How do you motivate your prospects to buy, now, today, right away with your marketing?
Have you ever had a prospect you were talking to and just when you thought it was time to close the sale they brought up an objection to the sale?
What do you do next?
Discover the 3 ways to shorten the marketing and sales cycle in this week’s article >>
Charlie
Business Marketing Ideas That Make You More Money
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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
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Are you spooked by your marketing. If you’re not getting results, its your marketing strategy which is playing a trick on you.
Should you sugar up your marketing and pass out treats to prospects? What’s the answer, how can you make your small business marketing bring in a flood of new business?
Find the answer in the article I wrote on Marketing Tricks and Treats to Use All Year Long >>
– Charlie
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Get… Results
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Are your marketing habits good for your business?
Bill is a friend of mine who is smart, hard working and dedicated to his management consulting business. His clients love him, but his business is stagnating. He gets referrals occasionally, but considering how good he is at what he does, new clients should be lined up outside his door.
When business slows down and his client list shrinks, Bill blames it on a lack of interest in the marketplace. What’s Bill missing?
He doesn’t have good marketing habits. Actually, he doesn’t have any marketing habits.
Marketing is like your health. If you want to see your business continue to increase its profits year after year you need to have healthy marketing habits.
If you eat three meals a day, get exercise, take some time to relax, brush your teeth and get 7-8 hours of sleep. You have reasonably good health habits. Maybe a few more vegetables instead of cookies, more exercise and some more sleep would help but basically you’re doing the right things to keep yourself in decent shape.
Want to do the same with your marketing to get it in shape?
Ready to discover the simple marketing regimen that can make you rich? Use this link >>
Every day you do at least 4 to 7 tasks to keep your body fueled and functioning well. You eat more or less balanced meals, get a little exercise, brush your teeth, sleep. etc.
But are you doing the 4 to 7 things you need to do every day to keep your business fueled with a steady stream of new clients and profits? If not, don’t panic, but don’t shrug this advice off either. It’s time to adopt healthy marketing habits.
The 3 Most Important Wealth-Building Marketing Habits
1. Take Responsibility for Your Marketing Strategy
Puzzled by what to do to grow your business? You need a proven marketing strategy that’s right for your business.
If you’re serious about growth, it’s time to find out what really works to generate more clients and sales. Use this link to get the details >>
Thinking of hiring a marketing firm to do it all for you? It doesn’t quite work that way. I can’t tell you how many business owners I’ve heard from who’ve hired marketing firms and seen little or no increase in sales. Even if you hire a firm to implement your marketing, you’ve still got to take responsibility for understanding what it takes to develop and maintain a winning marketing strategy.
You may have hired a personal trainer to guide your fitness routine and a full time cook to make delicious, nutritious meals (lucky you!); your health is still your responsibility. The same is true of your company’s marketing.
Discover what works to generate more clients and sales. Use this link to get the details >>
2. Schedule Time For Marketing
If they aren’t locked into your schedule, you won’t get to your marketing tasks and you won’t ever see your marketing strategy kick into gear.
You eat regular meals to keep yourself thriving; likewise – establish regular times to nourish your business by focusing on your marketing. I schedule a morning a week to write newsletters and manage the various on- and off-line tasks that keep traffic coming to my website and convert prospects to clients.
If you haven’t done so already, block out time each day or each week to spend on marketing – a minimum of five hours a week.
3. Use a Proven Marketing Strategy
Most business owners and marketers make the following mistake. They spend money on advertising and then sit back and wait for results. Or they put up a web site and sit back and wonder why so few people are buying from it.
If you wanted to grow your favorite variety of tomatoes, you wouldn’t just throw a handful of seeds onto a patch of soil and expect them to thrive. You’d water and weed and pinch them back and check their progress at least once a week.
In marketing as in gardening, a simple strategy will help those leads turn into clients and you’ll have healthy profits. Without a proven marketing strategy you’ll just end up wasting your time and money.
