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

The 2 Numbers You Need To Track To Know If Your Marketing Is Working

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

Knowing where to start to improve your small business marketing can be a bit of a mystery. Is it your marketing message, the places you advertise, your web site or what? By measuring the results or your marketing efforts and collecting feedback, you can uncover the secrets of what is and isn’t working and learn what to refurbish or replace to generate more leads and increase sales.

Tom called me with a question about how to increase sales. from his web site. Despite having spent three thousand dollars to build an attractive web, he wasn’t generating leads from his site. Only a small handful of people had contacted him since the site went live two months ago.

Do you have a web site? Are you disappointed by the number of leads and sales. your site is generating?

I asked Tom what percentage of daily or weekly visitors to his site contacted him. He didn’t know the answer. I asked him how many people visited his site per month. He didn’t know. I asked him, how many sales. of his books and coaching services had been generated by his web site. He didn’t have that information, either.

If you want to improve the perf0rmance of any marketing effort, whether online or offline, make the effort to collect and evaluate the results. You can use easily available numbers to help you fix what’s not working and improve what is.

Ever go on a diet? How do you tell if your eating and exercise regimens are working? You step on the scale and look at the number of pounds you’ve lost or gained. This simple figure gives you the truth about the success of your dieting efforts. To improve sales., track response and conversion rates.

Discover how to generate more leads and sales with your web site with “Creating Web Sites that Sell”

1. Response Rates
If you spend m0ney on advertising to drive people to your business web site, you want to know how many people responded to your ad and visited your site. If you’re only getting a handful of responses, the problem could be your ad. Something as simple as changing the marketing message you use in your advertising or in your search engine listings could increase your response rate.

Discover how to write and use your marketing message to get more attention and prompt people to contact you so you can convert them to clients.

If you’ve had success with the ad in another publication, it may be that the particular ezine or web site isn’t reaching your target audience and you’d be better off spending your advertising dollars elsewhere. If you track your ad results you can quickly discover where to avoid spending on advertising that doesn’t work and make changes to get more out of each advertising dollar.

2. Conversion Rates
If your web site draws lots of visitors, you’ll want to know what percentage of those visitors are buying, and if not buying, at least signing up for your ezine. With these conversion rates you can determine how to increase your online sales.

Barbara has a subscription-based web site that pulls in over twelve hundred visitors a day, yet only seven people a day contact her and the site only generates sales. a couple of times a week. Is this the best she can do? Probably not.

You can prompt 10-50% of the people who visit your web site to contact you and then work on converting these qualified leads to sales. For Barbara, all it took was a few changes in her layout and copy for her to add two to three hundred people a day to her list of qualified leads and increase sales. to dozens each day.

One of the most important things to identify and measure is where sales. come from. If you advertise with Google or in ezines and see that an ad has more than paid for itself in leads generated and sales., you’ll know its worth running again.

Just asking people where they heard of you or how they arrived at your web site is useful. When I asked one client how they found my site, they explained how they had been searching the web using the phrase, “marketing services” and how difficult it had been to find the site.

My advertising hadn’t targeted the phrase “marketing services”, so I quickly added it to the list of keywords for my ads. The result? The next day someone came to my site via my targeted ad and bought every small business marketing manual I sell.

Here’s the link to order “Creating Web Sites that Sell” to help you generate more qualified leads and increase sales for your online or offline business.

Don’t let marketing be a mystery. Start analyzing what is and isn’t working so you know what to fix. If your small business marketing is working, use these same numbers to set new goals for lead generation and sales. conversions and be even more successful.

5 Ways To” Get Lucky” With Your Small Business Marketing

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

In early-August, I got a call from Barbara at the Association of Management Consultants wanting to know whether I was interested in running a small business marketing workshop for their members. I asked how she had gotten my name; Barbara told me Jeff had referred me. When I mentioned that I had met Jeff over two years ago, Barbara said that I sure was lucky he still remembered me.

Luck had nothing to do with it. Jeff asked to be put on my mailing list after we meet. He gets my weekly ezine, full of strategic marketing ideas he can use. Over time, I’ve demonstrated my expertise to Jeff and he trusts me enough to refer me as a speaker.

