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Guidelines for Interviewing Influencers and Stakeholders: Part II

Monday, September 6th, 2010

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Gelada baboon
Creative Commons License photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

While web analytics can certainly lead to lucrative results, your stakeholders may still be hung up on the cost of integrating web analytics within the company. The best way to combat this doubt is to highlight projections of lost potential gains by not streamlining and tracking your site’s activity. It’s your responsibility to emphasize that the cost of Web analytics will be dwarfed by the loss of potential sales. Accentuate that analysis costs will be recovered and profited upon once these Web metrics are implemented. You need to show how this process will inevitably illuminate performance indicators. And for added clout, employing the services of an analytics consultant is a way to develop custom measures that can be applied throughout your organization. Entrench Web metrics within the company’s system.

Be sure to show due diligence to the bottom line. For example, heavily romancing your Google PageRank can be a red herring in your metrics, causing your business to concentrate on numbers that flatter the image of the company, but don’t actually help drive its conversion rates. So, you’ll want to make sure that you discuss how these analytics are measured against your company’s bottom line. Because Web analytics is still evolving, you have to empathize with your stakeholders and be prepared to address skepticism of its concrete usability and its ability to be indicative of market and consumer trends. A full-bodied Web metrics approach will prove that you have a comprehensive, trust-worthy strategy that considers all aspects of your specific type of website and intended market; not just page visits and log files.

Lucrative and Direct Research Tool

You need to stress that Web analytics is a direct research tool. Client-based surveys are essential for gathering opinions and can lead to productive insights. However, the statistics gathered from these surveys can be skewed by any number of outliers. Most importantly, a survey is only answered by those who choose to, which automatically infers some degree of polarized subjectivity; void of universal trends that can be accurately and repeatedly applied to your market plan. The beauty of Web analytics is that the consumer is unaware that as they surf your site, they’re actually creating unbiased metrics; a blind study. Your site is a testing ground for analyzing visitor paths, effectiveness of copy, accessibility of information and promotions, poignancy of new advertisements and products, and gauging visitor reactions.

Present the ability to make informed decisions. Through discovery of referral forces, you’ll understand how and why your prospects are being driven to your site. With this knowledge, you can implement a campaign with stronger focus. Concentrating on a spectrum of metrics as well as the energy behind them allows you to apply a disciplined budgetary plan. In regards to fundamental business, retention of customers is more budget-friendly than obtaining new customers. Qualify metrics that are specific to your site and industry, and learn what trends succeed in higher rates of retention. The company’s bottom line should be at the top of your interview topics. When you express the ability to fatten the bottom line, present the need to improve the site little by little, constantly adjusting according to visitor behavior. Don’t wait until your site is grossly out of date and inefficient. Continue to tweak so that it is riding the crest of the market wave, and not getting trounced upon in the trough of the wave.

Be a Teacher

You need to teach the higher ups. They are far removed from website management and the integral importance of Web analytic technology and benefits. The importance of Web metrics’ ability to generate revenue can not be stressed enough. Maintain your analytic goals but present them so they directly align with executive goals; discuss much more than click-thru rates. Who wouldn’t agree to a goal they’ve already agreed to? It’s necessary not only to study the trends of your customers, but also of your stakeholders. Make yourself aware of what internal objectives they’re harboring. What makes the management manage a smile? But you’ll need to do more than point out a trends in your own company and website. Give your argument added credibility by pointing out specific case studies of other businesses’ successes; especially if it’s a competitor. Once more, your data shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Create an entire microcosm of Web metrics, so the executives will be hard pressed to ignore the positive implications of proper Web management. Who doesn’t love a good success story?

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, SEO and SEM, Technology | No Comments »

Guidelines for Interviewing Influencers and Stakeholders

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Allioson's Birthday
Creative Commons License photo credit: Iversonic

That aint no filet mignon.

The trends and information you garner from your website should not only be considered a valuable measurement for internal business, but should also be used as a convincing tool for presenting to influencers and stakeholders. As we all know, going beyond unfounded claims and collecting data that can actually be pointed to will always achieve a degree of authority and persuasion. Don’t tell me why I should invest with you, show me why.

Make sure your Web information is distributed equally within your company. The more teams you involve, the stronger your attack will be. This serves to root the necessity of Web metrics further into your company. Demonstrating the benefits of Web analytics is obviously what we’re striving for here. But if you can prove that it’s actually an integral part, if other teams outside the Web management branch can also attest to the integrity of your tactics, then you’ve attained an undeniable presence. Forming a cooperative approach between your analytics and e-commerce systems incubates your forecast egg, proving to be an additional dimension to your accounting and accountability.