Ready to discover a proven marketing strategy to grow your business? Use this link to get the details >>
Charlie
Marketing Ideas That Make You Money
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Marketing Ideas #5
How can you fuel your business profits? Use these marketing ideas .
– Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing
That Puts You In The Fast Lane
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When my client Sarah called on Tuesday earlier this week I was a little surprised, since her normal time is on Wednesday. Then when she told me she’d just packed her children and a few belongings into her Toyota Prius, it started to make sense.
Sarah was forced to evacuate her home in San Diego on Tuesday morning because of the wildfires closing in on her neighborhood. She was calling because she wasn’t going to be home for our scheduled call on Wednesday, much less she wasn’t sure she’d even have a home.
Sarah runs her business out of her home – and while she was worried about losing her home, she was even more concerned about how she was going to keep her business going. She had wisely grabbed her computer on the way out the door and was now out of harms way at a friends who had Internet access.
Is your business disaster proof?
What would you do if a disaster wiped out your place of business? Would you be able to be up and running within a day or two at a remote location?
Want to disaster proof your business? Use this link to find out how >>
I hope you never have to pack up all your belongings in a suitcase and leave your home or your business, but it happens more often than you think.
California has it’s share of wildfires, my daughter was forced to flee New Orleans half a dozen times during her four years of college at Tulane, my family was forced to evacuate our home here in coastal Connecticut in the bucket of a highway front loader when a December Noreaster flooded our neighborhood.
Making your business portable is a good idea whether you ever encounter a disaster or not. Last winter I set up my business so that I could spend every other week working from our ski home in Vermont. All I needed to do to pack up my business and run it from anywhere with a phone line and Internet access, was grab my laptop. Thanks to my marketing strategy, the Internet and two Virtual Assistants, (now three), my business is both disaster and vacation proof.
How can you make your business portable so you can run it from anywhere whether you fleeing a natural disaster or just going skiing like I do? Use this link to get the answer >>
No, this won’t work for everyone but you’d be amazed at how many businesses can be run just with a phone line and the Internet if you know how.
How to make your business portable?
1. Have a website that generates leads and use your follow-up emails to pre-sell prospects.
2. Outsource your administration and operations to a small handful of trusted employees around the country. If one person in your virtual organization loses power due to a storm, another one will be able to take over. I’ve got staff in Toronto, Texas and I’m here in Connecticut.
3. Put your agenda, calendar, contact list, etc online so even if you lost your computer and had to borrow one, you’d still be able to keep your business running.
Want to know a secret?
Setting up your business so its portable can not only give you more freedom to live the life you want but doing so can help you make more money with less effort.
Ready to get started? Use this system >>
Charlie
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Work
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Most web sites don’t successfully generate more than a small trickle of sales. Is yours one of them?
Let me guess. You have a web site and it may be attracting visitors, but it’s only generating a couple of sales each week, if any. Is the volume of traffic the problem?
It’s true that you need visitors in order to convert them to buyers, but even getting thousands of visitors a day won’t guarantee a single sale. So you turn to your web designer for the answer to the problem. Your web designer should know what to do, right?
No!
Marcia called me from Chicago. Thanks to some top search engine positioning, her web design firm’s site gets around four thousand visitors a day. Wow! Even I’m impressed by that number. With that kind of traffic, Marcia’s firm should be generating between two and four hundred leads a day and have more business than they can handle.
When I asked Marcia what their conversion rate was – how many leads they generated from their site – she told me that it was only one lead per month. That’s only one lead out of 120,000 visitors.
Ouch! With all the interested prospects that stop by their site but never contact them, Marcia’s firm is losing millions of dollars of potential business a year, and their site was built by some great web designers.
Building a website is like building a house. Given enough time and lumber, you could throw up some kind of structure that you might call a house even without any blueprints. Of course, the plumbing might not work and the kitchen might end up on the third floor.