Are you relying on luck to get people to remember you?

When Jeff had a need or when someone he knew wanted an expert in marketing, my name came to mind. Why? Because I have a SYSTEM for promoting my marketing products and services that helps people remember me when they have a need.

Do you have a system that generates a steady stream of clients?

Over the years I’ve perfected a marketing strategy that generates a steady stream of prospects, clients and income. It is based on five core marketing principles and associated marketing tactics.

Why use a small business strategic marketing system?

When you have a system, each one of your marketing efforts works to support your other marketing efforts. Each action you take builds on the previous action. Your marketing is cumulative. In my case this means that each month, I have an additional thousand or more qualified prospects interested in my services and products.

What are some of the elements of a successful small business marketing
system?

Discover how to market your products and services systematically to generate a steady stream of sales.

1. Attract Attention
Learn how to explain what you do so that people quickly see how you can help them. All you need is a one-sentence description of who you help and the problem you solve; a marketing message or elevator speech. Use it on your business card, in your brochures, on your web site and in your ads.

Discover how to craft your small business marketing message and elevator speech and get attention and business.

2. Establish Your Credibility
Provide proof of how well your services and products work. Testimonials describing results work well. Articles, case studies and helpful tips show people how you think and how you can solve their problems.

3. Prompt Qualified Prospects to Contact You
Use your free report, test drive, workshop, etc. to prompt prospects to give you their contact information. If they read your ezine, or visit your web site, give them a reason to tell you what they need and want so you can contact them.

4. Stay in Touch
Whether a prospect came to you as a result of an ad, referral, web search, or a mailing, regularly send them mail or email and demonstrate your expertise with ideas they can use.

5. Educate Your Target Market to Create Demand
One of the biggest barriers to sales. is that your prospects don’t know you, the range of your services you provide, or why they need your products and services.

Discover how to use your web site marketing to generate interest, educate your target market so you have more qualified leads and sales.

Prospects won’t hire you if they don’t understand the need or the benefit. Use your regular communication to educate prospects about the problems you solve and to create a perception of need on their part and then they will want to use your services.

Still waiting to get lucky with your marketing? Use a systematic approach to marketing your business and generate a steady and reliable stream of clients and customers.

The Ten Steps To Marketing Your Small Business

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

Can you imagine you’re ninety years old and still hiking up mountains with your grandchildren, bench pressing more than most twenty year olds, and making milli0ns of dollars?

This past week Jack LaLanne, America’s first TV fitness guru, turned ninety. Not only is he still sound of mind, in great shape, he’s made milli0ns and is still earning more. How does he do it?

You know it is important to eat your fruits and veggies, exercise regularly, avoid drinking and smoking and get enough sleep to stay healthy. To that list Jack LaLanne would add, set clear goals, exercise with weights twice a week, avoid eating between meals and keep your mind active.

Of course you can’t just eat well and skip the exercise or avoid the drinking and smoking and skimp on sleep. Jack LaLanne is still going strong at 90 because he does ALL the things required to stay healthy every day.

Marketing your business requires the same comprehensive, disciplined approach Jack LaLanne uses to stay healthy at ninety. To attract new clients and retain existing ones you need to set goals, target a need, get attention, prompt action, grow your network, establish credibility, provide a solution, follow up, demonstrate value and stay in touch.

These are the ten essential steps to marketing your business.

Learn how to keep your business healthy with “The Insider Secrets to Attracting More & Better Customers” manual. You’ll learn how to get attention, get clients and be more successful.

Like a staircase, the steps are connected and you need to put them together in the proper sequence and use each of them regularly. A common small business marketing mistake is to focus on just one or two of the above steps and hope for the best.

Joan, who owns a sports facility, called last week about her advertising campaign. It was costing her significant dollars but wasn’t translating into new clients. What was the problem?

Advertising can help get attention but to be effective it needs to be focused on clients’ needs and prompt them to action. Joan’s advertising was focused on her solution, not on prospects’ needs resulting in a disappointing response. Once she rewrote her ads to target prospects’ needs, her response rates and business revenue increased.