Remove the guess work from your numbers and you’re sure to impress your audience. Take care to avoid becoming confident with hollow numbers. It’s most necessary to completely understand what your numbers signify. Telling a stakeholder exactly how many times the promotional page was and is foreseen to be visited is fine and well. But leave no shadow of a doubt. Include ramifications, theories, and projections that bolster these page visit statistics. Streamline your analysis so that it’s completely clear, causing decision making to be a process built on concrete; not wetlands. Those who are far removed from the Web management side often perceive the online aspect as lacking solidarity. They’re locked into the classical school of thought, perceiving revenue as produced only through core business. Thus, ensure to base your presentation on precise, detailed goals and correlations.

Vacuums Are for Cleaning

Apply your findings to trends in the market place, global happenings, or the results to Monday night’s football game. The point is, your Web analysis shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. Form a regular course of action where your data is studied and given depth. Depth is an essential ingredient here. Remove your data from the two-dimensional world of the spreadsheet, understand its behavior, and give it a personality. Surely, this palpable form will be much more appealing to those involved in the interview process. This degree of organization grants exponential levels of confidence for your influencers and stakeholders. Harnessing the activity of your website will inevitably lead to hard evidence of how your company is generating wealth, and more importantly, how it can improve.

Clearly define your objectives and activities. A stakeholder should be presented with exact goals that the website is to achieve. With these goals in mind, you can clearly illustrate the significance of your Web analysis, tying together click-thru rates, and forming a prospective customer’s path to and through your site. When such a path is demonstrated, the stakeholder understands exactly how their investments will be applied; with measurable projections. This way, the overall analysis dataset can be deconstructed, so that individual data packets can be applied to varying levels of strategy and planning.

Always Keep the Consumer in Mind

Let’s not forget that all your demonstrated data is consumer-driven. Yes, there are real people behind those clicks. Setting up a customer forum where marketing communications can be carried out is vital. This enables an understanding of your numbers. Again, we want to provide our stakeholders with reasons. Explain how your Web metrics are leading to a greater understanding of prospective customer behavior, thus conquering one of e-commerce’s inherent evils, shopping-cart abandonment. Direct consumer communication can answer these abandonment questions. From this, you can develop ways to reconnect your lost prospect to your site. In basic psychology terms, remembering something is always easier than learning it for the first time, using the synapse formed from the initial point of discovery. You’ll want to capitalize on this and demonstrate that you are dedicated to recapturing these lost targets.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Technology, marketing | No Comments »

What external (i.e. customer-based) objectives should my website support? Part II

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
Eye Close Up
Creative Commons License photo credit: Robert D Bruce

Assume your prospect is just as busy as you. Provide concise material that maintains the core principle of your product at all times. Of course you’re proud of your product, however, it’s extremely important to stave off the desire to illustrate in depth the many benefits of your product. With the Internet’s growing rate of saturation, it’s understandably tempting to rely heavily on intense graphics or creative copy. Remember, unless you’ve recently invented your product, your busy prospect will be anxious to quickly scan your site and then move on to other sites for comparisons of your product. Your site is not a public speaker with a captive audience. It’s more similar to a mother tending a child’s birthday party; your message will be immersed among other appealing imagery and information where you have no control over the other appeals being made. With a bold, simple message, you’ll retain the attention and interest of your audience.

Don’t Overwhelm Your Prospects

Make your site as efficient as possible. Make sure you thoroughly represent your entire product line or service in a succinct fashion. You have them on your site, now capitalize and deliver the whole pitch. Here lays a caveat though, don’t overwhelm them. Too much information or too many products thrown at the prospect will scare them in the direction of a less-cluttered site. Think of the feeling you receive when walking through a flea market with products and deals being shouted at you from every angle. It creates a bargain-bin façade where you find yourself walking faster to remove yourself from the situation. Again, deliver your message efficiently, with a clean, professional appeal. A clean site will inherently lend itself to easy-to-measure variables, ultimately making it easier to track and forecast your site’s usage by prospects. Respect your visitors by recognizing that they are intelligent consumers and will ultimately become skeptical of product pitches heavily laden with persuasion.

