“Currently we have a tradeshow circuit we do, but I would love to leverage the web more because we wouldn’t have to fly all over the country with a booth.  And a website is 24/7/365!  I want people to experience on our website what they would experience at a tradeshow. How do you make a site as personal as meeting someone at a tradeshow?” Dave Malda

Dave’s question highlights the fundamental opportunity of the web and its biggest problem. Like Dave, I’m sure you know a web site presents a global, 24-hour marketing opportunity but… how do you make it bring in as many sales as your best salesperson does?

Let’s take a look at how well face-to-face selling and selling online work and why.

-In-Person Sales
What percentage of sales do you close when you’re face-to-face with a prospect? 30-40% is respectable and not uncommon.

-Online Sales
What percent of visitors to your web site make a purchase? A few sites convert up to 3-5% of visitors into customers. For most web sites, the number is much smaller, often only thousandths of one percent.

Do these numbers represent your success in person and lack of success online?

Discover exactly what to do with your internet marketing to increase sales >>

Here’s how to make your web site as effective as your best sales person:

1. Target People Who Are Looking To Solve a Problem

People come to trade shows because they are looking for a product or service. When they walk up to your booth, you know they’re at least mildly interested and want more information.

Online, the best ways to attract people who are looking for your products and services is to make sure your site can be found in the search engines, to use pay-per-click ads like Google Adwords and to get your articles published everywhere you can online.

2. Start a Conversation

What’s the first thing you do when a prospect walks up to your booth at a tradeshow? Do you immediately start spouting product features and prices, or do you introduce yourself and try to get a conversation going by asking them a question? Of course, you don’t immediately try to sell them. First you find out what you can about their business and which product would best suit their needs.

The same is true online. If you immediately try to sell people, you’ll turn them off and they’ll go away. Instead, write marketing copy on your web site that begins a virtual conversation with prospects.

Start by asking them the biggest or most common question on their minds relative to your product or service. Continue to ask questions about their problems and aspirations. Use this virtual conversation to spell out their concerns and, once you’ve defined them, explain how the solutions you provide solve their problems.

Find out how to make your site engaging to get visitors’ attention and prompt them to contact you and buy from you. Use this link >>

3. Build a Relationship by Being Helpful

Where does your best business come from? From clients you’ve been helping for years; clients who know and trust you. When you’re standing in front of a prospect, you can hand them a free report, answer their questions directly and demonstrate your expertise.

Converting online prospects to clients involves doing the same things with your web site marketing. Offer a free report to prospects to prompt them to give you their contact information. List commonly asked questions; then answer. Include content on the site that demonstrates your expertise and knowledge of your customers’ business needs.

Think about how many ideas and how much information you’d share with a prospect in a 15 minute face-to-face conversation at a trade show. Your web site needs to present at least this much information. In fact, it gives you the opportunity to present more.

4. Make it Personal

Make a personal connection with your prospects. If you’re an entrepreneur or a business owner, use your web site to help prospects get to know you. Help your prospects see you as more than just an anonymous site that wants their money. Do this by:

• Putting up snapshots of yourself in your office or on the golf course. (In the last couple of weeks my subscribers have seen me on my bike and on my sailboat.)
• Using audio and or video clips with ideas prospects can use throughout your site.
• Providing free telecalls. Not only does this give your prospects a chance to hear you demonstrate your expertise, it gives you an opportunity to find out what they’re really thinking about.
• Using ‘Live Help’ on your site.

Most businesses have hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors and many of them market similar products and services. Whether you’re marketing in person or online, your best competitive advantage is the strength of your relationship with your prospects.

For getting a conversation going or closing a sale, nothing beats being there in person, talking face to face with a prospect. But your internet marketing can and should do as good a job. You don’t have to live with conversion rates in the thousandths of a percent. Put the four ideas above to work and make your site sell.

Tired of waiting for your site to transform itself into the lead- and profit-generating machine you’d hoped for? Discover what works from someone who is already highly successful online and make your site more profitable.

Discover the “secret” website marketing strategies I use to sell products and services every day >>

Debra emailed me in response to last week’s ezine. Her niche coaching site has top placement in Google, gets thousands of visitors a day and is providing her with a steady stream of clients. Despite her success, she wanted to know if she could be doing better and if anything is missing in her internet marketing. Could she be closing even more sales?

Most people are mystified by internet marketing. It’s still a relatively new and very unique medium. You hire a web designer; you give them your marketing brochure or similar information about your company, and they create a web site for you. And then… more often than not, nothing happens. If you’re lucky, you get a handful of visitors, but very few contact you, much less buy from you.

It quickly becomes obvious that your web site isn’t working. It’s not generating leads or sales. Of course, if you knew where or what the problem was, you’d fix it. But that’s the most frustrating part of it; you’re stumped.

How can you tell what’s missing from your internet marketing? And how do you fix it?

