December, 2010

Blog » Archives for December 2010

Archive for December, 2010

How To Boost Sales In One Simple Step

By Ryan Healy | December 20, 2010

Improve Sales by Taking Away Their Freedom

More choice is better… right?

Wrong.

That’s the conclusion of Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice.

Common sense says increased variety and more freedom of choice will make people happier. But studies show it does the exact opposite. It actually makes them unhappy.

Why Is This?

It’s because if they make a decision, they will continually contemplate all the other choices they “sacrificed.” They will wonder if they would have been happier had they made a different decision.

This paradox of choice not only affects happiness; it affects the bottom line as well.

The rule is simple. The more choices you give a buyer, the less likely it will be that he will actually make a decision to buy.

Choices overwhelm people. Too many choices offered at once lead to inaction.

In other words, if you give a person too many ways to say yes, you will make it easier for the person to say no. Making a decision is hard work. It’s emotionally taxing. The more choices and variables involved, the harder it becomes to decide.

Make Choosing Easy!

Instead of offering a bunch of choices, offer one choice only. The choice is to either buy or not buy. The prospect must then decide yes or no. That’s it!

In almost every case, you want to make the decision to purchase as easy and simple as possible.

Buy or not buy; call or not call; request more information or don’t.

What Joe Sugarman Says…

One time Joe Sugarman wrote a newspaper ad selling a watch. His client wanted to sell three styles in three different colors for a total of nine different watches. Joe wanted to only sell one watch: the men’s watch in black.

Joe and his client agreed to an A/B split-test. The results were surprising…

When both versions ran, the ad that featured only one men’s watch out-pulled the other version that featured nine models by a surprising 3 to 1 ratio. In short, for every watch we sold from the ad that featured the nine styles, we sold three in the other ad that showed just the one black watch. (Advertising Secrets of the Written Word, p. 162)

Even prior to this split-test, Joe had told his client, “…offering a customer too many choices [is] a dangerous thing to do.” (p. 161)

This only serves to illustrate the point I’m making. If you want to improve your sales, take away your buyer’s freedom by giving him fewer choices. Not only will he be happier, you’ll make more sales, more money, and more profit.

– Ryan

P.S. For more copywriting tips than you can shake a pen at, skip on over to Copywriting Code.

More choice is better… right? Wrong. That’s the conclusion of Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice.

Common sense says increased variety and more freedom of choice will make people happier. But studies show it does the exact opposite. It actually makes them unhappy.

Why Is This? Read More »

The Key To Becoming An SEO Matchmaker

By Susan Rice Lincoln | December 17, 2010

Keywords– The Ultimate Matchmaker

When all is said and done, online marketing is really about matchmaking.

On the one side of the relationship is YOU. Very simply, you run a small business and you are trying to find qualified prospects who are interested in your services. On the other side of the matchmaking equation are your potential clients. And, while most small business owners don’t think about this, it is important to emphasize that there are hundreds—if not thousands of people—looking RIGHT NOW for you to help them solve their problems!

So how to connect? Who does the matchmaking?

A large part of the ‘connection’ happens through the humble keyword. An optimal keyword is a word or phrase which describes precisely the service or benefit you provide.

So, if you are a graphic designer in Toronto, your prospect will be typing in something like ‘graphic designer Toronto’ or ‘graphic designers in Toronto’. And you want to be absolutely sure that when they type in that term that YOUR name pops us first (and not the name of your biggest competitor!)

Keywords matter. Big time. They are paramount to online gold.

But not all keywords are created equally. Your goal is to find keywords that have the following qualities:

• the maximum possible searches

• the lowest possible competition

• high commercial viability (in other words, when people type that term in they are ready to buy rather than just ‘seeking information’

So how do you figure out which keywords you need to grow your business?

One of the best tools out there to find keywords is a piece of software called Market Samurai.

Market Samurai will not just help you find the right keywords, it will show you how competitive they are, how often they are being searched, their commercial viability as well as which sites currently rank for them. It is a comprehensive and easy-to-use tool.

