Every time I hear about the bailout I can’t help but wondering, “Where’s my $700 billion dollar bailout? Hey, I’d even be happy with just a couple billion.”

Unless you work for one of the Wall Street firms or banks that created this crisis, you know that you’ll never see a dime of the proposed bailout. And in fact you and your children and their grandchildren will be paying for it.

What can you do to bailout your business in these tough times?

I’ve owned boats all my life, small motorboats and sailboats, and periodically passing rain storms fill the bottom of the boat with water. This makes the boat sit low in the water and go slow. The obvious solution is to bail the boat!

Let me ask you one question?

Who do you think ends up bailing my boats?

I do. Over the years, I’ve been responsible for bailing my boats. If I didn’t they’d sink.

While Wall Street may be looking for and getting a bailout, the only one who is going to bailout your small business is you. But I bet you knew that already.

If you want to bailout your business, and put in on the track to success, the simple answer is find out what works. Find out the fastest way to attract clients, keep them coming back and maximize your profits.

Interested? Get started >>

When you do, you’ll discover yourself making more than ever and laughing at the failures of Wall Street all the way to the bank.

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing That’s Proven and Practical

What makes an ad get your attention and then keep you interested and help generate more sales? It’s when it clearly identifies a common problem and then shows you an obvious solution that you can’t live without.

Here’s an example that does exactly this >>

Just use the above link and click on play to see what I’m talking about.

- Charlie
MarketingForSuccess
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Attract Clients and Increase Your Profits

Recently I mailed my subscribers an offer of a free report in exchange for answering one question. The response was terrific. I got thousands of people to download the report and got tons of data about what people are looking for. But then I got one person who wrote in and asked,

“How do you use your marketing to get people to contact you?”

Didn’t he see how I got him to contact me? Was I being too subtle?

If you haven’t done so already, sign up to get the 7 steps to build your business and increase your profits. It’s written for small business owners and marketers and it’s free, at least for now. Use this link to claim your copy >>

Am I being too subtle? Sign up before I start charging for this exclusive report.

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing Based On Results Not Opinion

Allstate has a commercial currently running that poses the “What If…” question. I can’t remember each one, but they included:
- What if someone rear ended your car crashing your car into another car?
- What if you had an accident with a car that was worth over $60,000?
- What if a friend borrows your car and trashes it… are you covered?
- What if a branch falls on your car… re you covered?
etc.

You get the idea. At the end it makes you wonder - heh am I covered?
If you have the youtube link to this video, please let me know.
(Want to view other great video ads? Here’s the best video commercials I’ve found >>)

Now ask yourself:
- What if when you sent out a mailing, instead of getting dozens of responses you got hundreds, or when you reviewed your web sales instead of just a couple of sales you saw thousands.
- What if your marketing actually worked?
- How much more money could you be making?
————
- Charlie
MarketingForSuccess.com

You’ve been working hard to get people to your site so you can generate sales. Are you frustrated yet?

Most website owners have spent more time and money on their sites than they want to admit — and they hardly generate any sales. Despite hours spent writing copy, getting the site built and struggling with SEO (search engine optimization), you’re still waiting for your site to kick online sales into gear.

Want to know the secret to making your website sell like crazy?

Traffic alone isn’t the answer.

I hear regularly from small business owners who’ve spent a fortune on SEO or pay-per-click ads and still aren’t making money from their sites. If you’re one of these, you know how annoying it can be. You want to be making money online, not losing it, and you want a good return on the time and money you’ve poured into your website.

What’s the secret to online success?
Get the answer >>

Your website needs to do four things to make money for you and your company. It needs to convert visitors to prospects; convert prospects into buyers; and to deliver the product or service and follow-up to get the next sale.

The first four steps to making your web site a money-making engine are to set up your:

1. Lead generation system
2. Conversion system
3. Fulfillment system
4. Follow-up marketing system

Is that all you need to do?