Larry’s promotional efforts were working but he wasn’t having success translating all the attention he was getting into dollars and cents. Thanks to top search engine positioning and hundreds of links to his web site, thousands of people were visiting his site each day. Yet, on average, only five people per day were contacting him about his services. Larry was doing a great job of getting attention but wasn’t prompting his prospects to action.

Learn how to use your web site to generate a steady stream of qualified prospects and revenue with “Creating Web Sites that Sell“.

Your Marketing Fitness
You can have a steady flow of new prospects and clients each month if you adopt a healthy small business marketing strategy. Here’s how.

1. Set Goals
Regularly review your marketing. Assess what’s working and what isn’t and set objectives for lead generation, client acquisition and retention.

2. Target a Need
Focus your ads, your elevator speech and your small business marketing copy on prospects’ concerns.

3. Get Attention
Prospects need to know that you exist before they will contact you.

4. Prompt Action
In order to get prospects to give you their contact information, inquire about your services or buy your products, prompt them to action. Use your marketing copy and your offers to get prospects to call you, visit your web site or your store, and buy your products and services.

5. Grow Your Network
The more qualified leads you have, the better.

6. Establish Credibility
You need to demonstrate your competence and convince prospects to trust you before they’ll make a purchase.

7. Follow Up
Old leads are cold leads. Follow up when leads are fresh. When people contact you, send an immediate email response and give them a call within 24 hours.

8. Provide a Solution
Make sure your products and services are the solution to your prospects’ problems.

9. Demonstrate Value
If you want someone to buy, they need to understand the benefits.

10. Stay in Touch
Don’t let prospects forget you when they need you and are ready to buy.

If you increased the time you spent working out each day and improved your diet, you’d start to see a difference in a couple of weeks. You’d be stronger and healthier.

Small Business marketing is the same. You need to do all the right things consistently. Start using these ten marketing steps and in a couple of weeks you’ll start to see a change. You’ll find more prospects contacting you and a steady increase in revenue.

Whether you want to be fit and profitable at ninety or not you can learn from Jack LaLanne’s continued health and prosperity. It just takes some discipline and knowledge. Apply both to keep yourself and your business in good health.

The 4 Most Important Objections To Eliminate To Increase Sales

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

You want to increase the flow of sales revenue, but you are stymied by prospects’ seemingly endless objections. Prospects say they’re not interested. They tell you your price is too high, or this isn’t the right time. You’ve heard all the objections. What can you do to simplify sales and get rid of these once and for all?

Engineering Your Marketing
When I was seven one of my favorite ways to spend a hot summer day with my friends was playing a backyard game we called “waterworks”. We’d use a trowel to construct channels in the dirt, put the hose at one end and watch the water flow. If we wanted the water to go straight, we’d remove rocks and debris to clear a path. We became sophisticated engineers, guiding water around corners and across short aqueducts. We felt like masters of the universe, directing the water where we wanted it to go. (You can bet my mother loved seeing us come into the house at the end of the day.)

Plan your small business marketing to take charge of increasing your sales Your marketing can lead prospects to your products and services the way my friends and I engineered our waterworks; by making clear paths and removing obstacles. Channel your prospects’ attention and interests and eliminate objections.

Discover how to engineer your small business marketing plan to provide a steady stream of clients >>

Below are the four most common objections and ways to eliminate them.

Lack of Interest
Prospects need to understand what you do before they can become interested in what you have to offer. It is that simple. If you’re marketing yourself as a lawyer, coach, accountant or fitness center, you’re not telling people why they should be interested. To capture their interest, explain the problems you solve from their perspective.

Lack of Leads
You want people to email you, call you or go to your web site to buy your products and services. But first you have to motivate them to contact you so you can market to them. Once you have their attention, use your conversation, your emails and your web site to ask them what they want and need.

Lack of Credibility
You want prospects to see you as the expert; the person and the firm that has the products and services they can rely on. One of the biggest challenges to attracting new clients is gaining their trust and being seen as the essential expert. Use your articles, ezine, and web site to demonstrate your expertise. Use testimonials from clients to tell prospects about the results you and your products have achieved.

Pricing Objections
Whether it is a $25 subscription or a $50,000 consulting fee, prospects object to price when they don’t understand the value of the purchase. Establish a set of questions you can use to help prospects define what they want and what you are providing. When price is put in context, it becomes much less of an obstacle.

