options, or how well they complement the initial item they bought. Up-selling enhances their initial purchase, making them more powerful, capable and effective. Cross-selling similarly enhances their purchase, often maximizing its impact on their business.

Suggestive Selling
Salient in Our Lives Quite frankly, we've been up-sold and cross-sold every day. And it's not necessarily a manipulative process. Consider the following examples: - "Would you like fries with that order?" - "For just 49 cents we can super-size that for you." - "When you buy 2 today you get 1 Free!" - "Would you like to purchase our extended warranty coverage on this? It's only...."

I've worked with customer service staffs afraid to sell, others who felt it was manipulative and smarmy to sell. Yet here's a secret: It's really a form of service!

Service Through Sales
When you up-sell and cross-sell: - You are making informed suggestions as a knowledgeable rep - You are apprising customers of options they may not be aware of - You are often anticipating future needs - It's a way to further help your customer.

To be more powerful, to enjoy more benefits, to maximize the usefulness of the products or services they're acquiring. Remember this, when you are the rep who is selling and serving:

- You are in the business of solving problems, generating solutions and making customers happy, or even happier.
- You are the subject matter expert when it comes to the products and services you are representing.
- To the extent you listen and understand the situation of your clients, customers or constituents, you are ideally suited to provide solutions, recommendations and remedies.
- To withhold this from others would be selfish, and poor service. - Any time you can fulfill more needs, address more issues or solve more problems you are easing your client's/customer's life. After all, they already trust you, like you, and are doing business with you.

So, how does one UPSELL or CROSS-SELL? It's easy.

Let's Play Bridge
After you've completed the initial transaction or gotten the initial indication your customer wants to buy, you can then bridge to the Up- or Cross-Sell: Mr. Randle, while I have you on the line, were you aware you can work in multiple advanced speech manuals at the same time?

Oh, by the way Ms. Kennison, did you know.that the book you bought for new hire also has a companion CD for just $9 more?

Mr. Younger, I'd like to take a moment to inform you of a new nationwide program just for businesses such as yours. Incidentally, were you aware that you are 2/3's of the way toward qualifying for a discount on shipping of your office supplies?

Using BRIDGE statements allows you to transition from your initial sale to up-sells and cross-sells. Look anew at the offerings you're selling. For each, what is an up-sell? What can you cross-sell with it?

Make sure your salespeople know the migration paths so they can suggestively up- and cross-sell with ease. In closing, I'd like to thank you for your engagement with this material.

Before concluding, could I interest any of you in a related article on up-selling and cross-selling? Perhaps you'd prefer a training course on suggestive selling? Shall I customize that for you? Consider yourself super-sized!

Add Internet Marketing To Your Marketing Mix

The importance of Internet marketing is continuing to expand. Surveys of all kinds show a major shift in traditional marketing budgets to dollars being spent online to market all types of products and services.

Internet Marketing Defined. Internet marketing is the use of the Internet to advertise and sell products and services. Within the definition of Internet Marketing you will find mention of pay per click advertising, banner ads, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing (including search engine optimization), blog marketing, and article marketing. Each of these subject areas is important to consider prior to planning your internet marketing strategy.

Internet Marketing Provides Many Benefits. There are many advantages to having a fully executable internet marketing strategy. These benefits include measurability, flexibility, and affordability. Many online marketing tactics provide marketing professionals with the ability to customer acquisition costs. Moreover, marketing professionals are better able to track what marketing campaigns are working and quickly allocate their spending towards higher producing media placements.

Internet Marketing Tactics. As the Internet has expanded, so have the opportunities for marketing online. Here we will take a brief look at each type of Internet marketing and explain the benefits of each.

1. Pay-per-click Advertising. Sites like Google offer pay-per-click advertising for anyone interested in getting their message in front of the right segment or prospective buyer. This method is highly targeted and offers one of the best and most popular forms of internet marketing. Marketers using pay-per-click advertising only pay a fee, based on the competitiveness of a keyword or ad title, when a link is clicked on.

2. Banner Ads. Once the king of Internet marketing, online banner ads have evolved to include animated and flash banners, but the premise remains largely the same. Marketers purchase a specified number of impressions to run on a single site or network of sites and are generally not guaranteed a specific number of clicks.

3. Email Marketing. Effective among current clients and prospects who have requested information form your company, email marketing is a well established means to communicate and marketing your products. However, be aware of CAN-SPAM requirements and contact preferences of those you plan to reach.

4. Search Engine Marketing. If you want web browsers to visit your site, than focusing on search engine optimization and search engine marketing is a must. No Internet marketing plan is complete without ensuring that your site is submitted and included on major directories like Google, Yahoo!, and DMOZ. The dollars spent on Search Engine Marketing of any type will pay huge dividends.

5. Blog Marketing. Getting mention of your site or information related to your products can quickly scale if you are able to effectively tap into the countless blogs that are being created everyday. It is essential that you focus your efforts on blogs covering topics relevant to your product or service offering.

6. Article Marketing. One of the most important aspects of Internet Marketing, is to improve the link popularity to your site and improve the awareness of your product or service offering. To do so, many companies are focusing on publishing valuable content and making available for other to post to their website's.

Regardless of the Internet marketing tactics you choose, be sure to consider an integrated marketing strategy. Be sure that your internet marketing has a specific goal and is supported with a definitive plan and budget. Lastly, be sure to pick up a book, conduct some research, or work with professionals to enhance your Internet marketing know-how.

Marketing Innovation: How to Improve Marketing ROI

There are a number of basic marketing fundamentals that everyone needs to know in order to generate attention, interest, desire and action among prospects. But to be successful in today’s competitive environment, you need more than a basic understanding of a traditional AIDA model and the 4 P’s (product, place, price, promotion).

A number of years ago, I discovered a marketing methodology made popular by Michael Gerber. For those of you who have never heard of him, you can still find his books on Amazon or your local bookstore. Mr. Gerber referred to this marketing methodology as the E-myth which was comprised of: innovation, quantification, orchestration, and documentation.

This methodology is the key behind major marketing successes like McDonalds, the Four Seasons, and many other well-known brands. Let me explain his methodology and illustrate how it can be applied to your business to deliver significant ROI.
Innovation

If you do what everyone else is doing, you’ll get the same results – if you’re lucky. Most often, those who excel in any market are the innovators, those who are continually trying new things, creating new methods of doing business, or standing for something unique.

Whether you’re Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Apple computer, or Tommy Hilfiger, innovation is baked into the sale, marketing, and product development process. To illustrate, let’s take a look at your run-of-the-mill retail clothing store. When you enter the store, what’s the first thing the sales rep says to you? You guessed it, “How can I help you”?

An example of applying innovation would be to have that same sales representative open with a new greeting, something like, “Hello, is it your first time visiting our store?”. If yes, there’s a perfect opportunity to discuss what makes you unique, how to navigate the store, and so on. If no, the same holds true… “Welcome back. Were you successful in finding what you needed upon your last visit? What can I help you with today?”

Regardless of the actual questions used, the example of innovation in a sales/marketing sense gives you the ability to try something new. This ‘something’ can take a variety of different formats, but most importantly it iis something that can move you towards a greater ROI. Especially if you understand the next step which is quantification.
Quantification

With each innovation, an action is taken – a product sampled, research conducted, a new sales pitch or value proposition delivered. To be truly effective with your marketing you must measure your results.

The most successful marketing programs are always working to improve their return on investment (ROI). The key is to measure each independent element that could possibly influence your result.

Using our example of the retail establishment, you wouldn’t want to ask all of your sales reps to start using a new pitch AND change their dress code. Doing so might dilute your ability to measure the effectiveness of a new sales script. Additionally, you wouldn’t want to change other store elements like the music or store layout at the same time – doing so would make accurate measurement next to impossible.

Now that you’ve tried something new and measured its effectiveness, you’re ready for the third component, orchestration.
Orchestration

After trying something innovative, and measuring the result, you now know what works and what doesn’t. The key is to keep innovating in small ways, continually testing and evaluating the results. Once you have your successes identified, you need to roll them out in a systemic fashion.

All sales and marketing personnel should be utilizing and implementing the latest innovation in all they do. This methodology now becomes your control. Your next innovation is only effective if it produces better results than your control.

Improving your process of orchestration is also extremely important. The faster you implement your innovation across the business – in a consistent fashion, the better your results become. Walmart is a master of this. If there is an innovation in one store, it is quickly shared and implemented with all store managers across the U.S. The result is innovation on a massive scale which has a direct and positive influence on ROI.
Documentation

The top innovators do this last step extremely well. Documentation doesn’t mean creating reams of manuals that are esoteric or difficult to navigate. Rather, documentation is the development of a guide, procedure, or system that allows consistent implementation of the innovations you develop.

As new personnel come into your business, you want to make sure that the innovations and enhancements you’ve made to your sales and marketing practices are fully implemented. The best way to do this is to not expect an employee to memorize a 700 page employee instruction manual. Rather, they should become familiar with your way of doing business - which needs to be documented in a simple, easily understandable format.

You know you’re at a company that does this well when you hear things like, that’s “the Walmart way” or “This is how we do it here”. It’s those companies that create living documentation that is easily understood and implemented that excel.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to enhance your marketing program, or create one from scratch, keep this methodology in mind: innovation, quantification, orchestration, documentation. This process will ensure constant growth and improvement in your marketing results.

Don’t just take my word for it, look at most major brands or category leaders. Under the hood, you’ll find systems for innovation, ways of testing, measuring, implementing, and documenting in a seemingly effortless fashion.

7 Steps for Creating a Powerful Jump Page that Sells

Your jump page is an essential tool for generating online revenue

If you practice Internet marketing, you know the importance of a high converting “Landing Page”. Also called a promotional page, jump page, or squeeze page, effective development of these pages are essential for online marketing success.

After a web browser clicks on a search engine generated link (organic or paid), they are directed to a website or jump page. Depending on your promotional tactics, you may be using pay-per-click marketing to generate sign-ups, inquiries, or sales. Regardless of the specific purpose of your page, one fact remains the same – you want a browser to take some type of action.

In the steps that follow, I will share some landing page best practices that have been provide to increase conversion rates and have those browsers taking the action you’re hoping for. Keep the following concepts in mind when designing your jump-page:
Big, Bold, Relevant Headline. If you don’t catch the attention of the browser with a big, bold, headline that is relevant, than nothing else matters. This is why expert marketers test multiple jump-pages at once – to see which page proves most relevant to browsers. For example, if a user is searching for tinker toys, the headline should be targeted as such - versus saying, “Hey check out these toys you can build with”. Doing so is not particularly relevant and as a result individuals will never get past the first few sentences of your jump page.

Use Visuals. If people have to read beyond your headline and sub-headline before understanding what you’re selling (or offering), you’ll have a difficult time getting them to read any further. This is where visuals come in. Pictures are worth a thousand words and can convey your message quickly and with less effort. Make sure your jump page goes beyond plain text and integrates visuals in the form of a different colored font, pictures, and/or video.

Testimonials Sell. Would you buy a product you never heard of? What if your best friend told you all about it? People like to buy based on recommendations. This is particularly true of online purchases. Having proof points validated through like-minded individuals removes fear and breaks down skepticism. There are a variety of ways to share a testimonial and they all work (photo and quote, audio recording, video).

Provide Something for Free. Encourage action by offering something free in exchange for name and email address. If you’re actually selling a product from your page, consider giving added bonuses for making a purchase. The more you offer at the price point you’ve identified, the more value you create for your potential customer.

Time Bound/Limited Offers. Create a sense of urgency with an offer that is only valid for a short time. You may also make your offer available to a limited number of new registrants. Either method works for creating urgency and encouraging a purchase. You will need to test your time-bound offers to identify the time frame that works best for your potential customer base. The same is true for limited-time offers.

Offer Multiple Payment Options. Believe it or not, some marketers only provide one way for prospective customers to order their product or service. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way, nor should it. Give users multiple options for how they pay. From traditional credit cards to PayPal, the more the merrier. Additionally, be sure to include an 800# for any questions they may have.

Test.Test.Test. No matter how good you think you are, you can always do better. Be sure to test your control page, attempting to improve conversions each time. This ensures that your business will continue to grow and you’ll better understand what works and what doesn’t with your target audience. It will also help you better understand seasonal trends.

Creating an effective jump page is essential for successful online marketing. Begin with a basic page that follows the criteria mentioned above. Test multiple pages to determine which has the highest conversion rate and continually tweak the page to improve results. This ensures jump page will continue to produce long into the future.

Pricing Your Products and Services for Ultimate Growth

Developing an attractive price for what you have to offer is both an art and science. These tips make it easy!

One of the most challenging things you can do as a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner is to price your products appropriately. Often times, individuals have no real strategy for pricing products or understand the perceived value that pricing can create. In this article, I’ll share my 12 year of product experience and what I’ve learned by pricing dozens of products – pricing them to sell.

When considering how to price a product, there are a number of methods for arriving at a starting price. The most popular include zero sum pricing and competitive pricing. Those who price their products using the zero sum method generally begin at zero, add all their costs including manufacturing, overhead, and so on, plus some type of margin to reach an initial price. The margin used in this calculation is based on industry norms or existing margins on similar products.

Competitive pricing is a method where you evaluate the products your competitor is selling and at what price. If your product or service is the same or similar, you’d want to price your product in the same general area. If your product is different, you’d adjust your price up or down based on features, benefits, and value derived.

Another model is called premium pricing which is used when considering a competitive pricing grid. Companies like Cadillac use premium pricing. This method charges ‘top dollar’ for a product that is of better quality or perceived quality. Rolex is another example. It doesn’t tell time any better than a Seiko but it costs much, much more.

Once you’ve determined your preferred pricing method, the next step is to develop multiple pricing options. Too often companies stop with the selection of a pricing method. The top marketing professionals know that the only way to optimize price is through tiered pricing and testing.

There are way too many individuals still pricing their product based on gut feel. The dialogue usually goes like this, “How much should we charge?” “I don’t know, what does competitor X charge for it? $39.95? Let’s charge $34.95 so we can out sell them”. Don’t laugh…this is how 90% of the products are priced out there.

This method would be okay if after you evaluated your costs and were able to charge less. However, using pricing options allow you to charge both more and less for a given product compared to your competitors. Let me explain what I mean.

To illustrate pricing options, let’s use a popular example, the fast food restaurant. Fast food establishments use tiered pricing all the time. Would you like the single hamburger, double hamburger, or the triple? Smal, medium or large drink? Small fries or large? Regardless of your industry, product, or service, you must give the consumer options.

A number of my clients have said that they can’t offer that type of pricing. When I ask why, the answer is often that their product is one size fits all. If that’s the case, determine how you can offer your product in increments. An attorney that charges by the hour can offer his services by the hour or on retainer. A landscaper can add-on additional services such as weeding, edging, or trimming. And an online publisher can provide a basic or premium package. It’s all in the mind set.

Conclusion
When developing a pricing strategy, understand the direct and variable costs associated with your product, the competitive landscape, and the varying needs of your market segments. Only then can you develop a winning pricing strategy. Choose the strategy that you believe resonates with your market and test, test, test. Be sure to offer tiered pricing to give your prospects options and you'll soon be working at the optimal price.

Why You're Losing Traffic and How to Make Them Stay

Why You're Losing Traffic and How to Make Them Stay
If you’re like most website owners, chances are you’re losing a large percentage of your visitors before they complete a desired action on your website. Although the number of factors that drive potential consumers away can be varied, I’ve noticed many common mistakes in my work of designing websites for optimal performance. Here’s where many sites go wrong:

1. Lack of a Clear Purpose

Why was your site designed? What is the purpose of your site? Are you selling a product or service? Are you sharing information or serving as a forum to aggregate ideas and comments? Are you providing a social benefit?

If your website doesn’t communicate its purpose in 3 seconds or less, you’re going to lose visitors. I’ve seen this on numerous occassions, especially among companies who don’t know what they want their site to be or communicate. Make sure your website has a clear purpose and everything else will follow.

2. Making it Long-Winded and Complicated

Today, individuals have less time than ever before. As a result, time is their most precious asset – don’t waste it. The majority of people using the internet today still prefer brevity over verse. Try to say what you need to say in as few words as possible. If users have to scroll through 2 screens or more then it’s too much.

When writing for your site, highlight things of importance. You can use bulleted lists, short paragraphs, bolded and underlined text. Some of you may be asking about the marketing websites with long copy. If you know what I’m talking about, these are generally marketing pages (squeeze pages) that have been developed to promote a single product or service. This is not what I’m referring to here. For websites, copy should be brief and to the point.

3. Giving Web Visitors Too Many Distractions

As I alluded to before, websites should be designed with the single purpose of directing visitors to the information they want. A real prospect is one that needs the same information you want to provide; the art of sales is directing potential clients to relevant information, and presenting it in a way that visitors see your product or service as fulfilling their needs.

This is the reason why I don’t promote Google Adwords on my website. Why? Because it distracts potential buyers from purchasing what I have to offer. Don’t get me wrong, I make a nice living promoting affiliate products, but I do so on my own terms and I only promote those products that I haver personally reviewed and approve of.

4. Eroding Your Own Credibility

Does your website give first time visitors plenty of reasons to trust you? Website visitors are constantly looking for reasons why they should abandon your site. Does your site have a number of spelling errors or images that don’t display? How easy is it to find your 800 number or other contact information?

If you want to develop trust among your visitors, make sure that the basics are covered, that your site looks and feels the part of a well established company. Present important information in obvious places, have an about section, and make it easy for visitors to contact you via email or phone. This will establish trust and confidence in their buying decisions.

5. Not Giving Web Visitors Enough Options

When offering a product or service, it’s a true benefit to offer multiple options, but not too many. You want to make sure that website visitors have more than one item, price point, or model to choose from. When analyzing why people leave websites, I’ve found that the reasons are much to often simpler than you might think; “I didn’t want everything in the package, only the trading cards…”, “They had X but didn’t offer Y”, “The price was too high…”, etc.

People like options. Identify the most compelling bundles or most popular products and offer solutions at various price points. This is the most effective way to position your products or services.

6. Giving Web Visitors Too Many Obstacles

Removing obstacles to a purchase is the most important thing you can do to ensure optimal sell through. Do you make people go through the order processing system before they can find out how much something costs, or do you demand potential customers read all of the fine print that only a lawyer could understand? Is your order process long and complicated?

When evaluating the effectiveness of a website’s checkout process, I’ve always found a large drop off rate. In fact, the majority of consumers who click, “buy now” never finish the purchase. There are a lot of reasons why, and its unrealistic to think that 100% of these individuals will convert, but a major reason is that the purchase process is much too long and complicated. Keep yours simple.

7. Giving Web Visitors Too Many Forms To Fill-in

Do you attract your visitors with special offers or free white papers and then demand that they fill-out complex forms, surveys, and questionnaires before you give them access to what they came for? If you do, you are probably losing a lot of people you attracted. Keep your sign up forms very brief.

Many websites loose a significant number of individuals who are just no longer willing to complete a long form. Keep your questions to a minimum – only collecting the information you need to take the next step with your prospect.

Conclusion

There are a number of ways to keep visitors on your website and improve conversion rates. I just described a number of the most common mistakes that websites are making today. Start with a clear purpose and put yourself in the shoes of a first-time visitor. Is your website clear, authoritative, trustworthy, and easy to navigate? Think like a potential customer and make your user experience second to none!

Effective Web Sites with Keyword Rich Web Content

Writing for the Internet is a huge challenge. And this is the main reason why many companies have a separate section for web content writing services or have opted to hire web content writing services in India on a permanent basis to write for their sites. Web site articles and contents need to be changed or revised at least every week. If you’re wondering if that’s exaggerating it a bit too much, let me assure you, unless new information or updates are posted on the web sites every week, even every day, browsers will not be tempted to come back. It’s similar to a shop window display. And every new revision means new articles.

And nobody will be interested in reading articles that are dull. And in the long run this can affect you adversely. Another important aspect of web content writing is accuracy. If the information on the web site is false or inaccurate, it can lead to people being misled, which will not do much good for your business. So, the first step to effective web content writing services is a thorough understanding of the goals of your web site or your organization.

In addition, the content should always be clear and easily understandable to the layman. So, try and avoid fancy language. And last but not the least, the web site should be easily and quickly available to a person browsing. Most internet users, unless they know which web site they’re looking for use search engines to locate web sites on a particular area of interest. A well-written web site home page with keyword rich website content will certainly perform better with search engines than otherwise, where search engine optimization is treated as an afterthought. Search engine optimization of a web site is a mixture of marketing and technology with keyword rich web content, i.e. content that specifically focus on your chosen keywords.

And the web content writing services of India can provide you with such interesting key word rich web site content. When you outsource web content writing services of India, they’ll make sure that your website is visible in all the major search engines, and ranked somewhere in the top. And all that you’ll need to do is to provide them with the keywords you’re targeting, and they‘ll write enlightening, keyword rich content articles for your web site that’ll attract customers and make sure that you’re web site is somewhere in the top position of the search results.

7 Quick & Simple Website Changes That Build Personal Relationships Like Crazy

So you want make an impact online. You’ve created a website and it’s beautifully designed. You’ve written a sales letter. You have Pay-Per-Click ads and lots of traffic, but no business is coming in. Why? Maybe your website doesn’t work. Could it be missing a personal touch?

Let’s go shopping for a minute. Imagine entering a store that has no salesperson. No one greets you at the door. No one acknowledges your presence. No one answers your questions. No one seems to care that you have come to visit. If you have a question who do you ask? You will probably leave and find someone that does care and can answer your questions.