A site with stunning imagery and creative copy will still fail to convert its visitors if the following basic page physics are not incorporated. As mentioned before, a site must maintain momentum through clear content, obvious headlines, and simple navigation buttons. The rate at which your pages load is also a quintessential element. It’s been proven that a significant loss in visitors occurs when page loading times exceed 8-10 seconds. This may seem ridiculously impatient, but why wait when there are thousands of other similar sites that can be viewed? The most browser-friendly graphic files are GIF, JPEG, and for post-1997 browsers, PNG. Limiting the size of files, quantity of graphics, and using browser caches will also aid faster load times. Unless your graphics are of your products, or you are a graphics service, know that less will be more. Otherwise, you’ll slow your pages or simply confuse the visitor. Besides, the Poynter Institute released an eye-tracking study showing that website visitors’ eyes were drawn to headlines, article summaries, and captions much more than the page’s graphics. In addition, your style format should always consider accessibility aspects for people with disabilities. There are many resources available that educate how to tailor your site to be manageable by all. The entire site should flow like a single, cohesive body of literature, leading from one page to the next, even if the visitor jumps between pages that address different products or aspects of your business.

It’s actually best if you assume that your visitor will not view your site in a linear fashion. This way, you’ll be able to structure the site in a fashion that provides an obvious, all-inclusive message on each individual page. Be careful not to include vital information or selling points below the fold of the page, the point where you need to scroll down to see the rest of the page; the 300-pixels mark. Studies show that a significant amount of visitors never scroll below the fold of the page. Remember, visitors are using the Web for convenience and expediency, model your site with this in mind.

Attention to Emotions

You’ll also want to pay attention to the emotional aspect of you site. Due to today’s dangerous level of viruses, piracy, and spyware, many people are using the Web simply as a research tool without intention to buy online. Your site needs to provide constant means of reassurance by presenting security certificates on credit card input screens, discussing privacy policies when asking for their e-mail addresses, guarantee a hacker-safe environment, and promise information encryption. Who doesn’t get that warm fuzzy feeling when reading security certificates before entering credit card information? Certain credit card companies already offer temporary, virtual account numbers that link to people’s actual card number. But not everyone is savvy to this and it would be a good idea to include a short blurb explaining this option. By including these security tactics, you’ll not only please your customers, but you’ll also be certain that your own data will be protected and remain accurate for your metrics.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Technology | No Comments »

What internal objectives should my website support? Part II

Monday, August 30th, 2010

3D Bar Graph Meeting
Creative Commons License photo credit: lumaxart

Money Making Metrics

Another valuable set of metrics is click-thru rates. Despite this, blindly relying on click-thru rates can dangerously inflate confidence levels. Analysis of the prospect’s path before and after certain stages of “clicking thru” will come to represent a mother reading a story to her child. For a mother who has repeatedly read the same story to her child, she’s eventually able to recite the ending of the story. For example, it’s easy to attribute a higher click-thru rate to a special Web promotion. However, evidence of the prospect’s failure to follow through to the close of sale would leave you baffled. But with astute, regular examination of your website, you gain the ability to understand and better predict the outcome of your sales drives. Inspecting exactly where the prospect detoured from the sales path would deliver vital tells. You might discover that your promotion copy delivered in e-mails differs from the copy on your landing page, allowing you to doctor your copy and remedy your overall conversion rate. Direct comparison of initial ad click-thru rates to the rate of actual conversion will inform you of the cohesiveness of your Web page. Don’t be fooled, the truth will be found in the kernel of this data. The entire purpose is to thoroughly understand the customer’s activity by deciphering a common psychology.

Key Performance Indicators

Clear-cut messaging and conversion points bolster the ability to accurately speculate about a prospect’s movements and decisions within your site. A major reason people utilize the Web is for convenience. Don’t get caught up in distinguishing your site so much that it becomes a puzzle found in The Davinci Code. Here, we see a positive duality. Making your site easier to navigate and understand for your prospects, in turn, makes it easier for your company to gauge prospect trends, cluing you into best time-management practices. A mother who diligently disciplines her child fosters one that is easy to manage. Provide your site with these fundamental navigation tools for a well-managed Web experience. And just as a mother should monitor her child’s report card, your site should be continually providing measures of progress, creating an ongoing, virtual forum for recommendations towards its own improvement.

