Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

 

The Top Experts Reveal Small Business Marketing Strategies
That Get Results In This Economy

What Is A Landing Page And Will It Help My Internet Marketing Strategy?

By Charlie Cook   |   June 6, 2005

“I’ve heard the term landing page in regards to web sites. What are they and do I need one?” – Margaret F.

Landing pages are an internet marketing strategy some people use to increase sales. They are specialized web pages you can use for visitors to “land” when they link through from an ad or even somewhere else on your site. In general they include limited links and are designed to help your prospects take the action you want them to take, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. You’ve probably linked through to a few that consist of a long page of marketing copy where your only option is to buy the product.

For example you might use a Google Ad for your product or service. When prospects click on the ad instead of taking them to your home page where they have lots of options, you could send them to a product page that lacks any links to the rest of your site where the only option is to make a purchase. Some people even use separate URLs for their landing pages to keep visitors from finding their primary site.

Are landing pages a good idea?

It depends. Take out all the links to the rest of your site for a page and you may be able to force some people to make the decision you want them to make. The risk is that many others may want to explore your site in order to get to know you and trust your company prior to commiting to making a purchase or even signing up for a free newsletter. If you’re not careful your landing pages could result in a high cost, low return advertising campaign. Not what you want.

Your results will depend on what you’re marketing online, the price, the content on the page, and whether you know how to create instant crediblity and prompt prospects to buy.

Find out how to Create a Web Site that Sells your products and services with this step-by-step manual.

Add a comment and tell me what’s your experience with landing pages as a site visitor and as a site owner.
–Charlie Cook – Use this link to signup and get the FREE Marketing Plan Ideas Guide immediately.

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What Type of Web Site For My Business?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 31, 2005

“I’m a motivational speaker and trainer and work with community groups, churches, voluntary and professional organisations and individual clients. What type of web site should I build to attract clients worldwide?” – Trevor Carter, United Kingdom

The best type of web site to attract your prospects is one that your prospects will seek out and want to read. Instead of focusing your site on yourself and your services, focus instead on what the information your prospects want and are looking for.

Then when visitors come to your site give them helpful ideas they can use and they’ll want to learn more about your services. Of course you’ll want to use your site to help you with lead generation and to increase your sales. Learn which type of site to build to grow your business and how with Creating Web Sites that Sell– Charlie Cook

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Want To Add A Thousand or More Subscribers Each Month to Your List?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 27, 2005

Have an email list of prospects you’d like to grow? One of the best ways to grow your list is to offer something for free that your prospects want and need. You proabably already know that. The problem is you don’t have the time or inclination to create the perfect giveaway. What do you do?

You could ask me to write an eBook you can use as one client is at a cost of over $6,000. Or you could offer my existing marketing guide for free.

My free marketing plan guide, “7 Steps to Attract More Clients and Grow Your Business” is what small business owners, marketers and service professionals are looking for. It prompts an average of 50 people a day to add their names to my mailing list and I’d like to help you use it to do the same or better for your business, for free!

If you provide a product or service targeted to small business owners, service professionals or marketing and sales professionals, your web site gets over a thousand visitors a day and your Alexa rank is 80,000 or less, I’ll create a co-branded version of this popular free marketing strategies ebook with a custom cover and insert that includes your products and services. I’ll show you how to promote it on your site and get 10-20% of your site visitors to give you their email address so you can market to them again and again.

Why would I agree to let you offer this guide on your site?

When you offer my free marketing guide on your site, your prospects get a great marketing tool, you get their email address and I get to add their names to my free marketing ezine mailing list. I’ll provide you with the code to include on your site and then send you the email address of each person that requests the free marketing guide. Depending on your site traffic this should generate 50-100 or more opt-in prospects each day.

Interested in using this proven tool on your site to capitalize on your traffic and build your subscriber list?

Contact me using this form with your questions and your web site URL so I can check your page rank and get a rough idea of your site traffic.