Think of your website marketing as a large water main or pipe connecting a gigantic reservoir to your business. The reservoir is overflowing with prospects and your goal is to get as many relevant prospects as possible down through the pipeline to your business.

The web marketing pipeline has three valves; one for visitors, one for relationships and one for sales. Most websites are built with all three valves shut, blocking prospects from rushing to your site and keeping profits from flowing into your bank account. In most cases, even after months or years, these valves continue to restrict the flow of business so that only a small number of prospects ever make it to the point of sale.

To fix your website, you need to open all three valves. You need visitors, prospect relationships and sales in order to put money in the bank.

Ready to stop struggling with your website marketing? Tired of just getting a trickle of prospects and sales? You can tap the reservoir of prospects waiting to buy your products and services. Get the details >>

Opening Your Web Marketing Pipeline

Visitors
Take the following three steps to get more qualified visitors to your site:

1. Build incoming links from other sites. Writing and distributing articles is the fastest and most effective way to generate the type of links to your site that attract visitors and that help your ranking in the search engines. It’s effective and essentially free.

2. Sign up for Google Adwords. With a couple of attention-grabbing words, your pay-per-click ad is a quick way to attract site visitors while you’re working on improving your search engine positioning.

3. Help the search engines find your site and give it a top ranking. Make sure you know which words your prospects use when searching for your site and include them throughout your copy. And, of course, submit your site to the most popular search engines.

Relationships
The more people that read your web page and contact you, the more prospect relationships you’ll have and the greater chance of generating a sale. Your site should prompt 5 to 20% of visitors to contact you. If it doesn’t, take the following three steps to open the relationship valve.

1. Use your page design to lead people through the information in the sequence you want them to follow, and lead them to the steps you want them to take.

2. Grab your prospects’ attention with your web copy by focusing on their concerns. Speak to their interests.

3. Give prospects a compelling reason to give you their contact information. Offer a free report that solves their problems or run a contest offering a prize they’d love to have.

Sales
20% of your sales can come directly from a prospect’s first visit to your website. What most people forget is that 80% of your sales come from your follow-up systems. Check to see that at a minimum you are doing all of the following:

1. Set up your email system so that prospects automatically receive a sequence of messages prompting them to take the next action you want them to take.

2. Use a weekly or monthly ezine to share ideas, success stories or case studies with qualified prospects. Pose problems and include links to your solutions.

3. When people sign up online for your free offer, be sure to collect information about what they want and need so you can follow-up with a phone call.

Marketing is all about percentages. Open the visitor valve by 25%, the relationship valve by 25% and the sales valve by 25% and your sales will increase by almost 100% (1.25 X 1.25 X 1.25). Leave them alone and sales will stay the same.

Ready to Open Up Your Website’s Sales?
Take just a couple of minutes to learn how to increase your web sales with our web marketing solution.

You’ll discover exactly what’s missing in your web marketing and what to do to start attracting more prospects and sales so you can put more money in the bank.

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Wendy and I were discussing a postcard campaign she was planning when she asked if it was a good idea to direct people to her web site. She’d asked the same question when we were talking about how to get a better response with her marketing phone calls.  She wanted to know whether she should direct prospects to her web site or tell them to call her office.

I’m asked the same questions by other business owners. They want to know if it’s a good idea to use their other marketing efforts to direct prospects to their web sites.

Should you be trying to get more people to your web site? My answer may come as a surprise to you.

For most companies, it’s a bad idea to try to direct people to your web site for a crucial reason. Very few web sites do a good job of converting prospects to clients. Wendy’s site was no exception. It looked good, but it wasn’t clear what site visitors were supposed to do or why. The result was that first-time visitors and qualified prospects looked around and left.

You wouldn’t take a solid lead and give it to someone on your staff who knew nothing about marketing; you’d give it to someone you could rely on to follow up and close the sale.

Typically when you have a prospect on the phone you do an excellent job of getting them to tell you what you need, clarifying the value of your services and getting them to take action. Most small business owners and marketers I talk to tell me that once they are talking with a prospect they can close the sale 20% or more of the time.

The opposite is true with most web sites. Most don’t generate leads or sales, even for a half a percent of the prospects that visit them. In effect most web sites are like a sales person who never shows up for work and never follows up on leads. If you had such an employee, you’d retrain them or fire them.

Is it time to retrain or fire your website?

Imagine where your business could be if your web site was ten times as good as your best sales person. A web site can generate far more leads than any sales person, and can convert leads to sales. Discover how to make your web site work >>

Creating a Path to More Sales

With effective internet marketing, it’s possible to lead your prospects step by step through the sales process. First you grab their attention; then you demonstrate your expertise; then you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt how much better off they’d be with your product or services and, finally, you give them an urgent need to buy. Here’s how:

Step One
Take a couple of minutes to map out the sequence of steps involved in your marketing and sales process. List the actions you want your prospects to take. What information do you want them to read and in what order? At what point in the process do you want them to contact you? How?

