Creating Audio Mini Courses to Market Your Services

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Email Formatting Tool Avoid jagged edge emails with this email text formatting tool.

Freeze a Web Page to View Later with Freezepage

Google Page Rank Report Check the page rank of your and competitor sites.

Identify Top Sites and Site Ranking

Link Popularity Calculator Determine how many other sites link to a site. You can use this as a rough measure of how popular a site is.

Pay-Per-Click Search Engines Reviews – Read about how each one works and how much traffic they get. Before you spend a dime on any, read the chapter on advertising in ‘Creating Web Sites that Sell‘.

Reverse Area Code Look-up Find where an area code is located.

Search Engine Submission Links – Use these everytime you update your site.

Search Engine Tools – Link popularity check, search engine saturation and keyword verification.

Web Site Design Browser Compatibility Check – See if your web site is compatible with commonly used browsers.

World Time Zone Map Find out what time it is anywhere or just in the USA.

Where to List Your Affiliate Program Website

• 2-tier

• Affiliate Announcement

• Affiliates Directory

• Affiliate First

• Affiliate Guide

• Affiliate Marketing 411

• Affiliate Match

• Affiliate Programs

• Affiliate Ranker

• Affiliate Scout

• Affiliate Seeking

• Affiliate Tip

• Affiliate Trade Links Network

• Associate Programs

• Become an Affiliate

• Big Affiliate Directory

• Directory at Affiliate Tracking

• Earn Find

• Global Affiliate Programs

• GR1 Innovations

• Marketing Terms

• Sponsor Directory

• Start Earning

• Top Affiliate

• We are Affiliates

• Web Hosting Resources- Affiliate Program Directory

• Webmaster Affiliates

Top Paid Directories to Add Your URL

• 01 Web Directory

• Abi Logic

• AbleSeek

• AliveDirectory

• All Top Sites

• Apahcinc

• Aviva

• Beacon Post

• Best of the Web

• Business.com

• Buzzle

• CBravo

• Elib.org

• Ezilon

• Gimpsy

• Go Guides

• Hedir

• InCrawler

• JoeAnt

• KWIK Goblin

• LinkCentre

• Linkopedia

• Maxlinks.org

• Microsoft Small Business Directory

• Massivelinks

• Octopedia

• Seek Zap

• SevenSeek

• Skaffe

• Site-Sift

• SOC Engine

• Tygo

• Uncover the Net

• V7N Directory

• Web-Beacon

• Web Sky Guide

• Web World Index

• Wow

• Yahoo Directory

There is a hierarchy of information and elements you need to present to prospects to make it easy for them to become customers and clients. This is not what most small business owners provide on their web sites. Most sites lead with a boring description of services and credentials. This tends to push prospects away.

Before you build your web site or start to fix a site that isn’t attracting as many clients as you’d like, take a minute to clarify the objectives of your site. Marketing objectives for web sites for most independent professionals and small business owners should be:

Lead Generation
Build your list of qualified prospects that are interested in your products and services but not quite ready to make a purchase. First time visitors to the site need to be able to quickly identity if they are in the right place and determine whether you can help them. Make it easy for prospects to qualify themselves.

Establish Credibility
If people found your site by searching the web, you have a lot of work to do to prove that you can help them and deliver on what the site promises.

Sell Your Products and Services
Of course you will want to include information about your products and services, but if you rush this step, you’ll lose prospects before you’ve created the context that will move them to a purchase.

Putting Your Selling Steps In Sequence

Now that you know what you want your web site to do, define the key elements that should be on your home page. Put these in the correct sequence and more prospects will do what you want. You’ll generate more leads and more sales. Here’s how.

Feature Your Marketing Message
At the top of your home page include a one sentence marketing message that describes what you actually do and the problems you solve. For example, “Helping service professionals and small business owners attract more clients” or “Helping you create the ultimate personalized trip to Britain”.

Collect Leads
Place the sign-up for your free newsletter, ebook, or catalogue at the top of your web page. The right hand top corner is the optimal position. Above the sign-up form don’t just say, “Enter your email here for complimentary information”. Make an offer, one that will motivate your prospects to give you their contact information. For example, “Sign Up for Britain’s best travel secrets.”

As an incentive on my site I offer a free marketing guide to motivate people to subscribe to my newsletter, with the result that 12-15% of site visitors sign up for my ezine.

Use Qualifying Questions
Don’t start with a description of your services or products. Below your marketing message, lead with qualifying questions, that will help prospects understand the problems you solve, engage your visitors’ attention and create a perception of need.