Lock on to Customer Longevity

A website with a comprehensive set of metrics will be able to provide measurement to all departments in the company. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) measured for leads and buying customers inform about the sales value, inherent costs, and potential earning. They are direct insights to what works and what doesn’t work. Your company can then draw on these indicators to foretell customer longevity, customer value, and customer costs. If the path to the point of sales, or equivalent based on the type of site, is segmented, then crucial personal data can be attained, such as e-mail, physical addresses, or the industry that the visitor is involved with. This information is perfectly pertinent for future marketing to well-defined target areas; geographic or demographic.

This segmentation details the specific path of navigation through the site by the visitor, pinpointing areas that succeed or fail in maintaining the interest of the visitor. Similarly, if your site includes a greater number of internal links, you’ll achieve a paint-by-numbers status, and be able to see exactly where your visitors have gone within your site; not just general page views. If you address several issues on one page, you’ll merely know a general set of data that your prospect is interested in. But if you provide links that deal with these concerns, you’ll see precisely what is important to them. You’ll gain a definitive assessment of the return on investment (ROI) as well. Additionally, Web metrics enable you to track other companies. There are businesses that follow competitor activity, providing reports to keep you abreast with your industry challengers.

Remember to think of your site not only as a means to an end for your product or service, but also to respect it as a product in and of itself. Always keep in mind that online business is faceless. Your prospects and customers may never meet me you. However, if you’re a good mother to your site, then your prospects will be greeted by a well-behaved child, exuberant to comply and conduct some serious business. With a focused approach to your campaign, you’ll have the ultimate opportunity to sculpt your company’s longevity, blossoming with ever youthful maturity.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Technology, marketing | No Comments »

What internal objectives should my website support?

Friday, August 27th, 2010

the unbearable lightness
Creative Commons License photo credit: christyscherrer

Mother, can I trust the Internet?

You’re excited about your product, great! You’d like to sell it to everyone, not great. Maintain focus on your plausible, potential audience. Befriending Web analytics will empower you to capture and hold your intended audience. A mother with one or two children will be able to provide them with infinite attention and care. Employing Web analytics closely models this. Using vital statistics gathered through careful analysis of your site will, like a mother’s close watch over her children, allow you to concentrate on a particular demographic and actually penetrate that group. If you fail to fully embrace proper analytical procedures, then it’s much more similar to a mother with 10 children. It will prove to be a daunting task, lacking in focus and necessary care for essential components; a useless expenditure of energy, rendering your site ineffective. Carefully decide exactly what you want your site to do for you. Yes, you do have control.

With a funnel approach, you’ll not only drive prospects to the site, but drive them within the site. Recording and collating your site’s activity creates data that can be used for sales projections and future marketing approaches; not just measuring current activity. Mother knows best. She understands every aspect of her child and is thus best-suited for the proper development of the child. Begin with a broad understanding of your demographic, attributes relating to their values, and trends in their actions. Your site should possess a specific appeal to these factors, forming a strong center of attention. With this, you’ll safeguard yourself against detrimental assumptions.

Be a Mother to Your Website

Give it guidelines, curfews, and boundaries. By doing this, you’ll be surprised to see that you’re actually releasing the tethers from your site. Like a child who’s had regimental, intellectual nourishment, your site will eventually achieve a degree of autonomy. Making your site highly “trackable” on the client-side, not the server-side, enables a well-oiled self-automation. Organize and optimize site structure to improve the customer engagement process. Through thorough parameters, you’ll be able to test definitive variables, thus gaining the ability to absolutely attribute conversion gains or decreases to respective variables. Today’s analytic tools take into consideration that we’re not yet at the point of one computer to every person. These tools use a combination of the IP address, the operating system and user agent to gauge a unique visitor count. And every mother knows children love cookies. For more reliable results, it’s suggested to use a constant cookie. This will also allow you to discern who’s just visiting and who’s actually buying. With any statistical endeavor, the statistical significance and level of confidence will be greater with a larger quantity of parameters and acquired data. To have any meaningful implications, it must be replicable and measurable.