Still not converting as many prospects to clients as you’d like? Use questions to find out more about what they want, and what their concerns are. Then address each of these objections up front and remove them as potential sales killers.

Discover how to use your web site to eliminate objections and generate a steady flow of new clients.

Think of your target market as a reservoir of water waiting to be tapped. If you eliminate the barriers between them and you, you could send a steady stream of new clients and customers your way. now, don’t just imagine it, do it.

Start eliminating your prospects’ objections and create a clear path for them to become clients and customers. Help your prospects get what they want and you’ll be sales to more clients.

8 Marketing Ideas for Small Business Marketers

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

…More Small Business Marketing Ideas & Tips for Small Business Marketers >>

7 Key Small Business Marketing Ideas

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

…Index
of Small Business Marketing Articles and Marketing Ideas

Small Business Marketing Ideas You’ll Kick Yourself for Not Using

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

… More Small Business Marketing Ideas & Marketing Tips >

4 Small Marketing Changes That Get Big Results

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

Last week we got the big one.

We got our first big winter storm and up north in Vermont where I ski, the mountain received over 48 lovely inches of fresh snow, enough to even convince my wife to leave a day early for the holiday weekend. Here on the coast in Connecticut where I live the same storm produced 2 measly inches of rock hard frozen crud.

What was the difference? Just a couple of degrees.

Your small business marketing is the same. Small shifts can make a big difference in your results and your profitability. With the right small business marketing plan you can get an abundance of business or with a slightly different approach hardly any business at all. Here are four little changes which can yield big results for your business.

1. What You Do With Your Goals

Everyone has goals for themselves and their business. Some keep them in mind and only a few commit them to paper. A small difference but it turns out the people who regularly identify and put their goals on paper end up making over ten times as much.

What are your goals for this year? Do they include discovering how to attract more clients? Find out how >>

2. Where You Focus Your Small Business Marketing
If you’re like most people your marketing touts your good name and your products, it’s focused on you. Typically this approach yields only minimal results and limited sales.

Your prospects’ biggest concern is their own needs and wants. Change a few words in how you talk about yourself and your products and services. You’ll find that instead of just getting a luke warm response you’ll be generating a ton of hot leads with your marketing.

This simple shift from a focus on you to a focus on your prospects could help you attract as many clients in one month as you did in the last six as it did for Denise Annunciata of Leaplaw or help you get your next $200,000 sale as it did for Bill Orser of SafePlay.

3. What You Do With Leads
Last week I got a call from John, a builder in Oregon who after ten years was still struggling with his marketing. I asked John how many names he had in his prospect list. He said he had a dozen or so.

Over ten years anyone in business will have helped, talked to and met 1,500 people or more unless they live in an isolated village in Alaska. Imagine instead of just giving someone your business card you asked them for theirs. Then take the next step and ask them to tell you either what they want and need relative to your services or for the name of one person they know who could use your services.

Do this small task and you’ll have more leads than you ever imagined.

Over ten years, using this easy marketing technique you could have built a database of thousands of people to contact with information about your services.

With the help of any contact management system or database program it’s easy to build your business network. It may seem like a small thing to do each week to take 2-5 minutes to add in the names of prospects but without this simple action, ten years down the road you could still be struggling like John.

Ready to stop struggling to grow your business or to take your business to the next level? If you keep using the same approach you have been you’re going to get the same results. You know that already, right? If instead you want to see your business reach its potential discover the small business marketing system that works >>

4. How Often You Contact Your Prospect List
80% of sales are lost due to lack of follow-up. Personally this drives me crazy when I hear a client tell me about their low lead to buyer conversion rate. More than 9 out of 10 times the problem is they don’t have the simple follow-up systems in place.

Think about it. You’ve done all the hard work to identify a qualified prospect. You know they want what you sell – yet all too many don’t buy. Don’t be satisfied with this!

I asked one client why they didn’t follow up inquiries by interested prospects with a series of helpful emails to engage their interest, help build credibility and create a sense of urgency. Their response was they didn’t want to pester the prospect and they already had a once a month follow system of contacts in place.