For example, if you sell ergonomic chairs, you could ask, “Does your back ache at the end of a day at your desk?” Or if you sell customized travel services to Britain you could ask, “Are you
interested in a customized, hassle free vacation in the British Isles?”

Build Credibility
One-way to do this is to include testimonials from satisfied clients. People will read your marketing copy with a grain – or a whole shaker – of salt. When people read what others say about the amazing results you achieve, they are much more likely to believe your claims. Limit your testimonials to ones that are easy to believe, even if you did help someone make ten million dollars.

The second part of establishing your credibility is to demonstrate the value of your expertise by providing prospects with helpful ideas. If you’re in the computer repair and maintenance business you might include tips on identifying software conflicts and keeping computers from crashing.

People like to do business with people they know and trust so use your site to bring your company and personality to life. Include links to your articles, case studies and /or product demonstrations. Add a photo of yourself or your employees to personalize your site and move prospects to thinking of you as a person.

Show Prospects The Results You’re Selling
Include thumbnails of products and services people can click on in a side navigation bar on most of your site’s pages. Whatever you sell make sure to feature both visual and verbal testimonials along with information and images of your products and services.

On your individual service or product pages provide examples of clients and customers using your services or products. For ebooks, include tables of contents and sample chapters. If you sell log homes, include pictures of happy customers in their homes. If you sell information, feature client testimonials.

Tell Them What To Do
If you want people to sign up for your newsletter, tell them to. To get people to read the articles on your site, tell them to. To increase the number of people who view the pages describing your products and services, include thumbnail images of your products and tell them to click on the image for further information. If there is a particular sequence of steps you want prospects to take, tell them what they are.

Make It Easy For Prospects & Buyers
Place your contact information, including email address and phone number in an obvious location on every page, particularly the homepage. Include a link to a contact form or place it at the bottom of your homepage, or both.

In your form, ask a few key questions to help prospects clarify what it is they want to achieve and get their phone number so you can follow up. Their responses will help you prioritize who to contact and help you focus on your most profitable prospects.

Show prospects that are ready to engage your services or buy your products how to do so. Coaches will want to include a coaching inquiry form. People, who sell greeting cards, should include a quick link so people can place their orders.

Use the blueprint above to construct a web site that sells. Build steps that will lead prospects into your web site and motivate them  to give you their name, email address and phone number or to contact you about your services or to buy your products. Build steps that will move them from prospects to clients and customers.

Getting articles about your business published on the Internet is one of the most effective ways to get attention, demonstrate your expertise and increase visitors to your website. Why isn’t it working for Stephanie?

There is one simple technique that will get editors and prospects to read your articles and read the marketing copy on your web site. Let explain with the following call that made me laugh.

Tanya is Chinese and has a web site that sells various forms of Ginseng. Her site was attractive and professionally done but was only generating a trickle of inquires or sales. After all her hard work putting the site together, Tanya was frustrated and called me. She knew that she could be making more, if only her web site marketing worked.

Sound familiar? Could you be making more from your website?

In our conversation Tanya explained that she thought she was a boring person and her web site was boring too. Have you ever had someone call you up to tell you they were boring? I had to laugh, but Tanya knew exactly what the problem was and I had to agree with her about her web site.

Want an editor to read your article or a prospect to read your web page?

If it’s boring, they won’t and all your effort will just be a waste of time and money. So what’s the secret technique to get people to read your articles and or your web site?

Give editors and prospects a reason to do what you want them to do, which is to read your article or your web marketing copy. Give them information about something that’s important to them. It sounds obvious, but 99% of the web sites, articles and ads I review make the internet marketing mistake of not providing the reader with a compelling reason to keep reading.

Start by reviewing the title.

For example:

“Growth of Home-Based Business – Part 1″

What do you think? Would an editor grab this one and say to themselves, it’s a must to publish?

If you thought the title was boring, you’re right. Some alternatives include:

“Why Home-Based Business Profits Are Skyrocketing”

or

“The 7 Secrets to a Successful Micro Business”

Whether it’s the title of your article or the headline on your web page the purpose is the same, to get the reader to read the next line, and the next and the next.

Without a reason, prospects won’t respond. Give them compelling reasons to:

• Read your articles,
• Go to your web site,
• Read the first line of your web site,
• Read the first paragraph,
• Read everything from your individual product pages to your bio,
• Contact you even if they’re not ready to buy,
• Place an order today.