Personalize Your Website

Amplify the measurability through personalizing your site. Dr. Kamran Parsaye, president of Intelligence Ware, Inc., writes that personalization comes about as a reaction to individual information, dividing personalization into customization, individuation, and group-characterization. If a site is engineered so that visitors can select personal preferences, then not only will the site more accurately cater to their needs, but it will give us a more exact idea of what our prospects are like. Based on the behaviors and activities that people exhibit on your site, you can generate a game plan with greater detail because they can now be seen as people; not just numbers. Departmentalizing visitors’ experiences on the site eventually tells us how to best corral them through the site with real-world assimilation. Prospects will readily perceive this personalization, leading to higher repeat business and retention. The more you know, the more you grow. But even with these vital datasets, you won’t grow if you don’t fertilize. Make sure personal information is updated regularly. A stagnate knowledge pool will most definitely lead you astray. Make the most of the energy spent on collecting and sorting this information. If personalization isn’t feasible for your type of site, then offer a reward or promotion for personal information. Believe it or not, current studies show that pizza is the most desired reward for IT folk.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Technology | No Comments »

Altruistic Marketing Makes Money

Friday, July 9th, 2010
free 'sweet' hugs
Creative Commons License photo credit: kalandrakas

Regardless of whether it’s for business or personal matters, if you concentrate on giving something for nothing you’ll eventually get everything. Businesses have an outstanding opportunity to bring in new business by providing their prospects with free resources. This will help you establish your business as a comprehensive, caring and credible resource which is guaranteed to eventually improve your sales.

Providing free information will also create a tremendous foundation for trust. Let your prospects know you’re there to answer questions and address concerns and they’ll think of you as a credible online friend—one they’re willing to write checks to!

This free information approach also provides an ideal opportunity to create a wedge between you and your competitors. If your business is coming in even with a competitor, provide certain elements for free that most other competitors would charge for and you are sure to gain the competitive edge. It’s simple—as a consumer, would you rather spend money with a business that just gives you the bare minimum or a company that goes above and beyond to provide you with additional value?

Some of the best methods for providing free information include e-books, newsletters, Web conferences and training sessions, Web videos and e-mail marketing.

Free Info Creates Need

Not only will your prospects appreciate free information, the information you provide could provide the missing link which will motivate them to buy. First, free information has the ability to maintain a friendly, soft sales approach, which prevents prospects from automatically putting their guard up against your offer. With their guards down and their listening caps on, prospects will be much likelier to pay full attention to the information you provide.

Take advantage of this, ethically of course, by using your information as a catalyst. Whether your prospect is in a state of procrastination or simply isn’t aware of how they could benefit from your product or service, the information you present to them will catalyze them into action. Your information-based marketing grants you an ideal opportunity to both persuade and educate your target audience.

You should also use this opportunity to illustrate specific examples of how people are using your product or service to better their lives. Concrete examples of how others are experiencing an improved quality of life will always sell more than a list of your business’ features.

Web Training Sessions

You can easily create a series of Web training sessions, webinars, regarding highly relevant material within your industry. There are several very simple options available online that allow you to present material online. Those who attend your virtual presentation will be able to view your desktop and listen to audio, allowing you to show them specific material, discuss the material, and actively field questions from your audience. (Hint: Try typing “free webinar software” or “free webinar hosting” in the search engine.)

The focus of these sessions must concentrate on providing useful information. You must stay away from sales speak or your attendees will quickly perceive your session as a thinly veiled sales call. Maintain a friendly, relaxed and informative tone for the best effectiveness here. For example, let’s say you’re a moped dealer. Pitching how your mopeds are the best in the industry will quickly disgust your audience and leave them feeling as though they’ve been duped. Instead, educate them on what exactly makes a moped environmentally friendly, how they can repair their own moped to mitigate maintenance costs, etc. By providing all this information and free value it will be readily apparent why your company is the clear choice, making it completely unnecessary to blatantly point out why they should buy from you.

These free Web training sessions and presentations create the perfect opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your field. And they also provide an excellent opportunity for direct interaction with your prospects. They’ll get the chance to see exactly how you do business and how much you truly care about helping others.

Web Videos Make You Money

You can just as easily mirror this approach by generating a series of online videos. Producing these Web videos also creates another excellent opportunity to show up in search engines and boost your rankings. For example, YouTube is now considered the second largest search engine on the Internet; behind Google but ahead of Yahoo and Bing. Get your business message into videos and you’ll unlock a huge market for new clients!

