Top 10 Ways to Make Your Website Sell 24/7

I know - I've been neglecting this blog way too long! My early New Year's resolution is to keep you informed and updated on business at least once a week, if not more often. Starting now!

Cindy


Top 10 Ways to Make Your Website Sell 24/7

I've spent more hours that I care to count attending networking functions, and I continue to be amazed at all the people I meet who don't have a website. Many entrepreneurs love what they do but hate marketing and selling themselves. A well-written website is one of the most effective tools at your disposal that will sell for you 24/7, provided you have written compelling copy for the site.

Here are ten ways to make your website your unpaid sales force:

1. Networking
A website permits you to pass out your business card to thousands of potential clients and lets them know how to reach you and what you sell. If, in your sales copy, you tell your story of why you're in your business, write a bio that accurately reflects your voice and style for your site, and upload your photo, your potential customers will begin to get to know you, without having to meet them one-on-one. Nothing is more amazing to me that to walk into a networking event and have total strangers come up and begin a conversation with me as though we were long-lost friends. They think we are. Why? Because they've visited my website or read my email newsletter or blog to the extent they have begun to get to know me, like me, and respect me.

2. Make Business Information Available
Help your customers find out more about you. What are your hours? What methods of payment do you accept? Where are you located? Being the "Internet snob" that I am, I go online first to check out a business before deciding to do business with them. Sometimes it's to check the menu, if it's a restaurant. Sometimes it's to see if they offer a discount coupon. Other times I just need to find their hours of operation or driving directions. If I can't find their website, I'm apt to find their competitor's site that contains precisely the info that I'm seeking.

3. Better Serve Your Customers
Make doing business with you as easy and effortless as possible. With an online presence, you could make forms available to pre-qualify clients for loans if you're a mortgage broker, enable your clients to upload their files for typesetting and printing if you're a professional printer, or allow your customer to see if the coat he wants is in stock if you're a clothing store. My sister is a "shoes horse" and desperately wanted a particular pair of shoes from a nationally-known department store in Houston. She checked their website to see if the shoes were in stock in her size at the store closest to her. She discovered they weren't, but was able to find another branch that did have them in stock and was able to swing by and pick them up. When your clients are over-committed and trying to squeeze another hour out of the day, how much more will they appreciate your online presence if you can help them save one of their most valuable assets -- their time?

4. Release Time-Sensitive Materials
You may have a service business that relies on appointments to make your money, like a hair salon or a chiropractor's office. You walk in on Monday morning and discover that only about half of your appointments are taken for the week. Do you decide to take part of the week off? You could, if you needed a vacation. Or, you could email the customer list you've built through your website and let them know that you're taking appointments at a special discounted rate this week only, or on certain days of this week, or that they'll get a free widget if they book an appointment by a certain date or time. How quickly do you think your customers would take advantage of this time-sensitive offer?

5. Be Open All Night, 365 Days of the Year

Internet surfers don't go online to buy--they go online to find free information. However, we live in an immediate gratification society. If you have a product for sale that fulfills a need to a particular problem, you can add a shopping cart with credit card purchasing ability to your online product catalog and enable someone to buy something from you at 2 AM, for example, when most of us are in bed. If your shopping cart permits immediate delivery of an electronic item, like an ebook or audio file, all the better, as your customer can have the information he has ordered within minutes after purchase. How many sales are you losing because your prospective customer has to fax or phone in an order or wait for your office to open to talk to you? Your e-commerce-enabled website can be your 24-hour automated salesperson.

6. Make Pictures and Sound Files Available
What if your widget is great, but people want to see it in action? Your website permits you to add sound, static images, and video to better explain who you are and what you sell, or to demonstrate use of your product or service. No brochure will do that. Additionally, audio and video testimonials from enthusiastic customers are now becoming more commonplace on websites. If you hate to sell, have a happy customer tell your website visitors how wonderful you are and how well you solved his problem. People believe enthusiastic testimonials from others who've successfully used your product or service.

7. Answer FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions)
Every business has questions that customers ask again and again. Do you have the staff, or want to dedicate staff time, to answering these questions? Instead, post the questions and answers to your website and remove another barrier to doing business with you. Or, if you have the staff to do so, install a "live help" program on your website so that your site visitors can click and log-in to ask their questions right away while the question is fresh on their mind.