You’re almost there but you not only need an online engine; you need one that generates more money than it uses.

Which of the following scenarios describes your site?

A. Your site gets a hundred or more visitors a week but hardly generates any leads or sales.

B. Your site gets a modest amount of traffic, say, a hundred visitors a week, but at least 10% of site visitors sign up for your free offer (you do have one, don’t you?) and they give you their contact information so you can go to work helping them become buyers.

In example A. you’re probably spending more than you’re making. In B. you should be happily making money.

Ready to discover the secrets to turning your website into a money-making machine? Get started >>

What’s The Difference Between Sites That Make Money and Those That Don’t?

Every website that wants to make money has all 4 of the above elements but why then is it that some do a better job of making money than others?

In our family we own both a 1998 Subaru Outback and a 2005 Audi Allroad. Both have seats, engine and wheels. Both burn the same amount of gas. What’s the difference?

The Audi has an engine and turbo charger that converts gas into at least twice as much power. It accelerates beautifully, while the Subaru, chugs slowly up to speed. Now don’t get me wrong the Subaru is a great car but it’s slow.

Which would you want? The slow website that chugs along or the one that converts leads to sales at blinding speed?

Interested in turbocharging your website’s performance to increase sales? Find out how >>

The fifth step to making money online is maximizing your conversion rate. Many small business websites convert only a couple of visitors a week into prospects and sales. You want to convert at least several each day, if not each hour.

How much money in sales is your site bringing in each week? How much would your site bring in if you increased your conversion rate by a factor of ten? Or twenty? That’s how much money you could and should be making.

You can improve your conversion rates and convert more visitors to prospects and prospects to clients. Here’s how to do it:

1. Measure Your Conversion
Google provides a free, easy-to-use tool called the Website Optimizer. you’ll find in your Adwords account. With this you can set up simple trials to measure the conversion rates of key pages and compare them to variations on that page.

2. Change Your Web Page Copy and Layout
Once you’ve analyzed your existing pages, you can go to work on making changes to get a better response and generate more sales.

Small changes in copy, type size, and the location of these on a site page can make a big difference in the number of people who respond to your offers and to your conversion rates. I’m still amazed at how significant apparently minor changes can be.

After ten years of online success, I’ve found many ways to boost my conversion rates at every point in the sales process.

Want to discover how much more you could be making with your website? >>

To your success,

Charlie
MarketingForSuccess

P.S. Use these web marketing strategies to dramatically increase your conversions and your web site revenue. I did. Take action today and start closing all those online sales you’ve been missing.

Interested in doubling or tripling your web sales? Take action today >>

“Email marketing doesn’t work!” People who say this have it wrong. They’re confusing the medium with the message.

You may get dozens if not hundreds of emails each day that are tossed into your bulk mail or spam folder before you even see them. Of those that you do open, sometimes by mistake, most want to sell you stuff that you don’t want or need.

It’s true that a lot of email is pure junk, but before you dismiss email entirely as an effective marketing tool, you should know that for the past year I’ve been using a planned sequence of two emails that result in $15 to 20,000 in sales each time they’re sent out. And you can have the same success.

Here are four ways you can use email to increase your profits by helping more people buy your products and services.

1. Send Email to People That Ask For It
Sending email to people who have never heard of you is almost always a waste of time. They’re not going to open your email, much less read it.

Before people will open and read your emails, you have to prove to them that you can be trusted to provide helpful ideas or information. Then you can politely ask them to give you their contact information and ask their permission to email them. In your first email, double check that they want to hear from you.

The confirmation process described above may seem onerous, but it keeps all of us from being deluged with spam and ensures that the people on your email list want to hear from you and are interested in buying from you.

What’s the fastest way to build your own massive email list? Use this link to get the details about this marketing idea >>

2. Get the Conversation Going
One of the biggest mistakes online marketers make is sending out a barrage of emails that try to sell right away. Send emails like these out and you’ll destroy the trust you’ve been working hard to develop.