Does your website provide the best customer experience possible? I like to think of the website like a salesperson. The components of your website represents you when you are not there. What does your salesperson/website look like? What does your salesperson/website say? Is your salesperson enthusiastic or boring? Compassionate or Firm? It is important to build a website for your targeted audience. What does your targeted audience what to hear? Start thinking like your customer.

I have put together some questions to help you start thinking about your website’s components that may need to be changed or modified.

1. Does your website have a crystal clear vision of who you are?
2. Have you included photos that give your targeted customer more visual information? A personal picture is a great idea, but maybe you own a large yoga studio. Adding some studio pictures would bring warmth to the website.
3. Information about your background?
4. Testimonials with valuable messages? Add testimonials with energy. Everyone loves to read rags to riches stories.
5. Do you want your audience to HEAR your message? Have you thought about adding audio to your website? Why not explain your service to them. Save them the time of reading a long message.
6. Have you included an email address opt-in form box? Most web visitors aren’t ready to buy, they are just gathering information. Give them what they want. Inform your visitor with articles and give them the opportunity to receive email newsletters or ezines from you.
7. What does your site REALLY say? The copy on your website is extremely important. It should be clear, concise and to the point. You may want to consider using an informal, you-are-my-best-friend tone. I try to picture one person and write to that person.

Digging Deep To Get The Most From RSS Technology for Marketing

An integral part of getting the most from RSS is really understanding how RSS works as a technology --- basically understanding its structure and how to best use it to get more readership and better search engine rankings.

The good part is that it's easy and quick to do, without needing any technical expertise and just using standard RSS publishing tools.

A) HOW RSS FEEDS ARE STRUCTURED

RSS feeds contain the basic information about the RSS feed itself and the individual RSS feed content items that actually carry the content you want to deliver to your target audiences or syndicate to other websites.

All of this information is carried within different perscribed RSS feed elements that are used for different purposes.

But how you use these elements may actually define whether you are getting the most from RSS or not.

Now you don't actually need to know how to create an RSS feed, since your RSS publishing software will do that for you, but you need to know what to put in these elements to make the most from them.

B) RSS FEED ELEMENTS

RSS feed elements describe the RSS feed.

Each element encloses the actual descriptionary information, just like an HTML tag.

The most important elements you need to pay attention to for increasing marketing results are:

1. RSS FEED TITLE

The name of the RSS feed, which will be displayed in the RSS Reader when someone accesses your feed, as well as the search engines and so on.

You need to craft your title so that it stands out among other feeds in your subscribers' RSS Readers and attracts them, and is at the same time rich with your most important keywords to assure you achieve better search engine placement for your feeds.

2. RSS FEED DESCRIPTION

A short sentence that describes the RSS feed. Just as with the title element, the description needs to attract your target audiences (in many RSS Readers the description is displayed just below the feed title) and at the same time assure better placement within the search engines.

So keep it user-attractive, conveying the main content points covered in your feed and the key benefits for your readers, as well as search-engine-friendly, with your most important keywords.

3. RSS FEED IMAGE

The image element is used to display your logo on the RSS feed presentation in RSS Readers. The default width for the logo is 88 px and the maximum width is 144 px. Default image height is 31 px and the maximum height is 400 px.

Including your logo in your feed will make your feed more memorable for your subscribers, thus helping you increase actual readership, as well as provide additional branding for your business.

C) RSS CONTENT ITEM ELEMENTS

While the RSS feed elements define and describe an RSS feed on the level of the entire feed, individual content item elements describe and carry the actual information you want to deliver to your audiences.

And if there's any question about it, RSS content items are contained within an RSS feed.

Each content item may then contain some or all of the elements that describe that content item and provide information.

1. RSS CONTENT ITEM TITLE

The title of the specific content item that is of course displayed in the RSS Reader and everywhere else where your content appears.

Your content item titles are one of the most important things in your RSS feed, determening whether your readers will actually read the rest of the content or whether the search engines will rank it high enough for you.

Just think of the title as an e-mail message subject line and webpage title in one. The e-mail subject line is what makes your recipient decide whether he's going to read the entire message or not. You need to keep it to the point and give just enough information to make it inviting to read on.

The webpage title has much weight with the search engines, helping you get higher rankings for your content for the keywords you're trying to optimize your webpage for.

The RSS content item title performs both of these functions for you at the same time.

2. RSS CONTENT ITEM LINK

The URL pointing to a webpage on your website where the user can read the entire content of the content item, if you're publishing your RSS feeds in summary format. A "read more" type of destination.

If you're publishing your feeds in full-text format the link can serve for archiving purposes, for example if your customers would either want to clickthrough to your site and then bookmark your content in their internet browser.

Of course, if you don't want to provide a backlink to your site, you don't have to, as the link element is optional. This could come useful if you're using your RSS feed meerly as a direct communicational channel to send a quick message to your customers or anyone else, without also providing that content on your website.

But since most RSS users actually expect to be able to clickthrough it's highly recommended that you always provide the link.

3. RSS CONTENT ITEM DESCRIPTION

This is where the actual body content of the information you're trying to deliver comes in … the actual story you're trying to tell.

The description element can either be a short summary, or can contain full-text content of the story, with images and almost everything else (there are some restrictions).

Depending on who you ask, some will say that summary feeds are better, while others will vouch their head for full-text feeds. What you decide for actually depends completely on your business model and what you are trying to achieve with RSS. In short, there are no rules.

Also, you might not even need a description.

--> If you just want to deliver headlines of your latest content and have people clickthrough to your site to find out more you could easily do that. This would usually be useful for syndicating your content to other websites, if you didn't want them to publish anything else but your headline.

--> Or the content you are delivering might not even need a description. For example you could create an RSS feed with the latest stock-market updates where the update would be quickly delivered just using the title element. More on this in later chapters. What you do need to know right now is what kind of content can actually be included if you decide for full-text content.

For starters, if you do it right, standard text formating, such as bolding, works just fine in most RSS Readers, although some may even ignore that. Links within the content and images are also not a problem, although again, some RSS Readers might just ignore them.

But still, most of the new ones won't, so adding some flavor to your full-text content should not be a problem.

If you want to go even further, even tables in content should work in most cases, actually enabling you to post a full e-zine issue right inside of a single RSS feed content item.

The worst problem is that different RSS Readers will display this content in different ways, some even not displaying tables at all.

And finally, if you want to syndicate your content to other websites, they might just want a summary instead of full-text content, so you might need to prepare a summary version of the feed as well.

Web Design that is Screen Resolution Friendly

Surfing the web always brings up a swath of different problems all based on the different settings implemented by the web designers in their signature web designs. Among these problems is a major one that has to do with the screen resolution settings of all the different visitors who may visit any given web design. When it comes to screen resolution, it doesn’t matter how perfect and beautiful the web design may be, it is very frustrating when a viewer either cannot see the images or text properly, or the viewers have to scroll to the side to see the rest of what the site has to offer. It is truly annoying when the width of the site doesn’t fit within the width of a visitor’s monitor’s screen size.

The reason for this is that many older monitors – frequently VGA monitors – have a maximum of 640x480 pixels that they will support. There area also many visitors to your website who have older video cards. This means that no matter how good their monitor and your website, they simply will not be able to handle higher resolutions. You will need to keep this in mind when you are creating a web design for a large target audience. After all, you will want the maximum number of people possible to be able to easily and clearly read and view your website.

So why is it that web designers continue to write for such large screen resolutions – such as 800x600 and 1024x768 when it means that they’ll be sending so many people away from their sites due to the inability to read them or being frustrated from having to scroll sideways all the time? Actually, there are quite a few reasons to explain this web design pattern. For one, there are likely quite a number of web designers who don’t even realize the issue that they are creating. Similarly, there are those web designers who don’t care that some people will not be able to enjoy their websites. Also, we must consider that some web masters have recognized that their target audience are typically equipped with high screen resolution capabilities, and therefore are simply catering to their desired market.

It is indeed hard to believe that there are some web designers out there who can call themselves professionals and not understand the way that the different technologies used by their viewers will be impacted by the web designs that they create. It is hard to believe that a supposed “expert” may not recognize that their web designs won’t look the same on every computer. Of course, web designers can’t always be blamed, since they often have the latest technologies to make their work more pleasant and professional. However, it is up to them to understand that the majority of the internet using world is not using state-of-the-art technologies. These web designers are only trying to put out the most impressive looking visuals for a website.

When it comes to those web designers who know that not everyone will be able to see their website properly, but they just don’t care are the most likely to lose the highest number of visitors. Any graphic larger than 600 by 620 pixels will definitely create a horizontal scroll bar for several website visitors. This is frustrating to visitors who have to scroll in order to read each line of text. Navigation also becomes a struggle because menus may become partially or entirely hidden as the rest of the content is viewed. Furthermore, if the viewer doesn’t realize that the horizontal scrollbar has appeared, they may simply assume that the site is not finished, that it has errors, or that there is nothing additional to see. If the webmaster simply doesn’t care, they’re turning away an awfully large number of people who could be potential clients, part of a potential network, or even contributors.

When the webmaster has recognized that the primary audience of the site has higher screen resolutions, it is quite natural to create a website design that caters to that resolution. While they will usually meet the standard, making certain that a viewer of 640x480 can still see the vital information on the site, the entire itself will have been optimized for their main target audience. This is an extremely professional way to function because it avoids creating problems of viewing the site no matter what the client, and it still gives the most accurate settings for the equipment used by the main visitors

Tips to Achieving a Successful Web Site

1. Choose a Niche - Today, anyone can have a website and sell merchandise or services on the internet. The choices are endless and only limited by your imagination. If you are already in a business and don’t currently have a website, then it’s simply a matter of deciding what name to chose. If you are thinking about setting up your first website and aren’t sure what niche to chose, you might consider a favorite hobby. I’ve always liked to collect & repair antique radios, so I setup a website called RadioExchange.net

The fastest way to achieve success and a high ranking on the internet is to build a website around a theme and niche which does not have a large amount of competition. For instance, if you were to start a web hosting site, it would be an uphill battle because there are thousands and thousands of hosting websites already on the internet fighting to be seen in the top 10 or 20 listings of the major search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google. The more competition, the more costly and time consuming it is to get your website seen.

I know of a guy who used to drive a van for a courier delivery service for a living. He started a expedited transportation website on a shoestring budget several years ago. Today his website is one of the most successful in the US for the expedited transportation industry. Another guy I know loved to collect scale model steam engines, so he built a simple website with photos of his collection. Before long, he started getting inquiries from other collectors as to where they could buy some like his and where to get parts. He began selling parts and hard to find steam engines to collectors around the word. He also added a paid ad section to his site. These are two examples of how you can turn a job or hobby into a successful, money making website. There are still many untapped, niche markets available. You can do the research on your own or a detailed report on 109 Untapped Markets is available for download. The price is only $33. and it’s well worth it. To get your report go to Niche Topics at http://UntappedMarkets.cashflowsystem.biz

2. Purchase a Domain Name – Think of a domain name which uses the words which describes your business or what you will be selling. If your domain name contains the keywords which describe your business, you may rank higher than with names which do not. For instance, if you are a realtor located in Orlando Florida it would be a good idea to register the domain name OrlandoFloridaRealEstate.com/net or org or Orlando-Florida-Real-Estate.com/net or org. A scientific way to determine the best name to use is to run keyword popularity searches by using Overture's Keyword Tool at http://inventory.overture.com . When you type in keyword phrases, the tool tells you how many times any given keyword phrase was searched across the internet for the previuos month. Once you determine the name you want to use, you can search to see if it’s availabe and register it at a domain registration / hosting service such as http://Website-Supermarket.com .

3. Set Up Web Hosting - Web Hosting is what connects your website to the internet so it can be viewed by people around the world. Prices for hosting service range from free (I would not recommended a free service - you get what you pay for) to $39.95 per month which is on the high end. Some hosting companies charge a setup fee and demand a year commitment. I would not use any hosting service which charges a setup fee or demands a year commitment because there’s so many which does not. http://Website-Supermarket.com offers excellent hosting services for only $4.95 per month which includes 24/7 live customer service and no set up fee or annual commitment.

4. Design Your Website - If you have no experience or limited experience designing a website you can choose from thousands of professionally designed templates for as low as $20. at http://Website-Supermarket.com and they are available for immediate download. Just browse through until you find a template you like, then click “Buy this Template” and download to your computer. They also offer 1000’s of clip art and photo art ideal for customizing a website. Unlike many of the other template websites, after you’ve selected the site you want, if you need help customizing your template, they offer complete set up services to get you up and running quickly.

If you choose to customize the template yourself you will need web design software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Front Page.. You will also need image software such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks. A new alternative web development software which is rapidly become the tool of choice for Internet Marketers is XSitePro. To learn more you can visit their website at www.XSitePro.wsone.net .

5. Upload Your Web Site files to your Hosting Service’s Server – Most Web creator software such as Front Page and Macromedia Dreamweaver has built in FTP (File Transfer Protocol) capability. A super program I recommend for uploading and downloading files is Cute FTP by GlobalScape. You can download a copy from their website at http://Cuteftp.com It’s especially handy for managing several sites.

6. Submit Your Website to the Search Engines - I recommend Submit-It which is a Free service that Submits your URL to all of the major Search Engines such as Yahoo, MSN & Google. Their website address is http://www.submitplus.com. Also, don't forget to make a sitemap and submit it to google. This makes it easier for google to index your web site pages therefore increasing your website's ranking. Just go to Sitemapbuilder.net, type in your URL and their online sitemap program will create a sitemap for you which you can download and then upload to google. Complete instructions are given on Sitemapbuilder.net's website.

7. SEO / Search Engine Optimization - This is the final step and an ongoing process to achieving success with your website. Search Engine Optimization involves having as many pages of articles and text as possible containing keywords phrases which describe what services or products you are offering in your website. You can get articles about almost any topic you can think of from many of the Ezine websites with reprint rights. Articles written about your niche on your website vastly increases the value and ranking of your site to search engines because they reinforce your keyword word count. Another very important step is to trade links with other sites and get as many inbound links as possible. Publishing your own articles to Ezine websites will help increase your inbound links. I highly recommend the Article Money System. It's comes pre-loaded with 163 article directory sites. For each article you write (if accepted) you can get up to 163 incoming back links to your site thus improving your page rank. For more info, go to http://articlemoney.wsone.net . You might also want to purchase links to your website which have a high Google PR. Link Directory Submitter is a software which submits your website link to over 300 directories, with more than half ranging from PR4 to PR7. For more info, go to http://LinkSubmitter.wsone.net

Choosing Website Content Writing As A Career

The Internet has pervaded through the entire ambit of activities whether they are business ventures, public services, government departments or publications. Each one of the business, commercial or private organizations has a website of its own which propagates its individual sphere of activity and makes it easy for the general public to get the information they desire without wasting any time and at the minimum of cost.

However, merely having a website does not serve the purpose as the contents of the website need to be regularly updated and made attractive and informative so that more and more visitors go through its contents. Herein lies the importance of effective website content writing.

It is essential for the website content writer to make the article as informative and reliable as possible. It should be such that at the very first glance the viewer is attracted towards it and he is kept glued to the article until he finishes reading it. As such, the article should be written specifically for the target audience, which you have to identify beforehand. Moreover the article should not be long-winded and should convey the information precisely and briefly, as most web viewers do not have the patience to read lengthy articles with repetitive content.

There are so many other web pages that are just a click away, which makes it essential for your article to be alluring enough to hold the attention of the reader, and informative enough to give him what he wants to know.

Companies from all over the world are finding India to be the hub of top quality web site content writing solutions that are cost effective as well. Indian writers are famous for their high class writing skills that are next to none. English language has been given a completely new horizon by them. The excellent web site content writing services that are offered in India are due to the superb writing abilities, experience and search engine optimization ability of the web content writers.

As such if you outsource the web site content writing work to Indian web content writing companies, you will receive the web content written by the best writers who are extremely adept in the English language and have a flair for writing, which is ingrained in their blood, although English is not their mother tongue.

It is imperative that your website should be regularly updated and to help you in doing that, the web site content writing companies in India only need to have the data from you regarding the latest developments that your customers should know. The content writers of these web site content writing companies will incorporate this information in your existing web content and polish the whole content matter in such a way that the reader will find it difficult to click to another page till he has read it. However, it is essential that all necessary information including any statistical growth figures (if required) are provided to the content writer.

Web site content writing service has grown considerably in India in the past few years and there are many writers, professionals and freelancers, in the field who are giving this industry a big boost.

Expert and experienced professional content writers are working for RNCOS. These writers can write on any topic and present it in such a way that your business will definitely grow. Their services will prove to be extremely beneficial and so you can leave your worries to them and relax.

Web site content writing service has grown considerably in India in the past few years and there are many writers, professionals and freelancers, in the field who are giving this industry a big boost.

Not Experienced? Things To Know Before You Start

Technical content writing is essentially a craft. It’s different from writing for a company or academic writing. The main reason is the short attention span of the surfers which means that you’ve to grab their attention with graphics and great text. So, your technical content has to be to the point and interesting enough for a second glances at least.However, not all of us are prolific writers. So, if you think that technical content writing is not up to you, then you needn’t worry about your business suffering.

Let’s start with the title. The function of the title is to describe the article or technical content. However, this doesn’t mean that your title should be a summary of the article. It should be informative and specific, as well as eye catching at the same time. For, example, if your article is about horses, then your title should use the word horse. So, instead of writing something like “Caring for Animals”, write “Caring for Horses”.

Then comes the actual writing. Even the best writers are often faced with some starting trouble. So, don’t despair if you feel that you’re stuck. It’s all right to tear up some of your initial attempt at the first paragraph of your technical content or article. The opening paragraph is as important as the title. This is because, the reader will read the first paragraph and only if it’s interesting will he or she proceed. One option, in case you’re stuck for an introductory paragraph is to write the rest of the article and come back to introductory paragraph in the end.

Also, it’s common to have more than one draft of the technical article. The first draft is usually the rough draft which acts as the foundation. Then you’ve to work at polishing this draft and making it into the final finished technical content or technical article. While writing technical content, you should also keep in mind the requirements of the search engines.

The search engines have a different set of criteria like, keyword phrases including keyword frequency, weight, prominence, proximity and placement within the text and within the html. And this criterion varies from search engine to search engine. However, there’re a few basic requirements like keyword placement within the text of technical content and within the html coding. And it’s the responsibility of the technical site content writer to ensure that these requirements are met in the technical articles or technical content.

And if in the end you enjoyed technical content writing so much that you wish to become a professional technical content writer, then there are many technical content writing companies that’ll be interested in employing you.

Avoid Turning Your Site Into A Pop-up Nightmare

We've all experienced the frustration of pop-up windows. Some sites are so loaded with pop-ups that your visit turns into a pop-up window zapping game. You eliminate one just to have another take its place.

It's too bad such a good advertising technique has been abused to the point that pop-up advertising has basically become ineffective. Customers have become so overwhelmed by pop-ups that they don't even bother to read the advertisements, sometime becoming obsessed with closing the pop-ups as fast as they appear. Too many pop-up ads can actually cause a customer to leave your site.

Due to this pop-up abuse, the use of pop-up windows has been on the decline since its heyday a few years ago. However, many Internet marketers continue to have success with pop-up advertising. How? They've made their pop-ups less annoying.

One way to do this is to reduce the amount of pop-ups on your site. Having more than one pop-up per page on your website quickly becomes a nuisance. Definitely limit your pop-ups to one per page, or less.

Another way to make pop-ups more appealing is to make it easy to escape. If the surfer has trouble locating the X to close the window, they will become frustrated and leave your site. Don't make the mistake of trapping your customer in a pop-up window prison. Allow them to escape easily to enjoy the rich content on your website.

Many Internet marketers have adjusted their pop-up strategies. They now employ what is called a pop-under window. This is truly a less annoying form of pop-up advertising. When the surfer comes to your site, a window is discretely opened behind your web-page. After the customer comfortably peruses your site for the information they want, and clicks out of your site, they will see the ad and be more likely to respond. This creates a much more favorable experience than bombarding them with pop-ups while they try to enjoy your website.

Other pointers to keep in mind include creating a large headline that details the benefits to the customer. Also, Make the advertisement simple and to the point. Customers do not like to read long and drawn out advertisements.

With a little forethought you can avoid making your website a pop-up nightmare. These suggestions can make the use of pop-ups, or pop-unders, appealing to your potential customers. Yes, the proper use of pop-ups can generate profits for your Internet business.

Unrevealed Secrets of Successful Technical sites…

If your business deal with technical manual and is mainly conducted over the Internet, then you’ll need a good technical site, in order to be successful. Technical sites can be compared to trees. Technical sites, like trees, need a strong foundation or root to turn out the much-desired increase in sales. However, without visitors or well written technical site content is essential for attracting visitors, technical sites can't be successful.Also, technical sites need large numbers of technical pages that are full of informative keyword rich technical content, in order to reach and appeal to the most number of visitors. And if your technical site doesn't look proficient enough, regardless of what the product that you're offering, your chances of success will be minimal. However, not all of us are experts when it comes to technical content writing.

But, where the difference between well-written technical content and badly written technical content is success and bankruptcy, no money or effort should be spared. So, at times like these, you need the services of a technical content writing service in India. However, many choose to develop technical sites without the help of a technical content writing service. But as they learned the hard way, this could almost definitely lead to failure in the long run.

There are any aspects to a successful and effective technical site and interesting content is just one of them. So, when you choose to get the services of a technical content writing service in India, you’re in reality ensuring the success of your technical site. These technical content writing services know all the tricks of the trade when it comes to making sure that your technical site gets the maximum visibility and number of visitors possible.