Focusing on keywords is an absolute essential first step in successful online marketing. Go to http://www.marketsamurai.com/ (this is NOT an affiliate link) and grab a free trial of Market Samurai today and get going!

Here’s to your blogging success,

When all is said and done, online marketing is really about matchmaking.

How To Make Your Prospects An Offer They Can’t Refuse

By Paul Martinez | December 16, 2010

In one of my previous posts, I showed you how to increase your response rates overnight—simply by targeting the right prospects.

That alone can have a huge impact your bottom-line profits. But there’s something else that’s just as powerful. Read More »

How Google Local Marketing Helped Me…

By Charlie Cook | December 16, 2010

It’s 1:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep. There’s this loud chewing noise coming from over my head and it’s keeping me awake.

What is it? Watch the video below. Read More »

How To Achieve Your Small Business Goals for 2011

By Tom Hopkins | December 15, 2010

Planning the Achievement of Your Goals

Tom Hopkins

Goal setting and time planning go hand in hand. I don’t believe you can effectively plan your time without goals. And, I don’t believe you’ll ever achieve your goals without effectively planning your time.

Since numbers are easier to work with than ideas, I’m going to demonstrate how time planning and goal setting work together to help you achieve your financial goals. The same system can be applied to any other goal you can measure with numbers, but this is the easiest way to demonstrate it.

First of all, determine what your financial goal is going to be. If you want to earn $60,000 next year, you’ll need to know exactly what you have to do to get there. This can be done with a simple graph shown below.

Year Month Week Day

Financial Goal $60,000 $5,000 $1,200 $249

# of Sales 120 10 2.4 .5

# of Presentations 360 30 7.2 1.5

# of Contacts 1,800 150 36 7.5

In order to make $60,000, you’ll need to be on track with earning $5,000 each month. Assuming you take a two-week vacation, that breaks down to earning $1,200 per week. Earning that $1,200 each of the 50 weeks of the year will let you truly relax and enjoy your two-week vacation.

To see how that breaks down to what you must earn each day, let’s take 365 (days in a year) and subtract weekends. In our example, I’m assuming you work 5 days per week. That leaves 261 days per year for you to work. However, that’s not true in that you are likely to celebrate various holidays and, don’t forget your two-week vacation. So, let’s take away 10 holidays and 10 vacation days. So, now you have 241 days per year that you are out there face-to-face with potential clients. Dividing 241 into $60,000 shows us that you must earn $249 each day you work. Now, if you take longer vacations or personal days or sick time, you’ll have to rework your figures here to stay on track.

You know how much income you generate from each sale on average. Divide that amount into your $60,000 goal, then across the month, week and day columns. This shows you how many sales you need to make each day to earn that $60,000.

For example, if you earn $500 per sale, you would need to make 120 sales per year, which averages 10 sales per month, 2.4 sales per week or about half a sale per day. So, if you didn’t close a sale yesterday, you’d have to close one today to stay on track.

Next, we consider your closing ratio. Your closing ratio is determined by how many people you must present your product or service to before you get a closed sale. If you close one out of every 3 people, then your ratio is 1-to-3. So, if you must make 3 presentations to get one sale, how many do you need to reach your 120 annual sales goal? 360 presentations.

If it takes 5 contacts to make 1 presentation, you’ll need to contact 1,800 people this year to achieve your goal. That boils down to just about 7.5 people per day.

Now, as you plan your time to accommodate your goals, is it feasible for you to make 7.4 new contacts each working day? If it’s not, you have two choices: 1) you can lower your income goal, which doesn’t sound like much fun, or 2) you can improve your skills so your ratios are better and you don’t have to meet as many people to make the number of sales you desire.

Knowing what you must do each day to achieve your larger annual income goal helps you direct your time to what will really matter most.

This same system can be applied to saving or investing your financial resources for retirement; a special family vacation; or any goal that can be broken down mathematically. Once you get a handle on this system, you’ll find you can even apply it to your exercise routine and other aspects of your physical health. If the small steps are well taken, the journey will reach a successful end—the achievement of your goals.