Build a Herd

While you’ll obviously be hoping for some direct sales from your free-information marketing, the most lucrative element you’ll gain from this is the leads you’ll generate. Providing free information is one of the best ways to get people to provide you with their contact information. Every time you get someone to opt in for one of your free e-books, newsletters, Web videos or Web training sessions that’s a qualified, exclusive lead. Build yourself a herd by logging those leads into your database and then continuously marketing to them.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Marketing, Blogs, Content Distribution, Email Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Social Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Avoid Fluff and Keep it Real with Your Marketing Message for Improved Conversions

Monday, June 28th, 2010
Clown Mask Burgundy White Gold Black
Creative Commons License photo credit: royblumenthal

There’s a reason why it’s said that “content is king” and not “content is the court jester”—you must provide value and useful information in your content. Stuff your marketing messages with too much fluff and your prospects will be able to tell the difference. Combine this no-fluff approach with your overall sales methods and you’ll significantly improve your sales conversions.

Constant Value in Your Content

After each and every paragraph you write for your blogs, ebooks, social marketing posts, articles, newsletters, direct response pieces, and email campaigns, you must ask yourself, how will this paragraph help my prospects and current clients? This will help you stay on target in consistently providing value to your audience.

With the virtually endless number of resources that can be found online, few things frustrate or even enrage an Internet user more than being misled online. So much information and so little of it is actually useful—a true testament that many of today’s SEO-based articles are purely written to boost search engine rankings and drive traffic to websites instead of actually helping their readers. Online consumers are going bald from pulling their hair out in frustration over reading through entire articles only to find that they completely failed to address the title or the keywords that brought them to the article.

One of the primary culprits here? Fluffy content that features no useful material. Businesses need to be very wary of using too much meta speak, essentially talking about talking. Correct this by maintaining highly purposeful content and language in all of your online and offline pieces.

Distrust Demolishes Sales Potential

No one wants to buy from someone who they don’t trust. Fluff-filled content that mirrors what a court jester would produce instead of what a king would bestow on his loyal subjects creates sales-killing skepticism. While some of us might be wishing for a line of lemmings mindlessly marching off a cliff and into our bank accounts, you must respect your audience as educated readers, savvy consumers and highly trained value seekers.

Besides, when you look at it in terms of apples to apples, who in their right mind would buy from a business that provides fluff as their main marketing message when there are countless other businesses to choose from? The marketplace is more saturated than a five-pound bacon sandwich, so you’ve got to make every marketing piece count. If you fail to make your online and offline marketing messages useful to the public, then you will be wasting everyone’s time, including your own.

Keep Your Business Healthy

You must remember that word-of-mouth marketing and referrals go both ways—negative viral marketing will infect your business. If you flake your way through your content and copywriting then you will quickly raise countless red flags against your business. And what do consumers do when they sense that there’s something sketchy about your business? Warn all of their friends, family and business associates about the potential pitfall that your business promises.

Fortunately, all you have to do is maintain a proper degree of integrity with your content, keep it honest, and you’ll soon be able to enjoy positive word-of-mouth marketing that will assist your business in going viral—the money making way.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Marketing, Article Marketing Strategy, Article Marketing Tips, Article Writing, Blogs, Email Marketing, Online Marketing, Quality Content Writing, SEO and SEM | No Comments »

How to Generate Steady Leads for Record-breaking Sales

Friday, June 25th, 2010
Gellato
Creative Commons License photo credit: Sirsnapsalot

One of the most forbidding challenges for any business is generating steady leads. Without a stead stream of incoming prospects businesses are enslaved to constant marketing, with every unit of effort producing one unit of success; if that. Instead, businesses can propel themselves into record-breaking sales by executing marketing that produces multiple units of success from just one unit of effort. The long-term ROI benefit of generating your own leads instead of continuously buying leads from others will bolster your business for perpetual success.

The best approach for creating your own self-sufficient stream of leads instead of doggedly pursuing new business is to execute a blend of marketing efforts. Put more marketing lines in the water and you automatically increase your chances of creating continuous leads.

Guide Your Prospects to a Lucrative Landing

Put another line in the water with a landing page. A landing page is different from a fully functional website—it doesn’t feature a full suite of content and images. Instead, these are usually just a single page intended to capture leads online. Your landing page must include a simple form to capture contact information. You will then direct Web traffic to the landing page which offers approximately 250 to 400 words about a specific offer. (SEO Tip: You can also plant a backlink on this page to your main website to drive reverse traffic and to boost your search engine ranking by building your overall number of inbound links.)

While you can certainly use these pages to pursue a direct sale, the main goal of your landing pages should be to build your herd (list of leads and prospects to continuously follow up with and market to). You need to offer something that encourages prospects to submit their personal information, such as a free e-book. You can even state that they need to input their info in order to claim their free gift (free 1-hour consultation, sample product, etc.).