When you help your prospects improve their marketing for free, everybody wins. Please only contact me if your site gets over 1000 visitors a day and your target market is small to mid-sized business owners and marketing and sales professionals.- Charlie Cook

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How Do I Motivate My Sales People to Sell More?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 25, 2005

“What’s the best way to motivate my sales staff? They’re not making as many calls as they could or making as many sales as I think they could?” – George, Colorado

In my experience the problem is most often not the sales reps or their motivation. The problem is that sales reps are given goals and often incentives but aren’t provided with the marketing strategies or tools they need to get the job done. A carpenter would have a tough time building a house without a hammer, a saw, lumber and nails. Sales reps are the same. They need the right marketing tools to get a prospect to the point of a sale.

The best way to motivate new and experienced sales people to sell more is to give them the tools they need. It’s hard to get excited about selling any service or product when the sales script your using, the company brochure and your other supporting materials don’t help you get the prospect’s attention, interest and their business. It’s no wonder so many sales reps lose motivation and drive. Just telling sales reps to sell more and offering larger incentives isn’t a long-term strategy for increasing sales.

If you want to motivate your sales force, you need to show them how to stop only selling and instead focus on helping their prospects get what they want. Few people I know are interested in being sold, but everyone needs a wide variety of products and services and most will happily pay for things they want.

Here are a three ways to motivate your sales force.

1. Provide you sales reps with a marketing plan and a marketing strategy that gives them with a steady stream of qualified leads.

2. Teach your sales reps how to talk about what your firm does so it prompts interest instead of a yawn with the 15 Second Marketing guide.

3. Show your sales reps how to use questions instead of a sales pitch to start conversations that lead to sales. Support them with marketing materials that will prompt prospects to contact your sales reps. Learn how to apply this proven marketing strategy using More Sales with Less Selling.

Give your sales reps a marketing plan and the marketing tools they need to help your prospects get what they want. You’ll see their motivation and your sales soar. – Charlie Cook

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Is All This Marketing Information Free?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 24, 2005

“Is this all free? If so, how come? What’s in it for you?” – Neva

Yes, the marketing blog, the marketing guide “7 Steps to Attract More Clients and Grow Your Business” the marketing articles on this site and my marketing newsletter “More Business” are all free.

Why?

I want to help you grow your business. My goal is to help as many marketers and business owners improve their marketing so they’ll be more successful.

What’s in it for me?

Every time I share an idea with you that helps you attract more attention, improve the response to your marketing efforts and get more clients I’ve shown you how I can help you. Each time you read an idea of mine, try it and find out that it works I consider it a success. Why?

At some point you’ll get serious about your marketing and want more than just a tip here and there, you’ll want a better marketing message or better networking strategy, you’ll want to create a marketing plan that helps you build your business, or you’ll want an online lead generation strategy that works to increase your sales. Or you may want to work with me directly to show you how to grow your business .

When you do get serious about growing your business, if you enjoyed my free marketing guide and weekly marketing tips, there is a good chance you seek out the marketing resources I provide.

Does this give to get marketing strategy work?

Each month I have more subscribers to my marketing ezine, more sales of my marketing manuals and more marketing coaching clients. The more ideas I share, the more my readers buy my marketing manuals. – Charlie Cook

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How Can I Ensure My Web Site Works With All Browsers?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 23, 2005

When people visit your web site you want them to see it at its best. If it looks good on your computer, you may assume that everyone else is getting the same professional view of your online business, but there is a good chance you’d be wrong. Each browser, browser version and operating system combination interprets your web site code differently.

It may look great in your IE browser, but columns could be squashed to AOL viewers or typefaces bold instead of not. Unless you own one of every operating system, each browser version and type, you won’t know how others view your site. Fortunately there is a simpler way to check your sites browser compatibility.

Thanks to an alert Ari at ximedia.net I was alerted that one of my primary pages had alignment problems in IE and was quickly able to fix the Marketing Tools Buyers Guide.