Instead, use your marketing emails to demonstrate that you’re the go-to expert in your industry niche. And periodically ask your readers’ relevant questions. Hearing their feedback will let you know what they want and need.

People are much more likely to buy from you when they know you, trust you and feel like they can talk to you.

Ready to find out the secrets to using email to build trust and sales? Start here >>

3. Use Personal Reputation To Increase Sales
Your personal reputation is the sum of every thing your prospect has seen or heard about you and your company. Ideally, your prospects think of you as helpful and interested in them as well as, knowledgeable, up-to-date, trustworthy and reliable.

If your reputation isn’t solid, people will perceive too much risk when you ask them to buy. If you’ve got a strong reputation, your prospects are much more likely to respond when you suggest a product or service and become clients and customers.

How can you use email to build your brand and your profits? Find out here >>

What can you do if you’re just getting started or have been in business for years but aren’t reaching many buyers with your current email list?

Find another company targeting the same market you’re trying to reach. Let them review your products and then make them an offer that can’t be beat to promote your products or services.

When one of the most famous people in your industry niche tells people to buy your product, you’ll generate five times as many sales as you would trying to make the sale yourself.

4. Listen to Your Readers; They’re Your Buyers
Your marketing emails are going to thousands, if not tens of thousands, prospects. You can’t hear what those prospects say when they get your email, but there is an easy way to find out what they are thinking.

Each time you send an email, check your email tracking stats to see:

# The percentage of people that opened your email,

# Of those people that opened your email, how many followed the links provided in the email,

# How many of those that followed the link made a purchase.

Use this information to improve the results of your next email. For example when I log into my email broadcast service I can see how many people opened each of the html emails I send.

When you have this information you can determine which topics and subject lines to focus on and which to dump. Similarly you can use tracking links in your newsletter to see what percentage of people who read your emails went to your product page and how many of those made a purchase.

With a little bit of simple tracking data in hand you can identify whether to fix your subject line, your email content or your sales page, or all three.

Want to know the secrets to using email to grow your business? I’ve been testing and refining my email and web marketing strategies for almost a decade.

Here’s a shortcut to email marketing success >>

Do these 4 ideas sound too simplistic? 90% of my sales are in response to emails that either I send out or my sales partners send out on my behalf. Using the four email strategies above, you could easily boost your sales by more than you ever imagined.

Want to increase your online profits? Put these ideas to work today to see your website profits soar.

To your success,

Charlie

P.S. - Even if you already have a web site that’s making money, I challenge you to double your profits this summer. I know you can if you use these proven email marketing ideas and techn iques >>

P.P.S. - I’m always amazed at how many people keep doing the same thing over and over when it doesn’t work. I know you’re smarter than that and would rather find out how to use these proven email strategies to grow your business too >>

What’s the one web marketing disaster that happens every day?

It happens to almost every website owner dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.

A visitor clicks to your site. They take a look at your home page and then they leave without so much as an email or phone call to you.

If you have a top search engine position, this may happen hundreds of times a day. If you’re using pay-per-click advertising, this happens as often as you can afford to pay for it.

In the first case, you’ve probably invested a lot of hard work into achieving a top search engine ranking and in the second, a lot of money in advertising. The result? You’re losing money or barely breaking even on your web site investment.

Most business owners with well-planned sites get hundreds, or even thousands, of interested prospects visiting their sites each week and then - nothing. Your prospects don’t come back and they don’t buy from you in spite of all your efforts.

“What’s going on?” you ask yourself, as you try to make sense of all these lost opportunities to generate a lead or a sale. “What did I do wrong? Aren’t people interested in my products and services?”

It just doesn’t compute. You know that your existing customers are happy, so why don’t more people contact you and buy from your website? Find the answer here >>

For most business owners, the problem has nothing to do with you. You provide top quality products and services, don’t you!?