Since numbers are easier to work with than ideas, I’m going to demonstrate how time planning and goal setting work together to help you achieve your financial goals. Read More »

Which Discounts Generate Profits…

By Charlie Cook | December 14, 2010

{!name},

When it came time to pay the bill for dinner I must admit, I felt a foolish.

There I was handing over a $10 discount coupon for a bill that was $190 but I had to admire the marketing savvy of the restaurant owner.

A few nights before, my wife had been conferring with our good friends Leslie and Will and Leslie offered to pick the restaurant and make the reservation.

Like us, Leslie is always interested in trying new places and she had a $10 coupon for Tendga, an Asian restaurant across town in Greenwich.

We knew we were taking our chances with a new restaurant but it turned out both the food and service were first rate. My only complaint was the techno music blaring from the bar.

Which brings me back to the math.

The restaurant owner spent money on a mailing to selected homes in Greenwich, CT offering $10 off. That’s right, just $10 off in a town where the average home sells for a million dollars.

The result was that he generated at least one sale of $200 and given that we’ll be back and I’m telling all my friends – just this one $10 coupon is likely to generate a couple thousand dollars in sales over the next couple of years.

Add in a few more new loyal customers the mailing generated and the simple $10 coupon more than paid for itself.

Now I know many people worry about giving discounts. After all it seems contradictory, if you want to increase your profits – giving away money doesn’t sound that smart.

And it’s true, cutting your prices dramatically isn’t the brightest move to make if you want to stay in business. That’s what General Motors did just before they filed for bankruptcy and got bailed out.

On the other hand, using discounts to generate leads, to get people in the door so you can create loyal customers who will buy from you over and over again is just plain good business. That’s what the owner of Tengda did and you should do it too.

Speaking of discounts. Want to save $10 on any MarketingForSuccess product?

Just enter “MFS-10” in the coupon code box before 12/20/10 to save yourself $10 on any order.

Go here to get started >>

(https://www.marketingforsuccess.com/store/)

Talk to you later,

Charlie

MarketingForSuccess

P.S. What’s the easiest way to get more people to your web site, or to your place of business?

Give them a reason – even one as simple as $10 discount coupon. Who knows – it could easily bring you in dozens or even hundreds of new customers and tens of thousands of new sales that you would have otherwise missed.

P.P.S. What’s the best discount strategy you’ve used to increase sales and profits?

Just go to the blog, and add your idea as a comment to this post and provide the link to your site, and get some free press for your business. Here’s the link to the blog post >>

When it came time to pay the bill for dinner I must admit, I felt a bit foolish.

There I was handing over a $10 discount coupon for a bill that was $190 but I had to admire the marketing savvy of the restaurant owner.

A few nights before, my wife had been conferring with our good friends Leslie and Will and Leslie offered to pick the restaurant and make the reservation. Read More »

14 SEO Tools That Will Get You Better Rankings

By Charlie Cook | December 13, 2010

Keyword Optimization

What do marketing and advertising have in common? In the land of keyword optimization, absolutely nothing! If you don’t know what words your potential clients are using to search for your service, they can’t reach you. And if they can’t reach you…well you know what happens then. Absolutely nothing! Save yourself time and money by getting keyword optimization down and prevent your other initiatives from falling flat.

The Free Dictionary

www.thefreedictionary.com

I consider this to be one of the most valuable resources out there for keyword optimization. In addition to just showing you the meaning of a word, the dictionary also shows words of the same root and thesaurus entries. Use it to approach your keywords from more than one angle.

Google Trends

www.trends.google.com

Google tends to make software that is easy to use, extremely helpful and best of all, completely free! Their Google Trends service is no exception. It analyzes Google search data and shows you how popular that search is over a period of time. and while they don’t claim to be 100% accurate, having a general idea of the popularity of your search terms will help you whittle down your SEO terms.

Google Blog

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Add this blog to your regular blog roll now and thank me later!. These masters of SEO clearly know a thing or two about search. Learn tips, tricks and go behind the scenes with the geniuses behind the service that has taken the world by storm.