The first step to a successful technical site, according these technical content writing services in India, is to have a large number of technical pages with each page devoted to a single specific topic. Also, since most visitors use search engines to search for technical sites you’ll need to decide on the various aspects of the business that can attract visitors from the search engines. Once this has been fixed then the technical content writing service in India can work towards it. Also, a well-designed technical site should be easy to use and the focus should be on helping the customers achieve their goals. All successful technical sites focus on making the design fit the user instead of trying to make the user fitting the design.

Another thing to pay attention to is the layout. Customers prefer and even expect a layout that’s intuitive and easy to remember. You shouldn’t expect your customer to invest his or her time in learning how to use your technical site. Also, only provide that information that’s useful to your customers. And all information given in your technical site should be accurate. This will go a long way in improving your credibility.

Also, these offshore technical content writing companies of India use search engine optimization techniques to ensure the maximum number of visitors to the technical site. And for this the technical site content should be made key word rich. Search engine advertising is another helpful way of making sure that your technical site is visible. And all this is possible with the help of a technical content writing service in India.

Improve Your Communication To Improve Web Conversion

The following questions were asked by Jennifer LeClaire for ConversionPress.com's upcoming book Sell Now. I thought that readers might like to see what I answered before anyone else.

How does one design a web site for results?

The correct answer is “It depends”. Allow me to explain. What it depends upon is firstly the goal of the website. Have you defined what it is that you need from your visitors?

For instance are you an e-commerce website selling products to the general public? If so then your business objective is to sell products.

A content website on the other hand might be driven by ad sales, in which case the goal is to generate as many visitors and page impressions as possible.

Service websites might want to reduce the amount of service calls from customers, so a conversion is counted as a visitor who got what they needed without calling the helpline.

Finally a business selling services might want to generate leads, so filling in contact forms or sending a request for quotation is considered a conversion.

All these different business functions have a different result and therefore need to be designed in a different way. Perhaps the best answer to this question is to say you first define your goal and then design your site to help your visitors achieve that goal. Then of course you need to measure and test the various ways in which people navigate the site so that you can better cater for them, find out what they need and fulfill their desires. You do that with a good web analytics system.

In your opinion, what are the key elements of designing a web site to increase conversions or sales? Top tips?

There isn’t one answer to this question because again the correct answer here is that “it depends.” It depends on which people you want at your website and what your business objective is.

However to give you an example of one answer lets take an e-commerce website. The first key element is to ask yourself to whom are you selling your product? Have you done your market research? What kind of people are going to be purchasing your products and what motivates them to buy? This planning is the most important phase of the development, because if you get this right you will have 4 or 5 key types of people with key motives to buy from you.

Let’s say for instance you’re selling Jewelry. Some of your visitors will be women whom are looking for the latest fashions. Some will be perturbed males who have got to buy a present for their wives or girlfriends, have a budget and need a lot of help. Someone will be looking for presents for a 21st birthday. Someone else will be looking for a specific piece of jewelry from a specific designer.

Do you communicate to each individual in the same manner? You shouldn’t. Your copy and content is the most important part of your website, so by planning how you communicate with the people that buy from you is the key part of the process that wins or loses the sale.

For instance consider how you would communicate with two of the persona’s above, lets take the obvious ones, firstly Mr Bob Noclue, a 28 year old guy who is buying a present for his girlfriend.

He is motivated by the desire to buy his girlfriend a nice present that she will appreciate and because she’s special to him he doesn’t want to offend her. So he wants to feel safe in the knowledge that he’s buying a gift that if he makes a mistake can be easily put right (a good returns policy). You want to make it easy for him to make a decision by assuring him that the gift he’s buying is something that will delight his lady. You might craft the product copy like this;

“When she’s happy, you’re happy. Delight her with this beautifully crafted 24 carrot gold engraved Aztec heart pendant. You can place a picture of yourself inside so she never forgets who gave her this delightful gift. From the mountains of Brazil each one hand crafted with meticulous care, this unique gift will delight the lady in your life. We even guarantee it. If your lady doesn’t love this gift then you can swap it for any product matching the same value or get your money back, no questions asked.”

Next we need to craft the same product to a different persona.

This time it’s Jane Iknowwhatiwant, a 28 year old highly fashion conscious young jetsetter who is buying a product for herself that will help her stand out from the crowd. She wants to know details like who the designer is, how the product was made, who else is wearing it, and whether she can have it before her next dinner party.

“Exquisite fashion from the Aztec. Be the belle of the ball with this outstanding and unique 24 carrot gold heart pendant from the Ronaldo fashion house. Each item from Ronaldos is uniquely crafted which is why celebrities across America are our customers. Order it today and you can have it delivered to your door within 2 weeks, just in time for you to shine at your next dinner party.”

By doing your research and planning your website to communicate directly with the people who are going to buy from you, you have a better chance of closing the sale. My top tips? I only have one, craft your copy and images to communicate with the people who are going to buy from you.

What are the biggest mistakes web site owners are making with relation to converting site traffic into leads/sales?

They make it difficult for people to achieve their objectives by putting hurdles in front of them. The biggest hurdle is the one I’ve just described, they communicate to the wrong people about the wrong things. If I was Bob Noclue I wouldn’t be impressed by the high fashion copywriting and that is typical across all websites. There is a “one size fits all” attitude when it comes to copywriting and it’s woefully inadequate.

Then there are the usual suspects like bad usability and design getting in the way of completing the process. Stuff like bad shopping processes, poor internal search engines, poor information architecture, irrelevant graphics, poor error messages, poor returns policies, poor security etc. The basic stuff that web developers should have covered, often result in lost sales.

But let’s face it, when you really want a product you will move mountains to get it. The main problem is that copy and content doesn’t persuade the visitor to “want” the products.

What does it take to close a sale on the web?

You have to give the right message, to the right prospect. That’s all.

It sounds easy, but in most cases it’s not done very well. Most sites fall down here because they aren’t credible in the eyes of their visitor (giving the wrong message) or that they put too many distractions and hurdles in front of the visitor.

Of all the things we talked about above, do feel that designing for conversions is something that most web sites are doing? If not, what could they be doing better? Where are they missing it?

The websites that do at least try to convert often do so in a way which is pushy and deliberate rather than tugging the heart strings of the purchaser, which is what copy, content and graphics should be doing.

We also find a lot of websites using words, which aren’t factual, but are values based. Things like “Plenty of room” instead of “300 square meters of space”. Plenty of room is a value based statement, but isn’t descriptive and doesn’t put an exact picture in your head. Plenty of room to me could mean something entirely different to you. 300 square meters on the other hand can’t be mistaken for anything else.

There is a lot of hype out there which everyone is bored with. Words like Guaranteed (without any accompanying explanation), lowest prices anywhere, while supplies last etc. are all so common our minds switch off. If you guarantee something describe it in the same paragraph, tell us your prices and tell us how many you have in stock!

The majority of websites miss that they need to communicate their message in a way that we as the visitor want to be sold. Give us what we want and we’ll buy. The money being spent online right now proves it. Unfortunately not enough businesses out there know enough about who they’re selling too and how to communicate with them.

Another big reason is they don’t measure and test, they don’t find out where the hurdles are and they don’t scientifically improve their websites. All of this can be helped by web analytics tools, which too many businesses don’t act upon. I know too many businesses that have expensive tools to track what they are doing, then either don’t have the time, don’t have the staff or don’t have the knowledge to use them. But the bigger crime, which is even more common is the business that has the web analytics tool, knows how to use them but then doesn’t act on the data.

In Summary

Learn about your visitor. Learn who they are, what motivates them and why they come to your site. Then write for them, all the while testing and measuring in a continuous improvement cycle – kaizen for your website if you’re into quality control and you will improve your web conversion rates.

How to create content that will get you loads of links

Did you know that there is a way that you can actually create content that will help generate plenty of relevant and valuable one way links pointed at your site? In the same way that articles can be written with the objective of getting as many readers as possible to click through the links in the resource box at the bottom of an article, you can also specifically write content with links in mind.

The accumulation of links has been made a lot easier by the rise of blogs in recent times which tends to make linking and creation of links very easy.

How Useful Is Your Article To Other Sites?
When one is looking for links, the focus changes from your prospective clients out there to fellow bloggers in more or less the same line of business. This means that you have to be familiar with blogs that are closely related to the topic or subject area of your own blog.

What kind of content would they be interested in referring their visitors to at the moment? These are the sort questions you will need to ask yourself and answer accurately before you can even begin working on a strategy to get related high-traffic sites to link to your content.

Select A Hot Topical Issue
Yet another direction to take is to select hot topical issues to write about. Especially where it is directly related to or deeply affecting the industry or topic you usually cover. Actually the idea here is that the more passionate people are about the issue, the better.

Then you have to be careful to write about it in a different and refreshing way. If for example you can look at the whole raging debate in new light, the better. Whatever you do, just remember that you cannot afford to bore you potential audience. This brings us to the next point.

Controversy Sells, Controversy Will Get You Links
For centuries offline newspapers have known this great secret to high sales. Controversy never fails to sell newspapers. In the same way that it sells really big on the newsstands, controversy can also get you plenty of links. There are numerous examples on the net to prove this. For instance controversial pictures have had the effect of getting thousands of links pointing at them literally overnight.

Admittedly, getting a controversial photo to post at your site or a controversial topic to write about is far from being an easy task. However the huge advantage you will have from this day on is that you will know exactly what you are looking for and therefore it will be a lot easier to find it when you always keep in mind what you are looking for. Whatever you are doing, which ever site you are visiting always keep the thought at the back of your mind that you are looking for something controversial to help you win links. If you do this for any length of time, then chances are pretty high that sooner or later you will get an idea.

Get Into The Conversation
It is really all about creativity and the powerful ideas that you can generate with the sole objective of coming up with the sort of content that can help you accumulate many precious links to your site within a relatively short period of time.

However your idea creation needs to be controlled so that you concentrate on your particular niche and other closely related niches that compliment yours. To be able to so this successfully, you will need to get into the conversation going on in your niche. At any given time they will be a certain discussion through comments left in blogs and discussion groups about some issue related to the industry in general. By monitoring the comments on the major blogs and also discussion groups and forums, you will be able to even participate in this conversation. This is important since it will give you the added confidence of writing your content.

Participating in these conversations also plays another very important role. And that is, it will enable you to test your ideas before you turn them into content.

Conclusion
When you create content with links in mind, it dramatically increases your chances of accumulating them. More so when you use the tips supplied in this article.

How to Write Results-Oriented Web Pages, Sales Letters, Ads, and Flyers

First, the bad news: There are dozens of ways you can go wrong in writing and designing (what you hope will be) an effective sales letter, web sales page, promotional flyer or ad.

Now the good news: The learning curve for getting it right is relatively short. Here are some key guidelines and pointers for getting noticed, generating interest, and persuading people to respond to your offer.

Create Visual Appeal

In a matter of seconds, your prospects will make a snap decision on whether or not they want to read your marketing message. If they have to strain or struggle in any way, they’re going to skip it. Avoid a cluttered, hard-to-read appearance by making generous use of white space, headlines, subheads, and text bullets. Use italics and ALL CAPS sparingly because, when used in excess, they can be hard on the eyes. For web pages and flyers, avoid too much large print (it looks amateurish), and be careful with your use of colored or textured backgrounds. If the background competes with the text or lacks contrast, the message will be too hard to read. And if you use 10 point text or smaller…well, let’s just hope you’re not targeting us aging baby boomers!

Writing Style Tips

After you’ve written the first draft, you can improve it by eliminating unnecessary or redundant words, breaking up long sentences, checking for spelling and grammar errors, adding impact with a few carefully chosen adjectives, and making sure each idea flows logically into the next. A conversational tone is usually much more appealing than a formal, stilted approach; and you should always gear the message to the intended audience. One of the big advantages of targeting your marketing to specific groups is that you can ‘talk their language’ and relate the message directly to their emotional and practical needs and wants.

Devices to Capture Attention and Arouse Interest

An effective sales message, whether it’s on a web page or 24-lb stationery, usually contains the following elements: a compelling headline, attention-catching sub-headlines, a bulleted list of features and benefits (with proof, whenever possible), a few intriguing questions, a deadline or incentive for responding promptly, a guarantee of satisfaction, a testimonial or endorsement, and a call for action (tell them exactly what and how you want them to respond: call, stop by, visit your website, or mail their order.) Words such as ‘no obligation’, ‘free trial’, and ‘convenient payment plans’ can also increase response levels. By the way, a ‘P.S.’ is a great place to put a reminder, a special offer, or an added incentive. People read them.

A Vital, Sometimes Overlooked Ingredient

One of the cornerstones of any effective marketing strategy is identifying and clearly communicating your Unique Selling Proposition or distinctive selling advantages. Make it clear why you’re better and offer more than the competition. Emphasize your competitive strengths as a business, an individual, or as the provider of high quality services or products. In today’s competitive marketplace, it’s essential to exceed customer expectations, find ways to lower sales resistance, and have a value-added approach to doing business.

Website design guidelines and tips - just common sense

Here are some design guidelines and tips to help you build a user friendly websites.

1. First, figure out what you want to do and make a plan for it. This may involves some brain storming. Then, translate your ideas and plans onto paper by drawing a diagram or a flowchart so that you can visualize it. Then, ACT on it.

2. Keep your design simple, clear, consistent and user friendly.

3. A simple design layout makes it easier for you to build your website. The end result will be a website which your visitors will find easy to navigate and easy get whatever information they want.

4. Your content should be simple, complete and direct to the point. It should make clear the intention of your web pages, cover the subject matter thoroughly and convey the messages direct to your visitors.

5. If your design look complicated - redesign and simplify it. Complicated design layout will not only make it harder for you to build your web pages, it may also confuses your visitors if your site is full of complicated mess of information.

6. Be consistent throughout in your design approach. The background, color usage and text format should be carefully chosen and the screen layout for all your pages visibly consistent.

7. Create a simple logo to identity your website. Have a captivating tag line somewhere with the header, and write an About Us page which describes the uniqueness of your website. These will leave an impression for your visitors to remember your website. Make a copyright statement at the bottom of you web pages.

8. Have a clear color scheme based on the theme of your website. Choose carefully a set of colors you use for your background, text, border, tables and cells etc. The color scheme expresses the characters of your website and makes it unique and attractive.

9. Identify who are your target visitors and how you would make your presentation. Decide the tone of language usage and the approach that will best suit your visitors. Whether your language usage should be casual and simple or formal and technical? Whether you should use pictorial or language oriented approach in your website.

10. For ease of reading, the length of a text lines should not exceed certain width within the computer screen. To limit the length of a line of text, use indent text or use a table with the pre-set width.

11. Long blocks of text passages can be tedious and strenuous to read. Try to use short sentences, short paragraphs and bulleted or numbered list form to break them up.

12. The width of you web pages should preferably not exceed that of the computer screen. People viewing your site usually don’t mind scrolling up and down the screen; but will be annoyed when they have to scroll left and right.

13. Font size: use larger size font; Bear in mind that some of your visitors may have poor eyesight; some may have partial impaired vision and some ordinary people who just can’t stand reading tiny script on the computer screen.

14. The text color should contrast well with the background color to be easily read. Likewise, Background image or texture chosen should contrast well with the text color, so that it is easy to read on screen.

15. It looks great on the screen and soothing to the eyes. But it is not recommended to use white text on a dark background. When somebody wants to print out your page for reference, it won't print because the background will not be printed; while the white text is printed on white paper, you see nothing.

16. The images you put in a web page are not there just for decoration. They should be relevant and necessary to use as visual to help to convey the message, or serve to break a long and monotonous text messages.

17. Limit the size of an image you insert in a web page. Large image takes longer time to display, and most visitors don’t like to wait too long to view a certain image.

18. Keep the size of a web page small so that it will open up fast - preferably less than 10 seconds. If the page is too long, have too many items to load and slow to display, you should consider breaking it into smaller pages and link them up.

19. Contents such as video, audio, flash animations etc. are huge in size. They will slow down the display of the page. If it takes too long for to load a page, the viewers might give up and leave. They also use up more of your bandwidth.

20. Ensure that the visitors get around navigating your website with ease. They should be able to find what they are looking for in quickly and get there. Use a menu or image map, a site map, arrows, links and buttons to provide direction to your visitors.

21. Make sure the pages are interlinked for easy navigation. Links should be well organized, strategically placed and easy to detect by using appropriate colors. Use anchor links to facilitate navigation on the same page. Always check for any broken links and fix them.

22. Load all the important and essential information in the first page that the visitors see. Give a quick introduction to your website with brief header, bookmarked lists, short summaries, etc. This will quickly let them know whether your page is what they are looking for.

23. Is your website screen layout look neat and tidy? Ask someone to have a look at it and get her feedback. You will be surprised!

24. The contents inside a table should have a little space between the borders. Set a padding around the table or set indent to your content.

25. Don’t simply add every neat gimmick and animated images you can find just because you think they are cool. In reality they are distracting and confusing.

26. Decide whether to use or not to use pop-up windows. They are great for catching the attention of the viewers; but can be distracting and annoying as well. Some viewers would dismiss pop-up as ads and close it immediately. Pop-up also will not work if the viewers have installed a pop-up blocker.

27. Encourage visitors to contact you by providing a Contact Us page with your email link. It is even better to have an opt-in box that serves to collect visitors’ contact and data.

28. Study other’s website design and set up. See how they layout and organize their header, links, menu, buttons, images and etc. Then choose, adopt and modify and whichever design to suit your needs.

29. Use website templates if you don't have any designing flair. It's easy and saves you time and effort.

30. Make a back-up copy for all your web pages. It will save you a lot of trouble in the event that you have to rebuild your websites.

Well, some website design guidelines and tips - It’s all common sense.

Does Your Website Work?

When was the last time you tried out all the parts of your website? Have gone clicking around your site to see what your customers are seeing? If you have answered ?yes? then good for you? but even if you have, have you looked on your own computer?

A friend of mine is a web designer and if you go into her home office your jaw would drop? you?d think you just stepped into a spaceship. She has several screen and several computers running at once. I asked her what all the computers were for. As a high end website designer, she wants to make sure that her customer?s websites look good for everyone viewing the site, whether they are viewing it on a small screen or a large screen. She?ll create a website then view it from different monitors to see how it looks? then she?ll make adjustments accordingly.

Now, I?m not suggesting that you rush out and buy yourself several monitors to do that job, but there are things you can do.

First, make sure that all of your links are live. Make it a goal of yours to click through your site once a week to make sure the links are live. Of course, if you never change your site and all of the links are internal, then you don?t need to do it that often. However, if you change your site periodically and you link to other sites, your links could drop so easily! Check to make sure they?re still working.

Second, have friends or family browse your site periodically. I have one friend who emails me every time he changes his site and asks me to check it out. (Please don?t email your sites for the same reason? my time is limited! Instead, get some trusted friends or family to view your sites). Have them give you honest feedback. If you?re concerned that they will be too nice, put together a checklist where they have to rank various aspects of your site on a scale of 1 to 5.

Third, watch your metrics very closely. If you have 5 steps between your first page and the final purchase confirmation button, what do you notice about the people visiting each page? You can expect most of your visitors to see the first page? then a proportionately fewer number visit the next page? then a proportionately fewer number visit the third page? etc. I can?t give you an exact number, of course, but you should see similar numbers each month and they should be proportionate. If you lose 25% of your viewers from the first page to the second, and 25% of those from the second to the third, and 25% of those from the third to the fourth, and 50% of those from the fourth to the fifth, there?s a good chance that something on the fifth page is driving them away. Identify what it is and fix it.

Fourth, consider a quick customer service survey. You might want to email customers a survey after they have purchased something or perhaps you can build into your site a quick customer service survey just before the purchase confirmation page. If you have to, consider offering a coupon to customers for the completion of the survey.

Your website may load well and look good on your computer, but the reason could be that your site was designed FOR your computer. If you check it out on other computers and go through the 4 steps above, you?ll improve the chances that your website will work for other people no matter how they?re viewing it.

Are Your Providing Readers With Effective Web Content?

Effective web content is vital when it comes to promoting your business to prospective customers. Your readers need to understand your message if you hope to increase your sales.

The overall success of your online business is more than just marketing, it’s about making sales. Marketing is the number one tool that will draw visitors to your website, but it’s what they will find on your site that will ultimately determine whether or not you make a sale.

Effective web content is part of the process that will turn visitors into customers; first time customers into repeat customers; and repeat customers to spread the word and create new customers.

The web content you need to feature on your site is as follows:

Clear details about the product and/or services you are selling
-Information on how the products work
-What they feature
- How they can benefit the user
- How to order (what type of payments)
- etc.
Information about you and your company
- Who you are (IE expertise, etc.)
- When you started your company and its success
- Etc.
Contact information/customer service
- all the different ways customers can contact you.

While the webcontent on your site may also include an F.A.Q page, blogs, etc., the above three elements are a must.

The best way to go about creating effective web content that will attract attention and gain the interest and trust of prospective clients is to:

Create a theme – people like things that are simple and they can follow. Therefore create a website theme that is easy to navigate and features:

Colors – Choose two or three colors, and use these colors as your background and for every webpage. Make sure the colors compliment each other, such as blue and orange or violet and yellow. You can use different shade and hues, just pick something that is easy on the eyes and is a good representation of your business.

Font - You will also want to make sure that your webcontent is written in a font type and size that is inviting and easy to read. Forget the loopy fonts, or really small print. Space out your paragraphs and use short sentences. The last thing you want is to intimidate your customers with an onslaught of words.

In addition, try to break up the web content with pictures or other graphics to keep your website theme looking unique, friendly and professional.