Yet, something happened when your prospect visited your website and left without a word. And this, more likely than not, is what that something was…

One of three things could have happened when your prospect landed on your site to make them leave without contacting you or buying from you.

1. They were looking for something different.
Your site sells jewelry and they were looking for dog treats. Unless the copy on your site has nothing to do with what you sell and the keywords you’re using for your pay-per-click ads are totally wrong - this is highly unlikely which brings me to…

2. Your prospects only had a passing interest.
When they saw your site they lost interest in looking for a solution to their problem. While anything can happen, most people are much more dogged about finding answers.

What’s the web marketing secret to that will get your prospects to come back? Find the answer here >>

Most people will search for hours online until they find what they want, which brings me to the third and most likely reason your prospects left without contacting you…

3. Your site didn’t show them what they wanted to see.
The key information they were searching for was missing entirely or wasn’t readily available. Or your site may not have given them information in the order they were expecting. Prospects are picky that way.

If you want your prospect to stay on your website, contact you and buy from you, you need to know:

- What your prospects want to read at the top of your homepage.

- How to get them to contact you before they leave your site and forget about you.

- How to lay out your web page to get your prospects to take action and buy from you.

- The common design mistakes that will send your prospects packing.

When you know this and build your site around the information your prospects want, you can easily convert up to 20% of all the visitors to your site into qualified prospects and up to 10% into clients and customers.

Let me ask you something. Who built your website?

Most business owners are way too busy to master the technology to build their sites themselves. They hire web designers and programmers. Sounds like a good idea.

Unfortunately, hardly any web designers know how to create sites that sell, either!

Let me repeat that. Web designers don’t know how to build a site that sells.

Most web designers know nothing about converting prospects into customers, which after all is what your site is supposed to do. If they had any formal training it was in design or programming, not in generating leads or sales or in how to make a profit with your site.

It’s not that some web designers aren’t creative and smart but without the right copy or a clear plan you’re asking them to do something that they don’t know how to do. It’d be like hiring a carpenter and telling him to build your dream house but not bothering to give him the plans for the foundation or layout of the house.

Want to make a profit with your web site? Discover what works >>

Leaving your site up and hoping your response rate will change and you’ll start raking in the sales is a waste of time, too. The truth is that you can be successful online if you have great products and services and if you know what works to get prospects to contact you and buy from you.

Ready to find out how make your site sell? Get the web marketing details here >>

Charlie
Web Marketing Ideas that Sell

To listen to the podcast online, use this link >>

Running your business often means starting work early in the mornings, working evenings and the occasional Saturday and Sunday. Wouldn’t you like to cut back this year, ease up a little, maybe take a few Friday afternoons off or get away on vacation this summer? How can you do this and at the same time build marketing momentum?

You know that you could expand your business if your marketing was more effective, but you barely have time to keep up with your present workload, much less take on a whole new set of business marketing ideas and tasks.

How can you take your small business to the next level and work less this year?

The secret of course is in the 80/20 rule. For most people 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your efforts. Now imagine you knew where to focus your time so it consistently helped you to get results. You could easily increase your sales by a factor of five.

In marketing most people are using the equivalent of smoke signals or Morse code. They’re using outdated marketing ideas and strategies.

Instead of using a marketing system they’re using bits and pieces.
That’s like trying to go somewhere in a car without an engine. It might look good sitting in your driveway but it certainly won’t get you where you want to go.

If you’re struggling to grow your business the solution is simple. Use a proven marketing system, one that can put your marketing in gear and help you achieve your goals.

Ready to finally discover how to make more and work less? Use this link to get the details >>

3 Ways to Reach Your Business Goals

1. Plan To Get More Done With Less Effort
If you want to make better use of your time start by setting aside time each week get the knowledge you need and to implement the proven marketing ideas you get. Make room for continuous improvement on your agenda.

Take out your calendar and block out an hour once a week, preferably first thing in the morning, when you’ll give yourself a mental vacation from meetings, answering the phone, and email. Use this time to evaluate your current efforts. It’s like stepping the scale each day.

