Marketing Blog - Ideas That Work

"I have very little control over my website. What is the best way, for my site, to get on search engines." - Nancy Brown

If your web site was built with a third party template and is hosted on their site you may have little you can control about the actual site. This puts you at a serious disadvantage in terms of getting people to your site. You can't make most of the changes you need to help the search engines find your site.

You can promote your site in a number of other ways including using:
- Pay-per-click ads to send traffic to your site
- Articles
- Online press releases
- Links from other sites.

My best recommendation is that you create your own web site, one you can write and set up so the search engines find it.
- Charlie Cook

If you have a headline or an add that pulls in prospects like a magnet, think about other ways to use it to bring in even more business.

Earlier this summer I wrote a 35 word newspaper ad for a client. The first week it ran their phone started ringing with interested prospects. Based on the success of the ad the client's secretary took the lead copy and printed it on the back of their envelopes and sent out their monthly invoices. Days later the phone started ringing like crazy with even more work.

Have marketing copy that works? Use it again and again to attract more clients and increase your sales. Or if you need marketing copy to get your phone ringing off the hook, contact Charlie Cook at 203-637-1118.
- Charlie Cook

During a vacation to Scotland this past week I noticed the following front page news,

"Revealed: The True Cost of Potholes"

Yes, revealed is a great word to use in your headlines. Unfortunately you'll need to do more to get attention for your small busines than include the word revealed. Unlike the above headline you'll want to include copy that motivates your prospects to read your marketing copy and to contact you.
- Charlie Cook

Why aren't more people stopping by your web site, contacting you and buying from you?

Let's take a look at the path your prospects follow.

1. They look for your site in the search engines, in the vast majority of cases in Google.

Is your site listed in the 10 or 20 spots so they can find it? If not can they find your Google Ad?

2. Once a prospect sees your listing in the search engines, the copy in your listing needs to instantly get them to stop searching and click on your link.

Try searching for your site in Google, Yahoo or MSN and take a look at the title and description that shows. Is it compelling? Do the few words that appear give prospects a reason to visit your site? If not then find out how to write a marketing message that motivates prospects to visit your site.

3. Once a prospect is at your site, is it a virtual funnel that grabs prospects attention and moves them to contact you or buy from you? If not take a look at the sequence of information on your site and organize it so it prompts prospects to take the action you want them to take. Find out how to funnel prospects to contact you and buy from you with Creating Web Sites that Sell. - Charlie Cook

Are you having the same problem with your marketing my Dad has with his favorite skiff? Read the article below to find out. And, yes the story about my Dad isn't just funny, its true.

How Do You Know When To Change Your Marketing

When you put an ad in a magazine, send out a sales letter, or put up a web site, you want results. You want your prospects to contact you and to buy from you; you hope to get a flood of calls and sales.

If your marketing isn't generating the results you want, then it's time to change your marketing strategy! Don't expect to improve your results using the same strategy.

Here's an example. A search engine positioning firm I work with was having trouble generating leads. Yes, in spite of their superior ability to put their site at the top of the search engine listings and do the same for their clients, they were hardly converting any of their site visitors into leads and then clients. They were getting well over a thousand visitors a week to their site and generating at best a single inquiry per week.

Think about this for a minute. Most people assume that getting your web site to the top of the search engine listings will solve all their web marketing problems. The reality is that it doesn't matter how many visitors you get to your web site (or how many sales letters you send or ads you place,) if you aren't generating leads and converting them to sales.

Find out how to change your small business marketing so that your ads, your sales letters and your web site get a huge response. Use this link to discover a proven marketing strategy for generating a steady stream of sales.

The search engine positioning firm I was working with has many satisfied national clients, are highly skilled and great people to work with, but their marketing strategy was broken. Their website looked very similar to their competitors' sites. In fact, with a lot of information about what they do and who they are, it read like a blend of the information found on websites of other firms who offer similar services.

Many small business owners look at their competitors' marketing materials and cobble together the information for their own pieces based on what they see. The problem with this approach is that they are copying a strategy that isn't working for someone else. Once they publish their materials, someone else copies the same stuff and tries to make it work. Know anyone who has done this?

Nine times out of ten, marketing materials put together in this way lead with the company name and then list services or features. I can guarantee that if you are using this approach to marketing your business, you’re not happy. This marketing strategy doesn't work.

Discover a business marketing strategy that can help you attract more prospects, generate more leads, and increase your sales. Use this link to find out how to generate more leads and grow your business.
Is your marketing working? Ask yourself the following questions:
- How many leads did my web site generate relative to the number of visitors it gets?

- How many leads did my ad generate relative to the cost and number of people who saw it?