Keep web content relevant – Everything you write should be related to your business. You don’t want to make the mistake of confusing or boring the reader with long winded sentences or a puff piece. Your readers must understand what you are talking about so make sure you spell check, grammar check and edit everything you post on your site.

Furthermore, visitors want to know what you are selling and who you are. Therefore, make sure you provide them with the web content details they want to know. This means giving valuable information about the product and not sounding like an infomercial.

Be original – How many online businesses do you think are out there on the web? If you guessed hundreds of millions you’d be right! So what determines the success of one website over another? Originality!

To be original you need to provide visitors with unique webcontent, so brush of the dust from your thesaurus and put it to good use.

Originality is also about using your own thoughts and words instead of someone else’s. Talk to your visitors as you would a close friend. The more “real” you are with your web content, the more your customers will come to trust you.

Hire help – If you don’t have the writing skills to create effective web content, or are writing in your second language, you may want to hire the skills of a professional ghost writer. These individuals are skilled at writing, and can transform your thoughts and ideas to create engaging webcontent.

Effective web content will mean all of the difference to your sales. Don’t underestimate the power of words. They are the most important part of your website and are how you win over prospective customers.

Technology & E-Business Expansion: Website Strategies That Will Take Your Business To The Next Level

Many companies agree that a website is a very strong sales vehicle resulting in increased sales. However, after investing a substantial amount of money in building an elaborate Website, the disappointment settles in when they begin to realize that their website does not produce the results they hoped for, and that it does not match their needs and expectations. What people fail to realize is the fact that having a beautiful Website does not guarantee an increase in sales, and will not improve efficiency or customer relationship management effectiveness. Yes, I will agree you must have an attractive, professional looking website, otherwise you will immediately lose credibility with your prospects. However, your website also needs to be:

1. Informative – Your website must speak to your prospect’s needs, wants, desires, and address their concerns. If your website is not informative, and if it does not sell to your prospects, then you are dramatically reducing your chances of closing the sale.

2. Traffic directive – Your website should lead clients easily through the sales funnel. If you do not have an easy navigation system, and if your sales prospects are getting lost – they will easily become frustrated. Frustrated prospects do not become happy customers.

3. Marketable – Sales are rarely completed upon the first introduction, whether it is in person, over the phone or on the Internet. You have to gain your prospect’s attention and keep their attention. If you go to http://www.smcdata.com, you will notice that I continually update my site, and add new articles and case studies to entice prospects to visit my website often. You may want to add an e-newsletter, or a special report, or offer a free e-Book, or e-Course as a lead generating strategy to capture your prospect’s contact information. Once you have their information, you can then email them or snail mail them, or make follow up phone calls that will eventually close the sale.

A Fourth Factor That Is Frequently Overlooked

Not meeting the goals mentioned in the above paragraphs, can lead to not achieving the results anticipated. But a successfully designed and marketed Website that results in a substantial sales increase can also create business disruption when the e-commerce system is not integrated in “real time” to the “back office” system.

For example, I recently received an inquiry about our ERP software solution from the president of a small fastening company who had read my previous article “how to choose the right software for your company” which was published in a popular trade magazine. When speaking with her, she told me that she recently “turned off” her website despite the fact it was extremely successful in producing a substantial amount of new sales. The reason for “turning off” the website was that the “back office” system did not produce the proper inventory status information.

Not having this data resulted in severe business disruptions. Realizing that she would lose customers and her company’s high rating on the web, the president decided to “turn off” the website until she could find suitable new “back office” software for her company. As a result of the high level of stress created by the business disruptions, many of her staff members decided to leave the company, increasing her business disruptions.

Another Example Of How A So-Called Successful Website Can Create Unnecessary Business Disruptions:

Recently, three presidents of very successful electronics e-commerce companies told me they have excellent e-business retail stores that enabled them to grow their businesses substantially. When I asked them how good their inventory control is in the warehouse, they all admitted that this was one area that required great improvement as:

1. Misplaced inventory was “collecting dust” and was not found until the next physical count took place in the warehouse. Quite often, when the misplaced inventory when found, it was obsolete. The inventory that could have been sold became excess inventory since new inventory was ordered while it was misplaced.

2. Incorrect shipments resulted in a high rate of returns, and double freight bills.

3. Credit issued for returned inventory resulted in additional workload for the accounting department results in the loss of vendor early payment discounts.

Make Your Website A Success With An Integrated Computer System

While selling on the Web can be a very powerful tool, as you can see, it can also be a “double-edged sword” resulting in severe business disruptions. With an integrated computer system, the Web, the “back office, and the warehouse information will be updated in a “real time” mode without the danger of data being corrupted or lost. An automated warehouse will insure shipment accuracy, prevent inventory from being misplaced, and the company Website will always reflect an accurate count of the inventory available in the warehouse. This will your company’s customer relationship management effectiveness and encourage customers to become recurring clients.

If your website is attractive, informative, marketable, and if it has traffic direction and a integrated computer system in place, it will then enable your company to go to the “next level.” You will then only be limited by your imagination and your budget. The question is, “What is your destination?”

Building Your Website

There are a few things to consider when building your own website. If you don’t know anything about web design, you will need to hire someone to build and design it the way you want it. You want to use a dependable source so you are not wasting your time and money. Choosing your domain name very wisely; make sure it is short, relevant to your site, and memorable. A popular site you where you can check what domains are available is www.whois.sc. You can see who owns a domain you maybe interested in. If the owner is not using the domain, you can offer to purchase it from them.

Choosing a very good web host is one of the most important factors in setting up and maintaining an internet company. If your website crashes, you’re now out of business. You want a web hosting company that have secure server capabilities, fast servers, lots of space, web-based administration, access to raw server logs, full email services, power and daily server backups, unrestricted CGI access, SSH and FTP access, and no minimum contracts. You should test their technical support and find out if they offer services, scripts, and software. Find out about their downtime and how long they have been in business. Make sure they are not charging you for the extra services.

When a customer visits your website, you want them to see professionalism, knowledge and fast connections. If your visitors notice ads from your free or low cost web host server on your website, they may see your site as unprofessional and small time. A web host with slow connection speeds will definitely lose customers and cost you a lot of money. Make sure you choose your web host server very carefully and you will be on your way to creating a website that will attract lots of visitors.

Nine Advance Networking Skills for Seasoned Networkers

A seasoned networker knows the real meaning of networking -- being organized, efficient, effective, and, of course, work the event to its fullest. Attending networking groups after so many years can tire and drain anyone’s excitement. Especially since these situations are not social events. It is easy to have one foot in the event and the other some place else. A major challenge for all networkers is to be there with both feet.

What propels someone to advance networker? Is it the number of events or the number of years they attend? No. Is it the delicate balance and expertise on how they work the event? Yes.

Here are nine techniques that raise networkers skill level:

1. Business cards. If you are networking for a new job or career, there is nothing inappropriate about having a business card with a tag line of what type of job or company you are seeking.

Basic networkers learn that wearing an outfit with two pockets is important for the business card shuffle. Advance networkers think of those pockets as their in-box and an out-boxes.

Aware networkers hand business card exchanges differently. They don't ask for the card until they know something about the person’s functionality and there is a match. No match, no card. When you receive someone’s card; receive it gently with both hands, stop and read it. This shows respect. Respect to who they are and what they do.

Present your card exactly the same way you receive a card. Present with both hands and the card’s information facing the receiver. Extend your card, with eye contact, and wait for them to receive the card. To present and receive in this manner, both hands need to be free.

Keep a pen handy, in the out-box pocket with your own cards, for writing tidbits on the back. Doing so is also a physical queue that is your pocket in case you forget. In- box, left pocket, is for other’s cards. If you are left- handed, the boxes are opposite.

Never apologize for your business card. At the last six events I attended, there were at least four people that were apologizing for either not having a business card, or for some error on their card. When this occurs you have zapped your personal power. It sends a signal that you aren't ready to do business. Even quickie inkjet business cards and better than an excuse.

If you don't have any business cards or ran out, I recommend skipping events until you do. Don't say you don't have a card, use this other technique: ask if you can call them and schedule the time then. Advance networkers are ready to schedule an appointment right then. Generally seasoned networkers toss any business card if presented with an excuse.

2. Brochures, samples or flyers. If you need to hold any of these use an appropriate see-through sleeve or small see- through carrier. For flyers use a clear sleeve with an in and out business card holders on the front. This keeps handouts clean and safe. People don't appreciate receiving paper with bent edges or ragged rims. If you write articles, bring your latest and appropriate copy for handouts. One handout per event is appropriate.

3. Eye contact depends on the culture. I'm speaking here for the American culture. Make eye contact, both eyes, when presenting your business card or receiving theirs. Make eye contact when shaking hands. And look at them, not their hands. Honor the person by maintaining focused eye contact on them.

Seasoned networkers know if you are right handed, the name tag is placed on the right. This allows the name to appear in visual perimeter when shaking hands. If the name tag is on the left, others assume you are left handed and will present their other hand accordingly.

During your 30 seconds, advanced networkers don't begin or continue speaking as they stand or return to their seat. They breathe from their stomach and slowly look around the room before speaking to gain audience attention and allow people to switch to listening mode.

4. It is not important to meet everyone in the room. Use the time efficiently to meet only those that match your intention. Seasoned networkers know when and how to break- off the contact to keep moving. They do so smoothly.

If you know others in the room, seasoned networkers know how to hand the other person off to the next person. "Jill, let me introduce you to Sandy. Sandy, Jill. Please excuse me while you two get to know each other." Another way to politely move on is by saying, "Thank you, I've enjoyed talking with you. I know we're both here to meet other people. So, let’s do so."

5. Come ready to sell (one of my pet peeves). People bring an event flyer with a call to action to register at a website or mail a check. You just lost the sale. Be ready, accept cash, check or credit card payment. Generally people don't carry more than $20 and prefer to use their credit or debit cards. Give people an incentive for registering at the event. Ask for a commitment. Flyers that require a visit to a website or to mail a check almost always get trashed. You can see them piled in the events trash can.

If you're not ready to get orders, omit it. If you are an author, bring your books and sell them. Autograph the book. Ask if they want to purchase a copy for a client or friend.

When people don't accept credit cards, it tells me they are new and aren't ready to sell. It can also say that the event will have little attendance. People hate to show up at events with little attendance.

6. Let go of the multi-tasking ladies. Eat first and then network. People generally don't want to interrupt someone when they are eating. Use a purse that doesn't slide off the should ever few minutes, it’s distracting. You may want not to take a purse or use it to hold the material in plastic sleeves.

7. Introducing yourself, title vs. functionality. Which is more important to the person you are talking to -- your title or what functions you can help them with. Yep, the latter. Instead of saying, "I'm a tax preparer" say, "I help people save money on their taxes". Instead of saying, "I'm a business coach" give a WIIFM. Here’s one of mine: "One of my specialties is to help service professionals create a short business plan in less than an hour that says everything they need to stay focused for the coming year."

Be careful of your tone, pace, and breathing when you talk. People don't naturally tune into what you are saying until the third or fourth word. The example above, "One of my... doesn't say anything important until "service professionals". Name presentation is the same. I say, Catherine Franz, slowly and then repeat my first name: "Catherine with a C". Generally, when people are nervous, they forget to breath before speaking. Then the information erupts like a volcano. Most of it as inaudible.

8. Less than ½ % of 1% of unseasoned networkers follow-up. That is a sad statistic, and loss of opportunity. Recently, after five events and tagging 40 business cards, only four followed up. I called four, said I wanted to place an order, and still no response. When we met up again, they apologized for being too busy. Oops, I went somewhere else. Stop the excuses, no wants to hear them.

On another similar note, don't promise to follow-up and don't. It shoots down your credibility. If you are one of these, please note, when this occurs, people many times take it personally.

Follow-up within 24 business hours. Your follow-up displays your level of commitment to relationships. The way you follow-up, e-mail or phone, measures how much you want a relationship.

9. Prepare for the event. Bring any promised items. For morning events, prepare the day before. Arrive early. Early bird gets the worm. Freshen up, walk in relaxed, breathing correctly, standing tall, and ready. Bring samples, product specials of the month to sell. If its hand cream, use it and pass it around the room. Author of a new book, read a paragraph that gets them curious during your 30 seconds, and bring copies for people to purchase.

Relationship Networking

What is Relationship Networking?

Relationship networking is simply the art of meeting people and benefiting from those relationships. Often the benefit of these relationship is to obtain information and leads to further grow your business. Any successful relationship, whether a personal or a business relationship, is unique to every pair of individuals, and it evolves over time. Effective relationship networking is all about building those relationships and maintaining long lasting connections with other professionals.

The Internet is an excellent vehicle for networking. Relationships can develop in newsgroups, forums, and via email. Though nothing really beats good old-fashioned face-to-face networking to start the process of building a relationship and trust, which is why industry conferences can be so important.

Not all contacts will be useful or worth pursuing. There will be leads that don't provide much information. Use your judgment on whether the information and relationship is worth spending more time on.

Relationship networking opens new doors, often it's "who you know, not necessarily what you know".

Tip to Build Network Relationships:

1. Provide genuine assistance to others.
2. Be open-minded.
3. Remember personal details.
4. Respect cultural differences.
5. Research people and companies. Know their goals and interests.
6. Reciprocate.
7. Introductions.


Where to Network:

So many people wear multiple hats; everyone and anyone could possibly be a networking opportunity. However, just like targeted search engine traffic, the more targeted the networking the higher the chance of success. 'Targeted' networking offers the most potential.

1. Trade associations or industry specific organization.
2. Trade shows.
3. Friends.
4. Schools.
5. Focused newsgroups and topic specific forums.
6. Customers.
7. Suppliers.
8. User groups.


Constantly refine and grow your network of relationships, as they are valuable and need cultivating. If you are perceived as someone who is only trying to get something your network will likely not increase. Networking is about building relationships and mutual interaction benefiting both parties. Share information and help others grow their businesses.

In many ways relationship networking and partnering overlap, and on some occasion's relationship networking will lead to synergistic partnering.

Partnering

Partnering is an attractive flexible way for companies to develop new markets and additional revenue. Working together, partners can combine strengths in critical areas. Often a larger well-known vendor provides small vendors with credibility, while the smaller vendor contributes specific industry knowledge unknown to the larger vendor. Synergistic relationships come in all shapes and sizes, but the best relationships and partnerships are the ones that benefit everyone. Partnering is a good way of tapping into related customer bases. Often the partners complement each other in such a way that they can provide a combined solution that neither partner could deliver alone.

Expectations

In order for a relationship to work you must have a clear understanding of both your companies and product(s) strengths and weaknesses. By being aware of any deficiencies, you will find partners with strengths in the areas of your weaknesses.

1. Know what you have to offer.
2. Know what you are looking for.
3. Don't waste yours and your potential partner's time.


Different relationships/partnering that works:

1. Product bundling.
2. Newsletter exchanges.
3. Integrations.
4. Link exchanges.
5. Technology or knowledge exchange.
6. Revenue share.
7. Ad exchange.


Win/Win

Only when each partner is successful can the partnership itself claim success. Partnerships are genuinely a win-win. Developers, who master the art of strategic partnering and relationship networking, will obtain long-term profitability and success.

Final Tips

1.) Qualify sources.
2.) Adage - you are who you hang with.
3.) Not every relationship is a good one.
4.) Evaluate potential partners.
5.) Make it personal by taking the time to say thank you.
6.) Results are not always immediate.
7.) Carry business cards everywhere you go.


Being proactive and following up, you can have a network of contacts that you will be able to access quickly when you need them. Whether by more traditional means, such as in person or over the Internet, personal networks are essential for furthering your business. Relationship networking is give and take, be sure to help others in your quest for help.

7 Tips on How To Prepare for Business Events

Are you scratching your head after business events wondering why you aren't finding prospects? Whether it’s your first or 100th event, here are some tips on how to prepare for your next event that can make the difference between scratching and smiling. These tips will help you save time, money, create memorable impressions, and increase connections.

1. Know your intention. Why are you attending? Listen to your self-truth. Are you attending to refine your skills, build relationships, make sales, or need to just get away from the office? Intentions work best when they are limited to one. The limitation clarifies and directions all your actions. When there are multiple intentions, you begin with confusion and convey the same to all at the function.

Does your intention match the type of event? If it’s a Christmas party and your intention is to generate sales, there isn't a match. You don't want to give a negative first impression; they take too long to change. If you aren't sure what types attend the event, contact the event manager, and ask or use of the theme as your answer.

What does your business need? Maybe you need a referral, are looking for a new employees, or accountant, or image consultant. A need can be a secondary or first intention. If you decide to include a need into the equation, make sure you know what that need is, how to present it and to whom. After you ask, what is the next step? Clarity is necessary for success. You job is to be ready for when it appears.

Are you ready for the sale? I've met many people who want sales but aren't ready for the orders. If someone says yes at the event, are you ready with the next step? If not, reconsider your attendance. It is better investment to focus your time on finishing the preparation. A first impression of not knowing what you are doing isn't a good impression to give.

2. Continuing with the topic of needs...what are your short-term, medium-term, and long-term needs now? If you are seeking short-term funds and the event is about building relationships, medium to long-term, then it might be wise to pass it up for now and pursue endeavors that match.

For a new business, short-term is three months or less, medium-term from four or six to eight months, and long-term is anything over that. Short-term projects usually match short-term funds, and so on. It’s like buying food and paying for it over a six-month period when the food only lasts 30 days. You are buying apples to pay off with oranges, and the two never mix well.

If there is a mixture, do you have something available to sell that will generate short-term funds? For coaches, whose prices do not fall into the short-term attraction range, selling coaching with the thought that it makes short-term funds is a mix match. Coaching falls into medium-term and long-term and seldom short-term unless your name is very recognizable.

3. It takes three contacts before people are aware that you exist. It doesn't matter if this is in person, an ad, or three ezines. What three do you use to create awareness for yourself? This is why the 60-second elevator speech is important. Yet, by itself, it’s too lonely. Shaking hands and carrying on a discussion is another but that is still shy of three. If you write Internet articles, bring copies to the event. Don't place the articles on the general table, personally hand them out so people can connect the two.

4. Rehearse don't practice. Create a list of 10 opening questions, choose a few at a time from that list, and rehearse them with colleagues, friends, or family. Rehearsing is interacting with live people and is closer to what you will actually be doing. Practicing into a tape recorder is the next best thing because it allows you to hear the voice others will hear. If that makes you twinge, then maybe that is exactly what others are feeling as well. Work with a voice coach to refine your tone.

Here are ten story-opening questions to get your started.
Pull from these and then create your own.
(1) What do you enjoy most about what you're doing?
(2) What is the strangest (or funniest) incident you've experienced in your business?
(3) What marketing have you found most effective in your business or industry?
(4) What is your key product (or service)?
(5) What do people like best about working with you?
(6) What is your number one need at the moment?
(7) What do you like most about coming here? If it’s their first time, "What do they like most about the event thus far?"
(8)What business trends do you see affecting you right now (or next year)?
(9) If I had an ideal customer of yours in front of me right now, describe them.
(10) How do you see this event helping you in your business?

Know what actions you want to occur and what are their triggers. Rehearse until smooth, not strained. Are you going to ask them to become a subscriber for your newsletter? Visit your website? Sign up for a workshop? Set up a time for coffee? You will most likely have several calls to action, limit them to five, and never request more than one per person per event. Otherwise, you will come across as too pushy or confuse your listener.

Ask attendees to join you in the next step. "Ask and you shall receive." Ask if they are interested in having a call together. Ask if they would like to be a subscriber and mention the main benefit people tell you why they enjoy receiving it. Ask if they would like to register for your workshop. If they answer anything other than yes, they aren't interest, it’s important to just move on. Never, never, never, promise to call and don't. The label will follow you.

5. Differentiate yourself from others in similar professionals. Even twins have differences. Leave the humbleness at home. How are you different from others in the same profession or selling the same type of product? Can you explain the differences in 2 minutes during any introduction if needed? Any longer and the listener zones out because the conversation is no longer about them.

Due to its importance, let me repeat this. If you don't know what you're selling, how you are different, or have a clear direction on your current prospect needs, then you aren't ready to attend any events yet. Spend the time defining these first.

6. A memorable moment includes several items. One of the items is your personal style. You can accomplish this in your selection of clothing, tone, or language. You can wear scarves or ties with themes, a comment-getting pin, hats, and the same color in shirts or shoes. I knew a man who always wore cowboy boots. He had a wide collection, they matched his accent, and people could spot him across the room. Did his style increase business? You bet. Create a style and treat it like your trademark or calling card.

7. Know what you're marketing strategy for attending this event -- all seven steps. What happens after yes, after they become a subscriber, or any other call to action you have? Always have the next step planned no matter which direction the conversation goes.

Be the leader and they will follow. Be the leader, inside and then out.

You Bored Me at Hello - Top Three Strategies for Networking Your Brand

"You had me at hello," those famous words from the movie Jerry McGuire let Tom Cruise know that Rene Zellweger's character was hooked from that point and the rest of his talking was unnecessary. When in networking situations, many small business owners leave people with a slightly different feeling. If questioned for the truth, what would likely be said is, "you bored me at hello!" That is definitely not a great way to grow your business into a powerful name brand. Networking works, but not if you leave your prospects bored.

Networking opportunities are everywhere. You can find them at Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau events, not to mention when you are in line at the grocery store. There are even groups of people who regularly meet solely for the purpose of networking. Unfortunately, all of the networking opportunities in the world will not help grow your business unless people remember you and your company after you are gone.