Just providing stellar products or services isn’t enough. To generate interest and to get prospects to buy you need to also supply them with the motivation to act at every step of the web site marketing and sales process.

Don’t kill your sales by boring your prospects. Grab their attention with a reason to read and motivate them to buy from you. Do this and you’ll generate more leads and sales than you ever imagined.

Each time you look at your web site and then at your sales figures, how to you feel? If your site currently isn’t bringing in all the clients you can handle its not all of a sudden going to start selling like crazy.

Imagine your prospect, Tom is online looking for a particular product or service. He has found your web site either through a search engine or a link from an ad. Tom clicks through your web pages. Your product or service meets his needs perfectly, but he clicks away.

What can you do to turn more site visitors like Tom into customers? How can you make your Internet marketing work for you?

Like any sensible person, Tom is cautious about making a purchase or a contact on the Internet. There are thousands of honest and helpful service providers online but unlike local shopkeepers Tom isn’t familiar with any of them.

Your challenge is use your web site to engage your prospect so he/she discovers what an expert you are and knows and trusts you. People buy from people they know and trust.

If you want to connect with prospects, you need to personalize your Internet marketing.

Here’s how:

1. Introduce Yourself
You want people to remember you, your products and services. Add a personal introductory note to your homepage or your site and include a picture of yourself so people have a face to associate with your name.

2. Include Personal Testimonials
Get past clients to make your selling points for you. Use personalized testimonials from clients that refer to you and your firm by name and describe the incredible results you achieved for them.

3. Demonstrate Your Expertise
Use case studies on your web site and in your newsletter to explain how you help people. With permission, refer to the clients involved, their situation and how you helped them.

4. Engage Site Visitors with Questions
Find out what your prospects are looking for. When people leave a page, prompt them with a question so that you can find out what they were looking for and what they want to achieve.

5. Include Pictures of People in Your Firm
People love to look at pictures. Include photos of yourself and your employees at play and at work. If you have a dedicated contact page, include thumbnail photos of your staff next to their contact information.

6. Add Audio or Video Clips to Your Site
When people hear your voice or see you in action you become that much more real and credible to them. This is one reason public speaking works so well to generate new business. Add an audio clip of yourself discussing the problems you solve. If you do public speaking, include a clip from one of your talks.

7. Include Full Contact Information
When you are looking through a web site and contact information is buried, or only an email address is provided, it makes you question the credibility of the firm. While the web itself is intangible, you want your prospects to know they are buying from real people who work at a real company. Include your firm’s name, phone number and mailing address on every page of your web site.

8. Answer Email Inquires
People half expect that they won’t get a response when they send an email to a business they don’t know. Pleasantly surprise them by thanking them for their inquiries and answering their questions promptly. They’ll appreciate you and be much more likely to buy from you.

9. Follow Up with a Phone Call
Prospects are amazed and delighted when, minutes after leaving your web site, their phone rings and a live person calls to follow up on the question they just asked by email. Use their inquiry to start a conversation and discover what their needs are and how you can help them.

Whether your goal is a hundred thousand or a hundred million dollars in revenue for the year, your business is built one prospect and one client at a time. Use your web site to help each of your prospects get to know you and your business personally and you’ll build both trust and sales.

I asked John, “What’s the most important function of your web site?” After a pause he responded, “To tell people about myself and my services.” This sounds like the right answer, and it’s the one I hear most often.

But it’s wrong!

Build a web site focused on yourself or your products and it is doomed to fail from the start. No matter how hard you work to promote it or make it look impressive, it won’t pay for itself, ever.

What is the primary purpose of a web site?

There are 3 key steps in the Internet marketing process. Understand the purpose of each and you’ll be able to bring in more new business with your web site. You need to attract prospects, convert them into qualified leads and then convert leads into clients.

The problem for most people is that despite their best efforts to collect thousands of leads, they only end up with a few clients. Sound familiar?

Your Internet marketing is like New York City’s water system. In upstate New York they use reservoirs to collect rain. This water is then piped down to New York City and finally when apartment dwellers turn on the tap, they’ve got clean drinkable water.

The only problem with this system is that for every ten gallons of rain that falls into the reservoirs the city only receives eight to nine gallons of water. What happens to the missing gallon or two of water? It’s lost through an antiquated leaky piping system.

Is the same thing happening or worse with your web site marketing? Are you losing the majority of your prospects due to an antiquated marketing and follow-up system?

