Jul 29, 2010 Posted in Marketing Ideas

The Easiest Path to Better Website Conversion?

I’ve written about the importance of website conversion in the past but a quick review here won’t hurt before I dive into why it is so critical to the success of your websites.

First, conversion is the percentage of your website visitors that take a positive action on your site.  For most small business websites that don’t actually sell anything online this means contacting you for further information or signing up for an email list. In other words, generating sales leads.

Conversion is critical because the slightest improvement in conversion will be reflected in a large improvement in website performance… without the need for more traffic.

Now that we’re up-to-date on the importance of conversion, the question becomes, “How do we increase conversion?”

There are a number of ways but I’m going to share the one that I’ve found works the best and is the easiest to implement.  Video.  Specifically, adding a professional video spokesperson to your site to greet and/or guide visitors.

I recently added a spokesperson to my site at Modern Sales Prospecting.  Immediately, I saw a doubling of the sign-ups to my newsletter and a slightly smaller increase in sales leads for my services.

I was so impressed with the ease of implementation and more importantly, the results the video produced that I decided to offer professional actors as a service.  Visit ModernSalesProspecting.com and click on the On-site Video link to see how I’ve set this up.  Exciting times.

Jul 25, 2010 Posted in Marketing Ideas

The Lost Art of Selling Over the Phone

The more business owners I speak with the more evident it is that we, as a society, are losing the one most important skill that makes a business work.  That skill is selling.

I recently re-read Robert Kiyosaki’s “Before You Quit Your Job” (an awesome book if you haven’t read it) and he repeatedly makes the point that an entrepreneur must be the best salesperson in his or her organization.  He also goes on to say that if a business owner is not comfortable selling he or she had better find a partner that is or go back to being an employee.

I must admit that I took a bit of offense to that suggestion as I didn’t consider myself a good salesperson and I was anything but comfortable prospecting for new customers.  In fact, my own book, “Nice People Can Sell” was spurred on by my dislike for selling and my desire to find alternative methods of developing sales.

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Jul 15, 2010 Posted in Marketing Ideas

The Importance of Site Structure When it Comes to SEO

Here is a very common scenario. You decide that you need a website so you pay good money to have someone design and build a site for your business.  You go back and forth with the designer getting everything looking the way you want it to and a month later you have a sparkling new website.

You are excited and you show it off to your friends and family.

Another month passes and you notice that your shiny new website isn’t exactly producing stellar results.  You do a Google search on a number of search terms that your potential customers may be entering to find your services and you don’t see your site coming up on the first page of results.  Or the second. Or the third.

You take a look at your website traffic logs and you see that your site is getting ZERO visitors.  It looks great and contains awesome information but nobody would ever know this because it isn’t being seen by anyone.  For all intensive purposes your website is lost in Cyberspace.

This is such a common problem it isn’t even funny.  Fortuntely, the solution is simple. Your site must be structured properly right from the get-go so that Google and the other search engines know that a) it exists and b) what your site is about so they know how to rank it.

Rather than going through the entire process of website repair here I’d rather refer you to a report I wrote specifically to address this very problem. It is a short read and yep, it is free.  You can download my report by visiting WebsiteRepairTips.com

Check it out and let me know what you think, ok?

Jul 7, 2010 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Steve Jobs Speaks to Stanford Grads

An awesome speech by an awesome speaker.  I can’t believe I had never seen this before today.  Too many great points to list here.  Fifteen minutes well spent.