But you wouldn’t hire a builder to put up your new home without a plan. You’re smarter than that. The first thing you’d do is find an architect to draft a plan for your house. Once you’d worked out a plan that you liked, you’d find a builder to turn your plan into reality.
Did you ask your web designer to build your site without first giving them a marketing plan and the marketing copy they needed to create a winning site? Whoops, you and 97% of web site owners did the same thing and got the same results.
Web designers build sites, but they don’t create your web marketing strategy or the master plan to start with. And without a master marketing plan to get prospect’s to contact you and to convert them to buyers, no matter how much you spend on your site, it won’t sell your products and services.
It’s not your web designer’s job to map your online selling plan, they just build sites. If you told your home contractor you wanted an all black granite kitchen, they’d build it whether it was a good idea or not.
Web designers and carpenters get paid to create what the owners want. And if you don’t know how your site should be structured to generate sales, don’t count on your web designer to tell you what to do.
If you want a web site that generates leads and converts them to buyers, you’ll need to give your web designer the compelling marketing copy and the marketing strategy and plan for your site to follow.
With a web site marketing and sales strategy in hand, your web designer can do their job and help you build a web site that sells. Without it you’ll waste your money.
Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Gets Results
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If you’ve ever wanted to look for ideas you could use for marketing slogans, radio commercials or video ads – you’ve probably been frustrated. To find the good marketing ideas you have to search through all the trash that’s out there.
Wish you could find one place to go to where someone already had put together the best video commercials, radio as and marketing slogans?
Finally there is a resource you can use to get marketing ideas and advertising ideas for your next marketing campaign. Use this link to check out the best business advertising ideas >>
Charlie
Marketing Ideas That Make You Money
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I finally gave myself a promotion yesterday. Have you earned one as well?
No, I’m not just patting myself on the back for growing my business, I’m firing myself from all administrative tasks and promoting myself to focus on the few parts of my business no one else can do. Should you be doing the same?
Are you up to your eyeballs in work? Are you spending dawn to dusk doing marketing, administration and fulfillment? If you are, you’re wearing too many hats and it’s time to relinquish most of them.
When I first started my marketing business, I spent my time writing, building and improving my web site, boxing and shipping my marketing courses, providing one-one-one coaching and a host of other tasks that kept me busy six days a week. My hard work paid off and my business grew – up to a point.
When administrative and operational tasks started taking time away from writing and coaching, I fired myself from the web work and fulfillment. I hired a webmaster and a virtual assistant to get orders out on time. Are you in this position too?
Some small business owners have a hard time delegating substantial work after being in control of every aspect of the business, but take it from me; the assistants I hired were faster and better at doing the web work and fulfillment tasks than I was.
Delegating administrative tasks and web site maintenance freed me to focus on the core of my business, where my real passion is, and to pursue another passion. I was able to work from my ski home in Vermont for the first time last winter.
The result? I skied a (personal) record of 30 days last winter and achieved record sales.
Want to free up more time so you can grow your business? Use this link to find out how >>
Yesterday I reorganized again and virtually kicked myself upstairs to a corner office. I let go of all administrative and operational tasks and hired my new assistant, Ros, to manage email broadcasts, product delivery, customer service, project management, PR and new product development. I’m confident she’ll do a better job than I’ve been doing.
Why would I fire myself from all administrative jobs?
With the 10 or more hours a week I’ve just given myself I can take on more coaching clients, finish the next book I’ve been writing and start a new service which could grow my business by another 100% next year.
How should you focus your time to grow your business? Use this link to find out how >>
Focus your time on your marketing strategy , developing new products and services and delivering the services that need your personal expertise.
How can you get relinquish all those time consuming administrative tasks?
Start by creating a job description of your next assistant. Look over your To Do list. Ask yourself, “Could someone else do this task or is this something only I can do?”
I spent two weeks doing this exercise. Every time I spied a task on my list that fell into the administrative or operational category, I added it to my job description for my new super assistant.