To see the problem I tested Browsercam.com. Within a couple of minutes it provides screen shots of your site from as many browsers and operating systems as you want so you can ensure your site looks its best for all viewers. Worth a try. – Charlie Cook

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What’s My Biggest Ezine Headache and How To Avoid It?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 17, 2005

Once or twice a year I send out a marketing ezine that doesn’t arrive the way it should. Here’s how I make this mistake and how you can avoid it.

When you use text from an MS Word document and paste it into an email, hyphens, quotes, apostrophes and characters other than numerical or alphabetical ones look fine, but watch out. When you send the email to someone, these hyphens, quotes, apostrophes all get turned into /s or ?marks or other unusual and unintended characters. Even though you wrote the best newsletter in the world, it looks silly when it arrives.

Try it. Send yourself an email with hyphens, quotes, apostrophes and see what it looks like when you get it. The email you thought was letter perfect will arrive a mess.

The same thing happens when you send an HTML newsletter, hyphens, quotes, apostrophes turn into odd characters. Even if you preview your HTML newsletter in a browser window you won’t catch this problem. The unintended transformation happens when the ezine is sent.

Avoiding this techno goof is easy. I just paste my completed ezine into a text only editor and then go through it and replace each hyphen, quote and apostrophe with the text editor’s version. Then when I paste the finished version into my ezine broadcast system or use it to create an HTML email so my readers get the what I want them to get, a professional looking marketing newsletter. – Charlie Cook

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How the Marketing / Sales Cycle is Like Farming

By Charlie Cook   |   May 16, 2005

This morning I was talking with a West Texas sales rep for an agriculture firm which prompted the following farming analogy.

Marketing involves the preparation of the soil, gathering seeds, planting them and then nurturing their growth.

Sales involves waiting for the right moment and then harvesting the results of your marketing endeavors.

Both are essential to making a profit. Without marketing you won’t have any leads to nurture, nor any relationships with prospects that can result in a sale. Without closing the sale you’d be leaving your crop of prospects out in the field.

Is your marketing and sales strategy balanced to generate the leads and nurture the prospects you need to generate enough sales?
– Charlie Cook

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How Is The Free Marketing Ezine “More Business” Valued At Over $300 a year?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 12, 2005

How is the free marketing ezine worth over $300 a year?

Currently the 87 million dollar a year publishing company Thomson Gale is now selling seven of my articles, the same ones you get weekly for free, for $5.95 each on Amazon.com.

If each of my weekly marketing articles is worth $5.95 then your annual subscription to my free marketing ezine, “More Business” is worth over three hundred dollars, not to mention the value of the free marketing guide “7 Steps to Attract More Clients and Grow Your Business”. Actually the ezine and free marketing guide are worth tens of thousands of dollars or more a year to those of you who apply the ideas.

Without my permission and without the knowledge of the original publication that printed these articles, Thomson Gale is now distributing articles for which I own the copyright on Amazon.com. Here’s a link to the screen shots in a pdf file. Or you can just search for Charlie Cook on Amazon.com (look at the bottom of the listings for my articles).

No, you don’t need to write me a check for $300 to keep your subscription active. At least for now “More Business” is sent to you every week for free to help you grow your business. Of course if you want to get serious about taking your business to the next level you’ll want to read my best selling marketing tools , including “More Sales with Less Selling “, all of which are a steal at their current prices.

And please don’t pay Thomson Gale to buy my copyrighted articles, which they’ve promised to remove from Amazon in a couple of weeks. – Charlie Cook

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Can I Rely On Search Engine Placement?

By Charlie Cook   |   May 11, 2005

“I have a client who is generating lots of business from the top placement of his listings under his keywords in the search engines. Is this a risky strategy or should he be looking at pay-per-click advertising?” – M. Anderson, KPMG

Given the vagaries of the search engine algorithms and the volatile nature of the search engine marketplace I’d advise your client to develop multiple ways to generate leads over the internet. He could be doing very well with his Google search engine placement this year, but if Microsoft has their way, they’ll be putting Google out of business and his search engine placements could be irrelevant.

Even if his current listings continue to do well, why not invest in pay-per-click advertising and generate 30% more leads and business? – Charlie Cook

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