Feb 12, 2009 Posted in Marketing Ideas

How Big is Your Marketing Brain?

If you’ve ever heard of Rich Shefren, you know what a big marketing brain looks like. The dude is a genius when it comes to helping people set up online entities. Rich has written a number of very valuable reports that he gives away for free on his site Strategic Profits.

I don’t know what made me think of it but I re-read his Internet Business Manifesto the other day and it made one thing abundantly clear. There is a lot of things to do if you’re running an online business or an online marketing department.

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Feb 3, 2009 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Winning More Sales Through Technology

A few years ago this was really cutting edge stuff. Now, it should be an every day practice but I don’t think it is.

I had a client who was a personal trainer and while he was an excellent trainer and a great guy he wasn’t exactly technically savvy. By that I mean he wouldn’t even check his email.

Having said that he did see the value in using the Internet to build his business so we build a very simple site with his phone number so people could cantact him if they were interested in his services. We then set up a pay per click campaign to drive traffic to the page.

After a couple of weeks, the site was getting a lot of traffic but he wasn’t getting a lot of calls. Here is the interesting thing though. When we added a contact form for people to complete (including a phone number where they could be reached), the response rate soared.

Unfortunately, this didn’t do us much good because the trainer wouldn’t check his email. But, we could set up his cell phone to receive text messages. This was a little complicated to do a few years ago but now that you can check your email on your cell, this is super simple to do now.

All you do is have your leads forwarded to your phone and you can follow-up immediately. Often, the first to the punch wins the prize and this is a great way to make sure you’re first to the punch. If a prospect has found your site, he or she would have likely found your competition as well.