8. Offer Special Membership Access for Current Customers
If you're selling a service on your site, you may want your current paying clients to have access to certain information that is generally not available to the public. With your website, you can create a password-protected, clients-only section, or special membership section, for certain groups of clients. And, as website visitors are always curious and will try to get into private areas for additional information, you can use the "authorization required" page as another opportunity to tell them about the benefits of your product and service and how their lives will be better and richer for purchasing it. And, upon purchase, they will then become a member of this "special clients" club and have all the information and privileges associated with that membership. American Express is right -- membership has its privileges!

9. Open to National or International Markets
For most of my adult life, I've lived in parts of the country that have never recovered from the mid-1980's recession. Because I've had a virtual business with a website, I've never had to rely on the local economy to make a living. If you have a product or service that won't sell locally, or you have a brick and mortar operation and are trying to break into new markets, a website can help you open up a dialogue with nationwide or even international markets as easily as with the company across the street. Can you stand to make more money in your business?

10. Test-Market New Services and Products
Got an idea for another line of products for your business, or an additional service you'd like to add? Create a special page on your website and see how your current customers like the new offering. Ask them about price, appearance, and usability. They will let you know what they think faster and easier than any other market you may reach. Take their feedback, make necessary changes, and then roll it out to a larger market.

If you don't currently have a website for your business, get one! If your website only serves as a pretty brochure instead of bringing you qualified customers or sales, perhaps it's time to hire an expert to bring it to the next level. What difference would it make for you to get 95% of your clients online?I bet that would make your marketing efforts much more streamlined, and who doesn't want to make more profit in less time?

(c) 2006 Donna Gunter

Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.GetMoreClientsOnline.com. Read about running an online biz at our blog, http://www.getmoreclientsonlineblog.com.

12 Free SEO Tools You Must Use

12 Free SEO Tools you Must Use
by Christos Varsamis

Effective SEO strategies require a lot of effort and time. Although in the search engines market exist very advanced tools that cost a lot, there are many free SEO tools which can help the novice and advanced SEO marketer to save valuable time.

Here is a list of free and proven for their effectiveness SEO online instruments:

1) Alexa Ranking . It displays multiple domains instead of one. Therefore, you can have instant traffic results from Alexa Rankings instead of typing and search each time separately.

2) XML Sitemaps . Sitemaps are extremely important for websites because they help search engines crawl and index them. This is a free xml sitemap generator.

3) Directory Manager . You can track your submissions to various web directories and you can also visit regularly to see new directories added to the list. You just tick the appropriate submission boxes when you submitted your website. It's very easy to use it.

4) 123 Promotion Keyword Research Tool. This is a very powerful tool. It displays, based on the Overture and Wordtracker keyword search tools, similar data, including search figures from the previous month. It also adds statistics for average searches per hour, day, week, projected figures for the next 12 months and then also a figure to see how searches may look in 3 years from now.

5) Keyword Density Checker . This keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters/SEO's achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms/keywords. This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one, two, or three word key terms.

6) McDar Pagerank and Backlink Checker . This is another Excellent Resource. When you enter the appropriate URL and keyword, it will display Pagerank and Back links pages for the Top 10 websites.

7) Robots.txt Generator You can create a free robots.txt file with this resource. So, you will be able to direct the search engines to follow the pages structure of your website and also direct the search engines not to follow and crawl specific web pages of your website you don't want to be crawled.All you have to do is filling the fields and when the robots.txt file is created you upload it to your root of your web server.

8) Nichebot . This website displays keyword data using Wordtracker and Google search results. You just enter the keyword and press the button.

9) Domain Stats . You Enter the domain and get: domain age, number of pages indexed, and number of backlinks. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc. It will help you figure out why some of your competitors are ranking better than you.

10) Compare Search Engines . Shows top results from 3 search engines. This tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor's domains.

11) Verify Result . This verification tool checks to see if your site is in the top three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword. You enter your URL/Keyword and it displays top 30 for 11 Search Engines.