- How many leads did my sales letter generate relative to the number of letters I sent out?

Then ask yourself:
- Given the number of leads generated, how many did I convert into sales?

- What was the dollar volume of sales generated from each lead?

It's not a matter of time, either. If your marketing materials aren't pulling in clients within a few days, they're not going to do any better if you keep running them for months.

This client had the same problem with his small businesss marketing strategy that my Dad has with his boat; he just couldn't let go. After years of being dragged up and down a rocky beach, my Dad's aluminum skiff has lost many of the rivets in the bottom.

Put it in the water and throttle up the outboard, and fine sprays of water push up through the small rivet holes as you pick up speed. Everyone in the boat gets an upside down shower. Wherever you're going, you arrive damp.

Every year, the family tries to get Dad to replace his skiff, but he's had it so long he can't bring himself to part with it, even though its not doing the basic job of keeping water out.

Is your marketing like my Dad's boat? You've used it for years but it's not generating enough new business. If so, then it's time for a change. It's time to use a marketing strategy that puts you on top. Use this link to discover a proven and reliable system for attracting clients and increasing your sales.
- Charlie Cook

For most small businesses the first bottleneck to growing their business is generating leads and attracting new clients. Thanks to top search engine placement a web site that converts like crazy, and a track record that clients love, my marketing business is bringing in more leads and clients than I can handle.

In order to continue to grow my business, my bottleneck is the way I spend my time. I need more time. How is that possible given that they're are ony 24 hours in the day. Its actually easy, and I'm working on it as you read this. I'll be offloading all the mind numbing, time eating tasks that keep me from finishing my next marketing book and having more time for clients.

I can easily see 6-8 hours a week I could give myself simply by hiring someone else to do things like editing, ezine production and web page production. You may be thinking you couldn't afford to hire staff, part time or otherwise.

For me its simple math. I can hire someone to do my production and adminstrative tasks for $25 an hour, freeing me to develop new products or work with clients. Let's see, with 2 hours I can write a newsletter that generates a couple of thousand dollars in passive income and another coaching or consulting client.

If you're like me, you probably have waited too long and spent too much time doing stuff you could farm out via elance or to people who would love the work. Do it and you'll be able to focus your time on the activities that really make you money.
- Charlie Cook

My current site, www.marketingforsuccess.com, has become one of the top sites on the web. How did this happen?


Each week for the last two years, I've written an article a week and more recently added a couple of blog entries. Page by page the site and the resources it provides has grown until it now is big in content.

Want your small business site to be big in profits. Start thinking big in terms of content. Add a page to your site each day and soon the search engines and your target market will be seeking you out.

- Charlie Cook - Helping you get a better response and more clients with your marketing

Here is the link to the Not Work part of my web site. The part that prospects love to view and actually ends up selling my marketing manuals even though it's just includes photos of my "not work" activities. See what sells.
- Charlie Cook

Periodicaly I post pictures of myself on vacation, kayaking, skiing, or hanging out in Tortolla. These add a nice touch but the interesting thing is that they also help sell product.

When I include a link to these pictures in my newsletter, I get hundreds of people clicking on them to see what I've been up to. When I put these pictures on a page that has links to my marketing manuals, the people clicking through to see me having fun in the sun, buy my manuals.

They buy my - 15 Second Marketing Guide and discover the fastest way to increase their sales.

They buy my - Small Business Marketing Manual and double the number of clients.

They buy my - Creating Web Sites that Sell and turn their web sites into incredible profit producing centers.

Personalize your marketing to increase your sales. It works.
- Charlie Cook

One client recently wrote to say she'd finished her web site and now was waiting for the orders to pour in. Wouldn't that be nice?

The first step is creating a web site that grabs your prospects' attention and prompts them to read your copy and contact you or buy from you. The second step is to pull your prospects to your site by the thousands.

Some people focus on building traffic to their web sites, others on perfecting their sites. To be successful you need both. Discover how to do both with Creating Web Sites that Sell.
- Charlie Cook

The smarter you are the more you know what you don't know. That being said, as a marketing expert, I know that no matter how good I am at coming up with the perfect marketing copy or marketing message that I'll never really know whether its the best unless I test it.

To find what works the best I put up a bunch of ideas. Some work and some don't. To discover the best I know I need to make a few mistakes.

Using Google Ads, I test similar marketing messages and usually find one that pulls much better than the others. Or I'll find two or three that work equally well and two others that are out and out losers. I never know until I test them.

Did you test your marketing message?

If not you could be generating 4 times the response with a better marketing message. Discover how with the 15 Second Marketing guide.
- Charlie Cook