Identify what to do more of, what to change and where to get help.
- What’s working and what isn’t?

- Where are you getting the best results?

- Which keywords are attracting the most prospects?

- Which marketing messages?

- What sequence of information results in the highest conversion rates?

- What follow-up strategy is working?
Etc.

If you keep managing and marketing your business the same way, what do you think will happen? You’ll get the same results. If you want a breakthrough you’re going to need to make a change and more from piecemeal marketing to using a proven marketing system. Interested?

Use this link to discover how to make more, work less and achieve your goals >>

2. Get More Attention With Less Effort
A common misconception is that marketing success is a result of plain old persistence. Most people think that using the same type of marketing message and advertising that everyone else uses will build their “brand” or grow their business.

Is using the same approach your competitors use helping you get all the attention you want for your business? Probably not.

Your marketing message is the first place to start. Replace it with a message that clearly and succinctly explains how you help your clients. Prospects respond when you speak to their needs.

On average, my clients report that composing and using a client focused marketing message increases their response rate by 400 percent. That’s 4 times as many leads generated with the same effort.

3. Generate More Qualified Leads and Sales with Less Effort
Getting attention is the first step in marketing; getting qualified prospects the second. You want more prospects so you can convert them to clients and increase sales, but you don’t have time to make more calls or write more emails or letters. But you can get more people to contact you and buy from you each month and reduce your long-term marketing costs.

Establish systems for prompting prospects to contact you. Then automate every function of your marketing you can.

Want to increase your marketing reach and your sales while reducing your marketing costs and efforts? Use this link to get the details >>

I leverage the web, related software and a set of proven systems to manage my marketing and my sales. The result is that I can manage a continually growing enterprise with less effort. You can do the same.

You deserve some R and R this year - and you can get it and still grow your small business with the above three strategies. Start by setting the time aside, making a plan to implement your marketing ideas and a vacation plan so you can enjoy your life while steadily increasing your revenue.

Best,

Charlie
Marketing Ideas That Save You Time and Make You Money

Ever hit your finger with a hammer when you were hanging a picture on the wall? It hurts! Make this painful mistake once, and you’ll swing more carefully the next time, and try to improve your aim. With practice, you’ll hit the nail on the head and get the job done.

Is your marketing also missing the mark? That will hurt your bottom line. Banging away with the same failing marketing strategy is like hitting your finger over and over, all pain and no gain. Believe it or not, I know many small business owners that do exactly this.

Ron was one of them. He mailed 5,000 postcards to generate leads for his business. When he only got one response, he tried again, with the same result.

Ron had a web site that was only bringing in a trickle of leads, so he hired a marketing firm to rewrite and rebuild it at a cost of $40,000. What happened? The new site was even worse than the original one. He stopped getting any leads at all from the web.

Ron was spending more and more and getting fewer and fewer leads and sales. I wish I were making this up, but I’m not, and Ron is only one example of many I could tell you about.

Want to avoid making the same marketing mistake?

Use this link to find out how to get results with your marketing >>

What was Ron doing wrong?

Ron was missing a lead building strategy, one that converted prospects to clients and instead was focused on the individual marketing tools, postcards, ads, and websites.

A hammer is just a tool and if you don’t know how to aim it you’re going to do damage to your fingers and the wall and maybe even need a bigger picture to cover the hole you’ve made. And, if you’re missing the nail and hitting your fingers, an even bigger sledge hammer isn’t the solution either.

Ads, postcards, websites and any other marketing tool you use only work when you know how to aim them. Ron didn’t have a marketing strategy to help him target his marketing efforts. Worse, the marketing firm he hired took $40,000 of his money and gave him a handful of marketing tools that got even fewer results than the ones he’d had.

If your marketing isn’t generating the results your business needs, the answer isn’t spending more on doing the same thing or just shooting wildly and hoping for the best. That’d be like hammering your fingers again and again.

