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Is a Marketing Plan Vitally Important to a Small Business?

By Charlie Cook | December 15, 2005

“Is a marketing plan vitally important to a small business?”
– Tameca

Imagine for a minute you wanted to build a house. What’s the first thing you would do? You’d talk to a an architect would create the plan or blueprint for your home. Then with your plan in hand, you’d get a contractor to build your home.

Creating your business is similar. If you want to succeed you’re going to need a plan that will help reach your goals. Without it you might you’ll be lost and be destined to fail.

Yes, a marketing plan is vital to your small business if you want to succeed! If you’re ready to stop wasting time and start growing your business, use this marketing plan >
– Charlie Cook

How Do I Find Ezines That Want My Articles?

By Charlie Cook | November 28, 2005

“I have bought a few of your books — my stumbling block is that I work in a highly specialized industry — pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing. I would like to create articles for e-zines..how do I find these highly specialized e-zines for the marketing managers and CEOs of these companies?”
Kelley

In ‘Opening Doors with Your Articles’ you’ll find a list of over 40 web sites looking for content you can use to distribute your articles. You’ll also learn how to ensure your articles get picked up, used and generate leads. Discover how get tons of free publicity for your business with this link >

You can also google: “articles health care” to build your own list of online and offline publications.
– Charlie Cook, The Small Business Marketing Guru

Which Is More Important to Your Small Business: Marketing or Sales?

By Charlie Cook | November 6, 2005

Which is more important, small business marketing or small business sales?
What percent of sales should marketing bring in?

The marketing department of course thinks they are the most important. Or talk to a sales person and they think marketing is a bunch of silliness and that the real work is closing the deal, or selling. Who is right?

To grow your business you need both marketing and of course sales.

Your small business marketing creates the context for sales. Marketing gets your prospect’s attention, helps your prospect understand how your products and services can help them. The better your marketing, the easier it is to close the sale.

Imagine you were in sales and you had the choice between making cold calls all day long or making follow up calls to prospects who had already indicated an interest in your product and were ready to buy. Which would you want to do? Of course following up on hot leads is far preferable to making cold calls. You’d have a lot more success and sales.

No marketing and you’ll have to work hard to close a few sales.

With effective marketing you’ll generate a flood of leads and close a ton more sales.

So which is it, marketing or sales. To grow your small business you need both!
– Charlie Cook

What’s Involved In Increasing Web Sales?

By Charlie Cook | September 27, 2005

“I want to get more traffic to my web site, generate more leads and increase sales. If I sign up with you can you do it?” – J. Bollard

Creating a web site that sells is like building a spec house. You need an architect to create the plan, a contractor to build it and a realtor to market it.

In the case of your web site, I can work with you to develop the plan and the marketing copy for the site. Next you’ll need your web site designer to follow the plan and put the plan and copy in place. If you don’t have a web designer, I can recommend a few I’ve worked with.

Once your site is built to spec, you’ll need to market it to the search engines, sign up for pay-per-click advertising and use your articles to pull in traffic. I don’t do these tasks for any site except my own, but can refer you to a reputable firm.

In summary the three steps to creating a web site that sells are:
1. Plan & Write
2. Build
3. Attract Traffic

Discover how to improve your web marketing and increase your web sales with Creating Web Sites that Sell
.
– Charlie Cook

Revealed: The Secret to Writing Headlines That Sell

By Charlie Cook | August 25, 2005

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

“Revealed: The True Cost of Potholes”

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

How Do You Know When To Change Your Small Business Marketing Strategy …

By Charlie Cook | August 14, 2005

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

How Do You Know When To Change Your Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the Second Biggest Bottleneck to Small Business Growth

By Charlie Cook | August 12, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

To Succeed With Small Business Web Site Marketing – Think Big

By Charlie Cook | August 10, 2005

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

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

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

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

Did You Forget the Web Site Marketing Sequence

By Charlie Cook | August 2, 2005

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

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

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

Why You Should Make Marketing Mistakes

By Charlie Cook | August 1, 2005

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

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

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

Did you test your marketing message?

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

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