Keyword Discovery

www.keyworddiscovery.com

This service is on the expensive side, but has some decently priced plans. If you need help with optimizing meta tags, beating out the competition or maximizing your PPC campaigns, Keyword Discovery can help.

Keyword Mutation Detector

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection/Default.aspx

Did you know people often misspell San Francisco as San Fransisco, San Franscisco, and even San Francsico. Don’t miss out on results because of searchers’ spelling errors. Microsoft’s Ad Lab is a helpful tool that shows you the most common misspellings for search phrases by mining actual searches so you can boost your SEO practices even further.

Keyword Research FlowChart

http://www.seobook.com/keyword-research-strategy-flowchart

Ever wonder how to determine if your SEO efforts will pay off. Use this flow chart to help navigate the SEO waters with easy to follow instructions each step of the way. Larger version and downloadable PDF available on the site.

Keyword Typo Generator

http://www.selfseo.com/keyword_typo_generator.php

Enter your keyword of choice and then enter the type of error you want to search. Wrong key? Missed Characters? Double Characters? This keyword Typo Generator has them all covered.

Meta Glossary

www.metaglossary.com/

Stop searching for your dusty physical copy of the Dictionary and start using MetaGlossary. They scour the internet to provide you with current definitions for any word you can imagine.

Ranks

www.ranks.nl

From a company with 10 years of solid SEO experience, comes a great keyword density tool. Check to see what keywords your competitors are using and use the results to boost your business. This is a great resource!

SEO Workers Analysis Tool

www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html

Don’t know the ranking potential of your web page? This tool is a great one because it provides you with keywords, all urls located in the page, keywords found in anchor tags and more! And it analyzes not only meta tags but the same places internet spiders check as well to ensure all bases are covered.

SEO Tool Set

http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

Multiple useful tools in one place make this site a go-to for anything SEM. From a SEM tool bar, a server checker (that lets you know if something in your server is erroneous) and competition research, you’ll find yourself using the resources on this site regularly.

Similpedia

http://similpedia.org/

As its name suggests, this site helps you find similar content on…you guessed it – Wikpedia. Just enter a URL or paragraph of 100 words and you’re given all of the wikipedia articles that are related to that content.

Tip of My Tongue

http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/

What was that word? It starts with Q and has an I in it…and an R, I think… No more guessing! Tip of My Tongue Enter partial words, letters or meanings to get that word off the tip of your tongue and into your keyword cache.

Traffic Travis

www.traffictravis.com

Besides the fact that Traffic Travis was highly rated by CNET (4.5 stars), this program combines a bunch of useful tools: keyword and competition searches, your site’s ranking amongst the top four search engines, and a point-and-click advertisement tracker. Add all this to the fact that the layout is simple and the program is easy to use and Traffic Travis is an online marketer’s dream come true.

WordTracker

www.wordtracker.com

Has a free keyword suggestion tool. Known as the Grandfather of SEO sites, but they also have linkbuilder and strategizer tools. Perfect if you need continuous (versus sporadic) access, high level details about a niche, and a few projects at a time.

How Remaining Positive In A Crisis Can Lead You To Small Business Success

By Eric Garner | December 10, 2010

“Hopes and Alibis”

A couple of weeks back, the top 20 world nations, economically-speaking, met to sort out the problems that are still affecting the world’s top economies in the wake of what we are told has been the worst financial crisis for 50 years. Just a few weeks on, few of us are likely to remember what the meeting agreed, decided, or achieved.

Not so long ago, we heard about two other responses to the financial crisis at a more mundane but more connectable level.

The first was the news of an early morning attack on the home of former Royal Bank of Scotland boss, Sir Fred Goodwin, in which missiles were thrown at his house and Mercedes car.

The other piece of news was the result of a survey into the business crisis by the UK Chartered Management Institute.

In the survey, 1118 senior managers were asked how they were responding to the downturn. To the surprise of many, a majority of respondents said they were refusing to let the gloomy news dampen their enthusiasm. Unlike the recession of the 1990’s, in which most businesses reacted by cutting costs, today’s business leaders said they remained positive.