12) Related Keywords. This tool generates a list of possible keyword combinations based on lists of keywords that you provide.You enter a list of terms, one per line or separated by commas. This is very effective for Google Adwords and Overture.

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About This Author
Christos Varsamis is Internet & Affiliate Marketing Specialist. Get your Free Reports “Internet Marketing Myths Exposed” & “How to Generate Revenue from Your Sites” http://www.fastprofitbiz.com/Reports/Report.html

How to Hire Some Help and Give Yourself a Rasie� by Online Business Coach Donna Gunter

How to Hire Some Help (A Virtual Assistant) and Give Yourself a Raise

"There's no way I can hire anyone to do what I do. No one can do it as well as I can."

Do you resemble that remark? If so, you've got much in common with most other business owners in the world. We never think that anyone else will give something the time, attention, and dedication that we will. And, you're right, to some degree. No one cares as much about your business as you do. However, if you don't choose to delegate those things that prevent you from engaging in business development, marketing, and sales activities, you won't be in business very long.

Whether you're just starting out or have been in business for awhile, the thought of bringing on a support team member can be daunting, and you wonder, "How can I bring in someone else when it's just going to increase my expenses?"

You need to make the shift to seeing this cost as an investment in your business, rather than as an expense, and let go of the need to be in control.

I recently read about a statistic quoted in the life insurance industry, which stated that for every additional support team member employed in a small professional services firm, the firm experienced a 40% increase in gross revenues. Why does this increase occur? Because your support team takes work away from you, which allows you to focus on increasing revenues - either by making more sales or working on the marketing systems that will lead to more sales.

I realize this sounds overly simplistic -- if you want to increase your revenues by 40%, simply just employ someone on your support team. Of course, it is not that simple in reality. Hiring a support team requires you to trust your own judgment and ability to use this extra time to generate more revenues. And that's the key here - if you hire a support person and keep doing what you?re doing, the concept won't work. You have to hire the person and ensure that you're taking on the role of business development.

The best way to illustrate this is to look at your "lost opportunity" costs. Say, for example, you're a marketing consultant and you charge $175 per hour. Yesterday, your ACT! database was malfunctioning and it took you 7 hours to fix the problem and do the mail merge and printing and mailing of your sales letter to the new list of 100 prospective customers that you just purchased. Do you realize that 7 hours really cost you $1225? How? Your hourly rate of $175/hour multiplied by the number of hours it took you to do this task (7) equals $1225.

What would have been more effective? Finding a great Virtual Assistant to do this for you in half the time for a portion of your hourly fee. If you had hired the expertise of a masterfully skilled Virtual Assistant charging $45/hour, for example, my guess is that she probably could have completed the project in a portion of the time, say 4 hours, for a final cost to you of $180. Big cost savings over the $1225 it cost you to do the same project. With that project off your plate, you then have the time to go out seeking more $175/hour opportunities.

Amazing, isn't it? For a $180 investment, for example, you now have the time to complete the proposal to do that corporate training program you spoke about with an HR person two weeks ago. A week later, the HR person calls and tells you that they've accepted the proposal valued at $10,000 in income over the course of the year. Would you have had time to complete that proposal if you had not handed off this ACT database project? Perhaps, but I bet it would have forced you to work late into the night to complete it.

What operational aspects of your business could you delegate to someone else? If you had extra time, how could you increase the revenues of your business? Give these questions strong consideration--you may be pleasantly surprised by what you discover.

(c) 2006 Donna Gunter

Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service professionals learn how to get more clients online at www.OnlineBizCoachingCompany.com. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.GetMoreClientsOnline.com.

Web Site Leverage

Ever go to a web site and find that after poking around a few pages you just click off and go to another site? Of course. It happens millions of times a day on the web. Why? Good question!

This is number seven in my series of "Dumb Marketing Mistakes" where the mistake I'll explore is "Not Leveraging Your Web Site." This is an important one because if you can't get people to stick around your site and eventually contact you, your web site is just taking up cyberspace.

What does a results-producing web site need? Let's start with quality design, clear formatting and substantial content on every page. And you need to answer the "What's in it for me?" question every step of the way. But that's just the beginning.

Even sites that have all the bases covered often miss the key to turning visitors into clients. It's the difference between a web site that "just sits there" and one that gets a prospect to give you a call or send an email saying, "Can you help me?"