Here are three strategies to avoid boring people during your next networking opportunity:

1) Gone in Thirty-Seconds - Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Any longer than thirty seconds for your "elevator speech" and you will be tuned out. People cannot sit through a thirty-second commercial without changing the channel on the television. Your business will be treated the same way. They will start thinking about what they need to pick up on the way home or other random thoughts. Many times, they are simply waiting for you to stop talking so they can try to sell you on their business. Your brand message must be short, simple and to the point. If you ramble too much, the person will start feeling like Charlie Brown in school - "wahwah, wah wah wah," "yes ma'am."

2) Red or Black - Pick a color. Roulette gives you the option of betting on red or black. If you bet red, you win when it hits on any red number. Winning is good. If it hits on any black number, you lose. Losing is not so good. However, when you "hedge" and bet on red and black together you are guaranteed to not win. In a networking situation, limit what you talk about. Sure, you are risking leaving out something the prospect would like to hear. However, unless you get lucky and mention it first, the odds are that you will lose their attention by then anyway. Limit the scope of your brand, or say everything and be remembered for nothing.

3) Listen - That's right, you are remembered more when you listen. Most of us go through our day fighting to be heard. It feels really good to be acknowledged and understood. So good that we automatically think highly of the person listening to us. Listening demonstrates that you value the person talking. Sincerely listen to what the other person has to say and they will leave with high regard for you and your business.

There ya have it, networking success as simple as 1, 2, 3! Follow all three strategies and you are sure to notice a sharp improvement in your networking. Before you know it, you will leave your future clients saying "you sold me at hello!" Now, those types of responses build a powerful brand!

Network Security 101

As more people are logging onto the Internet everyday, Network Security becomes a larger issue. In the United States, identity theft and computer fraud are among the fastest rising crimes. It is important to protect your network and ensure the safety of all computers and users in that network.

What is a Network?

In order to fully understand network security, one must first understand what exactly a network is. A network is a group of computers that are connected. Computers can be connected in a variety of ways. Some of these ways include a USB port, phone line connection, Ethernet connection, or a wireless connection. The Internet is basically a network of networks. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is also a network. When a computer connects to the internet, it joins the ISP’s network which is joined with a variety of other networks, which are joined with even more networks, and so on. These networks all encompass the Internet. The vast amount of computers on the Internet, and the number of ISPs and large networks makes network security a must.

Common Network Security Breeches

Hackers often try to hack into vulnerable networks. Hackers use a variety of different attacks to cripple a network. Whether you have a home network or a LAN, it is important to know how hackers will attack a network.

One common way for a hacker to wreak havoc is to achieve access to things that ordinary users shouldn’t have access to. In any network, administrators have the ability to make certain parts of the network “unauthorized access.” If a hacker is able to gain access to a protected area of the network, he or she can possibly affect all of the computers on the network. Some hackers attempt to break into certain networks and release viruses that affect all of the computers in the network. Some hackers can also view information that they are not supposed to see.

Destructive Attacks

There are two major categories for destructive attacks to a network. Data Diddling is the first attack. It usually is not immediately apparent that something is wrong with your computer when it has been subjected to a data diddler. Data diddlers will generally change numbers or files slightly, and the damage becomes apparent much later. Once a problem is discovered, it can be very difficult to trust any of your previous data because the culprit could have potentially fooled with many different documents.

The second type of data destruction is outright deletion. Some hackers will simply hack into a computer and delete essential files. This inevitably causes major problems for any business and can even lead to a computer being deemed useless. Hackers can rip operating systems apart and cause terrible problems to a network or a computer.

The Importance of Network Security

Knowing how destructive hackers can be shows you the importance of Network Security. Most networks have firewalls enabled that block hackers and viruses. Having anti-virus software on all computers in a network is a must. In a network, all of the computers are connected, so that if one computer gets a virus, all of the other computers can be adversely affected by this same virus. Any network administrator should have all of the essential files on back up disks. If a file is deleted by a hacker, but you have it on back up, then there is no issue. When files are lost forever, major problems ensue. Network security is an important thing for a business, or a home. Hackers try to make people’s lives difficult, but if you are ready for them, your network will be safe.

Small Business Networking to Get More Clients and Market Professional Services

It’s possible that—like the thought of marketing and sales—the thought of networking may make you cringe. When most service professionals hear the word “networking,” they think of the old school business mentality of promotional networking at meet-and-greet events where everyone is there to schmooze and manipulate one another in an attempt to gain some advantage for themselves or their business.

Who wouldn’t cringe at the thought of spending an hour or two exchanging banalities and sales pitches with a phony smile plastered on your face to hide your discomfort? If it feels uncomfortable, self-serving, and deceptive, chances are all those business cards you collected will end up in a drawer of your desk never to be seen again because you’ll so dread following up that you’ll procrastinate until they’re forgotten.

Take heart! There is good news! It doesn’t have to be that way! The Book Yourself Solid Small Business Networking Strategy operates from an entirely different perspective; it’s all about connecting and sharing with others. All that’s necessary is to shift your perspective from one of scarcity and fear to one of abundance and love. With the Book Yourself Solid Networking Strategy, the focus is on sincerely and freely giving and sharing, and by doing so, building and deepening mutually beneficial relationships with others. It’s all about making lasting connections.

Networking Events for Small Business Owners—What To Do—If You Want More Clients

Do arrive on time—This is not the time to stage a grand entrance by being fashionably late or to tell any stories about why you’re late. Nobody cares. If you’re late and it’s noticed, apologize and leave it at that.

Do relax and be yourself—Contrary to conventional wisdom, you don’t have to fit in. It may sound trite, but be yourself, unless when you’re being yourself you end the evening with your tie wrapped around your head doing a nose dive into the shrimp salad. But seriously, people want to meet the person who is out in front, who is writing the rules and taking the lead, not the one who is following the pack. So don’t be afraid to be fully self-expressed. If you are you’ll be more memorable.

Do smile and be friendly—Both men and women may worry that smiling too big will be construed as some sort of a come-on or that they’re desperate for attention. This fear of being misunderstood will hold you back. Let it go! Better to err on the side of a big, friendly smile than to be considered unfriendly or standoffish.

Do focus on giving—If your focus is on giving of yourself, you’re going to get returns in spades. If you focus on what you can get, you will be much less successful.

Do prepare for the event—Learn the names of the organizers and some of the key players. Identify what and how you can share with others at the function: who you know (without being a name dropper), what you know (without being a know-it-all), and what you can share from your heart (without making assumptions) with the people who will be at this particular event. You never know what might change someone’s life.

Do introduce yourself to the person hosting the event—This person may be a very valuable addition to your network. Never forget to say, “Thank you.”

Do introduce yourself to the big-wig—If there’s someone you want to meet at a big seminar or event, someone famous in your industry, do you go up to them and say, “Here’s what I do and here’s my business card”? No! You start by offering praise. You say, “I just want to tell you your work had a great effect on me,” or “Your work inspired me to do this or that.” Then the next time you are at the same event you might say, “I would just love to hold your coffee cup.” Meaning, “I would love to assist you in some way that would add value to your life or work.” She may say, “I don’t think so,” but what have you got to lose? Then again, she may respond by saying, “Yeah, you seem like a really genuine and considerate person. I’ve got some stuff you can do.” Don’t forget that successful and busy people always have more on their plate than they can reasonably handle. They’re always looking for talented people to help make their life easier. If you can help reduce someone’s stress level, you’ve made a friend for life.

Do offer something when first meeting someone, whenever possible—Offer praise (as in the above example), compassion, or a connection. When you can say, “I know someone you’ve got to meet,” or “There’s a great book I think may offer the solution to your problem,” they are going to see you very differently than the person who shoved a business card in their face and said, “Let’s stay in touch, dude.” If you can leave them feeling even better, more uplifted, and energized after their interaction with you, they’re going to remember you.

Do start conversations by asking questions—This is a great approach, especially if you’re nervous. It takes the spotlight off of you and allows the other person to shine. It allows you to learn something new at the same time.

Do identify two or three things you’d like to learn from the people at the function—People are drawn to others who are curious and interested.

Do make eye contact—It expresses respect and interest in the person you’re speaking with. And stay focused on the person you’re speaking with. If you’re speaking with me, but you’re eyes are constantly scanning the room for someone more important or relevant to you, don’t you think it might make me feel unappreciated?

Do wear comfortable clothing—If you’re constantly fidgeting or worrying about how you look in clothes that aren’t comfortable or don’t fit properly, you’ll be self-conscious and others will sense it.

Do take the initiative—Go up to people and make friends. People love to be asked about themselves, their hobbies, or their family. This is the time to get to know a few personal tidbits that will give you the opportunity to find a common interest that makes connecting easier and more natural.

Do offer a firm handshake—Hold your drink in your left hand. This eliminates the need to wipe your damp hand on your slacks before shaking hands. And, guys, don’t think you need to shake hands differently with a woman than you do with a man. A firm handshake (not a death grip) is always appropriate.

Do be inclusive—Ask others to join your conversations; this is very important. Don’t monopolize people, especially those who are in high demand, like the speaker from the event. It makes the speaker uncomfortable. Remember, they’re there to meet lots of people too. It also annoys others who want to meet the person you’re trying to keep to yourself. Tip: if you want to help, ask the speaker if there is anybody you can introduce her to, or simply be sure to keep including people in your conversations with her. This way, you’ll be seen as a very generous and open person by the others at the event, and the speaker will remember you as someone who helped them easily network and navigate the event.

Do ask for a business card and then keep in touch—It’s your responsibility to ask for a card if you want one, and it’s your responsibility to follow up. Quality not quantity counts when making genuine personal connections. If you race through an event passing out and collecting business cards from anyone and everyone as though there were a prize for the most cards gained at the end of the event, you’ll do yourself a huge disservice. And remember, just because someone gives you their business card does not mean you have permission to add them to your mailing list or e-zine list. You do not. You can certainly send a personal email as a follow up, and you should, but you should not and cannot add them to your list. You don’t have permission to do so. This is a pet peeve of mine. I feel that 25 percent of the time I’m asked for my business card at a conference, I end up on another newsletter list. Not cool.

Do have a pen with you always—When you receive a business card, write a little note about any commitment to follow up, what you talked about, any personal bits or unusual things that will help you to remember the person and to personalize future contact, and be sure to include the date and name of the function where you met.

Networking Events for Small Business Owners—What Not To Do—If You Want More Clients

Don’t try to be cool—And don’t over compensate for your nervousness by bragging about your success; this is a major turn-off.

Don’t let “What do you do?” be the first question you ask—Let it come up naturally in conversation.

Don’t sit with people you know for the majority of the event—While it may be more comfortable to sit with the people you know, it becomes too easy to stay with them, and if you do, you’ll defeat the purpose of being there. Step out of your comfort zone and get to know new people.

Don’t juggle multiple items—Travel light to eliminate the necessity of juggling your coat, purse, briefcase, drink, or buffet plate. Keep that right hand free for handshakes and for jotting down quick notes on any business cards.

Don’t complain about networking or the event you’re attending—Don’t complain about anything—period. The cycle of complaining is easy to get drawn into, especially at events where almost everyone is a bit uncomfortable. While complaining is an ice breaker, it’s not an attractive one. Change the subject—for example, “Have you tried the shrimp?” or take the opportunity to recommend this great book, Book Yourself Solid, and how it’s transformed the way you think about networking events.

Don’t take yourself too seriously—Remember to relax and have fun. We’re all just people.

You Are Always Networking and Marketing Your Small Business and Professional Services

Your profits will come from connections with people who can send you business. Whether that’s by way of a satisfied client who refers others to you; or another professional who has the ability to book you for speaking engagements, write about you, or partner with you; or the manager at the video store who appreciates your big, friendly smile each weekend and the recommendation for a great baby-sitter you made when he desperately needed one.

With the Book Yourself Solid Small Business Networking Strategy, the prospect of creating a phenomenal network of connections doesn’t have to be overwhelming or intimidating. We all network constantly, with everyone, every day. Now we just need to do it consciously, with greater awareness, until doing so becomes a natural and comfortable part of our daily lives.

Then follow-up. Keep in touch. It is imperative that you get every one of your connections into your database and act on each connection. If the contact isn’t in your database or you don’t take the action necessary to keep in touch, your networking is pointless. Have some form of this database with you at all times—PDA, planner, personal address book—so you can instantly connect others rather than having to get back to them.

Writing An Effective, Profit Producing Ad

One of the biggest challenges for most Internet Marketers is writing effective ad copy. This is hardly surprising. Most marketers are not professional writers and writing ad copy is a difficult skill for beginning marketers to master. Here are some tips that might assist you in writing an effective, profit-producind ad.

1. Benefit from the experience of other writers. You can get ad copy ideas by studying similar product's advertising material. Collect their sales letters, classified ads, web ads, e-mail ads, etc. You can model your ad on these-- but don't copy them word-for-word. That's a no-no.

2. Set a goal for your ad. Know exactly what you want your ad copy to accomplish. It could be to qualify prospects, make sales, generate leads, attract web t.raffic, etc.

3. Build your selling points. Make a complete l.ist of your product's benefitsand features. Begin your ad with the most important benefit either in your headline or first sentence.

4. Make your ad benefits as specific as possible. Include exact numbers, percentages, times, colors, smells, sounds, descriptive adjectives, and so forth.

5. Set yourself apart from your competitors. L.ist all the ways your product is different from your competition's. Include all the differences in your ad copy that are better than their product.

6. Emphasize the benefit(s) of your product. Use graphics, pictures and drawings of people actually using your product to solve their problem. Include a picture that also shows the results. Your goal should to produce the "buying emotion" in your potential customers.

7. You must determine who the target audience is for your product. What age, sex, or background are they? Once you determine that, you should write down what reasons would attract them to purchase your product. Include those reasons in your ad copy.

8. Include any proven facts in your ad copy. Theycould be customer surveys, scientific tests, product reviews, etc.

9. Don't forget about "after the sale". Tell your audience what kind of support they'll get after they buy. It could be f.ree consulting, tech support, f.ree servicing, etc. Product support can be a huge factor in making the sale.

10. Try to get feedback from those who chose not to buy your product. Ask them why they decided not to buy. This will give you new ideas on how to produce a more profitable ad copy.

Writing ad copy can be a formidable task for any beginning Internet Marketer. Using these tips may hopefully set you on your way to becoming an effective copywriter.

Is Your Yellow Pages Ad Putting Cash in Your Pocket... Or Sucking Cash Out?

It’s a question that more than a few Yellow Page advertisers ponder. If you are currently spending money every month to run an ad in your local directory, you don’t want to wrestle with that question. You want to know that your investment is generating a consistent flow of new clients to your business. So what can you do to maximize returns and stop worrying?

First of all, know this—Yellow Pages Advertising has incredible potential. As a business owner, you have few other ways to reach prospects who are as targeted, and ready to buy as these. But naturally… your success depends on the quality of your ad. And when it comes to ad content, far too many advertisers are quite simply… lost.

“The red-hot commodity of the Information Age? Why that
would be the Yellow Pages… It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
Fortune July, 2003

There are few places to turn. It makes for an unpleasant situation for the honest businessperson trying to harness the tremendous potential of such a perfectly targeted medium. And so, most advertisers rely on the Yellow Pages design department, who, as it turns out, develop most of the ads in their directory.

It’s hard to differentiate your company if that’s the case, don’t you think?

That situation doesn’t need to be one that you find yourself in. While many advertisers fail to develop an ad that draws a strong response, it’s not especially difficult to do. In fact, the basic mistakes that “riddle” just about every subject heading provide a fantastic opportunity for the business owner that does his homework. If you’re reading this article, you’re doing your homework.

“How come we still have the Yellow Pages?
They Work. You don’t go to the Yellow Pages and look
up pizza unless you’re planning to order pizza.”
Fortune July, 2003

What Yellow Page success boils down to is ad content. Not color. Not professional design. Sure, those things matter too; but they are nowhere near as important as the words you use to fill your ad. People turning to the Yellow Pages have already determined that they need you. They just need to know whether they should call company A, B, or C.

Their choice doesn’t depend so much on color or design, as it depends on what you offer that your competitors don’t” the policies you hold yourself to that give consumers faith in you and your business.

Here is a point you need to understand… Listing the brand names you carry and the “laundry list” of products or services you offer don’t build credibility. They don’t set you apart from your competitors who offer the same thing!

Plenty of other things do. And chances are you embrace those policies and those hassle, and risk removing, motivators already. You probably do quite a bit for your clients that make their lives easier, more lucrative, more pleasant, and so on. You probably have credibility boosters that you’ve never considered including.

And that is because you may not realize the power they have in motivating an eager prospect to act. Iron-clad guarantees… customer testimonials… rock-solid offers for new customers… a headline that goes well beyond your logo and company name; these are things that work wonders in a targeted, ready-to-buy medium such as the Yellow Pages.

Since so many of your competitors are focusing on their company name and their laundry list of products and services, the copy points above will differentiate you! They give you the credibility that your competition likely lacks, and they make a strong case for many a prospect to choose you with confidence. That’s what the Yellow Pages are all about, right?

How To Increase The Response You Get From Your Lead Generating Ads

I received two postcards in the mail yesterday. One was cluttered with so much small text I had difficulty trying to read it. I gave up and trashed it.

The second postcard had a total of 48 words on it including a website address listed on the bottom of the card. The card announced a new book on one of my favorite business topics. Part of one chapter was available to read free at the website listed on the card. I did... then ordered the book.

The person who sent that second postcard was using the classic 2 step selling process:

Step 1. Generate leads - in this case traffic to her website.

Step 2. Provide the requested information - in this case provided online at the website.

This two step process is proving to be just as effective online (Internet marketing) as it has been for many years in traditional marketing.

WHY USE 2 STEPS?

It's easier to generate leads than to sell products or services. You don't have to persuade anybody to spend money. Therefore you can use simple and inexpensive methods of advertising to generate leads. You can also build a list of prospects who don't buy now and use it for future follow up.

TIP: Always try to get the contact information from your prospects so you can communicate with them again in the future. Implement an automatic follow up procedure to periodically contact previous prospects who didn't buy. (This one procedure alone can increase your number of new customers by 50% or more.)

KEEP IT SIMPLE

The purpose of a lead generating ad or message is to generate a large number of inquiries. You're not selling your product or service (yet). You're selling the reader on the action of replying to your ad. The most effective message I've found for generating the maximum number of replies includes only 3 things.

1. State the biggest benefit offered by your product or service.
2. Include a compelling reason for readers to request more information NOW.
3. Provide a quick and easy way to respond.

Keep your message brief. Most short ads I develop produce more replies than longer versions of the same ad. For example, one of the most responsive ads I ever developed has only 14 words. The version used on the Internet read:

Discover How To Build ANY Small Business FAST! Offer ends soon. Free information. mailto:address@domain.com

The off-line version of this ad also included a phone number and postal address so prospects had 3 ways to request more information. I used it for classified ads in magazines and printed it on postcards and mailed them to targeted lists. Every version of the ad produced a large number of replies.

Many prospects responded out of curiosity. That was OK. I knew they were part of my targeted market and had a compelling need for what I was offering. I controlled that by circulating the ad where it would be seen only by prospects in my targeted market.

Follow this model the next time you develop a lead generating ad or message. Place your ad where lots of prospects in your targeted market will see it. The number of leads it generates from seriously interested prospects will surprise you.

How To Effectively Use Offline Advertising To Build Your Online Business

First of all let me say that having spent the past 20 years working closely with small businesses I know exactly what works when it comes to offline advertising.

What I have found today is that online businesses have a built in advantage when it comes to promoting their business offline. You already have a website and autoresponder in place to lead your prospect to. When you combine that fact along with the traditional capture methods of telephone and snail mail there is no reason any online business can't use offline methods to build their businesses and sell their products and services.

A lot of online based businesses forget about offline advertising. I know I have. It is important to combine offline and online advertising together in your marketing campaign. This will give you to a more well rounded approach to promoting as well as attract potential prospects and customers you might not otherwise get.

In all your offline advertising you want to include your web site address, e-mail or autoresponder addresses, and your phone number and mailing address. This gives you the appearance of a real bonafide business.

Another thing is to start selling products for manufacturers who offer co-op advertising for promoting their products. You can read a little more about this technique in an article I wrote titled "Why Are You Wasting Free Advertising Money?" http://sites-plus.com/articles/article2.html

Finally you need to view offline marketing as a long term committment. I've seen businesses over and over run and ad not get the response they were looking for and quit.

This will not work offline. Or online for that matter. You need to establish a budget and stick to it. That doesn't mean that you can't change the ad copy if your response is marginal. It just means if you are going to run classified ads for example that you run them for a period of time and allow them to do their job.

Here are 10 offline marketing ideas. Use as many of these as possible to move your business forward.

-Classified Newspaper Ads- Place classified ads in newspapers. Local newspapers often have great advertising rates that you can take advantage of to promote your business. Here's a great source for running classified ads. http://www.nationwideadvertising.com

-Put up flyers. They could be in computer stores, libraries, restaurants, car windshields, or anywhere you shop that allows flyers.

-Direct mail. A nice direct mail piece when done consistently over a period of time can bring tremendous exposure for your business. The biggest benefit of direct mail is it allows you to reach thousands of people at a bulk mail rate. You could not do this if you had to mail each piece individually.

-Buy time on local cable T.V. It is surprisingly affordable and if you commit to a block of advertising you can develop Top Of Mind Awareness. TOMA is being there when they want or need you. If you are an affiliate or in an MLM consider doing group advertising and spreading the cost out over several of you. You can have leads routed into one phone number and divied out to all advertisers or have each ad display a different phone number.

-Pass out your CD-ROM or diskette business cards at special events. It could be at trade shows, seminars, fairs, etc.