And they are doing this by concentrating on two particular areas.

The first is an increase in training for their core staff. The second is a focus on the twin skills of management and leadership to see them through.

In a choice of attacking bankers or investing in the people in your business, it’s not hard to see which route makes most sense.

For just as uncertainty, fear and a lack of self-belief led us into this situation, so positivity, confidence, and self-belief will lead us out.

I hope at future world summits, the world leaders will follow the lead of those UK managers who are enthusiastically investing in their people.

I hope too that they will pause to remember the words of the greatest business enthusiast the world has ever seen, car maker Henry Ford, who said: “You can do anything if you have enthusiasm. It is the yeast that makes our hopes rise to the stars. With it, there is accomplishment. Without it, there are only alibis.”

Just a few weeks on, few of us are likely to remember what the meeting agreed, decided, or achieved.

7 Secrets to Internet Marketing Success

By Susan Rice Lincoln | December 9, 2010

The Seven Secrets to Successful Online Marketing

Almost every single day I have conversations with small business owners who honestly don’t know which way to turn. What tools should they use? How well is their website working? Should they concentrate on email marketing? Or SEO? Or social media? Or NOTHING?

To answer these questions, I drew up what I consider to be my top Seven Secrets for successful online marketing. Implement these and you will start to see some major transformations both on and offline.

1. Remember that marketing online is marketing. The same old rules apply. Make sure before you do ANYTHING online that you are crystal clear about your products and services and the true benefit they bring your customers. Define clearly your ideal client. (Hint: ‘everyone’ is never the right answer.) Be clear. Be specific. Meet a pressing need.

2. Make sure to walk before you run. A simple, streamlined approach is always better than being scattered, seduced by every new shiny object. In this ADD world of ours, less is still more.

3. To benefit fully from the power of the New Net, tap into what I call the ‘Golden Triangle’: search engine optimization, social media and email/website marketing. Each are strong in and of themselves. But put them together and you have a powerful package which will propel your business into another orbit.

4. SEO optimize. In simple English, make sure that when your prospective client goes to Google and types in your market and your geographic area that it is YOUR company (not your competitors’!) that shows up on the top of the page. Remember if you are not on the first page (or actually one of the first three); you are simply not a player. Make sure that the website you have invested time and money in is being shown in the best light in the search engines. (Oh, and by the way, the person who designed your site is not necessarily the one who can help you get it ranked high in Google.)

5. Tap into the power of social media. Social media brings many things to the party: one-on-one contact with clients and prospects, increased traffic to your site, SEO benefits and authority. Social media’s power grows exponentially when used alongside your SEO efforts and email marketing.

6. Go back to basics. Email is still a powerhouse. Put an opt-in box on the upper right hand side of every page of your website. In exchange for their email, give away something of real value (a written report, a video, an audio tape).

Why do this? What is the point of driving traffic to your site if you have no way of ‘capturing’ interested prospects? And once you have these names, begin a dialogue with them through emails and/or an e-newsletter. Without a simple opt-in box, you will have hundreds coming to your site-only to lose them forever. Ouch.

7. The best secret I’ve kept for last. Because if all of the above just got you more confused (or discouraged), the good news is you don’t have to do ANY of it yourself. Find a great partner to work with you on your online marketing. They do exist (although there are a lot of charlatans too so make sure you select wisely). You are simply too busy and I am assuming your goal in life is not to become an online marketing expert.

Stick with what you do best. Outsource your online marketing to a knowledgeable expert. And then concentrate on handling all the new business that will inevitably come your way.

To answer these questions…

The Key To Making Money Off Of Google Maps

By Charlie Cook | December 8, 2010

If your business is a local brick & mortar shop, you should pay attention to this.

There’s a finite window of opportunity right now for getting free organic listings – absolutely premium real estate on Google Maps.?? This listing is actually superior to a regular #1 organic listing. Or an AdWords ad, for that matter.

At this point in time, these are fairly straightforward to get if you follow… Read More »

« Previous Posts

Newer Posts »