A fine example of an information-based landing-page lead generator is the Calgary Painters Group landing page. First, they get it right by combining copywriting and video! Second, they ask for just a few simple pieces of non-invasive contact information. Third, they give you a solid reason for providing your personal information—a free, informative e-book.

Wake the Dead

Landing pages also provide an excellent opportunity to market a specific product or service. You can easily tie these pages into fresh marketing campaigns without losing people within the sales funnel of your main website. Directing them to a single page generates incredible focus on a particular product or service you’re trying to promote. This is ideal for both new offers as well as trying to rejuvenate older offers that haven’t been selling well (e.g. clearance sales, overstock items), bringing new life to dead campaigns.

Chocolate, Strawberry or Vanilla

Just because someone doesn’t share your over-the-top joy for chocolate ice cream doesn’t make them wrong. There are always going to be those who prefer the sumptuous strawberry or the reserved, yet refined vanilla over the coco bean. You will need to keep this in mind with your landing pages. There may not necessarily be a right or wrong tone that you convey with your landing pages, but there certainly are specific tones and modes of speech that will prove to be much more effective than others. Generate and test several different landing pages to see which tone best zeroes in on your target audience.

Start off by developing chocolate, strawberry and vanilla landing pages:

Chocolate: These are the people who like to indulge themselves. Include appeals to greater leisure time, making exorbitant amounts money, and materialistic values.

Strawberry: Write content that appeals to those who are looking for something new and interesting in their lives. These are people who like to be the first to try something new and thrive on novelty.

Vanilla: Incorporate copywriting that appeals to those seeking classic approaches to business solutions, greater stability in their business and daily lives and a higher quality of life.

After you’ve published your landing pages you need to use analytics tools to test which set of content is converting the most website traffic. The best indicator here is the click-thru rate, measuring how many landing page visitors actually click through to your call to action.

Get this system in place and you’ll feed your own business instead of always having to buy food from others.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Let Your Prospects Talk themselves into a Sale with Web-based Chat Rooms

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
NerdsOnBeer
Creative Commons License photo credit: Marco Gomes

Chat rooms create instant interactivity on your website. They not only promote an open platform for idea sharing, they also create a sub culture for your business. Give your business as much substance as possible and you’ll amass enough stability to stand up to any level of competition and market fluctuations.

Who do you listen to the most when considering a significant purchase? Your friends and family…always! While a chat room won’t necessarily have friends and family members participating, it will eventually create a friendly atmosphere that generates a much more relaxed sales environment, guiding your prospects to your virtual shopping cart.

Plus, if you are willing to let your customers and prospects freely chat directly on your website then that does a great deal for establishing your credibility. Businesses who aren’t wholly proud of their product, service or the way they do business will make great efforts to do as much behind the curtains as possible. Pull back the curtains and show your online audience that you’re the real deal and your sales are bound to grow.

Bootstrappers Can Do It Too

Think you’ll have to pay your programmer a pretty penny to redesign your Web pages? Not true. Simply search the term “free chat room software” and you’ll be able to pick and choose from dozens of options. Every business owner with a bootstrapped budget should check out their free options first to make sure they don’t toast their budget on something that doesn’t work or something they find out they simply don’t need.

  • Random SEO Note: I accidentally wrote “free” with a capital “F” and this reminded me of an important SEO tip that might be often overlooked. Search engines actually distinguish between capitalized and lower-case words. While one doesn’t necessarily carry more clout over the other, it may help boost your pages if you include both capitalized and lower-cased keywords in your meta tag information for proper nouns, acronyms, etc.

Today’s chat rooms are even easier to integrate, featuring user-friendly software that is embedded directly into your website. If you have access to your website code, then you can plug this in yourself. If not, it shouldn’t take your programmer long at all to do this, so make sure they’re not overcharging you for this simple task.

Let Them Have Their Chat

All proud business owners will surely be eager to jump right into these chat sessions on their website. But the main goal of your chat room should be prospect-to-prospect or prospect-to-customer. If you’re looking for the opportunity to direct topics of conversation and really get involved with discussions then we suggest you also set up a separate forum as an added resource for your website.

Remember, today’s Internet users are a bunch of doubting Thomases, and rightly so with all the scams going on. If you jump into the chat pool it’ll be like those parents who think they’re cool, milling around the pool party until they’ve thoroughly embarrassed their children and all their friends are too scared to talk about the things they normally do without a parental presence.