-Get 250 free business cards here and leave them everywhere you go. http://www.vistaprint.com -Hold a free offline class and teach people how to use their computer or how to use the internet. You could have your web site on display as an example.

-Give away promotional items such as free mouse pads. Put your advertising on the mouse pads and give them away at computer or internet events.

-Advertise in card decks. The card deck you advertise in should be targeted toward internet users.

You would also want to target your offline advertising to groups of people that will actually be interested in your product or service. If you're selling business books, you will want to market to business owners.

In conclusion, if you have a business that's only based online using offline advertising to make money online is a great idea because so many people today go online to get information about products and services they are interested in.

5 Common Advertising Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid

These 5 common advertising mistakes cause you to lose sales. But you can easily avoid these mistakes once you become aware of them.

1. STOP AND GO ADVERTISING

Many businesses reduce their advertising when they are getting plenty of sales. Then they increase their advertising when sales decline. This pattern of stop and go advertising creates a repeating cycle of high sales volume and low sales volume. It also prevents the business from growing.

Develop and follow a plan of regularly scheduled advertising regardless of your sales volume. Continuous advertising produces steady growth. It also reduces the time you have to spend on making advertising decisions.

2. ONE SHOT ADVERTISING

Businesses often devote all of their advertising efforts to attracting new customers. But they devote little or no effort to cultivating these prospects for future sales.

Most prospective customers will not buy the first time they hear or see your sales message. But many will buy later if you follow up with them. Your follow up can be as simple as contacting them periodically with a new offer.

TIP: Customers are prospects too. Stay in contact with them. Find or develop other products or services you can offer them. It's easier to make a sale to a previous customer than to someone who never bought from you.

3. COPYCAT ADVERTISING

Businesses often copy their competitors advertising ideas. This can be effective for a short time. But results quickly decline as more and more competitors copy the same idea.

Instead of copying your competitors advertising ideas, improve on them. Create something better - something your competitors cannot copy.

For example, give your customers a reason to buy from you instead of from a competitor. This can be as simple as including a unique bonus only you can offer - or providing the personal attention your competitors are not willing or able to provide.

4. SCATTER SHOT ADVERTISING

Many businesses get poor results from their advertising because they reach too many prospects with little or no interest in what they are selling. This often occurs because they choose the cheapest advertising instead of looking for low cost targeted advertising.

Take some time to research and plan your advertising efforts. Look for ways you can reach concentrations of prospects likely to be interested in your product or service. Then design your message to appeal specifically to their interests and needs.

TIP: Look for alternative media your competition may be overlooking. For example, many online marketers have started using direct mail postcards to generate traffic to their web sites. It's a low cost way to bypass the heavy competition online.

5. SELF FOCUSED ADVERTISING

Advertisers often promote facts about themselves or their products in their advertising. But facts don't sell. Benefits sell. For example, which of the following has more impact?

1. "We provide complete marketing services for starting your own business" 2. "No more time clock. Work when you want. Take long vacations"

The first focuses on the company and describes the service it provides. It's boring and unattractive. The second focuses on the benefit provided by that service. It attracts attention and creates excitement - and generates more sales.

These 5 common advertising mistakes cause you to lose sales How many are you making? Apply the information revealed in this article to avoid these mistakes - and maximize the results you get from your advertising efforts.

Grab Your Share of Untold Amounts of Advertising Dollars

If you advertise in any way, the following information could show you how to find and utilize untold advertising dollars you may not be aware of.

In the mid 80’s I was an account executive for a radio station located in Santa Rosa, California. During that time I became very familiar with what is referred to as co-op advertising.

Co-op advertising is a great source of advertising dollars. And there is so much of it available to people, yet most people know very little, if anything, about co-op dollars.

Interestingly, I was one of the only reps at the station who made sure my clients knew about this benefit. The reason was simple, there was more work involved in getting my clients set up, and yet, there was financial gain for both my client and myself by taking time to help them stretch their marketing dollars.

Co-opting is where you put in money for advertising and the manufacturer of a product you sell also puts in money. Often it is as much as 50% of the campaign. It is a great way to stretch your advertising campaign and to beef up your campaign.

Unfortunately, even though the money is available if conditions are right, many people either aren’t aware of this or if they are they think it’s too much work to meet the criteria. Granted, in some cases it is, but often utilizing co-op money is a great way to stretch your marketing budget.

There are many co-op-advertising opportunities available if you plan to do advertising on the Internet. Not all are good investments though. Check opportunities out very carefully before making a final commitment.

Using co-op dollars is an excellent way to build a stronger relationship with your retail suppliers and to generate a lot more traffic in your store or on to your web site. If the overflow of business is handled correctly you will increase your sales and profits.

The great thing about using co-op dollars when you are dealing with standard media is that your account rep can handle the paperwork for you. Many retailers hesitate using the “hidden” dollars due to feeling intimidated by the paperwork, the unknown.

Not only can the rep help you with the paperwork, they can also help you to build the campaign. However, before you trust them completely, find out what their experience is, what successful campaigns they have spearheaded and get some references. Take the time to do some research upfront to save money over the long run.

The reality is, if they are professionals in the truest sense of the word, they will be more than willing to take much of the paperwork burden off of you by handling it. After all, the more value an account rep creates for their clients the greater chance for an ongoing business.

Co-op dollars are not limited to retail businesses. Often, there are hidden dollars for non-profits. There are city and state funds that are set aside to help various organizations increase their visibility and reach.

One nice thing about using co-op dollars from a large manufacturer is that brand names do attract customers to your business—that's why you offer them. Advertising specific well known brands will increase your foot traffic. Harley Davidson has an amazing co-op program they offer to their retailers. It is a primary reason they have done so well. They encourage advertising based on specific guidelines.

It is to the advantage of an advertiser to utilize these dollars. Manufacturers in virtually every industry want to help with advertising costs. They are very aware that when you correctly advertise their brand name product you will probably sell more of it, thus increasing your orders.

The disadvantage of co-op advertising can be the restrictions set by the manufacturer. Often, they have such rigid guidelines about how to design the ad that you may lose all control of creative expression. For example, their logo may have to be positioned in an exact location in order for them to co-op the campaign.

If you are working with someone who claims to be an expert at advertising and they know nothing about co-op dollars they are not the expert they claim to be. Be aware.

Areas that you need to be educated on are program terms and reimbursement schedules. In some cases it can take months to receive reimbursement for a co-op campaign. In other cases, the company you are cooping with will send the money directly to the media source. Be sure to check this information out in order not to run into a cash flow problem.

Advantages of co-op advertising - Extra money to advertise - Account executive can do the paperwork - More frequency

Disadvantages of co-op advertising - Restrictions by manufacturer - No guarantee it will work - Limited creativity in ad copy

Before making a final decision, research your options on co-op advertising. You may be pleasantly surprised with what you discover.

How To Write Better Solo Ads

Writing responsive ads may seem like an exact science, but there are some simple things you can do to increase your response rate. Here are some tips on how to write better solo ads.

Start with the subject line. Your subject must be compelling and exciting and entice the reader to open your ad, but you do not want to mislead the reader because if you do, it does not matter whether they need your product or not, they will not buy from you.

There is a Spam email that I get a couple times a week with the subject line that reads: How to stop getting emails just like this one. Cute and a unique approach, but there is no way I would ever buy anything from a company that uses this type of sales approach. This would be like a doctor making you sick for free and then telling you he can cure you for $50.

Do Not use Re: or Fwd: in the subject line of your email. This is so overused on the Internet and it is very misleading and I personally detest anything that is misleading.

Make your subject as short as possible and as to the point as possible. If you are selling airplanes, you can use something like: Ready to take-off? or Full Throttle or Flaps set 30 degrees. These might not mean anything to you, but anyone who is interested in flying will instantly know this has something to do with flying and for that reason alone, they may open the email.

Put some thought into your subject line as this is the make or break part of your ad. If you can get people to open your email, then you have half the battle won. However, let me preface this with, if you can get the right person to open your email. The airplane sales person is not going to want to target kids, but he will want a pilot with the means to purchase an airplane, so targeting your ad is also critical, but this is another story and you simply target by doing research on where you are going to send your ad.

Write your ad like you are writing to yourself. If you are selling a product that you have purchased, then tell the reader why you purchased or use the product. If you are trying to sell something you do not use, stop reading here and practice saying the following: Would you like fries with that burger! Now, I say this for fun, but the bottom line of selling anything online or offline is a transfer of belief. If you did not buy the product, why would anyone else.

As you write your copy, use strong and powerful words. Remember, people do not buy what they need as much as they will buy what they want. If your product or service can solve a problem for someone and you can express to the reader how your product or service will save them time, money, energy, headaches, high blood pressure, etc. then you have the rest of the battle won and you will get someone to your sales page.

Ads do not have to be long and boring, because people do not have the time or desire to read a long and boring ad. Short and to the punch is the approach you want to take.

My airplane will get you to your destination safer, faster, more economically, and the flight will be twice as comfortable as the nearest competitor and I can prove it to you.

The above sentence would be a good solo ad. It is short--very short and it tells a prospect all they really want to know about the airplane--actually it does not tell them everything about the airplane, but it hits all the hot buttons. Safety, speed, economics and comfort--these are the main issues when someone wants to fly an airplane. Find the main issues that your product or service solves and write around those issues.

Below are some power words that you can use in your ads. Refer back to these words as you write your ads and replace words in your ads with some of these power words and then compare your two ads and see which you prefer.

One final suggestion. Spell check your ad and then spell check it again and then read it several times and if possible, have someone else read it. Make sure you do not write "your" when you mean "you're" and that you have capitalized correctly. Good luck!

Absolutely.. Amazing.. Approved.. Attractive.. Authentic.. Bargain.. Beautiful.. Better.. Big.. Colorful.. Colossal.. Complete.. Confidential.. Crammed.. Delivered.. Direct.. Discount.. Easily.. Endorsed.. Enormous.. Excellent.. Exciting.. Exclusive.. Expert.. Famous.. Fascinating.. Fortune.. Full.. Genuine.. Gift.. Gigantic.. Greatest.. Guaranteed.. Helpful.. Highest.. Huge.. Immediately.. Improved.. Informative.. Instructive.. Interesting.. Largest.. Latest.. Lavishly.. Liberal.. Lifetime.. Limited.. Lowest.. Magic.. Mammoth.. Miracle.. Noted.. Odd.. Outstanding.. Personalized.. Popular.. Powerful.. Practical.. Professional.. Profitable.. Profusely.. Proven.. Quality.. Quickly.. Rare.. Reduced.. Refundable.. Remarkable.. Reliable.. Revealing.. Revolutionary.. Scarce.. Secrets.. Security.. Selected.. Sensational.. Simplified.. Sizable.. Special.. Startling.. Strange.. Strong.. Sturdy.. Successful.. Superior.. Surprise.. Terrific.. Tested.. Tremendous.. Unconditional.. Unique.. Unlimited.. Unparalleled.. Unsurpassed.. Unusual.. Useful.. Valuable.. Wealth.. Weird.. Wonderful.

What Great Online Advertising Really Is!

Many business people have a distorted view about the distinction between sales & marketing. The common view looks something like this. "Market by advertising to get your name out there, so that people will be familiar with you. When they need what we’re selling, they’ll know who to call".

And off they go, to promote their company with image advertising that shouts to the world how great they are.

They hope, and they prey that some how, some way, the message about their brand will stick in people’s minds. Never knowing if it does, or if it doesn’t. Or whether their marketing dollars are paying them back in increased sales.

Some even think a cool web site, or sexy flash demo is enough to get their phones to start ringing.

This all too common approach is a huge waste of time, and money. Never let an advertising rep tell you any different.

Sales and Marketing are far more alike than most people realize. The sole purpose of marketing, and advertising is to make sales. Full Stop.

If you don't know how many sales dollars your online advertising is really bringing in, stop advertising.

Advertising must do much more than just get your name out there. It must educate, qualify, convince, & persuade.

Great Advertising is Nothing Less Than “Salesmanship in Print”!

Think of it as a sales presentation that’s geared toward accomplishing a carefully defined objective, whether that objective is the actual sale, or a step toward it.

Most successful campaigns are in fact a series of graduated commitments, leading up to a transaction. It might start with something as simple as an exchange of information. For example, the prospects name & address, in exchange for some information about solving a problem. That's always a winning formula.

When a prospect takes this step, they are actually qualifying themselves, persuading themselves, and giving you permission to follow up with them, all at the same time. And without any investment in personal selling.

After all, why should you waste your valuable time talking to a prospect that isn't already highly qualified, and predisposed to buying from you?

The key to profitable sales, marketing, and advertising lies in the response. Yet 90% of businesses fail to ask for, and track incremental response in their advertising. The only thing they track are sales, and then wonder why their results are so abysmal.

Why Is Incremental Response So Important?

Because it tells you what you're getting, so you can change what you're giving, until you get what you want.

The majority of people need to be exposed to your value proposition more than once before opening their wallets anyway. Why not play an active role in the process, and track the response you get to each successive stage of commitment?

Think of a pyramid, with rows of blocks piled one on top of the other. The wider you build each row, the better your chances of getting to the top.

If all of this sounds just too simple, and you don't believe it has the power to line your pockets with all the money you want, think again.

There are millions of businesses out there that just don't get this.

Nobody knows for sure how an individual will react to a given message. But en mass, human nature is as predictable as the hands on a clock. If you broadcast a message, the collective response will consistently come back to you within an amazingly small variance. So measure your response, try things, and repeat. It's that simple.

Set up a few pay per click campaigns on google, track your investment in real time, and start experimenting to see what kind of desirable actions you can get your visitors to take right away when they read your sales message. You get instant feedback, and changes are no cost. The whole set up runs for about the cost of a few cups of coffee a day. Think of it as your own personal marketing laboratory. When you find something that works, you can replicate it in other more costly forms of media. And remember, it doesn’t matter if you're selling printed circuit boards, herbal remedies, or anything in between, the same principles apply.

Google Adwords vs. Direct Mail

We recently ran a test to see whether Google Adwords could outpower traditional direct mail advertising. Here is how we did it. We created a new Adwords campaign choosing a few of our favorite targeted keywords, mainly keywords such as “small business web design”, “custom web design” and “promotional print services”. We set a budget of $500 for the whole campaign with a ceiling of $20 per day per keyword. Also, we set the campaign to target two regions, California and Florida in this instance. At the end of the week we ran out of money and only had 1 valid customer contact. That’s right, 1! We assume that the rest of the clicks were either trigger-happy Web surfers, potential clients that moved on elsewhere or perhaps our competition clicking on our ads to help us kill our budget faster. That’s right, we said it! Anyone that has worked with the Google Adwords program knows about the obvious problems with competitors clicking on your ads. It has become a part of the “waste” formula for many companies. For our company however, we try to minimize as much budget waste as possible, especially when many keywords cost over $5.00 a click for a top sponsored position in Google.

We turned to our now favorite method of reaching our target audience, good old-fashioned DIRECT MAIL! In our opinion, there is simply no better targeted way to spend your marketing budget and have results to prove your efforts. We set up a new postcard campaign with our logo, marketing message and a call to action. Then we sent it out to our target list of 1,000 companies. Total cost was $500 for postcard production & postage, and a day or two of building the list. Guess what? We had over 75 calls that we could track based on the postcard message. Out of those 75 calls, we have already begun work on 4 projects. Not bad if you compare those numbers with what Google Adwords did for us. Just give it a try and let us know how it works out for your company. It may just sway you towards cutting back on your Adwords budget and allocating those dollars towards more productive marketing means.

Here are 5 rules to follow if you want to create a successful direct mail campaign:

1. Make sure that you build the right list.
Instead of going out and spending thousands of dollars on a bulk list from a mailing list company, we suggest that you take the time to build your own hand-picked winners. Take a couple of hours a day and visit the Chamber of Commerce websites that are in your target region. Most of these sites will have all of their business members listed by category with company name, address and phone number. That’s right… FREE LEADS. A little time & sweat on your part could save you a bundle.

2. Make it easy for your prospects to take action.
Be sure to include a “call to action” in your direct mail piece that helps steer your potential clients into purchasing your product or service. Maybe it’s a time-sensitive offer, “Free Hosting For 1 Year - Offer good until June 6th, 2005.” Or perhaps it’s a coupon code, “Buy One Get One Free - Visit our website or call 1-800-555-5555 and mention code BFREE.” Regardless, it is always a good idea to have your website and a 1-800 number listed on the mail piece.

3. Choose the path to least resistence.
Carefully select the type of mailer and message that you want to send. If you send a postcard, then your recipient doesn’t have to actually open anything. So many letters get thrown in the trash before ever being opened. A bright, high-color postcard doesn’t have to be opened and will most likely be read by the recipient.

4. Make sure that you can track results.
By including a coupon code or a unique 1-800 number, you will be able to track which mailing the prospect is contacting you from. You must keep good tracking records in order to figure out which mailing gives you the greatest response rate.

5. Stay committed to your marketing campaign.
So many novice marketers will try a mailing only once. This is a big mistake. Persistence and commitment are both vital if you want to instill confidence in your prospects. After several impressions made on a prospect, it is more likely that the prospect will trust your company and purchase your product of service

Using Flyers to Advertise your Online Business

Using flyers is one commonly overlooked method of advertising offline. Flyers are extremely easy to create. They also allow you to exhibit some of your creative side, making it just that much more fun to make money.

In some areas, you may be able to put up as many flyers as you can afford to duplicate! The more flyers you put up the better chances you have of making money.

Go to the web site of the product your promoting, and save their web page to your hard drive. Modify the page a little bit so that it is in the form of a flyer, and be sure to include your own affiliate link on the flyer to ensure you make money.

Once you are satisfied with the way it looks, compile a list of all the possible places you may be able to put up your flyers,(ie) college campuses, neighborhood bullentin boards, supermarkets, etc. If you don't have the time to place them, consider hiring someone to do it for you.

If your flyer directs your potential customer to a web site, then the only traffic you will receive are those people who would take the time to enter your web address into their Internet Browser. That's pretty qualified traffic!

Let's break it down and estimate the amount of sales/traffic you could receive from a well planned offline flyer campaign.

Say you print 500 flyers promoting an affiliate product that you signed up for. If you put up 500 flyers on bulletin boards that allow your flyers for two weeks, you have an almost 100% guaranteed exposure number of 500 times 14 or 7000 impressions. If 1% of 7,000 are converted to a $30 dollar sale, you have just made $2,100 or 70 sales. Now that's good money if you ask me.

All you have to do is find a way to convert your affiliate products web site to a flyer, and print out as many copies as you can afford. Then the small task of getting them circulated.

Several months ago I ran a test campaign similar to this and started to receive sales the day after I posted all my flyers.

You may want to add flyers as part of your advertising plan.

Humor in Advertising

Many of the most memorable ad campaigns around tend to be funny. Advertisers use this strategy to attract customers to their product. Audiences like to be entertained, but not pitched. People will pay more attention to a humorous commercial than a factual or serious one, opening themselves up to be influenced. The key to funny advertising is assuring the humor is appropriate to both product and customer. The balance between funny and obnoxious can often be delicate; and a marketer must be certain the positive effects outweigh the negative before an advertisement can be introduced.

The best products to sell using humor tend to be those that consumers have to think the least about. Products that are relatively inexpensive, and often consumable, can be represented without providing a lot of facts, and that’s where there’s room for humor. Candy, food, alcohol, tobacco and toys/entertainment related products have proven to benefit the most from humor in their campaigns. One of the most important things to keep in mind is relevance to the product. An example of an extremely successful humorous campaign is the series of “Yo Quiero Taco Bell” commercials. The star, a tiny talking Chihuahua who is passionate about his Taco Bell got people repeating the company’s name across the country. The repetition of the company name and the actual content of the commercial reinforce the message in a relevant manner. Taco Bell saw a substantial rise in sales and their own mascot became a pop icon.

Another point to consider when using humor in advertising is that different things are funny to different people. A commercial that may leave one person gripping their sides from laughter may leave a bad taste in another’s mouth. The target market must always be considered. What’s funny in a client presentation may not be funny on an airplane, at a country club or in a hospital. An example of a recent humorous product introduction is Mike’s Hard Lemonade. These commercials feature over exaggerated and comical violence with the underlining message that no one's day is hard enough to pass up a Mike's. It failed, ranking as one of the year’s most hated campaigns by both men and woman according to 2002’s Ad Track, a consumer survey. The series of commercials are aimed at 21-29 year old males and the repetition of comical violence (such as a construction worker being impaled on the job and a lumberjack cutting off his own foot) gets less and less funny every time it’s viewed. Eventually the joke just wore out and the commercial became annoying and offensive.

Humor in advertising tends to improve brand recognition, but does not improve product recall, message credibility, or buying intentions. In other words, consumers may be familiar with and have good feelings towards the product, but their purchasing decisions will probably not be affected. One of the major keys to a successful humorous campaign is variety, once a commercial starts to wear out there’s no saving it without some variation on the concept. Humorous campaigns are often expensive because they have to be constantly changed. Advertisers must remember that while making the customer laugh, they have to keep things interesting, because old jokes die along with their products.

Yellow Pages Advertising: Is Hiring A

A question for the ages...

If the Yellow Pages design department will design an ad for free, who in their right mind would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars with someone else... right?

Well, ...no.

Of course it's not that simple.

If hiring a professional designer is a consideration for your business,you probably realize something very important about the free option that's available to you.

"SOMETIMES YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR."

Can the Yellow Pages design an effective ad for you? Of course they can.

They design hundreds or thousands of ads every single year for their advertisers. Some do okay. Then again... some don't.