Find out how to free yourself from being your business so you can grow your business >>
Once you’ve defined the job and the skills your business needs, how can you find good people? What do you do if you don’t want employees? How much will it cost? Where can you find the answers?
If I’d had the time I would have written ‘Outsource & Delegate‘. It’s that good. Use this link to to claim your copy of this book >> >>
You owe it to your business to download ‘Outsource & Delegate‘
right now and start implementing these time-saving, life-changing
techniques right away. Use this link to find out how >>
– Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Make Sense
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“I’ve been told by my webmaster that SEO is a waste of time and I shouldn’t bother. Is he right? Does search engine optimization still work?”
– Phil from Austin TX
It’s a question I’ve been asked more than once. I’ve also had clients tell me that they’ve hired search engine firms to help them with their search engine optimization but after spending thousands of dollars and waiting for months, seen no appreciable change in traffic to their sites.
– Is it a worth spending the time and money to make your site search engine friendly?
– Will it make a difference in the number of people who visit your site?
– Or would you be better off spending your money on pay-per-click advertising? Should you bother with any of it?
Absolutely. Search engine optimization, that is, helping the search engines put your site at the top of their listings, is the single most effective way to build your business.
Put your site in the top ten listings or the top few spots for the keywords your prospects use to find your products and services, and you can make a lot more money. Of course once you have lots of traffic you’ll need to know how to convert it into sales.
Want to know the secrets to getting all the business you can handle? Find your web marketing answers >>
Sugar For Your Site?
If you want a quick energy boost, you might grab a candy bar. You get a surge of energy, but when the sugar has burned through your body an hour or so later, you feel tired.
To build the stamina to get through the day feeling great, you eat a balanced snack of protein with some carbohydrates that will keep you going and build muscle.
Pay-per-click advertising is like sugar. It provides almost instantaneous results, but it’s short-lived, and to reenergize your web site marketing you need to buy more and more. Each time you spend money on advertising you get a handful of visitors, but to keep them coming in you need to spend again.
Search engine optimization or helping the search engines give your site a top ranking is a better balanced diet. It’s harder to put to use, but it has longer-term benefits. For example, each time you get another relevant site to link to yours, you help your search engine ranking for months, if not years to come.
Where should you spend your time and money to attract more buyers with your web site marketing? Use this link >>
Where to Spend Your Promotional Dollars to Start?
If you’ve allocated a thousand dollars a month to promoting your web site, I recommend that you spend half of that on optimizing your site and half on pay-per-click advertising. Site optimization can take months, in the meantime, use pay-per-click advertising to bring in prospects.
When to Shift Your Promotional Spend to SEO?
After the first 6 to 12 months, shift your efforts and your resources to concentrate on your search engine marketing efforts. I spend less than 10% of my promotional dollars on pay-per-click advertising and use it primarily to test sales headlines or book titles. I spend 90% of my web-marketing budget on making my site even more search engine-friendly and keeping it at the top of the search engine listings.
Yes, SEO still works! When people find your site in the top 10 or even top 20 listings on Google, they’re much more likely to buy from you, link to your site and want to joint venture with you.
What should you know about SEO?
Before you hire an SEO firm or ask your webmaster to take over your online promotional efforts, find out what it is you should be paying them to do. Many SEO tasks could easily be done by a real or virtual assistant.
And don’t assume your webmaster is an SEO expert, either. Only a few are. Web work is very specialized. Web programmers and web designers should know the basics of SEO to do their work well, but rarely are they SEO experts.
Step 1 – Understand the core SEO strategy that will put your site at the top of the search engines.
Step 2 – Give your webmaster and assistants a clear map of SEO tasks to do every month to help you generate more traffic, more leads and more sales.
Step 3 – Make sure your web site converts all the traffic you’re getting into leads and sales.
Want the details? Use this link to get the bonus special report on search engine placement. Start here to improve your web marketing >>
– Charlie Cook
Advanced Web Marketing Ideas
Work
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