The answer is finding out what works to get results. To make your marketing bring in more business you need to know the triggers that prompt prospects to respond and the simple steps to take to get them to become buyers.

Have you ever spent money on marketing that didn’t get the results you wanted? Ready to stop wasting your valuable resources and finally find out what works? Use this link to hit your marketing targets >>

Charlie
Marketing Ideas That Work

“My business is like a roller coaster. When things are going well, I’m too busy working on projects to do any marketing. Then I finish those projects and don’t have enough leads to market to.

How can I smooth out these ups and downs and grow my business even more?”
- Bill, a management consultant Cambridge MA

Ever wish you had more leads to pursue when sales take a dip or you finish a project?

Or, even better, leads to pursue before sales take a dip or the work slows down?

With a steady flow of business, you could manage staffing and cash flow better and significantly increase your annual revenue.

When I asked Bill what he did to follow up with the hundreds of senior managers he worked with each year, he sheepishly told me, “nothing”. He didn’t have a follow up strategy. I asked him how many business cards he’d collected at the last talk he gave to over 50 senior managers. His answer? “None”.

Don’t be mislead; Bill is a successful consultant. He works with CEOs and top-level managers at Fortune 500 companies. But he was making one big mistake, and it was keeping him from being as successful as he could be.

What’s the mistake Bill was making? Bill didn’t have a lead generation system or a follow up system. When there was a drop in the demand for his services, he had to start his marketing from scratch.

Want to avoid making this common marketing mistake?

Use this link to find out how >>

How can you get off the roller coaster and bring in a steady stream of business?

Think like a squirrel.

As fall approaches here in Old Greenwich, CT the dozens of squirrels in my neighborhood are busy doing what squirrels do; they’re collecting nuts and storing them away. They instinctively know that the more food they gather, the happier and fatter they’ll be, come February.

They have a system for collecting nuts each fall that gets them through the long winter.

Weathering the ups and down of the business cycles requires the same kind of planning. To come out on top, you need a marketing system for collecting leads, storing them and following up on them. The more qualified leads you have in your database, the happier you’ll be.

What’s the easiest way to generate more leads every month? Use this link >>

A lead generation system gives you an organized way of contacting prospects, qualifying them, prompting them to contact you and helping them make the decision to buy from you.

Is your lead generation system working as well as it could be to bring in a steady stream of new clients? Is it providing you with new sales from long-standing clients?

Put Your Lead Generation Marketing System to the Test

1. Do you have a system?

Bill had no system whatsoever for generating leads. He was getting occasional referrals, but referrals alone weren’t growing his business.

2. Does it work to prompt 10% of all people exposed to you or your marketing to contact you?

Whether you are giving talks to large gatherings of your target market, as Bill is, or marketing online through your website, the basic concept behind a lead generation system is the same. You want to motivate as many qualified prospects as you can to contact you.

Most small businesses and service professionals have websites, but few sites generate more than a trickle of leads. The graphics, content and marketing messages on your site should prompt a minimum of 10% of site visitors to contact you. If this isn’t happening, your site is broken and you need to fix it.

3. Do you have a sequenced system of communication for converting prospects to clients?

In my experience, only 1 out of 10 small business owners have a system for converting prospects in place. So if you don’t you’re not alone but if you want to grow your business you need one.

Once a prospect expresses an interest, you’ve gotten them to take the first step in the process. It doesn’t mean they want you to sell them. Usually that is the quickest way to kill the sale.

Prospects want to get to know you, trust you and discover the value of your product and services. Whatever media you use, your follow-up communication should accomplish this.

What’s involved in setting up your lead generation system? Use this link to get the details >>

You don’t have to go nuts to develop a solid lead generation system. With a simple, strategic marketing system in place, your business can grow every month, whether you’re immersed in a project or on vacation.

If you don’t already have one, put your lead generation system into place this fall and see your business continue to prosper this winter.

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Work