Think about this: The Yellow Pages design a majority of the ads in their directory. So if they design your ad, and the ad of 6 of your competitors, who gets the best one? It's anyone's guess. But you will receive no special attention, that's for sure.

In a medium that's as competitive as the Yellow Pages, allowing the design department to take control is not a risk many business owners are willing to take.

Simply stated, cookie-cutter ads get mediocre results, and NO ONE spending that kind of money wants mediocrity.

THERE ARE OPTIONS...

First of all, the Yellow Pages designer will do what you tell them. For the most part, anyway.

If you find yourself a kick-butt graphic and send it to them, they'll use it. If you tell them you want your headline to read, "L.A.'s Premiere Hair Salon 6 Years Running!" they'll do it.

You can have the Yellow Pages "design" your ad while you still maintain control of the content. For many advertisers, this is the best option. There isn't a person on the planet who knows your customers as well as you do. And no one cares more about your success than you.

The time spent learning what techniques work in the Yellow Pages, and the effort you put forth to developing that content will pay you extraordinary dividends when your ad begins to run.

Plus, it enables you to develop an ad that will stand out from the competition, while getting the your Yellow Pages publisher to design it for free.

That said... you still might want to consider hiring a professional.

The expense can be significant (from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per ad - generally varying by ad size), but considering the amount of new business that an effective ad can generate - the expense is often offset by a much larger increase in new business.

It's also well justified considering the high costs of Yellow Pages advertising. If your company is spending an arm and a leg to run an ad, you want to make sure you get it right.

WARNING: YELLOW PAGES AD DESIGNERS ARE NOT ALL CREATED EQUAL...

There's a big difference between great design and effective Yellow Pages Advertising design.

The Yellow Pages is different than just about any other medium out there.

What works in the newspaper... what looks great in a magazine... is often a far cry from what works in the Yellow Pages. Are you looking for an award winning ad design, or an ad that gets results?

What success in the Yellow Pages boils down to is ad content (the information you choose to include in your ad), not design. Is looking good a good thing? Of course it is.

But your ad's ability to make a prospect prefer your business - over all of the others - is what puts cash in your pocket.

Unfortunately, there are many companies offering design services who design a Yellow Pages ad like they would any other. So make sure you're dealing with an expert in Yellow Pages Ad CONTENT... not just design!

DESIGN AND MARKETING ARE TWO DIFFERENT MONKEYS, TRUST ME.

For any company that you consider - ask to see ad samples. If the company name and logo take the place of a real, attention-grabbing headline... if a "laundry-list" of products or services offered dominates the ad... if there's no compelling call to action... keep looking.

Your ad appearance - AND - your ad content need to differentiate you from your competition, and each will contribute to success in a different way.

If the person developing your ad understands that - whether that's you or a professional designer - you're investment should generate glorious returns for your business!

Advertising that annoys: The real story.

Critics conclude that entertaining or “creative” commercials sell better than those that are bland. But liking the commercial may not really be that important in the scheme of things. It all depends on the needs and preferences, motivation and financial reservations of the customer. The question isn't whether people like the advertisement or not, it’s whether the advertisement is effective in selling.

Often, people who are irritated by certain campaigns don't fall within the intended target market. In 2000 Budweiser ran its ''Whassup?!'' campaign. Ad Track reported these commercials scored best with 18- to 24-year-olds; 52% of the survey participants said they liked them ''a lot'', while participants 65 years old and over didn't understand them, or didn't want to; 61% disliked the commercials. Yet, it's highly unlikely that Budweiser was trying to reach the 65+ market.

When Toys R Us launched their campaign featuring Geoffrey the giraffe to promote the revamping of all Toys R Us stores, 38% of women rated the advertisements highly compared to 16% of men. Since the advertiser's goal was to get moms back into the stores, that low rating from men was meaningless to Toys R Us.

Pier 1 started running its commercials featuring Kirstie Alley this year. Twenty-seven percent of the people familiar with the commercials didn’t like them, and only 6% thought that they were effective. That comes as a surprise to Pier 1 because same-store sales rose 17% in February and foot traffic is up 12% since October! The goal of most advertising is to increase sales. So, if people buy, the advertising is effective—no matter what critics may say.

Let's look at some other factors that contribute to the effectiveness of "irritating" or "disliked" advertising. Media weighting has a lot to do with response to advertising. It's important the media plan is developed to accurately reach its target. Just the right amount of frequency has been proven to increase recall, recognition and even persuasion. So a focused and targeted media schedule with effective frequency is a major influence in selling a product.

Familiarity with the product plays a role in increased sales of a brand with an "irritating" advertising campaign, too. According to the Journal of Advertising Research, customers’ knowledge of, experience with, or loyalty to a brand are components of familiarity—and familiarity is the most important factor in the effectiveness of advertising. Since customers tend to give greater attention to advertisements of a familiar brand, and may attach their experience with the brand to the advertisement, customers are likely to accept the message and respond to the "irritating" advertisement with a purchase.

International Brand & Advertising Research conducted a test to determine if "feelings of liking or disliking commercials are the motors that drive brand attitudes and sales." In the study, 251 30-second commercials were aired, representing six major product categories: food, confectionery & desserts, beverages, household products, personal care products and automotive. An analysis of the 251 commercials showed that there was no "robust, empirical evidence to suggest that either liking or disliking are reliable predictors of a commercial's performance in relation to sales-validated, evaluative measures." In fact, liking or disliking accounted for "no more that 11% of the variation on any of the major evaluative measures."

A "well-liked" advertising campaign does not always mean an increase in sales. Just like an "irritating" advertising campaign does not always suppress sales. The fact of the matter is that effectiveness depends on factors other than "likeability", and what may be "irritating" to some may not be "irritating" to the intended target. At the same time, what may be "well-liked" by one group may not be received as well by another. It’s up to the advertiser to determine the most likely target and the best way to reach that market to make a campaign effective.

If You Lost 70% of Your New Customers, Would You Notice?

Buyers Don’t Rely on the Yellow Pages Like the Used to

Customers’ buying behavior has changed - for good. If your business depends on most categories in the Yellow Pages to attract new customers, you’ve probably seen a decline. Traditionally, people headed to the Yellow Page directory precisely when they were ready to buy. They’d check the listings to find their options, or "let their finders do the walking." Now they’ve got more choices.

New research by The Kelsey Group in March, 2005 found that 70% of US households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services. These buyers aren’t going to the Internet for online purchases, nor to find distant providers. They intend to spend their money in their own community.

The Kelsey Group also found that interviewed individuals felt the search engines were a "better source of purchasing information than Yellow Pages, newspapers and magazines." The trend is being driven entirely by Internet users. Related data from other sources show that consumers who search online for purchases spend more than those using the printed directory.

Demote the Yellow Page Ad to a Smaller Portion of Your Budget

The Yellow Page industry is a Fifteen Billion Dollar industry in the US. While there are more choices of printed Yellow Page directories than ever, the buying habits of the public have moved away from using them. Computer-savvy buyers know the easiest way to find the information they want is through search engines (and since May they can do searches on the run, on their cell phones). But many small or local businesses aren’t even listed.

The Kelsey Group’s data is consistent with other statistics showing that the Internet has overtaken the newspaper for cars and real estate (major purchases). And it’s becoming the "go-to" place for information. A study by imedia Connection found it’s "second only to spouses for finding referrals."

To stay competitive, small and mid-sized businesses will be compelled to make sure they’re included in search engine data bases. While it’s not necessary to have a website, it helps to be listed on someone’s (like a local portal or professional group). Enterprises that can’t be found by online searchers risk losing sales to businesses they find instead.

Where did the Customers Go?

Many factors influence where and what a person decides to buy. Although the Yellow Pages are no longer an automatic part of the loop, many buyers consult both the Internet and the directory, not relying on either one alone. However, many shoppers only call Yellow Page ads that show a website, even it they don’t intend to visit it. It goes to the credibility issue. What’s different?
- Buyers are less trusting and more willing to shop around
- Availability of Internet Yellow Pages (IYP)
- Expanded options and more ways to find them
- Aging population uses the Yellow Pages differently than young people
- Development of unique, narrow niches and specialties
- More choices for a "better deal"
- Increased immigrants and those from other cultures, unaccustomed to Yellow Page use
- Larger cities with multiple directories, rather than one large one
- Local search, whereby the search engines locate suppliers by zip code, state, city, region

Time for a Reality Check - Can You Find Yourself?

The next time you go online (or have a friend walk you through it), see how you rate in some local searches. Conduct a query in Google (then Yahoo, and MSN). Enter your type of business + Your town (“Pet Stores” + Scottsdale, Arizona).

Does your business show up? How many of your competitors are on that list? How many are ahead of you? That list is what your “missing customers” are likely to see when they’re ready to spend their money. Does that experience motivate you to make a better Local Search showing?


Start noticing how visible you are to customers researching their local options online. You really can’t afford to miss the boat.

10 AD Copy Tips you can take to the Bank!

1. You could add some sub-headlines in your ad copy. Sub-headlines act just like headlines; they grab the reader' s attention. They'll keep the readers interested as they continue to read your ad. They are almost like transitions or copy connectors; the sub-headlines will interest and carry the reader to the next part.

2. You could ask your readers questions throughout the ad copy. They will answer the questions in their own heads as they read your ad copy. The questions you ask should persuade the readers into buying. People have been taught to automatically answer questions in school, from their parents, from friends and from authoritative figures.

3. You could highlight keywords throughout your ad copy. The keywords should be attractive to your target audience. You could highlight them with color, underlines, italics, etc. You could also repeat key- words one after another. For example you could say, "This is a soft, soft, soft rug."

4. You could bullet or indent your benefits in your ad copy. Most people won't read the whole ad copy, so make your product’s benefits stand out and you won't lose the sales from all the skimmers. You can also indent other things like your guarantee, postscripts, testimonials, closing, etc.

5. You could change the size of your text in your ad copy. You want to make your text large enough so it's not hard to read. You also want your headline and major points to be larger so they will stand out. You could also use more space in between important parts of your ad copy to make them stand out.

6. You could raise or lower the price in your ad copy. A higher price could increase the perceived value of your product and a lower price could lessen your product's value. Either way, you need to test which price will pull the most orders. Another idea would be to use an odd number like $19.46 instead of $19.99, $19.95 or $19.97. It makes it look like there is a specific reason you priced it like that.

7. You could add proof of results in your ad copy. You should include testimonials, endorsements and factual statistics to prove your product's claims. You should only publish statements that are believable and have specific results. For example, here is a good line from a testimonial, “I increased my sales by 678%!"

8. You could add special offers in your ad copy. It's usually easier to sell the offer than the product. You could use discounts, free bonuses, volume sales, etc. For example, you could say, "You'll get 5 bonuses when you order by Aug 24, 2002!" Another example, "Buy one, get the second one half price off.”

9. You should eliminate the hard-to-understand jargon on your ad copy. Unless your product calls for technical words, you want your ad to be read without people pulling out a dictionary. If you need to use a word your target audience might not under- stand, define it or use an example to help them understand it.

10. When you ask someone to sign up to receive a freebie, don't ask for really personal information. This is a fast way to lose a potential prospect. For example, if you ask them for information they want to keep personal, they might not want sign up. Another example, if you ask for too much inform- ation, they may not have the time or patience to fill it all out.

With these 10 Tips your AD Copy NOW has the equipment to conquer the little challenges that you will encounter and that most marketers with stumble over. Start implementing these tip to work for you so that your Online AD Copy will make the sell for you........

10 Eye Popping, Jaw Dropping Ad Copy Secrets

1. Use a hand written letter on your ad copy instead of text. Write the ad on a piece of paper, scan it and publish the ad on your web page. Adding a personal touch will always increase your sales.

2. Publish a list of famous and respected customers who have bought from you on your a copy. People will think that if these people bought from you, they should also trust your business and purchase your products. Make sure to get their permission first.

3. Show before and after photos for your products on your web page copy. Show the problem picture and then beside it, show the picture of the resolution to the problem when they use your product.

4. Include an article or review that has been written about you or your business with your ad copy. This will show people that your business is respected and will increase your credibility.

5. When you offer free bonuses in your ad copy, also list the dollar value beside each bonus. People will feel they're getting a good deal and it will increase the value of your product.

6. Hire a famous person to endorse your product or service. Make sure the person is well known to your target audience. Include their picture and statements on your ad copy.

7. Include your own picture on your ad copy. This will show people that you're not hiding behind your ad copy and will increase their trust. Also, include your contact information below the picture and a brief statement or quote.

8. Tell your potential customers on your ad copy that you will donate a percentage of their purchase price to specific charity. This will show them you really care about the people. They may just buy your product to donate to the charity.

9. Ask your potential customers plenty of yes and no questions in your ad copy. The questions should remind them of their problem and make them think about what will happen if they don't purchase your product.

10. Tell your potential customers they will receive a free prize if they find the five words in your ad copy that are misspelled or spelled backwards. The longer you can keep someone reading your copy the greater chance of them purchasing.

Advertising in RSS Feeds

As publishers have moved towards monetizing RSS feeds, their have been vibrant discussions as to whether advertisements in feeds are viable or whether they will drive subscribers away. At the end of the day while it appears that many are discussing the philosophical approaches to ads in RSS feeds few are taking the time to examine the options available for inserting advertisements in feeds. Ultimately the advertisements served are going to determine the success of RSS as an advertising medium. The ads served must be related to the content contained in the feed. If the RSS feed contains quality content, the ads are relevant, and the volume of ads is in balance with the volume of content served, advertising in RSS feeds will succeed. Take a closer look at some of the ad serving options currently available for RSS feeds.

Review of Current Options

Google AdSense for Feeds

Google's AdSense for Feeds offers contextually targeted advertisements, with a wide selection of advertisers. Google chooses not to divulge the percentage of revenue that is shared with the publisher, so it is difficult if not impossible to predict monthly revenue. The current Google AdSense system for feeds is tied to blogs and does not appear to be overly flexible. http://www.google.com/adsense

Pheedo

Pheedo displays categorized advertisements rather than contextual advertisements. The upside to this is that Pheedo's advertisements can be used in conjunction with Google AdSense or AdSense for feeds without violating Google's contract. Pheedo works with the publisher to serve advertisements from similar or related categories associated with the feeds contents.

Pheedo's system allows for advanced ad filtering, giving publishers control over keyword ad filtering, specific ad filtering or url filtering. Pheedo's system also allows publishers to sell ads to existing advertisers whom they already have a relationship. The revenue split is 50% and feeds can be a sponsored flat rate advertisement or a pay-per-click advertisement, where the publisher is only paid if the advertisement is clicked. http://www.pheedo.com

Kanoodle for Feeds

Kanoodles systems for providing advertisements for feeds is similar to Google's but they do not have the breadth of advertisers that Google boasts. Advertisements are served based on topics, not to keywords. Kanoodle shares 50% of the revenue generated from the advertisements with the publisher serving the ad. http://www.kanoodle.com

Evaluating Options

When evaluating feed ad serving solutions consider the following:

1. Ad Relevance

In order to generate revenue from RSS advertisements or for an advertising campaign to succeed using RSS as a channel. It is absolutely critical that the advertisements served in the feed contain related content, the more related the content the higher the likelihood that the advertisements will be of interest to the reader and clicked. Also the closer the content relates to the feeds theme the higher the likelihood the reader will have genuine interest in the product or service being advertised.

2. Ad Ratio

Publishers need to retain control over the frequency of advertisements. Readers will become frustrated with feeds that are heavily laden with advertisements and genuine content. The advertiser is happy as they are reaching a targeted audience the publisher is happy because their advertisement is being clicked and generating revenue.

3. Clearly Denoted as Ads

The debate over editorial control and advertisements rage on. It is generally considered proper net etiquette for publishers to clearly mark advertisements to distinguish them from editorial web content. When selecting a RSS advertising partner consider the context in which the advertisements are displayed. Does it blend with the feed or site, while still being clearly marked sponsored material? Or does the content blend so well that it appear as a product or service endorsement from the publisher? Credibility and reputation online matter, and the segregation of advertisements and ensuring they are properly denoted as such will go a long way to enhance credibility with readers.

Clearly as RSS increases in popularity publishers are looking for ways to monetize their content. RSS in advertising is a logical step, and striking a balance between quality, consistent content and occasional related advertisements will lead to the success of advertising in RSS feeds. If the balance is not found, publishers may be forced to move to a subscription RSS feed model.

How To Get Free Web Site Traffic

There are many ways to get free web site traffic to your website or business promotion. One of the best ways is the use of free traffic exchanges. These exchanges allow you to submit your website into the rotation with hundreds, or thousands of other websites for the membership of that particular traffic exchange. Some traffic exchanges are better than others, so you need to make sure the ones you choose, are best for you and your business.

Needless to say, you want to pick a free traffic exchange that has lots of members so there’s much more exposure to your websites, sales pages or affiliate programs. You also want to make sure the audience would be more likely to purchase your product or service you’re trying to sell. For example, if you’re selling antique dolls and the free traffic exchange you’re joining is made up of 95% webmaster business opportunities, then your chances of selling something are slim to none. You need to know your market.

A free traffic exchange offers webmasters the ability to promote their websites or affiliate marketing campaigns for free, or at very low cost. The idea is to surf around other members websites, and for each viewing, you get so many of your own URLs and banners added into the rotation for other members to view. There are hundreds, if not thousands of free traffic exchanges online today. The trick is to find the ones that work best for you. Not all free traffic exchanges are created equal and the most active ones are not necessarily the best ones for your needs.

Free traffic exchanges are a great marketing tool for a variety of reasons. The most obvious reason is that you get lots of people looking, and hopefully clicking on your website or promotional pages. But there are hidden benefits to free traffic exchanges you may not have even considered.

Some free traffic exchanges may convert sales like crazy for one person, and be a complete waste of time for another. If everyone were promoting the same website or affiliate program is the same traffic exchange for example, then chances are you would not make many sales. Even if you were promoting the #1 thing on the internet, if everyone promoted the same program, your chances are much lower that someone will purchase through your website or link to make you any money. Also, when people see the same ad over and over again, they get desensitized to it. Don't fall into this trap. It's one thing to try and sell a very popular product/service/ebook etc, but it's another thing when a million other people are trying to do it too. Competition is a good thing, because it validates your market, but too much competition is tough and it's time to move on to something else. We all know clicking on ads in a free traffic exchange can be very boring, monotonous and can take a lot of time. That's why you need to make the best of your opportunity or you will just be wasting a lot of your time and effort on something that just isn't working. If you have your own niche website, then you already differentiated yourself from the pack. If you are an affiliate marketer, then you need to find products/services that everyone else isn't promoting, especially within that particular traffic exchange.

One way to use free traffic exchanges to your advantage is to join a few at first, and see if your sales pick up. If your sales aren’t doing well, then test out a few more. When you do find a few traffic exchanges that appear to be generating sales for you, then narrow those down until you find the one, or two that are working. Now concentrate your efforts on those because they’re the ones you want. At least for now. Things may change, so keep an eye on your campaigns and if sales seem to be falling off, then it might be time to change your offer or find another traffic exchange that could pick your profits up again. As I mentioned, your individual promotion is everything. If you're trying to promote something everyone else is, I don't care what traffic exchange service you're using, your sales conversions are going to be very low, or nothing at all. You cannot always blame the exchange. Sometimes you have to look at yourself and think if you're doing all you can to make sales.

If you're going to be using multiple free traffic exchanges, and I recommend that you do, your first priority should be to pick up a multi-tab web browser. Many of these browsers are free and run on PCs and MACs. The tabs feature allows you to have one web browser open with multiple tabs each going to a separate website. You could easily put 5 or 6 of your free exchange sites in these tabs, and earn credits for all of them at the same time. So instead of surfing for 1/2 an hour or an hour earning 200 hits for one exchange, you could earn 200 hits for 5 exchanges in the same amount of time. This is a huge time saver and multiplies your earned hits by 5X or 6X.

Getting The Most From Your Advertising Dollars

You now have that website up and running. You have a great product. You are all set to start taking orders and making those trips to the bank to make deposits! And then you wait, and wait, and wait some more! Unless someone can find your site, you will have a very long wait! That is where the value and benefit of advertising comes in. Advertising is what brings potential customers into your "virtual business door". As a business owner, every dollar you spend is a dollar right out of your pocket. This affects your profit margin and revenues. This can be especially difficult if it comes at a time when you're trying to grow your business. If you're going to succeed, you have to pay close attention to your bottom line and look for creative, innovative ways to cut costs while still getting what you need.

That old saying that it "takes money to make money" has never been truer than when it comes to promoting your business. And when it comes to spending money on advertising, how do you make sure that your advertising is working hard enough, without spending a fortune that consumes all your profits or even worse money that far exceeds your business revenues?

Thanks to the Internet, you've got lots of options for finding cost-effective advertising that does what it's supposed to -- bring targeted customers who are hungry for what you're selling, right to your door. But don't forget about cost-effective offline methods as well. Here are a few ideas to help you get started:

Always make sure you focus your advertising dollars on your target market. The tighter your niche, the better your chances of finding the customers who are looking for exactly what you've got to sell! So rather than going wide, and trying to sell to everyone, narrow your focus, and then, if possible, narrow it some more! Figure out who your "ideal" customer is, and then create an advertising campaign for them. Once you know who you're selling to, look for media that targets that demographic. Depending on your product or service, think community and neighborhood newspapers, high school sponsor advertising, chamber of commerce directories, etc.

If your ideal customers aren't defined by a specific geographic location, look at regional or specific demographic publications. Perhaps a regional paper runs an annual issue that focuses on an issue or activity that reaches your target market. Use local cable television to broadcast your ads only in certain markets. You'll get cheaper rates and a more focused demographic.