And that big key is called the "Call-to-Action." And you don't just use it once, but over and over throughout your site. Here are some important calls-to-action that you can easily add to your site:

1. At the bottom of every page tell people where to go next
Then include a link that points there. If you don't, your visitors will scratch their heads thinking, "Where do I go next?" and then scroll up to the navigation bar to figure it out. Don't make them think. Make it obvious where they should go next.

Your directions might say something like: "Now that you have a better idea of the kind of clients we work with, click here to learn about the results you can expect to receive from our services."

2. A "Contact Us" link, also at the bottom of every page

Who knows when the inspiration will strike to contact you? Have you ever been on a web site and wanted to contact the company but couldn't find an email address or a phone number? Bye, bye business. And make that Contact Us page more than a phone number, email and address. Tell them what will happen when they contact you. Make it easy to do business with you.

3. A response form at the bottom of every services page

Take an extra step here. Insert a small form that they can fill out to request even more information about that service. Get their name, email, company name and the answers to a few questions about their needs. Yes, people do fill out these forms. But keep them simple!

4. Have them do something that will get them involved

This is the psychology behind the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. It would be easier to just have people mail back the form. But they found that the more involvement, the better the response. You might try a survey of some kind.

5. Have prospects apply to be your client

When I created the Marketing Action Groups, I decided, instead of a "payment link" at the end of the description of the groups, to put in an application form. This way I can screen applicants, as I don't accept everyone. Then I send an acceptance email to those I felt would get the most from the group with a payment link. The conversion rate is still very high. When I accepted individual clients, I used a similar application form.

6. Capture their name and email address

This is really the number one purpose of a web site. Offer a pithy article or report, plus an email newsletter (in that order) in exchange for their contact information. Once you have them on your eZine list, the marketing really starts. I call it "keep-in-touch marketing."

7. Offer ongoing calls-to-action in your eZine

I generate much more business from the eZine than from new visitors to the web site. Think of the web as the place where you introduce yourself to your prospects. And think of the eZine as the place they get to know you. Then invite them to explore your services in more depth (by sending them back to the web site).

Now go back to your site and start inserting all these calls-to- action. I promise you'll start getting better results!

By Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Please visit Robert's web site at www.actionplan.com for additional marketing articles and resources on marketing for professional service businesses.

Before You Give Away Your Old PC...

Important information to know before you pass on that old computer to friend, charity or unknown third-party!

Solutions from PC Magazine: Before You Give Away Your Old PC

Secure Your Web Domain Name or Risk Losing It

Secure Your Web Domain Name or Risk Losing It
by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

I run across small business owners everyday that put all of their web assets, including their domain name, in the hands of a web designer or consultant. Web sites are easy to replace, valuable domain names are not. Make sure that you have ultimate control over your domain name or risk losing it or suffering some serious downtime if your web host goes belly up.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust your web designer, I'm just saying that for many small businesses, your actual domain name may be one of your businesses most important assets and you should treat it as such.

First a couple points that may need to be clarified.

Your domain name is just that, control of the name - bobsmith.com for example. Your domain host is another element altogether and is probably your web host. You assign who hosts your domain name by controlling your domain name. Many web designers or hosts will set all of this up for you including registering your domain name - you need to separate your domain name control from your domain host and keep it secure.

If you do not ultimately control your domain name - meaning you can't log in securely and update your domain's records, here is my recommendation:

Set up a free account with GoDaddy.com and ask your web host or designer to transfer administrative control of the domain to your GoDaddy account #. Once this is done you can use features at GoDaddy to give your IT person or designer access to make technical changes for instance, if you wanted to move to a new web host, but you need to control your domain name.

Designing sites for search engines and directories

by Andy MacDonald: Swift Media UK

In terms of layout, many web sites are not designed for optimum search engine and directory visibility. People or companies seem so centered on their corporate or personal images, products, and services that they neglect to design their web sites with search engines and directories in mind. Search engines and directories vary in the way they rank your web site in a search query. Some search engines place primary emphasis on the text within your title tags. Some search engines place emphasis on the main ideas presented in all of your text on a single web page. Some directories emphasize the text you submitted in their "Description" field. How and where you place your text, both in the copy your visitors see and within the HTML tags your visitors do not see, will affect your ranking.