If you are, don’t despair. There is a simple solution. You can use the 3 key steps below to help you plug the leaks in your marketing system and get new business pouring in.

The 3 key steps to improving your web site marketing are:

1. Get More People to Your Site
Your first objective is to get the greatest number of people to visit your site. If you use pay-per-click ads such as Google Ads, take a look at your click-through rate.

Are you getting at least 1.5 to 2% of the people who see these ads to visit your site? The purpose of any and all of your web advertising is to get people who might be interested in your services to visit your web site.

If your ads don’t prompt at least 1.5% of viewers to respond, test alternative headlines and subheads. You’ll have the most success with headlines and subheads that focus on your prospects’ problems and concerns.

In my experience with my own sites and my clients’ sites, changes in the wording of headlines and subheads makes a huge difference in response rates. You can double the number of people who click on your ads – and double the number of potential clients visiting your web site – by changing a few words in your ads.

2. Convert More Web Site Visitors to Leads
Let’s say a hundred people a day visit your web site. How many leads do you generate? With the right copy (headlines and text), sales offer, and page layout, you could motivate 15 to 25% of the people who visit your web site to contact you. Instead of a handful of inquiries from site visitors each week, you could have dozens.

At the beginning of this article, I asked my client John what the main function of his web site is. This is it.

The primary purpose of your web site is to get the greatest number of visitors to email you or call you with their contact information.

Your site may be the best looking site in the world, but if it doesn’t motivate your prospects to contact you, you’ve lost them and won’t get their business.

Few people buy products and services the first time they visit a web site. Most look at dozens of options. Unless your site is as well known as aol.com or amazon.com, your prospects won’t remember your site’s URL ten seconds after they leave for another site.

Before another prospect leaves your site and forgets your business, start using your free offer and your site layout to prompt at least 10-20% of all site visitors to contact you.

3. Convert More Qualified Leads to Clients
If you’ve taken the first two steps above, you’d have more people responding to your ads and more people contacting you. You’ve probably guessed the next step is to follow up and convert the greatest number of prospects to clients.

Depending on the type of business you’re in, your follow up process may include a phone call, a mailing, a series of emails, or some combination of these. Whichever system you use, you want to increase the percentage of people who buy your products and services. It sounds obvious to both you and me, but this is where 80% of new business is lost.

Is your website marketing system leaking more than New York City’s water system?

Take this Quick Quiz
1. Is the click-through rate for your pay-per-click ads 1.5% or better?
Yes – No

2. Do 15 to 20% of all unique visitors to your site contact you?
Yes – No

3. Do you have an automated system for following up with leads generated from your web site that generates sales from 4% or more of your prospects?
Yes – No

If you answered “No” to one or more of these, you’re in the same boat as most business people on the web. Your web marketing is full of leaks and with a few changes you could be collecting a lot more leads and converting more of them to clients. Discover how to get a better response to your ads, get more people to contact you and your sales could skyrocket within weeks.

Where to List Your Web Site

• Google Add A URL

• MSN Add A Page

• Open Directory

• Yahoo
Become a free member and you can submit your site. Just sign-up for their free email and then once you’re signed it submit your site.

• Top Places to Add your Url
A great list of other directories and resources that will help take your web marketing to the next level.

Paid Search Engine Listings

When you pay to get your site listed in the two following directories Google is much more likely to include it.

• Top Paid Directories List
Many of these paid directories enjoy a high Google PR and are a great investment in your your web marketing strategy.

• Joe Ant – Costs $39 (is worth it)

Free Search Engine Directories

• Over 275 Free Places to List Your Site

Where to List Your Blog

•DMOZ Blog Directory

• Submit Your RSS Feed

• Top Places to Submit your RSS feed or Blog
Your blog should be included in your small business marketing plan and these directories are a must for your internet marketing strategy.

Affiliate Program Directories

• Top Affiliate Directories
Have an affiliate program? Use these affiliate directories as part of your small business marketing strategy.

• And a List of Search Engine Directory Lists

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We’re taught in school that everyone should get a job, but for many people a job working for someone else can be a dead end. If you’re self-motivated you can create a career you enjoy, one that challenges you, where you work with people you like, with unlimited promotional opportunities, one where you can make a lot more by being your own boss.

How can you create your own career, live the life you want and make far more than most people ever make from a “job”?

Discover the simple formula to creating the lifestyle and the profits you want that worked for Steve Pavlina and me.

Listen to the audio and take action to see your wealth grow.