Not all your prospects will take the same path. With the right incentives, you can prompt some prospects to take a shortcut to the point of sale. Include the incentive information you want prospects to read in your sales sequence.

Step Two
Use the map of your sales process to plan your web site, the layout or organization of elements on the page, and the marketing copy you’ll uses.

Step Three
Test each of your web pages and each element on the page to determine its effect on lead generation and sales. With a bit of fine tuning, your web site can become your best sales tool.

When should your marketing direct prospects to your web site? When you’ve set it up to move prospects along the sales path. If it doesn’t do that, don’t send prospects to it. Once you’ve built the pages to convert prospects to clients, you’ll want to refer everyone to it.

Are you ready to finally stop wasting time and money on your web site and find out how to use it to take your business to the next level? My clients report increases in their leads and sales of 300% to 1500% with these simple internet marketing strategies. Get the details >>

Do You Want To Take Your Business To the Next Level?

Discover how to attract more clients, sell more of your products and services and be more successful with less effort. Finally you can use a simple and reliable web marketing system so you can stop struggling and start making more money. Get the details >>

Charlie,

I’ve built a web site and it’s been up now for three months, but I’m only getting a handful of visitors each day. What are the best ways to get more people to my web site and enjoy more lead generation?

Marla. J., Minneapolis, MN

You built a web site to create a surge of inquiries and new business, but hardly anyone even drifts by, much less stays to learn about your company. Given the time and m0ney you’ve spent, you’re frustrated that your web site hasn’t turned into a pr0fit center overnight, and you’re inclined to dismiss its revenue-generating potential.

Don’t! There are three excellent ways to bring people and lead generation to your web site.

1. The Best Way to Attract Visitors

Unquestionably the best way to channel a flood of visitors to your web site is to get it listed at the top of every search engine. If prospects can find your web site in the first ten on Google, Yahoo and MSN, you’ll get plenty of visitors. Even a listing within the top twenty will bring in a steady stream.

You know that search engine position depends on keywords and the way they are used on your site. Search engines look at the frequency of use on your page and number of links to relevant pages.

If you’ve ever worked with the site code yourself to try to get to a top position in the search engines, you know that it is not obvious how to succeed at this. The experts (and many who claim to be search engine specialists are not expert) charge $12,000 to $30,000 and up annually, per site, to achieve and maintain top search engine positions.

Thanks to top placements for a several keywords, my site attracts over 35,000 unique visitors each month. You or someone in your firm can achieve this, too.

Discover the techniques that will improve your site’s search engine placement and save yourself over $12,000 a year >>

Don’t have the time to do your own search engine positioning or a budget of $12 to 30 thousand dollars for the task? Write me and I’ll refer you to a reputable firm that can help you.

2. The 2nd Best Way to Attract Web Site Visitors

Top search engine positions make a big difference, but if you don’t want to invest the time or m0ney to put your site at the top of the search engines, there is a virtually no-cost technique you can use to bring in qualified prospects.

Thousands of online ezines and newsletters are hungry for content, and your prospects are always looking for ideas that will improve their businesses or their lives. Write short articles with ideas and information that your target market can use, send it to the ezines, and links from those back to your site will bring hundreds or thousands of prospects right to your ‘door’.

One article I sent out last December, ‘What Santa Knows About Marketing’ was picked up by over a thousand ezines, newsletters and web sites, and is still listed ten months later.

You can attract tens of thousands of visitors to your web site each week just by writing and distributing articles.

Discover how this formula works to bring in sales and find out exactly how to get slightly famous and a lot richer with your articles.

3. The 3rd Best Way to Attract Web Site Visitors

I love Google Ads and you should, too. They are simple to set up, you pay only when people c.lick on your ads, and you can set daily budget limits. They look like the easiest way to attract qualified leads to your web site. Why aren’t they the number one way to attract web site visitors? Because making Google Ads profitable is more complex than it first appears.

Have you tried Google Ads? What were your results?

Lots of companies use Google Ads, but few can justify the cost based on the sales generated. It turns out that to make your Google Ads pay for themselves, you need to pay careful attention to keyword selection, the wording of your ad, and the layout, wording, and links on the page that people are sent to from the ad.

I’ve written 8 tips to make sure your Google Ads help you make m0ney. Get all 8 tips along with the formula for making m0ney with your web site.

Given the challenge and the cost associated with search engine positioning, and depending on your particular product or service, Google Ads may be the best way to attract visitors. Use the approach outlined above to put them to work for your business.

Tired of spending m0ney on your web site and not generating a flood of new clients and sales? Waiting won’t improve your results. To make m0ney with your web site, you need a proven formula for bringing in prospects and business. Discover exactly how to get all the business you can handle online.