When someone contacts you they’re indicating an interest and what they want is to get all the information they need to get know you and trust you and buy from you. Wait a month and the prospect will have completely forgotten why they contacted you in the first place. It’s during the first week that they want to hear from you, again and again.

It may seem like a small difference, waiting to make contact over and over or doing it the first week, but it is often the difference between losing a prospect or adding a new client.

Can you see that if you made these four changes to your small business marketing plan you’d be more successful? Now imagine if you made a few more.

There are hundreds of little ways you can change your marketing that will make a big difference in your profits including ad copy, pricing strategies, product bundling, use of ezines, etc,. Each one could help you make 10-20% more this year.

Put a few of them together and you could easily see your income double from $750,000 to $1,500,000 in less than a year.

Small differences in temperature can result in over 36 inches of new snow versus 1 or 2 inches of frozen crud or 36 new clients versus 1 or 2 duds. While I can’t control the weather and have to take what mother-nature dishes out, you can control your small businesss marketing and how successful you are, it just takes making a few changes.

Want to know which little changes to make to get big results in your marketing and your business? Use this link >>

Should Your SEO and Web Marketing Be This Expensive?

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

I had a great arrangement with an SEO firm, until recently, when they started charging me for their services.

Five years ago I developed a relationship with a search engine optimization firm. I helped them improve their internet marketing and they in turn gave me advice on how to boost the rankings of my site on the search engines.

When I first started working with this SEO firm, they had top positioning in the search engines, as you’d expect, and were getting a ton of traffic to their site. But they weren’t getting enough qualified leads. Their biggest complaint was that they were working way too hard with the clients they had and not making enough money.

We talked monthly over the course of a year.  They gave me search engine tips and I shared internet marketing ideas. I showed them how to change the layout and marketing copy of their homepage and explained how to qualify leads.

I recommended that they fire the small-time, annoying clients that were taking up most of their time and focus on the clients they enjoyed working with and who had the funds to pay for a wider range of services. And I talked to them about their pricing model, showing them how they could increase their fees substantially.

Want to use the same ideas to generate more leads and sales for your business with your web site? You’ll find both the ideas I shared to help this firm turn site visitors into sales along with all the search engine optimization tips they gave me in Creating Web Sites That Sell.

If you’re ready to discover the insider information that website marketing professionals share with each other, you can when you claim your copy of Creating Web Sites That Sell. Use this link >>

During the year we worked together, I knew they were paying attention but I didn’t track how many of my ideas they implemented. We hadn’t been in contact for 12-18 months, so when I called them about an SEO task I needed done, I was shocked to find out how much they wanted to charge me.

What had gone wrong, or right, as the case may be?

Since, we had spoken last, the SEO firm had been gradually implementing most of the ideas I’d given them. They transformed their site into a lead generator that was providing them with top quality leads. They’d stopped taking low paying, high maintenance clients. And they’d increased their prices.

Bottom line: Using the web site marketing ideas I’d shared, the SEO firm had increased the number of qualified leads they’d generated online by over 300% and per client revenue by 400%. With fewer clients they were making more!

Want to make more with less effort? You can when you use the ideas detailed in Creating Web Sites That Sell. You’ll discover how to attract more people to your site and then how to convert site visitors into loyal clients so you can grow your business.

Ready to start making more money and improve your bottom line? Claim your copy of Creating Web Sites That Sell >>

Given the dramatic success of the SEO firm, our initial barter arrangement was history. Since they had more clients than they could handle, I had to wait in line and pay the same high fees as everybody else. While I expect my clients to succeed with my website marketing ideas, I hadn’t expected this turnabout.

I did end up paying the SEO firm to work for me and they’re worth every penny. They’re great people to deal with and do top quality work. Contact me if you need top quality SEO services and I’ll be happy to give you their name.

Are You Following or Breaking These 5 Golden Rules Of Web Marketing?

By Charlie   |   March 15th, 2010

Want to generate more sales with your internet marketing?
If you’re struggling to attract visitors to your site, to generate leads and to sell your products and services online, you’re not alone.

Many small business owners who have put up web sites are in the same boat; frustrated and wishing they were more successful online.