Importance of Moderation

Although you’ll want to promote freedom of speech in your chat rooms you will still want to be sure you’re moderating comments. First, check your settings to see if you can automatically flag or block messages with vulgarity (some allow you to manually type in words you want blocked).

Second, you’ll want to see that people aren’t outright knocking your business. However, make your chat room too squeaky clean and some chat room visitors are sure to feel that the whole thing is a setup; a false environment to dupe people into buying. Instead, concentrate on removing the truly malicious and leaving in reasonable suggestions for improvement.

Accomplish these things and you’ll provide the perfect virtual environment for your prospects to talk themselves into writing you a check.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Online Chat, Online Marketing, Public Relations, SEO and SEM, Social Marketing | No Comments »

Create a Solid Online Identity and Ignite Your Sales

Friday, June 18th, 2010
A Peruvian Child and his Favorite Toy / Un niño Peruano con su juguete favorito
Creative Commons License photo credit: AmazonCARES

Your prospects may know what your product or service is, but they won’t buy from you unless you establish a solid online identity. A comprehensive blend of classic and neo marketing tactics, including the latest in social media, creates a solid online identity and an unbreakable brand.

The more places you pop up on the Web, the more clients you’ll get. People are comforted by being able to easily find your and your company’s names. When they fail to find your name within the first page of the search engine results they’ll automatically doubt your legitimacy. Read on to learn about achieving a lucrative presence on the Web.

Social Media Still Sizzlin’

Despite some residual skepticism, social media is indeed still firing on all four cylinders. While you may occasionally hear some folks refer to social media as impotent, that’s probably because they’re expecting immediate sales from it. They call it “social” for a reason. Think about the total number of friends you have. Have you made all of the friends within the last six to 12 months? Of course not! Social media mirrors real life in that it takes time to build up a number of meaningful relationships.

When used right, social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz will improve your sales. One of the leading ways they do this for you is through data mining and prospect-list building. Don’t count on your one-time social media interaction to get them to visit your site and buy. Instead, count on it to help you create a lead generation machine.

Caveat: Again, executing a successful social media campaign takes time, making this endeavor a bit risky for first-year businesses looking for quick cash. Because it does have lucrative potential though, single-operator companies should start off by dedicating about an hour a week to their social media marketing. After you start to get some positive cash flow going, you’ll then eventually want to hire someone to take over that portion of your marketing. Remember to stick to your core capabilities and your highest-income producing activities.

Financial Gold-mine Forums

It’s actually not all that often that we hear about businesses using online forums to improve their sales. This makes it worth discussing again. Although online forums have seemingly been overshadowed by the latest wave of social media tools, they can still do wonders for creating a solid online identity. Forums provide an ideal virtual environment for positioning yourself as an expert in a niche.

Remember, it’s all about positioning, not prospecting. Create threads within various forums that provide useful information and insights subtly related to your product or service. Likewise, comment on other people’s threads within forums, planting your business’ name in as many places as possible.

You’ll not only create the opportunity to set yourself up as an authority, you’ll also have the chance to plant links back to your website or promotional landing page. This does two stellar things: 1) Provides more ways for people to find your website and click through; 2) Increases your inbound link count which helps boost your search engine ranking. Sweet, right?

Profitable Public Relations

While having your name register under a number of different business projects helps build credibility, having your name paired with benevolent acts will take your business credibility to a whole new level. Of course, we should all be on the lookout for ways to contribute to philanthropic endeavors anyway, but showing your online audience that you care about your community will make them want to do business with you.

Don’t just donate—any business can write a check:

Scenario 1)

  • You: “Hello everyone, we’re proud to announce we wrote a check for our local Habitat for Humanity chapter.”
  • Prospect: “That’s nice.”

Scenario 2)

  • You: “Hello everyone, we’re proud to announce that we had our entire staff visit our local Habitat for Humanity chapter and helped them build a new home for a family of six.”
  • Prospect: “That’s awesome! I feel I can trust your business to treat my needs with great care.”

Get out there and get involved with local non-profit and charity organizations. Not only will you accomplish something that you can genuinely feel good about, you’ll also create the perfect opportunity to draft a press release about your involvement. (Click here to get sales-boosting press release writing tips.) Submit that press release to as many sources as you can throughout the Web and you’ll crank up your credibility in no time.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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