Always ask for a discounted rate. (Many publications offer an "agency" discount of up to 15 percent. If you are acting as your own in-house advertising agency, you might qualify for the special rate. Sure, you might be turned down more often than not, but make it a habit to ask. It will be worth it every time it works for you.

Some monthly magazines offer discounts for multi-ads placed over a 3, 6 or 12 month time period. Most publications have a different rate schedule for different types of advertisers -- so depending on your product or service, you could qualify. And if not, sometimes just asking for the discount will give it to you.

Buy leftover space or airtime. This is advertising that the publication, radio or television station hasn't filled by their usual deadline. Of course you'll have to take the spots that are available, but again, depending on your business and the product or service you're selling, that inconvenience could still be worth the discount and the exposure you'll receive.

Use classified ads. They're not just for employment offers any more. You'll find classified ads in magazines and newspapers. Before writing your ad, go to your local library, and look through the back issues of the magazine or newspaper that you're considering. Look at the ads that catch your eye, or that are repeated month after month. Those ads wouldn't be in there each month, if they weren't making the advertiser money. Use those ads as springboards for ideas when you're ready to start writing your own classifieds.

Test your ads. Start out with the cheaper publications, so you can find out what's working and what's not. Play with them, and tweak them. Once you've got an ad that works, keep using it. You can run it more than once, or in more than one publication at a time. When it quits bringing in customers, or you start noticing a drop in effectiveness, then it's time to change it.

Do you own a retail business? If so, check into co-op advertising funds that may be offered by your vendors. Co-op programs provide joint advertising for your and your vendor, and you'll get a portion of the cost of the ad reimbursed because the ad mentions the vendor. (Note: most Co-op programs have strict guidelines, so check with your vendors and make sure you're following the rules).

Barter for goods and services. This can be especially effective with radio stations and local papers. See if you can provide your products or services in trade for the cost of advertising. (Also called "trade" or "In-kind" ads, the radio station or publication gives you the ad in exchange for products or services of equal value, and then uses those products or services as part of a promotion or contest for their listeners or readers). This can also be a great way to get additional free publicity, so if you decide to try this method, get creative and think outside the box!

Don't forget or be afraid to recycle the good ads in other advertising medium. If you've got an ad that's especially effective, looks great (or more importantly that is profitable), by all means reuse it in a circular, brochure, handout, flyer or direct mail piece. Use the graphics on your Webpages if available.

In summary, your goal should be to find a balanced mix of online and offline advertising. This will go a long way towards getting the greatest bang for your advertising buck! With a little creativity you will be maximizing your profits while minimizing your expenses.

Increase Your Returns With Opt-in Email Advertising

The amount of marketing that takes place online is increasing exponentially, leaving marketers scrambling for ways to get noticed. Email marketing has become a sophisticated field, consumers are getting more savvy, and regulations are starting to govern what you can and cannot do. The days of buying a list of a million email addresses and blanketing the Internet are over. "Spam" never was very effective, and it's even less so now. Click-through rates for unsolicited email are abysmally low, you are likely to receive angry responses from consumers, your ISP may shut you down if too many people complain, and you may even be subject to fines under the "CAN-SPAM" Act. The most successful email marketers are now using opt-in email advertising techniques.

Opt-in email marketing, also known as permission-based marketing, involves sending your message to recipients which have expressly stated a desire to receive information about products or services related to your particular offer. In many cases, consumers agree to receive advertisements related to something that interests them, in exchange for something of value, such as a discount, free gift, or informational newsletter.

There are two ways to go about permission-based marketing; you can build your own opt-in list, or you can purchase one. Either way is effective. Targeted, opt-in email messages receive response rates of anywhere between five to 15 percent, while conventional banner ads usually yield only about one percent. Spam yields only a tiny fraction of a percent. Internet entrepreneurs who use personalized messages always get better results.

Alternately, you can create your own opt-in list. The most obvious place to start is with your existing customers. Offer them a discount on future purchases in exchange for agreeing to receive your promotional messages. Also, create something of value to draw in new customers. For example, suppose you sell rare coins on the Internet. Create a well-written weekly newsletter that coin collectors will enjoy reading. Offer free subscriptions for anyone who agrees to receive your promotional email marketing messages. Don't stop there, though. Consider every point where there is customer interaction as an opportunity to sign up a new member to your list. Provide an opportunity to opt-in with customer orders. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, ask for email addresses at the point of checkout.

Growing your own opt-in email list will take longer, but your results will be excellent. Some marketers optimize their results by using both techniques. Creating your own opt-in list does require a bit of technology. If you have a very small list, you can start out simply by adding each subsequent subscriber to the "BCC" list on your email client, but this will get cumbersome as your list grows. You will want to eventually invest in an email list management program. This is a piece of software that helps you to manage your email list, and it will include features such as the ability to handle bouncebacks, automate the subscribe and unsubscribe function, and personalize each message. The software should also have a tracking and reporting function, to allow you to keep track of your success rates and other important metrics.

If you choose to buy an opt-in list, there are many quality vendors that you can work with. Do a little research ahead of time, and find out how they acquire their email addresses: do they offer an informational newsletter or something of value in exchange for permission to receive ads? Ask about frequency--an overworked opt-in list is just as useless as a spam list. You will do better with a list that is highly targeted. Find a list vendor who can provide you with email addresses of people who have indicated interest specifically in what you have to offer. The list may cost a little more, but your returns will pay off in the end.

3 HOT Tips to Improve Your Ads/Flyers and Letters for Small Business Growth

One of the areas that you can dramatically improve the number of leads to your small business is through effective advertising.

Right now I’ll take you through 3 HOT tips on how you can bring in more money and customers.

Here are three things you can do to improve your prospecting letters.

1. Use a benefit orientated headline, not your business name.

The biggest mistake most small businesses make is using their business name as the headline for their advertisements.

Your prospective customer isn’t interested in your business name, they want to know what you will do for them. So tell them in the headline.

A case in point is the weight loss market.

If you’d like to lose weight which headline would appeal to you more…?

“Naughton Services” (business name headline) or…
“Lose 5kgs in 7 weeks” (benefit headline)

Obviously the second headline would appeal more.

Make sure you use benefit headlines for all of your marketing pieces.

2. Take a ‘Point of YOU’ approach.

Print out each of your letters/ad/flyers and take a red pen and circle the words I, We, or Our in your letter/ad/flyer.

Now rewrite your letter using the words YOU or YOUR.

Why?

Your prospective customer doesn’t care about you. They are interested in themselves and they want you to tell them how buying from you will benefit them.

So don’t tell them about you in your ads/flyers and letters. They don’t care! Appeal to their self-interest by telling them how they will get value for money, and how they will benefit.

For example…

“I will talk about the 5 key areas that I feel are important in health”
“You will learn the 5 key important areas that will dramatically improve your health”

A general rule of thumb for any marketing piece is that for every ‘I’ or ‘We’ there should be 5 ‘You’ or ‘Your’s.

3. Ask the reader to ACT NOW!

At the end of all of your marketing pieces make sure you ask the reader to take action.

Specifically tell them to ‘pick up the phone’ or ‘visit our website’ or ‘visit our shop’.

It seems really strange to point this fact out. Yet so many businesses simply forget to tell the reader what they need to do to buy from them. And if you aren’t telling them, you’re losing sales.

Your customers are ‘silently begging to be led’ so tell them how to contact you or what they need to do to buy from you. It makes a HUGE difference. Try it and see for yourself.

These three guidelines you have just read, can immediately improve the results you’re getting from your marketing.

Try them, and see if they improve your business growth.

How to Use Magnetic Marketing to Massively Multiply the Results of Your Advertising

It works without fail, every time. It can work with everything you are selling or promoting. It works on the principle of giving before receiving, and of offering more in value than you are getting in cash. Your prospect must perceive an increase for themselves in order to want to interact with you. Magnetic marketing is the technique that does this. Then this same technique is used to convert a prospect to a sale or business partner.

What is magnetic marketing? It is a process of attracting leads to you by offering them something of value first. Using ezine classified advertising and solo ads for an example, don’t try to close the deal all at once by attempting to drive your prospect to your website. Instead, start by giving the targeted prospect an offer they can’t refuse.

Using my own business ad copy as an example, here is an ad I ran before I had put the magnetic marketing technique together for this business that is an example of NON magnetic marketing:

Catch the Buzz - Discover Revolutionary Health and Wealth!
As seen on TV Superfood is now yours to use and make $$ with
Low cost! No personal sponsoring to make money! No minimum!
Weekly Pay, 100% Matching Bonus, 2x7 matrix, Incredible Team
Visit and learn more right now: http://acai-4life.com

Admittedly, the ad copy is not my best, written off the cuff right when I had started with this new company. However this kind of advertising can and does work, don’t get me wrong! The thing is, it is only a trickle of results compared to the massive results you can get by incorporating magnetic marketing into your business model.

The main problem with this and so many other ads is: they all really want the prospect to get excited and ‘click here’ without offering anything in return to really motivate them.

For about $50 my ad ran and is right now still running to about 6 million ezine subscribers – with an audience that is mostly small business and internet related. I got and am still getting that trickle of results.

Now how about transforming it into a magnetic marketing campaign?

Take that same $50 and micro-target your audience. Since my company pays quite well with retail sales I could find health-related ezines. Then you can either purchase classified ads or solos. Even with a small subscriber base of two or three thousand, you will get a lot of leads and sales. Your new magnetic marketing will now have ad copy reading something more like this:

Did you know Free Radicals Accelerate Aging and Cause Cancer?
Discover everything you NEED to know about the massive damage
they cause, & the most essential antioxidants needed to fight them.
Learn little known secrets of health, anti-aging and disease
prevention in this free e-course: vitalhealth@robotreply.com

(If you like, you can subscribe, the email address and series are real).

What makes this ad now magnetic is that instead of trying to ‘make the sale’ of even driving your prospect to your website right away, your prospect now has the drive to contact you. In doing this, they become your lead.

They want to receive valuable information on a topic that interests them. They are plugged into your autoresponder and at the bottom of each valuable article in the series you send them, you drive them to your website. They now see you as a valuable provider of information and are more inclined to visit your website and do business with you.

Magnetic marketing works in any type of business or niche category. Give it a try. Put together some relevant content and make a valuable series for your prospects to subscribe to. Your business provides the solution to someone’s problem. Create a series of informative articles, reports, or ebooks that provides in depth information on the problem and solution.

Create an ad that addresses that problem, and propels the prospect to obtain the vital information you will give them for free that is the solution to their problem. Apply this to your marketing campaigns - by offering something of value to your prospects your magnetic marketing will massively multiply your advertising responses, leads and sales.

Free Advertising the Smart Way

Your biggest asset when becoming an internet marketer is to know how to get free targeted traffic to your web sites. It doesn't matter how many web sites you're promoting. Your primary goal should be to keep the cost down. It feels great to have monthly sales well into the thousands, but it also can ruin your day when you realize that most of this money goes right back into your advertising costs.

Yes, there's a rule that you need to reinvest 75% of your profit into advertising and marketing. I like this rule, but it also needs to be timely constraint. I think this rule is good for your first 3-6 months of business. After this you should be able to pull back the cost for advertising without impacting your income streams.

My philosophy in internet marketing is that if you have to spend a lot of money to keep a positive cash flow, the competition is probably too intense for this market segment. You will be better of to research a new niche market.

On the topic of free advertising, there are many free classified ad providers, but only a few sites offer truly free advertising. They all want something in return, there's no webmaster out there who promotes your stuff for free just because he/she feels like it today. One way to get free advertising is to tap into a startup company. There are hundreds of web sites that want to be the next Google. To attract new customers they give away free pay per click credits. Sometimes up to $100 worth of clicks.

Another way to receive free quality advertising is to give these webmasters what they want. In most cases it's a link from your website to their website. This can be a problem, especially if you want to keep your home page clean from too many flashy banners.

In this case try to figure out of the link back is required to be on your home page or any page from your website. If there's no requirement to have the link on your homepage, create a collection web page that is not necessarily part of your whole web site and put link back from this site. To keep the flow put a tiny link from your home page to this page and you're done.

Don't even think about to put the link on your web page and a few days later you will remove it. These days the link back verification is done automatically and they will check from time to time if you keep your promise or not. Your free ride will suddenly stop and you will gain a reputation as cheater.

Making Targeted Traffic Work for You.

There has been a lot of debate in other articles, forums, and books regarding sending targeted traffic to your website. Some sing its praises but many webmasters dismiss targeted traffic as a waste of money. They argue that CPC (cost per click) or paid banner/text link advertising is a better method for generating quality visitors to your site.

There is no doubt the CPC advertising and paid banner links can be a valuable source or web business. In fact, CPC advertising usually has a much high conversion rate (a greater percentage of visitors: registering on your site, signing up for your newsletter, or buying your product, etc.) than bulk targeted traffic. However, advertisers must pay a premium for this higher conversion rate. If the campaign is done properly targeted traffic is an inexpensive way to get your message out.

Here is an Example:

“Digital Camera” targeted visitor from Overture $1.70 / visitor
100,000 Banner Impressions (1% CTR) $0.35 / visitor
Targeted Traffic Targeted Visitors $.003 / visitor

Obviously targeted traffic is far less expensive than other methods of online advertising in terms or price per visitor. However, webmaster are, and should be, less concerned with price per visitor and more concerned with price per conversion, i.e., what is the cost per person registering on your site, signing up for your newsletter, or buying your product, etc.

So, in essence, the key to making targeted traffic work is to maximize your conversion rate. Let’s examine some primary rules you should follow to accomplish this.

1. Get traffic from a reliable source. You need to know where the traffic is coming from. Is it from Expired Domain redirects? Is it from pop ups or unders? If it is from pop ups/unders, does the traffic source have a method to compensate for pop up blockers? If not, you may find the actual traffic far less than the traffic you are being charged for.

2. Pinpoint your target market. Don’t try to save a few dollars with untargeted traffic. Make sure your message is being seen by people interested in your product or service. Give some thought to who would really benefit from your offer and target that group. Also, consider regional targeting as well. If you sell a product and can only ship to US customers, make sure only US visitors are being targeted with your message.

3. Create Impact Quickly. You have one brief chance to convert targeted traffic. Choose your landing page wisely. Use a page that will grab a visitor’s attention right away. However, be cautious not to create a message with too much hype. Web surfers have become more callous to advertising and may ignore messages that sound too fake.

The best option is to give a brief description of your offer then require them to click through to get more information. This way you can track conversions.

4. Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Experiment with different landing pages to see what works best for your offer. Do not send hundreds of thousands of visitors to a single page. Create several different landing pages and send 10k visitors or so to these pages. This way you can find out what works best and focus the rest of your traffic on those pages.

Also, don’t try to get all your traffic in a few days. By spreading it out over time you may convert repeat visitors who overlooked your message the first time.

5. Maximize your advertising dollar. I also like to sign up with a text link (www.textdot.com) or banner exchange (www.bexchanged.com) and place that code on my landing page. This way you can maximize your advertising budget by earning banner/link impressions. Just make sure that the code does not interfere with your primary message.

By following these rules, you will have a much greater chance of your targeted traffic campaign being a success.

What is Going On With the Paid Autosurf Programs Lately?

To understand what this means, you need to understand the difference between free traffic exchanges and paid autosurf programs. These are two completely different services. A free traffic exchange allows webmasters to get lots of traffic to their websites free or at very low cost. Paid autosurf programs are designed to earn money by surfing paid advertisers websites.

There was a recent shakeup to the paid autosurf industry initiated by Stormpay, who is a payment processor much like PayPal. The only difference being Stormpay routinely took money for these programs, advertised them to their members through their Stormclix program, and then later froze all the accounts of these programs and then started methodically taking money from peoples accounts who were investing in them. How a payment processor can one day be promoting these companies to us and the next day freezing accounts and taking money was incomprehensible.

Now the FBI and the SEC are investigating these suspect paid autosurf programs and Stormpay. This has caused a huge rift in the paid autosurf industry and has forced many programs to either go out of business or change their policies to conform to the SEC standards. This could actually turn out to be a blessing since most programs were Ponzi or pyramid schemes to begin with. These latest developments have forced many of these programs to disappear earlier than they would have liked and potentially saved many investors a lot of money they would have lost otherwise.

So where does this leave the paid autosurf industry? As you can imagine, many will move offshore to continue business and get outside the reach of the SEC and others will conform to the new regulations to stay in business. As of this writing, many autosurf programs have changed to manual surf programs. That means instead of just clicking a surf button and walking away for 5 or 10 minutes, the surfer is actually required to view and manually click a link that moves on to the next website advertisement. This makes sense and in the end, will be more beneficial to the advertisers paying money to have their websites viewed by surfing members.

As for more programs moving their businesses offshore and out of the reach of U.S authorities like the FBI or SEC, I would not consider doing business with any of these programs. If they don’t have to answer to anyone, then why wouldn’t this be a perfect breading ground for scammers and thieves?

The bottom line is the paid surf industry is currently evolving. The days of the paid autosurf will be going away and the paid manual surf programs appear to be taking their place. This will be a big benefit to advertisers as well as the companies generating income from these advertising dollars. We will also see the insanely high return rates promised by these paid programs to come down to earth which will be a huge boom to this industry. Stay away from the programs that promise very high returns and are based out of the U.S. Chances are almost certain you will lose your money with these programs. Remember the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. Be smart with your money.

What Makes a Successful Yellow Page Ad Headline?

Be daring and be different!

As a former Yellow Page consultant for 25 years, I would recommend you take the time to figure out what makes you different from your competition and work from that base. After all, how else is Mrs. Jones going to choose from the hundreds of plumbers in the directory?

Begin in the beginning. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Build your ad from the headline on down. It’s the place most users will see first. So conceive a headline that takes you out of the ordinary.

Sticking with “Plumbing,” I’ve seen the same headlines year after year:

“Quality Emergency Service.” “Save Money.” “Complete Services.” Need a Good Plumber? Call Us.”

Okay, let’s break these down, in order.

Shouldn’t the user expect “Quality?” And what plumber doesn’t handle emergencies?

Isn’t every broken pipe an emergency?

No, I don’t want to “Save Money. I want to spend more. Dumb.

Doesn’t anyone offer “Incomplete Services” anymore? Also dumb.

And do I “need a good plumber.” Why else am I looking under “Plumbing” in the first place? Did I think this was the “Pizza” heading?

So you’re a plumber, not an ad-man. What kind of headline could you come up with that every other plumber can’t offer? Sure it’s tough, but no one said marketing was easy. It’s takes a creative touch and some adventure. Look at advertising in a different way. How does it solve a problem? That’s why Mrs. Jones grabbed the directory in the first place. She had a problem: a leaky pipe, Not you have to solve it for her. How? By telling her exactly what you intent to do. That’s the solution.

Huh? What did I say? Well, what does a plumber do? No, not the “Fast Service” stuff. We already beat that to death. What do you really do? You fix leaks. Okay, that’s not the headline I had in mind. You also get the water going again. Hmm. So you think outside the box. “Water Your Expectations?” Now that’s different, or, “Real Men Wear Booties! (to Protect Your Floors)” Get the idea? “Draining Pipes, Not Wallets.” That’s a feature and benefit story. “

“Flow Slow?” “Sink Sunk?” “Shower Shot?” “Drain Pain?” I could go on and on, but I won’t bore you. You need something catchy, cute, and real. Make a point, tell a story and have fun. Try different headlines in different directories and headings.

Under water heaters, you might try, “Water Heater Leaving You Cold?” Under “Septic Cleaning” try “Tanks for the Memories.” It’s a bit of a game but the trick is to capture the reader’s attention in the few seconds you have in a Yellow Page ad.

Grab a Thesaurus and get to work. Rethink your industry and the various terms they use. Plays on word and puns are obviously acceptable. Write in good taste and avoid anything that even remotely looks obscene or improper. Don’t’ forget the subhead, if needed. For example, “Tanks for the Memories” followed by, “We Offer Memorable Service on Brand-Name Septic Tanks.”

Ignore all the clichés in the other ads, like, quality, dependable, fast, same-day, emergency, low cost, expert, professional, etc. Save that for the text, if needed. Concentrate on becoming the ad other businesses point to when they are looking for a creative approach. Then throw them a curve and change the headline every single year!

It’s a challenge but I’m sure you’re up to it. Your business is worth it, wouldn’t you agree?

E-zine Advertising, An Affordable Alternative To Google

You would like your website to be at the top of the search engines result page, that way, you can get some free targeted traffic, and save money on advertising. However, this has been more difficult than you would like it to be.

Google's pay per click advertising is an excellent alternative, except, It can be costly, depending on your keywords.

There is however, an even better, and affordable option: E-zine Advertising, that is, advertising in on-line magazines.

Let's do a comparison: suppose you ran an ad in an e-zine with a readership of 20,000 and that ad cost you $30.00.and only 5% of the readers click on your ad which is 1000 clicks (I'm assuming you have written a compelling ad. If not, no form of advertising will help!) In terms of cost per click it would amount to 0.03 cents per click.

Now, compare that to a pay per click ad in google or yahoo, where you would have to bid the highest for the keywords that will trigger your ad to display before the searcher/potential customer. Lets say you bid on a keyword like "exercise equipment." To get a realistic display you would have to bid at least 10 cents or more per click. If 1000 people clicked on your ad like they did in the e-zine ad. you would pay $100.00 or more for a pay per click ad in google or yahoo.

Which would you rather pay $30.00 for a e-zine ad or $100.00 or more for a pay per click ad, for the same amount of clicks?

Another thing to consider is this, when you di