You’re spending money to keep a web site up and running; you’re spending money on pay-per-click advertising; and the site is only producing a trickle of sales. Sound familiar?

The problem isn’t an awareness of your current situation, the limp results are all too painfully apparent. Nor is the problem one of goals. You know you want your web site to bring in $100,000 or $500,000 a year or more.

What can you do to get from where you are with your internet marketing to where you want to be?

My son Evan, a junior in college, recently returned from traveling in Europe with a friend. They made a low-budget, whirlwind tour of London, Rome, Florence and Amsterdam.

Neither of them had traveled on their own or visited those places before or spoke Italian or Dutch, but they knew what they wanted to see. Their strategy for making the most of the limited time they had in each city was simple.

Pick up a small guidebook, a street map, and map of public transit. Then plan a route that includes all the sights that could possibly be squeezed into a day. With good information, they accomplished everything they wanted to in each city.

Marketing on the web is like traveling abroad for many people. They don’t know the language, they don’t have a good guide or guide book and they’re easily lost and confused about how to get where they want to go.

This is not a vacation, though, its your business, and you don’t want to lose time and money wandering in circles. To reach your web site marketing goals, you need a guide with solid information. Get the proven, step by step Creating Web Sites That Sell and discover how to sell more with your web site. Use this link to claim your copy >>

The 5 Rules of Website Marketing

Rule 1 – Know Where You Want to Go
Before my son Evan arrived at the Rome airport, he’d made a list of his objectives. He had a short time and wanted to get to the most important classical sites. There are key objectives in onlinr marketing, too, that should be on every business owner’s list.

These include:

– Knowing how to attract a flood of traffic,
– Getting people to give you their contact information,
– Building relationships with prospects in order to convert them to clients,
– Motivating your prospects to take action so they buy from you.

Rule 2 –Get a Good Map
If marketing on the web were obvious, you and everyone you know would already be multi-millionaires. To reach your objectives you’ll need a detailed, up to date map that shows you how to make your online business highly profitable. Use this link to get your map to online marketing >>

Rule 3 – Choose the Best Route
If you’re going to get to St. Peters, the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, the Castle Sant’Angelo, the Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, and the Republican temples in Rome all in one day and still have time for lunch, you’ll need a plan. (And, yes, Evan did all that in one day.)

You’ll need to know where to begin and how best to get from place to place. The web is the same. You’ll need a web site marketing guide to take you step by step to increased sales.

Here are some of the areas you’ll need a map for:

Generating Leads
• Creating a site the search engines will love,
• Taking the shortcut to top search engine placement,
• Writing pay-per-click ads that will drive people to your site.

Converting Leads to Sales
•  Prompting people to contact you,
•  Writing compelling content,
•  Knowing when to use short and long copy in your internet marketing,
•  Knowing when and how to include links in your site,
•  What to do to follow up to convert interested prospects into paying clients,
• Increasing per client sales,
•  Knowing what information to track and measure.

Rule 4 – Know When to Change Course
If you were lost in a strange city, you wouldn’t keep walking around in circles. At some point, you’d look for someone to ask for help.

Marketing online is the same. It’s not a linear path and occasionally you’ll make mistakes, we all do. The key to being successful is to quickly recognize when you’re headed in the wrong direction get the help you need to get going in the right direction.

Ready to get your website marketing going in the right direction? Use this link >>

Rule 5 – Act on the Numbers
Foreign as it still is to many business people, marketing online has some distinct advantages over traditional media. For one thing, you have access to information which can tell you exactly how many people saw your ad, how many responded to it, how many signed up at your site and how many bought from you.

You can try out ads and ad copy at very low cost. You can compare the response rate to two different ads side by side.

You can test copy and design elements on your web pages to see which attract clients and which send them away.

Using readily available online information, you can easily determine your lead acquisition and client acquisition costs. Then you can leverage this data to cut your costs and increase your profits dramatically.

For example if you have a page on your site you where you want to get people to give you their contact information you can track the number of people who come to the page versus the number who sign up. If you’re conversion rate is less than 20% you know that something is wrong and you need to change the design or copy.

Check your conversion rates monthly, if not weekly, and adjust your website marketing tactics accordingly.

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