Keyword selection
Keyword placement
Keyword frequency
Links & architecture
Site statistics

Keyword Selection
Of primary importance is selecting the best keywords for your industry and the keywords you believe your potential customers will use to find you. Selecting the right keywords requires research.

Look at your company's printed materials. What words do you use over and over? When you speak to new and current customers on the phone, what questions do they frequently ask and what words do they use? Ask your current customers how they would find you on the Internet. Then go to the major search engines and directories. Type in the keywords you want to use. Study the source code of the web sites that appeared in the top 20. Look at how your competitors ranked in a search query. Adjust your keyword selection accordingly.

Keyword placement
Of equal importance is keyword placement on individual pages. The text in your title tag is one the most important elements for ranking well in search engines. The text in your titles should be descriptive, using the words and lingo in your industry, and should accurately reflect the contents of each web page.

For optimum search engine positions, your keywords need to appear at the top of your web pages. Thus, before you design your web page, ask yourself if you (or your web designer) have strategically placed your keywords within your title tags, meta-tags, headings, graphic images, and the first paragraph within your body tag. If not, you might need to rethink your site design.

Keyword Frequency
What is important to both the search engines and your target audience is keyword frequency and keyword prominence. Designing and coding your site with keywords in the right locations and the right frequency is an art form. Keywords need to appear frequently on your web pages, but if they appear too frequently, your site will be penalized for word stacking (also known as "spamming the index") or could be removed permanently from the index.

Also, some search engines ignore meta-tags. Thus, if you have included your keywords in your meta-tags but have not placed them elsewhere, you have missed a huge target audience, namely AOL users. Sites with frames have problems being indexed well because there is little opportunity otherwise to include additional text with keywords.

Very, very few web sites can get in the Top 10 of all the major search engines (AltaVista, FAST Search, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Teoma) without spamming. We cannot emphasize this enough: if you hire anyone (a submission service, an individual, an online promotion service, etc.) to do the services we just described, they need to have both HTML and design experience, online marketing, and excellent copy writing skills. You do not want your web site to be permanently banned from a search engine or directory due to ignorance or lack of experience. Furthermore, submission services usually do just that: submit. Many do not perform keyword research, the HTML coding, and copy writing necessary to get a site optimally placed within the search engines. Ask a lot of questions before handing over any money.

Links & site architecture
Placing keywords throughout your web pages is useless as a search engine marketing strategy if the search engine spiders are unable to record the text on your web pages. Therefore, always have a link architecture (also known as a site map) on your site that the search engine spiders can follow. Oftentimes, this means having two forms of navigation on your site: one that your target audience prefers, and one for the search engines.

Site Statistics
For the first few months after you have your web site submitted to the major search engines and directories, you should see a jump in traffic. If you look at your site reports with your visitor statistics, which should do frequently, you will see when the search engines spider and index your site.

Hopefully, because you have been thoughtful enough to give potential customers a reason to return to your site again and again, people will bookmark your site, and your web statistics will show an increase in a "No Referrer" category under referral URL's. Your site reports should show you where your potential customers are coming from (i.e. which search engine or directory they used to find you) and which keywords they used to find you.

After your site has listed in the search engines and directories for a few months, review your site statistics and determine where the majority of your traffic comes from. Then focus your advertising efforts on those directories and search engines. You get better sales from targeted marketing than from spreading your net too wide.

One client did exactly what we recommended, from keyword selection to monitoring site statistics. They found most of their sites referral traffic came from Yahoo queries. They bought banner space from Yahoo for two months. Whenever two of their keywords were typed in a search query, their banner would appear. Their traffic increased over 500%, and their sales reached five figures per month.

Lastly, the saying "Content is King" still rings true. You can increase traffic to your web site, but if (1) people do not like what they see, (2) you do not offer potential customers what they want to buy, or (3) you do not give customers incentive to stay and/or bookmark your site, they will click off of your web site as quickly as they clicked on to it.


About This Author:
Andy Macdonald owns and runs his own web design business called Swift Media UK, which incorporates logo design, & website hosting.